During the decades when Germany was divided between a Soviet client state in the East and a capitalist West, a whole genre of “East German jokes” highlighted the many deficiencies of the East’s economy. A typical example was, “How do you use a banana as a compass? Put it on the Berlin Wall. The end that gets bitten points east.”

Hardly any socialists today would point to East Germany as an example of the kind of socialism we want. Even at the time, dissident Communists within the Soviet bloc countries, and democratic socialists everywhere, argued that the world’s choices weren’t limited to the authoritarian and economically dysfunctional system that prevailed in the East and the exploitative and wildly inegalitarian capitalism of the so-called free world.

Oddly enough, though, in the last week I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the connection between bananas and socialism on left-wing Twitter.