Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]

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.

1. “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”.

2. “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”

3. 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.

4. “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”

Raising the interest rate (i.e. making loans more expensive) is the measure taken if there is a belief that there is too much demand for goods by the population (Keynesian inflation theory) or too much money in circulation (Monetarist inflation theory). It’s taken in the hope that reducing the purchasing power of the population will slow the price increase down with falling demand. Which is why you had mainstream economists talking of say the need to increase unemployment (i.e. take people’s incomes away) and how wage increases are bad due to the supposed theory of the wage-price spiral.

Cutting taxes is a measure taken with the hope that with reduced costs, private enterprises will scale up production and increase the amount of goods’ supply as compared to demand, lowering or at least stopping the increase in prices, as orthodox economists hold the thesis that excessive demand (as supposedly caused by the 2020 Covid Crisis) is responsible for the currently high inflation.

Nowadays, it’s commonly accepted in many studies, such as this recent one from New Zealand that a significant cause in the inflation is the desire for even higher profits compared to what they already had in years prior.

Lowering taxes in response to a stagnant economy in this case is, as I understand it, unlikely to affect inflation, but is rewarding a private sector that used the fuel and energy price crisis caused by the war in Ukraine to enrich itself even as those prices fell again, with more riches. Especially considering the currently stagnant economy, it’s placing hope on a sector that has already failed to deliver out of an ideological belief that the state is unable to do what the private sector can, as well as the support it gets from and how many politicians have personal relationships with the private sector.

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).

The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir “Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder”. Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C

The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.

That’s what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.

Wow that’s an old one. It reminds me of the glory days of r/fullcommunism

I’ve quit that server because there was a guy yankkksplaining me why the same housing policy as the one a nearby city’s socdem government follows is good and based actually, as well as praised landlords who (iirc) actually do want to build cheap housing and drive rent prices down, you see.

On the other hand, there was a surprising amount of international comrades… me included, I suppose

It’s baby leftists, not really surprising. 1/3 will go back to being libs, 1/3 will go Vaushite and shit and 1/3 will eventually develop into more mature comrades.

Also the Iranian Revolution (which wasn’t entirely Islamist in nature, but they were the ones who won the power struggle in its immediate aftermath - the liberals were out of the picture by 1980, while the communist opposition got finished off in mass executions in 1988) happened due to the unpopularity of absolute monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was stubbornly supported by the US to his last days.

And this has roots in the western-supported coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, who was a social democratic reformer.

It’s a story that unfortunately repeats many times around the region, and globally too.