The capitalist association - socialism = poverty

[Toppler]

Why do cappies always say "In practice communism caused poverty" when pretty much every communist country except for Mongolia and Maoist China was in the top human development reports and their economies in the better half of the world? See http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.ondrias.sk/images/1.bmp .

[Robespierre Richard]

Because there are no wealth creators in socialism.

[Toppler]

Because there are no wealth creators in socialism.

You mean wealth as in not the money that common people have, but the wealth in the pockets of capitalists?

If communism "causes poverty" then why the fuck has every communist nation experienced a rapid growth in personal income and living standards?

My grandfather was born into a poor farmer's family in a rural area, in 1936, when Slovakia still "enjoyed" human development indicators worse than present day Republic of Congo. In the 1950s he was offered an educational opportunity in a chemistry high school (mind you, still under the "nasty" Stalinists), then he became a well paid factory worker who became a foreman in the 1960s.

If it weren't for communism, I would probably not type lazily at the computer now. I would be probably toiling soil in a still agrarian nation (while in this reality, communist fully industrialized the Slovak part of the CSSR [the Czech part was industrialized long time ago] in the 1960s).

Russia had the per capita income of 1686 England in 1913, literacy of 30 percents, terrible infant mortality. Similiar conditions, although relatively better, existed here. It managed to get from middle ages to sending a man to cosmos in 50 years. It achieved 1/3 production of the USA at the end of the 1970s while the rate was more like 1:100 in 1913. Anybody who spits at the USSR deserves to have their fucking skull smashed with a sledgehammer. What the USSR and its allies achieved was a decolonised, developed Eastern and Central Europe. Even the capitalists have a reason to thank the Soviets as if they ruled all the time Slovakia for example would not be a relatively prosperous developed country now, but a semi-medieval shithole. Despite the 1990s cappie recession, today's capitalism here still stays on the bones of the socialist system that they stripped of its flesh 22 years ago. They wouldn't even have roads to drive their cars on if it weren't for socialism.

[Omsk]

Well,the capitalist media propaganda has a lot to do with that,as they like to present the socialist and post-socialist countries as hell-pits and generally places that you wouldn't like to live in,they brainwash their kids with that kind of information,and the problem is that people soak it all up,without actually knowing how it was in the socialist countries.
For instance,it is widely 'known' in the western world that places like Yugoslavia or the GDR were poor and the people couldn't wait for the 'liberation' - while in fact,a lot of people want the old countries back,as the life is in fact,worse than it was in Yugoslavia,which was a prosperous state,full of growing communities,large cities,workers and happy families.

While today Serbia is in a bad position,there are a lot of poor citizens,and a lot of overly rich tycoons who control a lot of capital.The people are unhappy,the democrats steal and pretend they are pushing the country forth,while in fact,they are just getting deeper and deeper into the mud.

The GDP of the socialist republics in Yugoslavia was pretty high too,not to mention a lot of people had cars (a lot for that time) and the mass industralization of the country began to take its swing,a lot of factories,dams,mines have been put to work,and the entire country had full electricity,the education was great,much better than in the 'west world' (as there were almost no people who couldn't read) friendship and comradry flourished,a WHOLE NEW MODERN TOWN (650.000 people now) was built in less than it took the today capitalist regime to make 1 apartment bloc.People competed in everyday work,they worked hard and did good.The country was risen from the ashes.Like the GDR.
And not to mention that the GDR arrested over 80% of all the nazi convicts that were persecuted under the terms of genocide and war crimes,the comrades in the DDR openly fought nazism,they built monuments,museums,kept peace and anti-fascism grown and flourish,while the west terrorist monungered for war and avoided all talks about the nazis because their ranks were all ready full of the fascist slimy pigs.
The Czechoslovak socialist republic was also a representative of the bright socialist countries,which are progresive even today.
For instance,the health,the Dachas (state given civil house for holidays) a sense of unity and trust between the citizens,no drugs,a low rate of crime and killings,remarkable successes in sport and medicine,in science and culture - it was all crushed by a couple of right - wing lies that spread the world.That saddens me.Greatly.
But we must stop dreaming about a better society,a better socialist society,we must start working on one.Now.NO stopping,ever.;)

[Toppler]

All true and yeah, especially the education is remember by the older generations as excellent. My parents say that the same stuff that I learn in the 3rd grade of a gymnasium (basically like Britain's grammar schools, except not just for rich people) they learned in the 9th grade of basic school.

When I see Westerners spitting on socialism, I am tempted to say - please, teach your youth to be fully literate before you say anything . The grammar of typical "Western" teenagers, if the Internet tells anything, is at the degree of my grammer... when I was 7 year old. Despite growing up after socialism (I was born in 1993, 4 years after the fall of socialism), my parents led me to learn English from when I was 5 year old. All the while many "Western" teens barely know how to write a proper sentence in their mother tongue. Unfortunately, to be fair, cultural standards here are falling too, with the new generation (born after 1996) of teens being just as semi-illiterate as any American kid.

Congratulations "Western" cappies on sucessfully converting a society (both your own and ours) into a zoo. Now crawl into a black hole and disappear for trillion eternities. I beg you. If Western civilization is the one built around the legacy of philosophers, scientists, humanists and rationalists, Einstein, Mandela, Platon, then you are as far from being Western as any african village. Actually, the african village probably has less degenerated values. The "West" has long turned into a caricature of itself, and pulled the societies it assimilated into the same shit. Your civilization was not supposed to be based on Burger King, McDonald and cable TV.

[Toppler]

Of course, the higher stage of this type of propaganda is the "communism starves the people" myth. Yeah, communism starves the people because of 4 brief famines all occuring in countries that were either after a war/civil war/very underdeveloped (1930s USSR, 1948 USSR, 1958-1961 China). That's capitalist "logic".

