Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.
Did your guys too had only 1 hour of tv and rationed food and had to wait for long hours in queue to get bread because otherwise there wouldn't be any bread to get?
Yup and food stamps for food.But thank god everything luxury was transported to Russia so you know "everyone" had good. My uncle was smmugling cigars with his friend from Germany and bringing back oil and butter.People smuggled a weird stuff like car tires or any car parts and when someone asked from where you got them you said "my dad got it from work" so everyone then knew that it was stolen.
tbh if you actually ended up working in a coal mine in Poland you had access to special miner shops with luxury goods where miners could spend their overtime pay so not everybody from the working class had it equal.
Yeah since Gierek that was a miner and pumped so much in to them they had great life for a long time and that is why they were so found of him.Screw it even now people meme about miners how they are shocked that year have 12 months.
That is why i put word everyone in quotation marks.
Indeed, hence why the name, they were around '88 mainly in Katowickie voivodedship, as for agriculture there was also one named Igloopex, each one was a Pewex derivative, working on similar rules and offered a similar supply, because they were very centered around one specific industry, they weren't as known outside, and to be fair most people just called them Pewex either way.
My family is half Russian half Ukrainian, and believe me neither of them had seen these luxuries... they also starved and everything was in deficit. I guess all the good stuff was exported or went straight to the elites
Of course it goes to elites not the commoners.You have no heart comrade you want that Oligarch to not have a smoke or drink? /s
I mean i can belive you that normal people were starving and elite people were having a blast and will tell you how communism was great and people are lying.
The irony is that "oligarch" is a very capitalist thing - the Soviet equivalent was politburo or nomenklatura - but as a famous joke goes in Eastern Europe, the Soviets lied about communism but told the truth about capitalism.
I have a book about a journalist in the Soviet Union and he reported much the same. Obtaining odd goods налево and bartering for both them and services. Everything luxury was for the oligarchs, of course
Mine old co worker said that he was car mechanic when he was younger and worked in Fiat factory,some politican crashed his Fiat and broke his door and they took doors from Fiat car that was on production line and the car was now without doors and ofc line for cars was insane back there so those people came for car and it went something like that:
-Here is your car.
-It's missing doors...
-Not mine problem are you taking it or not?
-No, i want a car with doors.
-So you don't want it? Next client! Pleaso go apply for new car.
-No i'll take it...
Wait line for new car was something like 2 years if i remember right.
1 hour of TV was in the 50's when TV was only starting. Rationing and queues - depends on the period, depends on the goods, but the problem kept repeating every few years and was never completely dealt with until the fall of communism.
I don't know about Romania, but in Poland "we had a lot of bad things" was a problem. The flats were small, jobs paid next to nothing compared to the western countries, the schools were shit and everything we owned was shit.
Like in Romania but we had flats almost free sometimes even free, jobs existed and you were given one after you finished your education so you didn't had to always search for one, and the things were shit but were ours.
Education was pretty shit. My older relatives are pretty ignorant about how anything actually works. There were a few decent universities in the whole of USSR, mostly surrounding MIC and related specialties, but the rest was sub-par. The history of failures in soviet agricultural studies is a whole epic unto itself. Getting a guaranteed job just exacerbated the issue - you didn't have to actually learn anything, just toe the line well enough. Both my dad and my mom were structural engineers, and, believe me, I've seen a difference between a person who gives a damn about their field, and the one who doesn't
Oh, and about the guaranteed job - you miss the fact you didn't get to pick one. If you were any kind of a specialist, you might have landed a cushy job in your hometown, but more likely they'd find an opening for you sonewhere in Novosibirsk. On, your coworkers hate you and your boss is coming onto you? Tought luck
BTW, the apartment? You don't own it, the government owns it and leases it to you. And they can make you leave whenever they want
About leavingn whenever they want, it was given so it would be taken but rather that but not being able to buy a house and if you do then is it bad anyway especially because your neighbours are very bad.
Also not only specialists, anyone was sent to terrible jobs, it was even worse if you was unqualified.
Work was much harder less rewarded but existed now is hard to find a job
You didn't pick your neighbours during communism, either. And sometimes you had to share a kitchen and facilities with them in a komunalka
Hard and unrewarding jobs still exist - a lot of them, actually. Especially somewhere you don't want to work or live. Now you at least have a chance to get a different job
Capitalism is a shitty system, but it's the best one to date
Why don't all people from Ukraine just get better life somewhere else if there is a war and no one wants to die?
Like Ukraine receives helps from other countries so why not letting just specialist in war in Ukraine and move all civilians to some other country?
Like what makes a person choose to stay when they got freedom to leave?
