- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmygrad.ml
- communism@lemmygrad.ml
- memes@lemmy.ml
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Love the downvotes on this. Perfect propaganda so well funded. But now it's not commies it's 'tankies'
Communism is okay, as long as its the purely theoretical version of it that suburban Westerners invent in their mind
Agree to disagree on that. But when it comes to slowdive, as per your comment history, we are in complete alignment. Saw them at Fuji Rock last month and it was the best show I've seen in ages. They totally killed it.
My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the "securitate" (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There's a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is "Dime quien soy" something like "Tell me who I am". It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the "securitate" created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin's delusion. I'm not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
"Communism and collectivization were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and then the baby looked at me."
- this dude's great-Grandpa in law
Oh look I talk about the terror regime during communism but users are too busy torturing their relatives to even care about the internal issues of communism.
Ah yes, communists, famous for not debating in intricate technical detail amongst themselves the internal issues of attempts at actually existing socialism.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
My girlfriend in the early 90's was a Croat refugee after the USSR got couped. Her family fled so that the newly emboldened fascists in Yugoslavia didn't murder them.
We met working at customer service job for an overseas company. She would always tell me that she works twice as hard here as she did back home; and we don't even get paid enough to live here.
That's a real person with real first-hand experience of the before-and-after of the Soviet Union dissolved. I can text her right now. Your pee-paw's pee-paw in law who lost his plantation to the people can come at me if he wants to talk. But I doubt they're even alive still; assuming they existed in the first place.
Update: I called her, and she's living on Okinawa now, with two adult sons! And her partner seems to be out of the picture...
@VOLCEL_POLICE@hexbear.net, @VolcelPolice@hexbear.net, @VolcelVanguard@hexbear.net, ANYBODY, send help! I cannot afford plane tickets right now!
Paddle a goddamn boat over there, this is romcom shit
And I'm from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the "communists" of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom's childhood friends... and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you'd find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the "LGBT Lobby" is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they're "all thieves" anyway... and against foreigners. After all, they're only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Dude, I talked about (1) how they stole a small piece of land barely enough to feed a family and (2) the terror regime of the communist era. Then you starter rambling about all the foreign intervention.
In my original post I didn't say that it wasn't there. I just talked about the internal issues of communist Romania (and also USSR) which mostly was point 2. The state of constant fear that people lived in.
If you think that it was all good. Why does your country hate Russia so much? Do you think that the Russians sang lullabies to the Romanians and that they loved them so much?
Edit: let me add more context that you avoided on purpose:
While this might be true, a key reason behind these results is an institutionalized amnesia regarding communism in Romania, which has not allowed an adequate society-wide debate able to inform the Romanian public. This is because the current political leadership is to a considerable extent formed of former communists, their relatives and business associates, who have no interest in revealing and punishing the crimes of communism, in which they were, to varying degrees, involved.
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People's Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
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"Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family". Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of "Communism bad, because they 'stole' my grandma's land".
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"The State of Constant Fear" is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as "a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don't go and vote"
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Aha, the classic. If "Russia" (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
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"context I avoided on Purpose" No, it's nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! "Oh he was in the communist party and that's why he's corrupt!" is fucking nonsense - and what's communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more "crimes". All this'll do is find out that to expand the "Crimes" of communism, you have to go "the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually"
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dude the article you quoted is about literally about huge the amount of nostalgia for communism in Romania is. I know because I read it before.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/ Yep here it is lol
Yes, because I was replying to someone that linked this article. My point was that they omitted some parts.
they did not link any such article, the person you're replying to was talking about poland, and there was no mention of romania either. Maybe you meant to link the quote to another comment?
I think I'll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/
But-but-but his family had the egg monopoly and the evil dictator Ceausescu stole it from them! Every egg in Romania!
So, you swap the order of the paragraphs to make your point. Do I look stupid to you. I know how to open the link that you posted.
My bad you're correct I accidentally pasted the paragraphs out of order
Here you go;
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
How does that change the point made and the actual Romanian people's experience living under communism?
“I regret the demise of Communism—not for me, but when I see how much my children and grandchildren struggle. We had safe jobs and decent salaries under Communism. We had enough to eat and we had yearly vacations with our children”.
- 68-year-old retired Romanian mechanic, quoted in George Jahn, “In Romania, Turmoil Fuels Nostalgia for Communism,” Washington Post, January 11, 2011.
Can you use quote syntax in Markdown instead of code blocks please?
It’s harder to scroll through a code block on mobile
Remind me, who was Romania allies with during ww2? And what did they do to Jewish people in the areas outside of Romania that they helped the nazis invade and occupy?
None of you have addressed the trust issues
Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion.
Sorry, we are not adressing crocodile tears shed in bad faith by anticoms. Reddit is that way ->
Romania was far from a paradise.
okay thats fair but I think everyone knew that was primarily on Mr Palaces, not Comrade Stalin
That's also true. But in my opinion Mr Palaces used communism as an excuse. To me it looks like that also happened in other places mostly because communism was a change of government and many people tried to profit from that. The book I suggest is full of people that truly believe in communism and that get tossed around by Stalin's zero trust policies.
In other replies many people mistook me for an anti-comunist. I am not, but I think blaming the failure of communism to only foreign intervention overlooks many points (I know it's a meme). One of such points is the one I tried to make: "there was an internal feeling of unrest".
Turned an imperialist monarchy where the majority of the population were illiterate into being the first nation of humans in space and defeating the Nazis within a few decades?
Turning a country fresh from a century of humiliation in to the world's largest economy by purchasing power parity and virtually eliminating poverty?
