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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> seeking equality and justice

Equality of outcome or opportunity? That matters. I'd support one but not the other. I lived under Communism until 1989 and I know what equal outcome looks like after decades of having its run. There is no incentive to excel and all the incentives to conform because equality comes before merit. After some time the whole society slides into poverty.

What I don't like is to put ideology over humans, meaning to prefer abstractions and reifications over concrete realities and ignore those realities. Fighting for justice on a societal level can often be blind to personal details. It's usually us vs them and personal details don't matter, in that regard it's similar to war, dehumanising their opponents in order to make them legitimate targets.

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Hello fellow Eastern European.

Yeah, a quest for societal justice can absolutely turn into an egg-breaking rampage with promise of a tasty omelette sometimes in the unspecified glorious future. We have seen it and are a bit sceptical.

The USA was spared this particular disaster. Perhaps we could point out the case of the Prohibition or War on Drugs to our American friends?

These, too, were/are moral crusades ostensibly led by the noblest of intentions, in practice steamrolling individuals without mercy and giving incentive to rise of brutal criminal organizations.

I support equality of outcome. Everyone should be poor. It builds character, and makes for better writers. A nation's progress should only be measured by the literature it generates, and then forces its children to read.

It’s disingenuous to blame all problems our countries had before 89 on socialism, while ignoring the constant blockade and attack from the Western European countries and the US.

Didn't the blockade work both ways?

I'm not blaming everything on socialism though. Russia was not very developed before the revolution, and it suffered terrible losses in WWII.

Several socialist countries tried to export the west, but it was always with the condition that they privatise, reduce worker wages and take on extortionate IMF loans.

I’m less familiar with the USSR’s policies on this, but I can tell you România tried to export to the west and took on an IMF loan to do so. Then we were blocked from actually selling our exports and the loan was required to be paid early and in full regardless. Since we were only allowed to export food for the most part, rationing had to be used for several years. This economic crisis, in addition to constant propaganda via radio and funding of fascists, is part of how the US and its allies made the 89 coup successful.

Was România free to buy everything the West was selling?

If nothing else, we were restricted from buying several foreign currencies at anything other than extortionate rates. A lot of trade deals also insisted on liberalising to some degree or other, which would have (and did, after 89) damaged the local economy. Without trade deals a lot of commodities are so expensive they might as well be banned.

Later on China and Vietnam did manage to negotiate an in-between position with some markets and some free trade (and in the case of Vietnam even IMF loans), but with workers as a class maintaining control of the state and significant parts of the economy continuing to be mostly planned by state-owned enterprises.

A country the size of the USSR does not need resources from other countries to survive. If communism was effective, the blockades would have been irrelevant.

You’re forgetting that the Nazis utterly ane completely destroyed the USSR, digesting an entire generation of men in every soviet state along with all of their infrastructure and resources.

In the end it was the sacrifice USSR which enabled USA and UK (lots of Uniteds here) to claim victory. As a thank you, the west invested considerable resources into rebuilding Germany and Japan while giving the USSR and China the middle finger and immediately treating them like enemies.

We really did kick Russia and China while they were down, repeatedly, then spit on them.

what about the part where Russia decided to continue occupying all the countries they’d fought the Nazis out of?

Just as we’ve seen with Israel and China, the bullied have a tendency to become the aggressors. It could have gone differently had we not decided to back the bad guys of ww2.(Germany and Japan)

It did however need to protect itself from the constant threat of annihilation by the US. At one point US generals were proposing to preemptively nuke all of the USSR because their own losses would be acceptable.

So it didn’t help that a developing economy had to redirect a sizeable portion of its productive power towards defence. Nor did the constant less direct attacks from the US and its allies. Despite all of that, average workers had good conditions even when compared to the US itself.

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