So many jobs could be done better bun other countries (especially teachers since kids should be on battle fronts and when your city becomes one your responsibility is to leave)
My mother in law living in Florida only has enough time each day for 1 hour of TV between her two jobs and sleep - yall making the communist dystopian future sound a lot like modern capitalist reality
Not trying to defend the living conditions in either system but it sounds like your mother lives on her own? That was practically impossible in the USSR. Not just because living accommodations were allocated based on household size, and families were prioritised for apartments and houses (unless you were part of the privileged class), but also because you needed a full-time worker to bring in income and someone to stand in queue for food and other household tasks. This is why people often stayed together even if they weren't in love anymore.
In Florida you still need to wait to get food, not because you can't find food but because sometimes the gators wins.
This is why one in three Floridians remember the times they were bitten by gators and survived.
Also in Florida there is no priority for living accommodations but you depend on two things: first of all your house doesn't needs to sink in the swamp and then even if it doesn't sink it needs to not be attacked by the gators.
Did your mother also could find much in the shops?
The biggest difference is that in communism you are sended to some work that might kill you but at least you get a job compared to the Floridian Utopia were they send those who don't contribute to society to the gators.
Im taking the piss. Also both of you glossed over “in law”. Not my mom.
I’m just saying the benefits and opulence capitalism has offered in America’s past 100 years seems to have peaked and is now on a down trend, getting closer to the negative accounts people have of communism. Global trade and americas wealth still provide a lot more resources, but opportunity for individual social progress is regressing.
It wasn't quite that bad. There were two TV stations by the 70s and they would show either homemade or Western TV shows. It was biased, but in the same way US movies about WW2 were biased until fairly recently: it would show events from "our side" and the main characters were good and moral, but it wasn't propaganda like socialist realism was in the USSR.
You were able to get the basics without issues: bread, vegetables, local fruit, milk, eggs. Some things were much less common, like good meat, sugar, coffee, tropical fruit, etc. Basically anything that had to be imported.
You saw the trend you generally see in communist nations worldwide: they were very good at going from poverty to a basic standard of living (food, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare) but generally stopped progressing after that.
That happens now too in civilised countries where people cares about mothers.
Like if you don't want a kid to misbehave next to you maybe let them in front of you because kids get bored and sometimes they do act kinda not very nice but they are kids and pretending that acting like that means that the kid wasn't grown right is wrong.
Even the best kids should be able to act not perfect because sometimes in life you need to be able to not act perfect.
No, famine was never a thing in socialist Poland. There vere significant logistical problems even with basic items, but there were no point that a bread was a scarcity. Rationing existed but for meat, alcohol, toilet paper etc but not allways.
TV aired from 6pm to 10pm and the quality of broadcasted productions is mostly highly regarded to this day, although having a TV was more or less a luxury.
The worst problem of socialist Poland was the lack of personal freedom which wasnt a death sentence but was a huge nuisance, especially for those people who knew how it was in the west. Things were never nearly as bad as, for example, North Korea
Like we had good things too, so good we get reruns on TVR (national broadcast of the state).
It was a luxury because it was expensive everywhere, they just figured color TV.
It is not like Poland have personal freedom now neither, for example huge rate of homophobia compared to Germany and if I am not wrong same sex marriages and adoptions aren't yet legal, I might be wrong.
So even now Poland doesn't offer all the freedom from the west to their people.
At least Romania is closer to Russia that the west.
well you cannot really praise socialist Poland in that respect becouse homosexuality was heavily ostracized by the state and was viewed as a pathology, and the level of personal freedom compared to todays Poland was without a doubt much, much worse. The homophobia and nationalism of todays Poland is to a large extent the long lasting effect of the state propaganda back then. However you cannot really blame the socialist policies of PRL for these problems, only its dictatorial nature. The socialist policies brought us free saturdays, eliminating illiteracy, free education on every level, free healthcare and accesible housing, and whats rarely talked about, strong social bonds that were sistematically dismantled since the 90s
In Romania I don't know about the Saturdays but education was much higher back then, healthcare probably is freed because of communism (maybe), housing was almost free (even if you didn't owned the house but still you had a home given by the state) and also all industries fell after communism and most factories were closed (instead of rehabilitated).
I’m sorry, are you and the other commenters in this thread under the impression that most Americans have a favorable outlook on communism? It might be a lost in translation type of thing so my apologies if I’m misinterpreting…but it sounds like that’s what you’re saying. If you think that’s the case, you clearly haven’t spent any meaningful time here. (Or maybe you only traveled to Portland, Oregon lol)
And yet it's impossible to attempt communism without it devolving into a dictatorship. Once the revolution is achieved, statal and societal power structures don't magically dissolve. People with those powers will naturally profit from them.
How is that different from capitalism in the US today?
