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THROWBACK cross-post from: https://hexbear.net/post/49520
Seriously tho these people can’t be serious, right? Like this has to be a fucking op
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My family's salary was $200 a month
I hear this shit and I think about my grocery bill today, in America. Like, what could you buy for $200/mo in Ukraine in 2004? What was rent? What was a month's worth of electricity?
Like, never even mind Communism v Capitalism. Americans have no clue how bad they have it, because there's always some guy on the other side of the planet living a depressingly normal existence on 1/10th of the salary you need to get by in the States. It looks fucking hellish on paper, but when you're living in the literal bread-basket of Europe its surprisingly easy to fill up your shopping cart when you compare it to some college kid who blows that same $200 at Whole Foods on dry pasta and laundry detergent.
yeah you also have to look at cost of living when talking about income. What kind of life does that money buy
although if he was talking about Ukraine in the 90's and early 2000's it is entirely possible his family were just really poor. But that would be capitalism by then
There was still a ton of infrastructure that's credited to the Soviets. And one of the big appeals of a place like Bulgaria is how you can privatize those incredibly valuable capital projects.
Then you build a gradient that siphons wealth from one corner of the county to another, you create a Rich cohort of professionals and a Poor cohort of day laborers, and you brag about all the new Burger Kings you've introduced to the post-Soviet frontier.
It's possible that they were on the poor end of that spectrum. It's also possible that $200/mo spent significantly farther than it does today.
Certainly, they weren't homeless and they weren't starving. That means their $200 was getting vastly more mileage than what an American in 2023 receives.
It's weird to me how many people my age (like this guy) believe they knew the horrors of communism when at best they had self awareness in 2008 xD
This pretend game is really annoying yet so many people for some reason love to do it to appease westerners.
there are americans right now who think their shitty lives are the fault of communists taking over america. the cold war propagandists were so successful that they crafted an entirely new reality.
It's actually maddening how convinced so much of the population in the west thinks that communists have secretly infiltrated every aspect of society (even going so far as to call corporations and lib politicians Marxist). They're living in a very deranged reality that makes them the victim of communists at every waking moment. There's no way it's a healthy state of mind to be in.
There's a lot of westoid propaganda about how Eastern Europe is horrible because of "the legacy of Communism" as if the USSR is like radioactive fallout that persists for hundreds of years.
Nothing to do with the neo libereral steel batch they subjected them to.
A lot of them perpetuate this themselves as well. Remember a Bulgarian telling me the racism they had was due to the legacy of Communism.
for real, people younger than me telling me generic pro-NATO talking points about a country my parents actually experienced? Countries that stopped existing 33 years ago? It comes across as obvious shilling/astroturfing to me.
Well I have parents which both lived their childhood through the martial law period, and despite the horrible situation of those times my mother still considers fondly that everyone had a job and a home, and my father hates (I think) every PZPR politician except Edward Gierek and ranted to me how we should've "been more like Yugoslavia who were more open to trade with the west". I love him but he could use some history on how it was the west who were the ones to close on us and yada yada... But what are you gonna do, the man is in his 50s and PRL ain't coming back any time soon.
They were both young adults in the 90s going through times barely different from the 80s, and then there was I born in 2003. I still somewhat remember the poverty I was growing up in up to like 2010 when things started to quickly improve. Not because capitalism good, but because my mother landed an okay job and we very fortunately living in a house with my great grandmother. So we had no rent to pay. We were very lucky to say the least.
If we were to rent, my life would have turned out drastically different. Definitely worse.
In capitalist state, when things go bad, communism was the cause. Don't analyze any further!
From where I'm at, growing up under communism would be the real privilege
I got into an argument with someone who was defending the American dream because their parents came here with "nothing" from a poor country and were able to become respected Ivy League professors
Their parents had advanced degrees, for free, from the USSR
A lot of immigrant parents love dramatizing what they went through and you end up with a lot of people that moved to the US with no money in their pocket and a dream to thrive. I've met a few like this with parents who came from my country. I meet their parents and immediately recognize their Spanish as someone who grew up with privilege.
