Was communism really that bad??

great stories about karlovac by the way

I must interrupt this interesting thread to thank all of you for participating in such an insteresting subject, but mostly for sharing personal experiences. MOU, your passion for your home town is admirable. I must confess that I have never felt that way about any town I have lived in. What is more amazing is the people of your town! Karlovac is now pinned on my world map.

hey, and we even have baseball C.I.

Such a pity I came across this discussion when it's almost over :-( .

Anyway, I was also raised in a Communist country - I lived in Russia until 1991. My Own Username is very accurate when describing the Communist reality (and yes, Hrvatska definitely worth a visit - never been to Karlovac, but Istra and especially Rovinj are just stunning), but...

Maybe someone already raised this point, but for an average Joe (Ivan ?) without any ambitions who's not into politics of any kind the differences between the two "isms" are not very striking. In a way, Communism is even a better option - the state runs your life instead of you, no mortgage's to pay, you have absolutely no chance of finding yourself unemployed... of course, the problem is that this sums up the benefits. If that average Joe attempts slightest move out of the system - he's a public enemy (OK, in most cases... there were variations, of course). I guess it's a cliche, but this system doesn't teach its subject to think and adapt; it teaches NOT to think and NOT to adapt.

Still, I believe there is significant number of people who'ld prefer that safe slavery to the dangerous world outside.

Needless to say though that the main problem is that even this security for the meek is not guaranteed to exist forever - the economic model is self-contradictory.

When I visited Bulgaria last summer I heard the same remark. It was like 'OK we have our freedom, but do you know how hard life is, how expensive life has become?' But eventually they just have to bite the bullet and there will be better times (I hope).

It's up to the younger generation to improve the economy by their education and risk taking and entrepreneurship for creating business. There must be a banking system that will provide the money for the improvement of their social overhead capital, and for investments in business ventures. It's very difficult (if not impossible) for the older generation that have experienced being provided for all their lives to change.

rick wrote : "When I visited Bulgaria last summer I heard the same remark. It was like 'OK we have our freedom, but do you know how hard life is, how expensive life has become?' But eventually they just have to bite the bullet and there will be better times (I hope). " ... the situation in the eastern part of germany has still not stabilized even though more than ten years have passed since re-unification. saw a report in a german news-site recently dealing with this subject. the german goernment established a commision to get advice on how to deal with the high unemployment and other economic problems. i understand that the commision could not come up with any quick and drastic solutions to the problems. i also noted that the new german president (not the chancellor) is suggesting that a low dose of "thatcherism" might be in order ! perhaps walter can give us some more insight. hbg

Lot of people say unemployment in east-germany is still so high because after unification, the east basically bought into the west's welfare state arrangements, when the state's economic health couldnt in fact "carry" or compensate for such arrangements ... eg, considering the state of the east-german economy, the only new jobs you could add to the labour market on any massive scale would be jobs so low-wage that they cant compete with unemployment benefits, and so on. That kind of argument. Proposed solution: a dose of thatcherism, especially for the east.

One problem with that. Further east still, in countries like Poland, they do have the thatcherite freedom for enterprises to create very-low-wage jobs, they dont have the welfare state trappings, they did implement thatcherite recipes ... and unemployment is just as high.

from what i know about the situation in the former east-germany (which really is very little), one of the big problems was the closing down of some fairly large enterprises that caused a lot of pollution. of course, it seemed right that the polluting factories should be closed down (i believe many were indeed beyond upgrading), but many people were thrown out of work and were not able to find other work in their communities. i guess the basic idea was a reasonable one, but there was simply not enough of an effort to follow through and provide work. (i believe the cost of re-integration of the former east-germany was grossly under-estimated). when we visited berlin last fall, we could definetely see the stark contrast between east and west - it seemed like someone had drawn a line between east and west, and it had still not been erased. i realize, of course, that east-germany had not received the kind of economic help that west-germany received after the war. i think it is a difficult job trying to bring the eastern part of germany up to the same economic standard as the western part. ... i guess even looking at canada we see wide disparities between central and western canada and the eastern provinces (particularly the province of newfoundland has not been able to see the same economic growth as the rest of country, resulting in economic stagnation and high unemployment). hbg

Motivation is a very difficult thing to gauge in any population. What I have found as a truism is how the Chinese have succeeded in many countries they have settled into, while the natives seem to remain in similar circumstances as their past generations. Anybody have the answer?