Also, interesting how there was no famine or starvation anytime in the Eastern Bloc, not even during the collectivisation, in fact, unlike the 1930s disasterous collectivisation by Stalin, the agricultural productivity increased more than ever, and agriculture was destroyed immediately after the capitalist restoration in 1989. Well, there were severe shortages in Romania in the 1980s, but Caucescau was never a real socialist anyways (unsurprisingly he was cosier with the West than the other socialist leaders). There were 3 famines in Maoist China and Stalinist USSR, and all of them stopped after a relatively short time. Both Maoist China and Stalinist USSR were starving all the time before socialism.

On the other hand, in the capitalist world, around 40 000 people die of hunger daily. That means 14.6 million people each year, many of them children. What a shit system, considering more people die from hunger under it every fucking year than in the entire Holocaust. Capitalist leaders should be hanged for crimes against humanity. All the talks about how the 1932-1933 famine during the rule of Stalin was a "genocide against the Ukrainians" (despite people of all nationalities dying just as much) is just to obfuscate the fact that capitalist world domination is causing an endless, unending famine in the poorest regions of the world, right fucking now, not 78 years ago.

[Savage]

You do realize that none of the leaders of these supposedly communist countries considered their nations to be communist?

[Toppler]

You do realize that none of the leaders of these supposedly communist countries considered their nations to be communist?

Yes I do. They considered them socialist. My point still stands.
Also, this means, that since the beginning of the cold war until today, at least 963.6 million people have died of hunger, most of them in capitalist poor countries. The actual number is probably more than a billion as the percentage of people living in countries with the average food consumption of less than 2200 calories has decreased from 56 percent in the mid-60s to less than 10 percents in the 1990s, so the death rate in poor cappie countries in the past was much higher.
I'd rather hold hands with Ghenghis Khan or Adolf Hitler than with anyone from Goldsman Sachs.
But nooo commies are the biggest killers of all.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

One day there'll be revolution in a developed nation, and they will never again be able to say that Socialism causes poverty.

Of course, the 20th century revolutions were flawed and we must understand this and learn from it, else we or any future Socialists who enact revolution will fail.

However, it's an almost absolute myth (if we discard places like DPRK) to say anything other than places like the USSR, GDR, PRC, Yugoslavia and Cuba, despite their flaws, did anything other than eliminate poverty and increase living standards, in the case of the USSR and PRC, vastly, and vastly more than any non-Socialist system at the time would have done.

[La Comédie Noire]

Capitalists love to pick and choose their hell holes don't they?

The transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one is a tough battle whether it's done by central planners or capitalists. Except the capitalists didn't have legions of paid stooges parading their country's poverty as "failure" and had the added benefit of not losing any sleep over it either. People also tend to forget how many of the things we take for granted today were won by bloody struggle with the capitalist class.

[Dimmu]

Like many of the above have said, its all capitalist propaganda to discredit socialism.

But we also need to remember that many of these so called "socialist" countries were no more then state capitalists.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

But we also need to remember that many of these so called "socialist" countries were no more then state capitalists.

It's difficult to agree with that notion.

Many of the old Bolsheviks whose ideas ruled the USSR for the first two decades of its existence had lived their lives fighting for Socialist revolution. It's really difficult to accept that they were 'State Capitalists'. They were indeed State Socialists, as their doctrine of Marxism-Leninism dictates, and it is incredibly unlikely that their ideology would ever have - successfully - gone past State Socialism towards communism, via the abolition of money, bureaucracy and state. However, their embrace of revolutionary ideals in the form of industrialisation, collectivised farming and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, along with a great many more workers' rights as well as the collective ownership of the means of production, for social benefit rather than for profit, surely defeats the hypothesis that they were State Capitalists.

It could, however, possibly be argued that the likes of Kosygin and those who advocated reforms along his lines were State Capitalists.

[Dimmu]

It's difficult to agree with that notion.

Many of the old Bolsheviks whose ideas ruled the USSR for the first two decades of its existence had lived their lives fighting for Socialist revolution. It's really difficult to accept that they were 'State Capitalists'. They were indeed State Socialists, as their doctrine of Marxism-Leninism dictates, and it is incredibly unlikely that their ideology would ever have - successfully - gone past State Socialism towards communism, via the abolition of money, bureaucracy and state. However, their embrace of revolutionary ideals in the form of industrialisation, collectivised farming and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, along with a great many more workers' rights as well as the collective ownership of the means of production, for social benefit rather than for profit, surely defeats the hypothesis that they were State Capitalists.

It could, however, possibly be argued that the likes of Kosygin and those who advocated reforms along his lines were State Capitalists.


Soviet Union aswell as other "socialist" states were not really socialists because workers had no control at all. Instead of working for a exploitive multi-national company they worked for an exploitive state. No unions were allowed and you would instantly be branded as schizophrenic if you went to riot.

And the living standards were not equal(but better then in todays Russia). You had a large portion of beuracrats who owned cars and apartments and you had actors who got a nice sum of money.

[RadioRaheem84]

For the lack of real socialism, the old Blocs sure achieved development levels to that of their western counterparts and that was without the total dependence of colonial and post-colonial imperialism.

But this is spurious, as imagine what true socialism can accomplish when witnessing what was accomplished by the state capitalist Eastern blocs alone.

Also, cappies never count the capitalist nations in the periphery of global capitalism as capitalism. For some reason they're never really mentioned as anything, just existing "command"" economies or some BS economics textbook term.

Capitalism creates wealth but also great poverty, and the cappies like to make it seem like these two polar opposites just exist next each other in some unfortunate juxtaposition.