Based on my understanding (which isn’t much, please mention any additional things I missed) Marx believed that the “proletariat” (the workers) were being abused by the “bourgeois” (the owners) in the capitalist system, and that the proletariat should seize control of the state and the means of production (“dictatorship of the proletariat”), and that the end goal was a stateless, classless society where everyone was equal, and that the state would “wither away”.

As we all know, a perfect communist society was never achieved, and that the state never ended up withering away for any of them.

How would Marx react to the Soviet Union under Stalin and his purges, Khrushchev to his denouncing of Stalinism and brutal crushings of protests in the Warsaw Pact states, to Gorbachev and his “glasnost and perestroika” reforms?

How would Marx react to the communist states that took power in Latin America, Africa, and Asia? Would he be happy that a communist state was able to compete with the capitalist U.S. in terms of global dominance, twice (Soviet Union during the Cold War, PRC in the modern day)?

Note: I am neither procommunist or anticommunist. I think that some if Marx’s ideas were quite good (everyone should be equal, classless society, etc.) but others not so much (history tells us what happens when there is a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the state never withers away like Marx imagines it would, as power corrupts all)