The collapse of any system will result in a period of chaos. The period of chaos may be short, or very long, dependant upon how catastrophic the collapse was. The Enclosure Acts pretty much spelled the end of the rural English economic structure. Thousands were thrown or forced off the land. Urban areas ballooned and the gap between wealth and poverty were extreme. So extreme, that some like Marx and Engles believed that the system would be destroyed by a revolution started and led by exploited factory workers. The suffering among the middle and lower classes was so acute as to be almost unbelievable to most of us today. Terrible suffering, but in the long run of great benefit for the whole nation.

The shift to an industrial economy and transitional capitalism made it possible for the British to oppose Napoleon on a near equal footing. English trade was an important part in gaining and keeping its empire until 1945, and that benefited the English economy. One little island, but tough and capable of standing against others many times larger, richer and with greater resources. The suffering that accompanied the Enclosure Act(s) was succeeded by the development of a world-class economy that has benefited most Britains ever since.

No, I don't have an answer but people seem to think that first generation immigrants generally are motivated to get ahead. Generalizing is a risky thing. Maybe they are just ignorant of all the cast in stone problems in the places they land. Or maybe they are selfselecting as the group that left whatever country they left.

Hhmmm ... most of ex-communist eastern europe went through an extensive phase of "de-industrialisation" in the nineties, i dont think it has much in particular to do with new environmental laws and rules (which still aren't especially strict further east).

What it does have to do with is ... well, all kinds of stuff. Soviet communism hugely invested in heavy industry, which was credited with higher ideological/strategical value than the production of consumption goods; much of it was part of the so-called military-industrial complex. Furthermore, with the imperative of pumping up production in each five-year-plan, the emphasis was on quantitative expansion (more of the same), rather than on qualitative innovation or exploring new products or technologies. The result was that after '89, the new East-European governments looked at what the country had in terms of industry, and saw heavily polluting, inefficient, old-fashioned plants churning out stuff that often had lost most of its global market value or had been focused on supplying the soviet army in a weapons race that was now abruptly deconstructed. Useless, useless, useless.

At the same time the heady urge to privatise, liberalise, sell off and modernize in those early years also did harm. The overwhelming majority of the old factory complexes was practically unsellable, and their losses a huge drain on the already overburdened budget. So a whole lot of them were simply closed down altogether, or sold off for a pittance, often (especially further east and south) to fraudulent biznessmen who used the ownership to launder money or what have you, quickly bankrupting the places after all. At the very best, a company could be sold to a Western investor, whose arrival was so welcome that few if any rules or conditions were imposed - and the investor would usually succeed to fire most of the workers and save only the part of the company that had the best chance of success, automatizing it where possible.

A lot of all that was necessary or at least unavoidable; some of it was plain criminal. But the end result was indeed in many cases a far-reaching de-industrialisation, leading to massive lay-offs of often older, low-educated workers in polluted, industrial zones - not the kind of people who easily find their way into the new jobs that did spring up elsewhere, in tourism, services, commerce and IT ...

osso, Sometimes generalizing is the only way to seek answers.

Asherman has a point about enclosure acts, but i would point out that individual acts of enclosure proceed over a periof of literally centuries. In addition to enclosure, the Corn Laws assured that only the most productive operations could afford to weather long periods of surplus. The Corn Laws basically assured that foreign imports would not sell for less than the national "floor" on grain prices, as established by simple supply and demand. Given that consideration was not given to costs of transportation, storage and milling, it was often cheaper in times of surplus to simply buy foreign grain which arrived in the ports, mill it nearby, and ignore the domestic market. This very quickly ended a life-style of centuries of the migrant agricultural worker--many of whom had taken up the work as a result of being thrown off the land due to enclosure. Farmers tightened their belts, and put their families to work, knocked down tenant cottages to open grazing land which could be put in grain as the market dictated. Economists have often pointed to the Corn Laws and the prices of grain in England as evidence of the stability of the economy--but in times of want, demand never reached it's potential, because of the poverty of itinerant agricultural workers, and cottage spinners and weavers (losing their livelihood to factories), and factory workers--they'd have surely bought more bread for themselves and their families if they could have afforded it. Factory workers were frequently co-erced in to employing their own family members, wives and children, on starvation, piece-work wages--and all the while, trades associations were banned by law. In 1819, with the depressive effects of the Corn Law at their height, and just about all of the available common land already stolen by enclosure acts, workers decided to hold a "monster meeting" at St. Peters fields outside Birmingham--and the attack of British Cavalry lead to a massacre known ever after as the Peterloo Massacre.