I learned that the Saudi guys we hung out with in college were from well off families and their dad's were business owners. I'm pretty sure they mistreated their employees at best, but they were probably doing a little slavery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/jcj0fr/ukrainian_here_i_cant_explain_how_much_it/
My dad once explained to me how communism works and why it fails. A teacher decides that from now on on assignments he is going to add up all of the grades and give the students the average no matter how they did. The kids who did good on the test are upset because they got a bad grade due to the dumb kids who didn’t even try on the test. On the next test they don’t try because they know that it no longer matters and get an even worse grade. Eventually everyone stops trying.
Fucking what.
My commune once explained to me how capitalism works and why it fails. A teacher decides that those who get the best grades get to take 10 points off the test of the kids who get the lowest grades. The kids who did well don't try on the next test because they get free points from the kids who did bad on the last test. The kids who do bad try hard to get a better grade, but don't because their points go to the kids ahead of them. Also the grades your parents got in school determines your first grade on the test. Eventually everyone kills the rich kids and the teacher.
Lmao
The trick with that idiotic metaphor is that grades are a million times fairer than capitalism
OK like imagine this. What if:
- grades aren't dependent just on the quality of your assignments, but the sheer quantity
- you need about 10 million man-hours per year to get an A+
- but lucky for you, you can have other people do your schoolwork for you!
- in exchange for writing out all your assignments, you allow your workers to have a C-
- if they stop working on your assignments, they'll get an F and flunk out
Yeah so uhhh, that sounds like the dumbest fucking school ever and I would absolutely want to "share" those grades between people equally
EDIT: Oh and GRADES CAN BE PASSED DOWN TO YOUR CHILDREN
you need about 10 million man-hours per year to get an A+
you need to network with the people who give out A+s or people who know a lot of A+ givers to get an A+ or even just to get a C.
Lol seriously. Old job used to have great management after it opened. People had no problem working some extra or less hours because they know everyone had each other’s back including the managers. But then corporate downsized a bunch, the good managers got fired and replaced by like 1 or 2 guys. Nobody ever knew who the second guy was, and the first one was a piece of shit who made everyone miserable. Eventually everyone slowly started to put in less effort and quit. The guys in the freezers and warehouse wasn’t aware that people were quitting until the managers went back and hassled them. Now whenever I go to the store I see like 2/10 registers open lol
if there's one thing planned economies are known for, it's not ever setting benchmarks for success. when factories underproduced in the soviet union, the bureaucrats simply said "okay thats fine sweetie."
no one tries because there's no rewards, also everyone dies because it's slavery.
This is just the same old recycled "I taught my kids communism by giving them all the same rewards for their chores" bullshit parable we've all seen before.
Here my dad told me to do my chores by quoting Marx. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" but to justify why I needed to clean the bathroom.
Whatever his motives I definitely took it to heart
Meanwhile under capitalism, the ones swinging the hammers the hardest in the factories make as many times more money than the one in the suit sitting in the cozy office in the corner, right?
This is literally a scene from a children’s sitcom on Nickelodeon
These people evidently think that socialism calls for equalisation, for levelling the requirements and personal, everyday life of the members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism, with Leninism. By equality Marxism means, not equalisation of personal requirements and everyday life, but the abolition of classes, i.e., a) the equal emancipation of all working people from exploitation after the capitalists have been overthrown and expropriated; b) the equal abolition for all of private property in the means of production after they have been converted into the property of the whole of society; c) the equal duty of all to work according to their ability, and the equal right of all working people to receive in return for this according to the work performed (socialist society); d) the equal duty of all to work according to their ability, and the equal right of all working people to receive in return for this according to their needs (communist society). Moreover, Marxism proceeds from the assumption that people’s tastes and requirements are not, and cannot be, identical and equal in regard to quality or quantity, whether in the period of socialism or in the period of communism.
There you have the Marxist conception of equality.
Marxism has never recognised, and does not recognise, any other equality.
To draw from this the conclusion that socialism calls for equalisation, for the levelling of the requirements of the members of society, for the levelling of their tastes and of their personal, everyday life—that according to the Marxist plan all should wear the same clothes and eat the same dishes in the same quantity—is to utter vulgarities and to slander Marxism.
