Communism ruined East Germany and it still hasn't been fixed - says Spiegel

[Angst]

Is this an argument for or against socialised medicine?

I want an answer for this. It's a quite seirous question.

 

[Domen]

Socialised medicine works terribly in post-Communist countries. Queuing for months.

 

[Domen]

"Look", they said, "We've rebuilt your country".. and Poles looked around and sure enough, it was rebuilt.

Warpus, Poland rebuilt itself from its own resources and with hands of its own citizens.

If anything the Soviet Union was taking bricks from Poland to rebuild their own cities.

Industrial facilities from western Poland were also transported to the USSR as war booty.

But the rebuilding phase was in years 1945 - 1950. After 1950 was mostly ruining again.

 

[Agent327]

No, he was not successful as you see. If he were sucessful USA would not have problems with modern obsession with "sexism", "racism", "imperialism" etc, and instead were colonizing asteroid belt by now. This days you can not put a spacecraft on a comet without being slammed by a rabid pack of progressive feminists. This kind of idiocy was rampart in USSR as well.

Hm. I seem to recall the USSR was quite fond of putting stuff in space. If they hadn't launched Sputnik there might here have been an Apollo program.

 

[Traitorfish]

Even if the war reparations were severe, they don't explain the GDR's miserable economic performance. State planning failed there as it did everywhere else. It wouldn't matter if the GDR had to pay nothing; it was doomed to fail.

I'm not sure that "state planning" is really the right word; the Eastern Bloc markets were never meaningfully planned, just centrally administered. The only real episode of central planning is the High Stalinist era, the collectivisations and the war, and that was a period of, what, ten years or so? After that, state "plans" were revised, renegotiated and just plain rewritten frequently enough as to make them more like manifestos than actual economics blueprints. The real stumbling block seemed to be the political impossibility of recession, and capitalist economies need recessions, need that episode of capital-destruction so they can begin expanding again, and the alternative is stagnation. (Even Keynes only ever argued that the state could lessen and shorten recessions, not that it could do away with them.)

So, yeah, the Eastern Bloc economies were programmed to fail, but it was a more mundane sort of issue than Free Market in the blue trunks, State Planning in the red trunks. That's an ideological narrative, a claim about how thinks are supposed to work, not so much about how they actually did.

 

[Angst]

Socialised medicine works terribly in post-Communist countries. Queuing for months.

Should healthcare be privatized then?

 

[Takhisis]

I'd say no, Mr. Angst. Since the problem is post-Communism, then just never leave Communism. Or go back to it if you have.


Amirite?

 

[Domen]

Post-Communist problems - as the name indicates - have their origin in Communism.

And these countries which failed to deal with post-Communist problems still suck.

Ukrainian GDP PPP per capita as % of Polish GDP PPP per capita (in current dollars):

https://www.google.com.au/publicdat...0000&tend=1384642800000&hl=pl&dl=pl&ind=false

1990 - 113,9%
1992 - ~100%
2003 - 43,7%
2013 - 37,8%

Yes - in 1990 Ukraine was richer than Poland (hard to believe today).

 

[Angst]

Should healthcare be privatized then?

Still waiting.

 

[Domen]

No it shouldn't - public healthcare should be available. But don't give credit to Communists for public healthcare.

Many countries which were never Communist have much better public healthcare than post-Communist countries.

 

[Takhisis]

But that does not include the champions of anti-Communism, 'Murica.

Also, you haven't quite disputed my point. Was the public health system good during the Communist years?

 

[LoneRebel]

Also, you haven't quite disputed my point. Was the public health system good during the Communist years?

Do you think it was?

 

[Yeekim]

East Germany (like North Korea) was not as successful at developing and creating prosperity as West Germany (or South Korea) was. This is pretty simple; I don't see why it's so hard to understand. East and West Germany started off at relatively similar income levels. In a few decades, West Germany's income level was far ahead of East Germany's. Why do I even have to explain this? In the same way, North Korea and South Korea had relatively similar income levels upon partition (in fact NK's was probably a little higher). In a few decades, SK had left NK in the dirt. These "divided countries" are the truest test of whether communism or capitalism was the better system, because almost all other variables are controlled for. But of course, some people are still going to deny something that's plain to see.

Yup. That's really so plain to see it ain't even worth discussing.
How, when or if the gap will be closed would be much more interesting.

My point is that the article isn't interested in that. You want to talk about it, because you're that dreary combination of bore and zealot who finds their personal hobby-horse in every detail and statistic and then insists on telling everyone about it. But the article itself is about something else altogether, something which is a legitimately important if somewhat dry topic, and which you've made really no effort to discuss or to prompt discussion on.

You're not wrong. You just swallowed the bait line, hook and sinker and have been continuing to feed the topic the article isn't even about...

 

[Traitorfish]

You're not wrong. You just swallowed the bait line, hook and sinker and have been continuing to feed the topic the article isn't even about...

I have poor self-control.

 

[luiz]

I wouldn't trust luiz to be a level-headed commentator on almost anything, least of all where communism is in any way involved.

Sometimes I do wonder how people here are at work and how or why they're successful. Seems difficult to hide hot-headedness in real life.

