Communism

I don't really know how communism should be but I have some idea how it was in this country. I was born in a communist country, but the revolution came when I was just a child.

Communism was bad but capitalism is worse, at least in this country.

In communism everyone had a home, unemployment did not exist and nobody was starving. Nowadays, I'm just tired of seeing people beg and searching through trash for something to eat.

My mother says that people were nicer to each other in communism because nobody had anything to gain by cheating others. People had enough money to go on vacations every year to the seaside or to the mountains.

There were dark sides to communism, of course. There was a dictator. Sadly, communism has always gone hand in hand with totalitarianism. There was a secret police. There was no freedom of speech. If you were caught saying anything bad about the system or the ruler, you were thrown in jail.

Contraception and abortion were restricted at one point, they wanted to increase the population. This led to abortions in precarious conditions and by dubious people.

It was very difficult to leave the country.

My aunt says that communism was great for a while but in the '80s, the ruler became simultaneously obsessed with repaying external debts and building himself a huge palace. Severe austerity measures were introduced, including food rationing, electricity rationing, gasoline rationing, etc. Most food was exported and what could not be exported remained for consumption. Not only was the food bad at the end of the regime but it was scarce and people queued up to buy it.

While nobody starved, people were not happy and this led to a revolution that ended the system.

Television broadcast was terrible, it was reduced to only 2 hours per day (austerity measures) and only one channel. I remember how people had antennas on buildings and we were trying to catch some russian TV channels to watch some cartoons.

The economy of ex-communist countries crashed alongside communism itself. After the regime ended, everyone took whatever they could, almost everything was dismantled, sold, almost nothing remained. Whatever survived was not competitive with capitalist products.

After the end of the regime, there was a mass flood to the country side. People were given land and they worked it with primitive means. Today agriculture is still mostly of subsistence in this country. During communism, agriculture was intensive, with irrigation systems and modern equipment. Even the irrigation canals were destroyed after the fall of the regime. Industry also collapsed.

The good part is that after the revolution we had no external debt, we've managed to pay it all. Oddly enough, the debt was payed off entirely just before the revolution. Since then, we have managed to gather more and more external debt but our situation has not improved.

Some people laughingly say: "during communism, people had enough money but there was nothing to buy; nowadays, you can find anything but you don't have money to buy it".

My mother says that work in communism is different than in capitalism. In capitalism work is more stressful, the employer exploits you as much as possible. In communism people had a certain amount of work to do every day, they had a norm. Maybe this is one reason why capitalism has been more successful, because it exploits you more than communism. I'm amazed to see that most people work over 8 hours per day, some people have 2 jobs, some people work over 12 hours per day. This is insane! In communism nobody worked more than 8 hours per day.

Nowadays people take loans from banks to buy an apartment and they struggle to pay it back. In communism they gave you a home, just like that, and a job too.

I don't really know how communism should be like. I don't really think that communism has ever existed the way Marx imagined it. I will read more about it and I'll come back to it to make the necessary adjustments. For the record, I'm not for any political doctrine. I just believe that everything should be done rationally, wisely. I believe that the current system is absurd. I also believe that communism (as it was) was absurd.