Isn't this what grading on a curve is? Like a really shitty explanation for an utterly normal capitalist thing?
No, grading on a curve is kinda more when you assign the grades based on how you did relative to everyone in the class and the actual scores on the test don't matter.
this is the problem with the internet, you never know that the anticommunist idiot youre talking to is an actual baby
My favorite part was when they said their dad actually didn't mind growing up in the Polish people's Republic because they had a nice stable life lol
I'd guess it's a bit based on the username that can be interpreted as "hogroast"
Management out of nowhere decided to no longer let me leave work early to pray the Friday (Jummah) prayer. They finally caught on to not having to participate in capitalism for 2 hours a week. Also the only one workplace in :estonia-burning: where I formerly could. It's like how the prospect of peace in Korea was shattered because Moon-jae In was no longer president.
Shit, guess I'll be moving again in 3 years back to Johannesburg to throw cinderblocks at Zionists from high-rise buildings, I guess.
How can a Ukrainian teenager have lived under communism if the USSR collapsed in 1991? That's not very math.
That poster is 100% an American.
Americans can't even point to Ukraine on a map, therefore they are very confident that Ukraine needs 5 billion rockets to defend itself from
Donbass separatists and Roma campsPutin and also ukraine was communist until like yesterdayShow
just the fact that it is impossible to achieve in reality and historical or even anecdotal evidence supports this criticism.
What are you talking about? What experts?
Source: random youtube documentary made with the same amount of academic rigor as "Ancient Aliens".
Yes an extremely weak argument. Arguably not an argument. It's one of those emotional truths that seem to just be accepted as fact nowadays.
My inherited experience is one of living in Ukraine in the Pale. Being victims of pogroms and extreme violence in the russian empire until the soviets came to power and afforded my family opportunities that they couldn't have possibly dreamed of whilst living in extreme poverty in the Shtetl. Then having to deal with a bunch of nazis and nazi collaborator fucks for decades. That's only on one side of my family which was lucky, by the way. The other side had huge portions killed because of said nazi collaborators. So who's inherited experience is more valid?
Elevating a view point that is based on ignorance, vibes-based understanding of politics and economy, and--let's be frank--lies with the express purpose of silencing dissenting opinions is, in fact, not respecting everyone's experience. Sometimes certain voices need to shut the fuck up and listen to other's experiences because what they believe to be true is just something absorbed through passive ideological osmosis.
You also speak as if I don't frequently experience at least mild antisemitism when I express this perspective. I do, depending largely on where I am. A lot of people don't care about bandera nazis in Ukraine currently, so pointing to this nazi history tends to spark a bad response.
someone's personal anecdotes, especially anonymously given on the internet, without hard evidence to back it up, are meaningless in the face of data and detailed reports, this is a basic aspect of any serious research. it is absolutely absurd to accept everyone's interpretation of events equally given the material conditions that shape people's beliefs. the poster screenshotted lived through capitalism, not communism, and uses that time period to denigrate communism, even though it was not the dominant ideology at the time for a while. that is absurd, and recognizing that is not '''invalidating someone's experiences'''.
and then you randomly jump to defending ukrainian (alleged) nazi militias. Which group did you meet i wonder, and what would i find if i googled their history or iconography? like, it is an objective fact that many of the militias in the country are nazis and use nazi iconography and espouse beliefs identical to nazi beliefs, in addition to their war crimes against ethnic russians, jews, roma, LGBT people, and the disabled. there is ample UN reporting on this issue, and your nice, friendly interaction with these alleged nazis does not counter that.
https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf
https://press.un.org/en/2022/ga12483.doc.htm
https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14823.doc.htm
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_14th_HRMMU_Report.pdf
https://www.state.gov/reports/2018-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/ukraine/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewashing-ukraines-past-volodymyr-viatrovych/
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/white-supremacists-other-extremists-respond-russian-invasion-ukraine
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality-of-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-is-far-from-kremlin-propaganda/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline/
https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/mappingmilitants/profiles/azov-battalion
My point isn't that my lived experience is more valid. My point, which I should have made explicit, is that lived, inherited, whatever experiences are inherently contradictory, so they are not useful alone. You have to look at the current and historical sociopolitical and economic situations in order to properly place testimony into context. Also it's a reddit post from a kid who is regurgitating half-baked information from their parents. It's not some important testimony about living conditions in the soviet union, its someone looking for attention.
