The feminist part of our party (we're all feminist, just this part is run by women focussing on women specifically) is focussing on sex under socialism now and it gets some people's panties in a twist for sure.
They were also consistently ahead of the "BRD" regarding LGBT rights. The reason gay sex was finally completely legalised in all of Germany was that it would be bad press for the "BRD" regime to take away rights from east German LGBT people when they made a new criminal code to go with the annexation of the GDR.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't see why there has to be a dichotomy. In a communist world, no reason we couldn't fairly compensate workers and manage the environment for growing bananas.
It’s the history written by the labor aristocrats and petite bourgeoisie who thought they’d make out better under capitalism than socialism. It ignores the many millions of working class individuals who suffered and died and who would gladly take security and safety over fucking oranges. But we never hear their stories in the west. We only hear from businessmen, journalists, academics etc who decry “no oranges” and ignore the suffering of the masses.
i cant with this people, they are the real spoiled ones taking everything they got in socialist states for granted and complain how hard they had it: "uh it was so hard, we did not have oranges? Can you believe that??? how can a society possibly function without oranges, literally 1984"
I give you the choice:
A: live in a society where human rights like housing, food and clothing are treated as such and the vast majority of peoples needs are met (no oranges)
or
B: live in a society where you need to pay for your human rights and where only the rich can carefree finance their lives without sinking in unpayable debt while homeless people roam the streets and get beaten by the police for being poor (with oranges)
one of the great baffling issues of the later soviet union was how little people appreciated things like safety nets, housing, security in old age. And how much people would really like the new phone
The section in Blackshirts and Reds where he details what it was like for people in former Soviet countries when they realized they had been duped by capitalist propaganda and lost all those things they took for granted was really fucking sad
Apparently the "2/3 society" was a hotly discussed topic in the late GDR, because liberals went that "if only 2/3 of the society lives well at the expense of getting everything to run well, then it's worth pursuing."
They got what they wanted.
A nationalistic "the state was supposed to take care of me, but I am unhappy. This is the lazy people's fault" was very popular in the 80s - east AND west.
Hey speaking of apartments, this bozo leaves out what happened to GDR citizens immediately after reunification. Anyone in the FRG could make a claim on property in the East that was “taken” from them or their ancestors in the process of Germany being divided. At one point, over half of all residential dwellings in the East were claimed by leeches in the West. Even though a lot of claims didn’t end in evictions, so many GDR citizens had to live under the threat of being made homeless (and many were).
You had to wait for a car but it’s not like in the US where a car is a mandatory (and incredibly expensive) requirement to live. They had public transport. And part of the reason they had to wait so long (and also why bananas et al were hard to come by) is that the capitalist world tried to strangle the economies of the Eastern Bloc as much as possible.
Also, the Stasi didn’t come after you just for complaining about the government. Lots of people complained. They came after you if they suspected you were on CIA or BRD payroll, or were a capitalist wrecker, or a fash, etc. Good faith complaints were fine. The book I cite in the source below has an opinion poll that was made shortly after reunification. Former GDR citizens responded to what they liked the least about life in the GDR, and the Stasi were pretty low on the list. Travel limitations were clearly #1 IIRC, but that can’t be blamed entirely on the GDR as the capitalist west also placed restrictions on the travel of GDR citizens.
Source: Stasi State or Socialist Paradise. Haven’t read any Victor Grossman but he’s pretty great on this subject, too.
The process also happened in Poland. I even have a distant, now deceased relative that made big bucks on landlordism in the 90s. Lots of stuff about old aristocrats coming over and getting "their" land back, the church, etc. Anecdotal evidence and all, but both my parents and grandparents claim that homelessness only started showing up around the time of Balcerowicz's market reforms, roughly at the same time the unemployment offices were created.
Public transportation was overcrowded, but it was very well built up even in smaller towns. Besides, the wait for the car is a luxury that imperial citizens of the west take for granted, as well as tropical fruit (a German lib classic). Sure, you had Bananas, and they came from a plantation in Guatemala where pro-American militaries were killing guerrilleros in fights over land in an extremely poor countryside. For the Eastern Bloc, where could they even get those? Cuba and various civil-war ridden republics in Africa. Gee, I wonder why there was so little tropical agrarian produce there - even ignoring the environmental cost.
Also the influence of censorship, authoritarianism, etc. is greatly overstated. Yes, the secret police etc. were overzealous (insert Michael Parenti talking about Nicaragua, 1990) but western music was freely available on the radio, contact with the west was allowed - even in stuff like shortwave radio communications etc., western goods were advertised freely (even including a competition to win these computers). Alas, the already wealthier people were dreaming of Paris (also paraphrasing Parenti) - the "we want FREEEEEDOM" was basically a constant in all media of that time (at least in Poland), and it almost always was expressed with "They're telling us what to do, this is 1984", a juvenile yet reactionary and incredibly popular position.
Victor Grossman
I actually saw him IRL once. I didn't talk to him since he was busy talking to someone else and frankly I don't know what about.
You had to wait for a car but it’s not like in the US where a car is a mandatory (and incredibly expensive) requirement to live
In capitalist Singapore right now there is a $10,000 tax on owning a car and not many people do for this reason (on the grounds that Singapore's infrastructure couldn't work if it had to accomodate everyone in the city having a car)
But they have some of the most exceptional public transportation I have ever seen and I have been all over the world. That's a completely reasonable tax as you really don't need a car there and is a small city state.