A level-headed person in the real world either despises communism or ignores it entirely as a dead ideology / cult.

What I wonder is how self-professed Marxists would fare on the business world if they ever talked politics. They'd be laughed out of their jobs. But then I remember that all our self-professed Marxists, for obvious reasons, fall into one of the following categories:

a) Lives off daddy and has mommy pack their school lunch;
b) Works at McDonald's or similar high-end enterprises;
c) Works in academia, where it's tolerable to be a lunatic.

 

[warpus]

Warpus, Poland rebuilt itself from its own resources and with hands of its own citizens.

If anything the Soviet Union was taking bricks from Poland to rebuild their own cities.

Industrial facilities from western Poland were also transported to the USSR as war booty.

But the rebuilding phase was in years 1945 - 1950. After 1950 was mostly ruining again.

I grew up in a neighbourhood that was all grey apartment buildings. Grey, square, devoid of soul. You know what else? Every single neighbourhood looked the same. The same simple architecture for every building and every single grocery store built to be the exact same way. It was boring, devoid of personality, and very depressing.

We called them "commieblocks". If the Soviets had not been running our country, we wouldn't have gotten "architecture" like that built in our country. Weren't soviet architects in charge? Wasn't Polish labour supervised by the Soviets during reconstruction? Weren't they in Warsaw, overlooking everything, planning our economy and deciding what gets built where?

Holding back is not the same as ruining. Of course, the Communist regimes did damage the countries they ruled, but I for one would blame the Allies for splitting the world between themselves and the Western allies for selling out half of Europe and large chunks of Asia to a madman like Stalin.

There are definitely more factors at play here than what I was outlining, but in the end the Soviets were in charge of the country. As such they get most of the blame.

The west might have abandoned Poland, but in the end the Soviets could have not given us all the crap they did. They could have done a much better job with the rebuilding - like what the Americans were doing in Germany. But they didn't.. So they get the blame.

Well, we were talking about East Germany and the SED regime, not Poland and the Soviets, so I think we might be straying off the track a little...

But either way, it doesn't seem like you're actually using "ruined" to describe what happened to the economy. You're not making the claim that the Communist government took a vibrant, healthy economy, and turned it into a stagnant, unhealthy economy. You're staking out a national narrative, a claim to a destiny that was interrupted by Communist machinations, you're not giving a description of the development of the East German (or Polish) economies, 1945-1989. The man who built you a poop-houses did not ruin your house, because the only house you have is the house he built, and that's simply what it is. That's not even what your claiming: the poop-contractor is alleged to have ruined is your life, that is, preventing you from thriving as you believe you were capable of doing. And that's a fair line of complaint, sure, I certainly don't think that the people of East Germany (or Poland) owe the Stalinist regimes their thanks or affection. But it's besides the original point.

I'm using the word 'ruined', because both Poland and west Germany were pretty much in ruins right after the war. I see the rebuilding of West Germany as having been done right, while the rebuilding of the east the exact opposite. In terms of potential, the west was invested in properly by the U.S., while the east was thrown into the toilet by the Soviets.

I agree that this is a bit of a tangent now that's not really worth getting more into. I don't think we really disagree on the main points here. Maybe just the use of the word "ruined", which I completely can see your side of. I just see ruined potential. They had a blank slate and they failed big time. They didn't care to make the country good, they just wanted a buffer zone between themselves and the west. They deserve the blame - they had their own interests in mind and not the interests of Poland at all. But again, tangent, etc.

 

[luiz]

The west might have abandoned Poland, but in the end the Soviets could have not given us all the crap they did. They could have done a much better job with the rebuilding - like what the Americans were doing in Germany. But they didn't.. So they get the blame.

It's not just that they "gave you crap". It's that they occupied you, set up puppet regimes, murdered the opposition and intelligentsia, and basically condemned you to subservience and mediocrity.

So of course the Soviets deserve the blame. They didn't have to rebuild you, but they should at least have left you free to pursue your own path.

 

[Samson]

One thing that could be considered with respect to the relative treatment of west and east germany, is that I would rather have lived anywhere in the US than in west germany from say 1945 to 1965, but I would rather have lived in east germany than most if not all places in Russia. While that does not say much about the capabilities of the respective economic systems, I think it says something about the relative effort put in by the 2 powers.

 

[luiz]

One thing that could be considered with respect to the relative treatment of west and east germany, is that I would rather have lived anywhere in the US than in west germany from say 1945 to 1965, but I would rather have lived in east germany than most if not all places in Russia. While that does not say much about the capabilities of the respective economic systems, I think it says something about the relative effort put in by the 2 powers.

Or it simply says something about how Americans, Germans and Russians run their own countries.

 

[warpus]

It's not just that they "gave you crap". It's that they occupied you, set up puppet regimes, murdered the opposition and intelligentsia, and basically condemned you to subservience and mediocrity.

So of course the Soviets deserve the blame. They didn't have to rebuild you, but they should at least have left you free to pursue your own path.

Exactly. Instead they decided to do what they did - ruining many things in the process. I am going to stick to that word.