"Thatcherite" measures are often simply a way of avoiding the hard work of building an equitable consumer market, with both incentive and protection of personal rights. The grinding poverty of England as it slogged and staggered through the "birth of the industrial age" (a good deal of conceit in that, by the way) assured levies for the Royal Navy and for the Army--and their aristocratic officers described these economic waifs as "the scum of the earth." It took capitalists literally centuries to understand the equation that well-paid workers consume the goods which make their world go round. The potentially fatal myopia of capitalists is that they fail to acknowledge that markets and resources are limited, and that everyone benefits to the uttermost when no one is left unable to make a reasonable effort to attain the benefits. In short, to my mind, greed is only slightly perferable to ideological righteousness, and ought never to go unwatched and unchecked.

nimh : let me again state that i'm not fully familiar with the situation in the former east-germany ... here are just a few points at random ... we made a daytrip from hamburg into the former east about a year or two after re-unification. we stopped in a small town to visit a museum. the air was so polluted from burning soft coal (braunkohle) that we could hardly breathe. we coughed and spit , and thought our lungs would give out. we than spoke to some of the locals who told us about the pollution problem ... to them it was just a normal day, but they told us that a lot of the children and older people were suffering from asthma and other lung diseases. i also remember seeing the pictures from some of the factories that were being closed down ... the level of pollution was almost unbelievable. (it reminded me of my earlier years in germany when our parents had friends who worked in the local copper-smelter and the lead-battery-factories ; i don't think any of them lived long enough to ever collect a retirement pension ! ). i see the most serious problem for germany (and perhaps europe and the world) in the young people living in the eastern part of germany who cannot find work; they are they best candidates for becoming extremists of the right or left - and i think both extremes are dangerous for any country in the wold. if there is no hope, what have you got to loose ... (makes me shiver !). hbg

Hamburger, yes, for sure pollution is a great problem - much of it rooted in the ways communist industry was run - well, the stuff i noted in my post above ...

Not that the western countries didnt have such pollution too, half a century or a century ago ... But i do think it persisted longer and excesses were sharper in the communist world, partly because of the emphasis on quantitative expansion rather than qualitative improvement, and partly because the state's stranglehold on the media and public action made it impossible for anyone to speak up about it or wage action on it ...

Interestingly, some of the first openly dissident activity directly prior to the 1989 upheavals was on the part of environmental groups, for example in Bulgaria (Ecoglasnost) and Hungary, where the environmentalists were called Blues rather than Greens, because of their focus on the Danube (resistance to the Gabcikovo dam etc).

My post really wasnt meant primarily to disagree with you, just to try to cover the bases in explaining some of the main causes behind today's de-industralisation and accompanying unemployment ... I hope it made sense ... I know I can be wordy sometimes.

nimh and hbg, It's not only in underdeveloped countries that have polution from factories. Here in Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world, we have polution from factories that builds pc's, ic's, and other high tech equipment. I'm not sure how long before our underground water system is completely poluted by chemicals. It's scary.

I'm not sure the natives are in similar circumstances; in fact, China is pretty much developed now. Take a look at this table:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_gro_198

China's GDP grew by whooping 382% since 1980. There are German luxury cars on the streets, capable banking system, Beijing airport is as modern and sophisticated as any European airport. Actually, China's today's economical maladies seem to be caused more by the ultra-fast uneven growth.

However, economic system of today's China is waaay far from Communism.

Galilite, I have visited China twice, and know how quickly they are developing economically. My last visit was in 2000, and I have witnessed dramatic developments in both Beijing and Shanghai. China's economy was slow to develop even ten years ago, and the new economy of China today is much changed - pretty much from the change in political leadership.