…waited 10–12 years for a car and it wasn't cheap…
Meanwhile, in capitalism, cars are so cheap that so many car 'owners' get into a debt that lasts longer than the car. Some of them even find out that after weeks or months of payments, their credit application can be refused and the car can still be taken off them.
Keep in mind, about that line where he says they made DDR the largest prison on Earth, just to keep in perspective: the USA, since 1970, has quintupled its incarcerated population, currently making up about 1/5 of the world’s prison population.
Not to mention the Indian residential fake schools from 1859s to 1998 that imprisoned all aboriginal first nation children and where all the brutal practices of Nazi Holocaust originated. They is also the forced imprisonment of indigenous people in Western European diaspora countries in federal reserves where the European immigrant dump all their toxic chemical wastes under the threat of land confiscation, violation of rent correcting rights, and confiscation of reparation for 150 years of child enslavement, unethical experimentations, and massacre in fake schools for aboriginals who tried to fled imprisonment for survival.
Guessing by the pfp this guy was in high school when DDR was annexed. Not quite as absurd as the 25 year old who has "lived experience of the horrors of communism" in the eastern bloc, but still not the full picture.
It's weird my mother and her siblings all lived in the GDR. The GDR was disbanded when they were in their early to late twenties. My mother who was the oldest sibling has quite fond memories of the GDR (even though she was annoyed at some aspects so much that she considered putting forth an exit application.
My uncles who where in their early twenties when the GDR fell don't think that way. They have adopted the Soviet Union bad, America good mindset.
I think in the former socialist societies there was this lack of abundance of consumer goods that annoyed the middle class. I mean yeah you can have have social securities but without having an abundance of goods and snacks 😜 , it's kinda boring. Take for example in China, there is abundance of consumer goods, products and snacks...
I work very closely with two people from the DDR who were in uni when it was annexed. I don't think I've heard them say a good word about the east in the three years I've known them. Even normal everyday things that we also deal with in the capitalist west are said in a tone or phrasing that implies the east was a particularly bad place. The company also has factories in the former east and I regularly hear things that have totally banal explanations but which are presented as DDR was a horrendous oppressive dictatorship. Meanwhile the one guy praises the business acumen of robber barons like Musk and Bezos constantly.
I was in high school before I realized (my father, an historian, told me) that the wall was only in Berlin. Every textbook I'd read up until that point implied it was all across Germany.
No it was not. A Lada was basically unaffordable, most people owned Trabants and Skodas, Wartburg etc. You had to wait at least 3-4 years (in the early days of the GDR), and some colors were sparce, so it could be that a random car would be assigned to you, regardless of what you filled in on the formular. You also still had to wait for other cars from the socialist foreign countries. A used car market did not exist, but if you had good connections you could transfer the waiting list from another person to you, if they wanted. (sry for bad english)
Did people care about the colour thing? Almost everyone I know can only afford second hand cars, which means the colour is less important than the engine history, etc. Then again, most cars only come ina shade of black, white, grey, blue, and red. So much for choice under capitalism.
I would reckon that part of that picture also was that socialist city planning meant that people had less need for a car than in the west. If you can walk, bike or take a bus anywhere you need to go then having to wait for a car is less of a nuisance than if you live in a city designed by car rains.
In Poland the 1968' generation of young anticommunists who came out of bureocratic inteligentsia and later became mainstay of liberalism and one of the main actors in destruction of socialism was called "Banana Youth".
The DDR was German, unlike Hitler's Reich and unlike modern Germany, which is a colony of the United States. Also unlike Ukraine, which is similarly a colony.
This isn't the first time I've heard some alleged former citizen of an Eastern Bloc country bring up the lack of imported fruits, and I always found it odd that they choose to blame the communist government instead of, idk, the fact banana republics were controlled by imperialists and probably insanely hard to come by? Regardless, it also feels like a petty caveat to throw onto a weak argument about why I should feel bad for them having grown up in a country with free housing, low unemployment, free education, and free healthcare (or damn near free, anyway). Because they didn't get Star Wars or oranges often?
I worked at a hospice (I guess you could call it that?) here in the States, and this nurse was from Romania. I've noticed a trend with "former communist citizens" randomly working in "I was from communist country" into interactions for some kind of sympathy, I guess? There was no rhyme or reason for it, but while talking to her, she brought up she hadn't had bananas when growing up in Romania because they were a communist country. When I suggested it might have been because a lot of bananas were grown in American-controlled regions and the US probably refused to trade them to communist countries, she looked really confused at me, like she hadn't expected me to actually give a sensible reason for it. I've also talked to a comrade who worked as a psych student and had to deal with an Eastern European entrepreneur who would do the same thing: work in something about how he didn't have access to (X), blame it on communism, laugh, and wait for some kind of positive affirmation about it, then get uncomfortable or confused if whoever they're talking to doesn't care.
I sense a pattern, especially when I read articles from other wealthy or well-off immigrants from socialist countries. A sort of exaggeration of hardship that, in a vacuum, looks bad, but with context undermines its severity. But I only know a few cases, so maybe it's just coincidence. Then again, if I were to move and live comfortably in a socialist country, I'd probably tell the citizens how much shit was wrong here in the States, even unprompted.
Funny story. The first time I read that quote was from Call of Duty 2. I was pretty apolitical and ignorant about history. I didn't have some blanket negative view of Stalin back then so I actually liked the quote. I didn't think it was negative or some evil maniac giggling about how he could kill millions because it was a statistic. I thought he was lamenting the fact that the death of one 'great' figure would be treated as a tragedy and the deaths of millions (his countrymen) would be treated as a statistic. The Georgian poet strikes again.