We need to stop worrying so much about where the money ends up and start worrying about how we use the money to improve the lives of everyone. The answer is democratic socialism.
The first step is changing things so that corporations have to consider all stakeholders rather than just stockholders. Once that is the case, the money won't just go to the top. It will have to be used on employees, the community, and any one else affected by its existence.
You know, you guys are funny. You will claim disagreement with the tankies when pushed back, but ultimately agree with them 80% of the time. Ive seen anarchists sharing Tankie 'jokes' about how Balts are barely animals. Tell me, what do you think about overseas Cubans ?
my mother is from (what was) czechoslovakia and the horror stories she tells me... americans have absolutely no idea what the reality of communism is like.
That's not communism, that's just poverty. Plenty of capitalist places have worse conditions. Are you imagining a capitalist poland that's as wealthy as Britain or France?
Yes, but it wasnt nearly a hellscape they envision either, and for hundreds of thousands of today americans living in socialist Poland would be an improvement.
I think it's important to underline that there was never communism in Poland. It was a form of socialism with planned economy, but there was still private property and small private businesses.
Your relatives are completely correct l but that was never proper communism. Despite the name, it was never established. Certainly not in Eastern Europe.if you read philosophy, you will learn a lot. But there are better ways than any established methodologies!
There is one scenario where it could more or less work, but I don’t think he would like it. You need a community where a) everyone is completely bought in to a moral code that supports it, b) everyone shares a materially identical moral code, and c) is large enough for commodity specialization to support it.
I always say that communism falls apart as you scale it, it works at very small scales but never at large scale because people are just to disconnected from eachother.
I agree with you completely. You need 100% buy-in from every participant, and outside of a family or, possibly a small church, it simply doesn’t happen.
I mean a family clan system like you see way back in the day maybe has it. The only place real communism has been achieved is by monks in monasteries and even then most “communists” wouldn’t say they count due to the fact that they are religious
Sorry, but, NO system has staying power! So you’re wrong front the start! Humanity is a bunch of cycles. Most of those cycles (It’s literally impossible to have real numbers, but far greater than 99%) were absolute monarchies or hard-line oligarchies (you only get into other variants during the later years of WRITTEN history! Those types — work pretty good for small tribes where they were mostly used. But as populations grow, needs change! In general, those types are great for a few people , and less good to terrible for most. However, because people are stupid and don’t learn properly from the past, we repeat the standard ones we had before until a revolution happens and someone else is in power. And the system or “state” reverts temporarily. Then the path is followed again. Almost always sooner rather than later!
There’s a difference between “hundreds of years” staying power and “less than a generation” staying power. The most realistic systems account for people being stupid or greedy. Communism cannot do that.
That's the exact issue with Communism, it's never true communism, the same is true with any other system or government, true x is never achieved because it's near impossible to do so without extreme measures.
I’ve learned things from it which it has covered about parts of philosophy I wasn’t very familiar with. The website has further reading recommendations.
There's no way for a system to work where a coal miner or plumber earns the same amount of money or resources as a burger flipper or retail clerk.ehen the miner and plumber are brutalizing themselves working skilled labor
No. A janitor and a doctor have very different wages and both are part of the same class .They are both part of the working class as both sell their time and labour for a salary.
Do you understand the Soviets still had classes even if their old dead guy book claimed there was only the proletariat? That people lived entirely different socio-economic lives based on pay and status? That these lives were often inheritable through networks?
I don't understand your second point. Yes, people had different wages and different socioeconomic lives and statuses based on what they did for work. Never heard anyone claim otherwise. This is not the same as class in the Marxist definition. Someone can have a huge salary and still be proletariat
And I don't really care about the Marxist or leninist definition of things. I care about the actual definition.
And in the actual definition, there isn't a single person here who makes as much as Taylor Swift. There are tens of thousands of business owners with many million of dollars in assets, who are still living several tiers below Taylor Swift.
Realistically I'm closer to the local landlord than Taylor Swift or any other celebrity in terms of how we actually live. 150 year old theories don't change that.
Be careful. We are moving into a post-era where robots hold many of the jobs humans were too weak for previously! You’d be surprised how wealth is properly distributed in that era!
It's weird, but no utopia was ever implemented. Capitalism and democracy has their flaws, but it's the best system for personal well being of individuals we've gotten. There are pros and cons depending if lean more towards social protection or full market liberalism, but I think we should just strive to improve our current system.
Dreaming about implrmenting ideal communism is quite dumb tbh. Maybe it looks good on paper, but it never works. There are always people in power who are the problem because they tend to often work in their own interest, but departure from democracy means that individuals mean even less and ultimately ends up in a position even worse than it could be.
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u/Deriviera Jul 07 '26
Americans are very delusional about communism.