I just listened to The Current, an interview with a woman who was raised in East Berlin and was a student at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall.
She stated that students at the time in the east wanted a 'better socialism'. She stated that the socialism they experienced 'wasn't what Marx, Lenin, and Engels' had in mind.
She then went on to tell of the impact of the secret service on the population, and the fact that one out of every seven members of the population was an informant.
There seemed to be no realization that Lenin was the one who initiated state surveillance and the terror of the secret police in the USSR.
Perhaps those over in Germany did not experience it directly as those further east did, or they, like many leftists in the west, only read what Lenin wrote, and believed that was what he was implementing.
In spite of the interviewee's lack of understanding of the situation further east, I found the interview reminded me of experiences of my own family members- the constant surveillance during the rule of Lenin and later Soviet rulers.
Nowadays we have constant corporate surveillance, along with the surveillance of any hacker who has time to kill.
Corporations, states, individuals..anyone who can decode electronic communications can do surveillance. And it's not being done through any clear system of participatory public democratic control.
What we have now is the worst of the former soviet system combined with the worst of a private free-for-all.
None of this surveillance should be tolerated as an ideal or goal.
It represents a complete disintegration of functional society.