Tom, you might be happier if you could get a bit more precise. Marx proposed an economic system.

A dictatorship is a political system.

Capitalism can have slavery, too. The US did, the Bible sanctioned it, and employers used it. Slavery was banned not because it was regarded as immoral or wrong under capitalism, but to deprive an enemy of workers. Capitalism cannot take the high, moral road about slavery. Slavery prospered under capitalism. They are not antithetical.

More recently the "company store" of mining companies is a great example of economic slavery under capitalism.

There are military dictatorships in largely capitalist countries, and there are democracies in socialist countries.

I've spoken to people who were your basic, average citizen in Russia under their communist regime. They weren't any different than you or me, to be honest, and were content there. Didn't "have" a lot, and nobody did.

(There are people who don't need a lot of stuff. I think that trait is partly a product of Western advertising, designed to make one unhappy unless they had everything manufactured.)

(Where we talked about political repression, they talked about how minorities were treated here. Listening to one fellow, a municipal cop, the Japanese internment camps sounded like the German concentration camps. They knew their political extremes, and some ethnic groups were maltreated, and we overlook our treatment of our political extremes and some ethnic groups.)

Were as brainwashed about the US as we were about them. It worked both ways. Though theirs seems so much worse, to be honest. I think half of what we heard was BS, and the other half just B.

Arf