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Communism in theory vs in practice
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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East Germany was the side with practically no industry, and the Soviets de-Nazified it and made it pay reparations, as the Soviet Union, unlike the US, emerged from the war with massive reconstruction costs and tens of millions of lives lost. It was not in a position to offer the same kind of support the US gave to West Germany, it had to build itself up first and then help out more. Later on, the DDR was much better and support increased.
In addition, the DDR provided free, high quality education, while the West offered higher pay, meaning a lot of educated workers could get the "best of both worlds" by getting educated in East Germany and defecting to the West.
The East had a good system, but it was bogged down by sitiational problems.
Well, maybe I should not have used FRG and GDR as an example. I should say that this is not the point I was originally trying to make.
I used those as an example because they are similar countries, and contrasted it with comparing a european nation with a undeveloped african/asian nation. I was not trying to criticise east germany really, and I admit there are many reasons why it was and still is I suppose lacking compared to the west.
You should compare countries of similar development. That's a good thing. People always compare the richest capitalist countries with the poorest communist countries, but by doing that always ignore the mass amount of poor capitalist countries, ones that are poor specifically because of capitalism.
Russia, for example, was extremely poor and behind. Comparing them to other majority agrarian societies during the Tsar makes way more sense than comparing them to countries that had been post-Industrial Revolution for awhile already, like Britain, Germany, or the US. That wouldn't make any sense. They were trying to catch up but they were still only just getting a proletariat from their burgeoning heavy industry and rail industries when the Revolution happened. They were way behind the West otherwise. Yet in a short period of time they managed to catch up.
China even more so was basically all peasants. Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, etc all the same, extremely poor, small, or both. So they should be compared with countries of relative equal development, which tends to be the countries in the global South, like Africa or Latin America.
Then there's the fact that they are kept at low development through purposeful exclusion from global markets, via sanctions, propaganda like the "Radio Free" programs, coups, support of separatist or terrorist groups, taking of national resources, being kept in debt by the IMF, and so on.