Seems like it works to me
We're fully aware that DoTP is a transitory step in the path to full stateless classless communism, I'm just engaging with conceit the meme makes to dispute the point those who make 'cOmMuNiSm oNlY wOrKs On PaPeR' arguments think they're making
I get it. My point is different. Communism has never been realized, therefore there's nothing to say about it's functionality.
That's fine if you think that, but it's not really communism, as defined by Marx.
That's the point, they are not communist states, just people misusing the name communism
Well in the full extend you could read das Kapital, or an abridged version of it.
But the remedy that he seeks is an international uprising against the possessive class and the dissolution of the power of capital. Unfortunately every 'communist' state is just an autocratic state role-playing communism. Sometimes with their own monarchy (north Korea) some more oppressive, some outright capitalist (China).
You realize that it’s called Marxism-Leninism correct? Because Lenin and by extension other writers expanded on this topic to clown on “communism purists” like you.
That's what it's called because Stalin enthusiasts somehow dislike the term stalinism, which it is. Marx has nothing to do with it.
You know, I was going to make a long detailed post about how that’s wrong, but I just can’t.
It’s so hilariously wrong and asinine that it’s comical. You have never before opened a book in your life, or hell, even bothered to Google anything about what you just said.
Please, you do realize when you say things like this without having a clue what you’re talking about, that you look like an absolute moron, correct?
For one all 'communist' fiefdoms around the world could unite, instead of ruling their own pseudo monarchies. Not a single one of them would set aside their power in favor of a true revolution.
Communism has never been realized,
Exactly, hence why those making 'cOmMuNiSm oNlY wOrKs On PaPeR' arguments and this meme are actually about socialist states which is what I am defending in my first comment, that is blatantly clear from context
Nah not really. I mean China is clearly blatantly capitalist since Deng Xiaoping. And there was little ownership of the means of production by the prolitariat in Soviet Russia.
So not really communist.
I'm not going to get into a pedantic debate with you about the exact labelling of the ideology of these states, what is important and you're intentionally being obtuse about is that these systems differ(ed) from bourgeois western liberal 'democracy' and is the subject of the meme being discussed
And there was little ownership of the means of production by the prolitariat in Soviet Russia.
What? What's your source for this?
We're all aware of that. The transitionary step of socialism has had many well documented successes, along with setbacks and things to learn from.
The issues with capitalism are also well known. Industrial capitalism does a good job at developing the productive forces, but neoliberal (financial) capitalism serves no purpose other than to funnell money to the very top of the economic elite.
The problem with those transitory step countries is that it has a ruling class with very different class interests and the same money funneling just like in a capitalist state which basically guarantees that they will never be socialist.
You see no difference in a government made to be a mediating entity between private interests where the source of power lies, and a government that's self interested and is where power lies? You see nothing but a flattened "they both did taxes and the leadership class has privileges"?
No, taxes are quite helpful to maintain public infrastructure for example. What I'm saying is that every time one of those transitory governments have popped up the leadership ends up ruling the population with an iron fist and horrible corruption that has benefitted mostly the ruling party and rarely anyone else. Pretty much exactly like a capitalist state but with gulags and no voting.
the leadership ends up ruling the population with an iron fist and horrible corruption that has benefitted mostly the ruling party and rarely anyone else
On the second point you're so wrong it requires no discussion. In the 20th and 21st centuries the countries that had the greatest reduction of poverty in the world are the USSR and the PRC respectively. Whatever definition of 'corruption' you have, the fact that those governments not only benefited their people but benefited them more than any other nation on the planet is not a debatable point.
So what exactly do you mean "iron fist"? Are you from the US? Because if you're saying it from the perspective of the most intrusive surveillance state in history and the largest police state in history, I feel like we're going to have to sort our semantics.
I'm from one of the countries the USSR did their imperialism on so I'm definitely going to take issue with your assertion that they benefitted their people more than any other country. They benefitted the people in Russia by draining resources from satellite states. By iron fist I mean the people who spoke out against their regime were either executed outright, worked to death or near death. And by corruption I mean any wealth went straight into the pockets of party leaders and members.
Also why does everyone who defend the USSR go into US bad dialogue tree instantly? Like I really don't give shit about the US and I'm sure it's bad too, but that completely irrelevant. At least the US doesn't generally outright annex countries to do imperialism.
NPC DIALOGUE TREE BEEP BOOP SELECT OPTION: WHINE WHATABOUTISM AND IGNORE THE QUESTIONFucking clown.
And BIG IF you actually are from a former soviet satellite you're either over 80 years old or you don't know shit better than anyone else based on "I live here"
Yeah and I hear shit from people who live in South Carolina about the Civil War all the time.
Wow, you spent most of your post complaining I ignored a question I didn't ignore while ignoring half my points. Impressive. If you missed my answer to "what about US" it was that I don't care, both are bad.
Also you need to be 40 to remember life under Soviet rule. And my grandparents are well over 80 and they do remember the mass deportations personally.
At least the US doesn’t generally outright annex countries to do imperialism
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Mexico. Also the US has over 800 military bases around the world.
Pretty much exactly like a capitalist state but with gulags and no voting
That is a childlike (and false) understanding of the world. Please educate yourself.
Loling at the idea that "99.9 percent of the population should be able to participate in democracy but the class that's been oppressing us shouldn't for a decade or two during the transition" is "autocracy"
I wanted to cross-post this to lemmy.ml's memes community, but you did that already. The libs are coming in, beautiful lmao.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