Lots of fascists love Israel and zionism btw, it allows them to avoid accusations of antisemitism while pushing adjusted nazi propaganda and at the same time accuse others of antisemitism. So call the significant Ukrainian far right segments neo-fascists, banderites, ultranationalists, they are tied into the history of nazi reaction in Ukrainian history regardless of their current, individual stance on jews (plenty still hate jews). And not every Ukranian is a fascist, of course. Plenty of forced conscripts. Plenty of people who felt compelled to fight and have been callously sent into a meat grinder. I'm not really interested in maintaining the "brave defender" romanticized narrative bullshit. It ignores the realities of opinions of people living near the front on both sides, they don't care how things end up they just want the killing to stop. These deaths are in no small part the fault of the Ukrainian far right which has consistently escalated and refused to stop attacking the breakaway regions of Eastern Ukraine prior to the outbreak of the war. Regardless of how one feels about this war or Russia these ultranationalist groups have only worsened the situation and everyone would've been better off with them being jailed or executed by the state. Perhaps a peace accord with the DPR and LPR as federated entities within Ukraine, rather than a series of bullet ridden ceasefires.
hey hexers, you ever play "spot the the federated poster?" it's a really simple game, you just look for the dumb takes and, bingo
I love how user reports from federated servers go straight into the file shredder.
IDK if you guys can see it but they also like to dehumanize children murdered by border patrol.
inherited experience seems more valid than no experience at all or knowledge procured from period literature allowed by the censors
Let me just clarify something
Are you asking if feels you have because of genetic ancestry count more than documentary evidence?
Because that’s fucking nuts. Bonko crazy.
Or perhaps by “inherited experience” you mean second hand anecdotes? You know that documentary evidence is legally admissible and hearsay is not and for a good reason right?
It’s because “my grandma once told me when I was young” is an atrociously unreliable source of evidence whereas contemporary records are a profoundly reliable source of evidence.
I've inherited some experience and I'd like to share it with you:
spoiler
fart
I don't think many experts criticize the idea of communism - just the fact that it is impossible to achieve in reality and historical or even anecdotal evidence supports this criticism.
I mean the history of human civilization between the advent of class society and the 18th century also had no evidence to support the "real life" viability of liberal capitalist rule.
Even then, for the first century of its existence, if you consider the number of failed revolutions that saw re-establishment of monarchial/theocratic rule, its failure to liberate slaves, engaging in the same imperialist tendencies as feudal states, violently squashing dissent, the constant market crashes, the corruption of the ruling class, the failures of political leaders to adhere to the constitutional law that they themselves wrote etc...an observer living under a prospering monarchy in the 1800s could also very well say
Ha! Meet the new boss - same as the old boss.
Well yeah it sounds good on paper but doesn't work in real life.
I'm not criticizing the idea of liberalism, it's just that history shows that it always fails.
Then, when the old feudal powers, for a time, were able to innovate their structures to accommodate industrialization, (domestic) slavery abolition, and demands for suffrage, they might also also comment
See? The system works - just very slowly. We don't need any revolutionary reconstitution of society that could jeopardize the current stability that is working in my favor
These traps of thought termination can be avoided by studying the dialectical materialist analytical method developed by Marx and Engels (and continually expanded by later generations), derived from examining the interactions of socio-economic forces within Feudalism that birthed Capitalism, and applying that study to the historical development of liberal capitalist society to sus out the transformative tendencies that would come to dominate the next major epoch of human civilization, broadly conceptualized as Communism.
In short, Communism isn't simply a set of "wouldn't it be nice if..." ideas. It's an observation of the evolution of human relations. Sometimes specific branches die off like the Soviets and Parisian communards, but there isn't such a thing as a "perfect stage" that evolution stops for, and it certainly isn't Capitalism. That doesn't necessarily rule out some third alternative, but so far it has only materialized as fascism and techno-feudalism, and neither to a Marxist are changes at all because the productive relations remain strictly Capitalist.
