There was still a ton of infrastructure that’s credited to the Soviets. And one of the big appeals of a place like Bulgaria is how you can privatize those incredibly valuable capital projects.

Then you build a gradient that siphons wealth from one corner of the county to another, you create a Rich cohort of professionals and a Poor cohort of day laborers, and you brag about all the new Burger Kings you’ve introduced to the post-Soviet frontier.

It’s possible that they were on the poor end of that spectrum. It’s also possible that $200/mo spent significantly farther than it does today.

Certainly, they weren’t homeless and they weren’t starving. That means their $200 was getting vastly more mileage than what an American in 2023 receives.

It’s actually maddening how convinced so much of the population in the west thinks that communists have secretly infiltrated every aspect of society (even going so far as to call corporations and lib politicians Marxist). They’re living in a very deranged reality that makes them the victim of communists at every waking moment. There’s no way it’s a healthy state of mind to be in.

Nothing to do with the neo libereral steel batch they subjected them to.

A lot of them perpetuate this themselves as well. Remember a Bulgarian telling me the racism they had was due to the legacy of Communism.

Well I have parents which both lived their childhood through the martial law period, and despite the horrible situation of those times my mother still considers fondly that everyone had a job and a home, and my father hates (I think) every PZPR politician except Edward Gierek and ranted to me how we should’ve “been more like Yugoslavia who were more open to trade with the west”. I love him but he could use some history on how it was the west who were the ones to close on us and yada yada… But what are you gonna do, the man is in his 50s and PRL ain’t coming back any time soon.

They were both young adults in the 90s going through times barely different from the 80s, and then there was I born in 2003. I still somewhat remember the poverty I was growing up in up to like 2010 when things started to quickly improve. Not because capitalism good, but because my mother landed an okay job and we very fortunately living in a house with my great grandmother. So we had no rent to pay. We were very lucky to say the least.

If we were to rent, my life would have turned out drastically different. Definitely worse.

A lot of immigrant parents love dramatizing what they went through and you end up with a lot of people that moved to the US with no money in their pocket and a dream to thrive. I’ve met a few like this with parents who came from my country. I meet their parents and immediately recognize their Spanish as someone who grew up with privilege.

My commune once explained to me how capitalism works and why it fails. A teacher decides that those who get the best grades get to take 10 points off the test of the kids who get the lowest grades. The kids who did well don’t try on the next test because they get free points from the kids who did bad on the last test. The kids who do bad try hard to get a better grade, but don’t because their points go to the kids ahead of them. Also the grades your parents got in school determines your first grade on the test. Eventually everyone kills the rich kids and the teacher.

Lmao

The trick with that idiotic metaphor is that grades are a million times fairer than capitalism

OK like imagine this. What if:

• grades aren’t dependent just on the quality of your assignments, but the sheer quantity
• you need about 10 million man-hours per year to get an A+
• but lucky for you, you can have other people do your schoolwork for you!
• in exchange for writing out all your assignments, you allow your workers to have a C-
• if they stop working on your assignments, they’ll get an F and flunk out

Yeah so uhhh, that sounds like the dumbest fucking school ever and I would absolutely want to “share” those grades between people equally

EDIT: Oh and GRADES CAN BE PASSED DOWN TO YOUR CHILDREN

Their dad really understood capitalism

if there’s one thing planned economies are known for, it’s not ever setting benchmarks for success. when factories underproduced in the soviet union, the bureaucrats simply said “okay thats fine sweetie.”

This is just the same old recycled “I taught my kids communism by giving them all the same rewards for their chores” bullshit parable we’ve all seen before.

Meanwhile under capitalism, the ones swinging the hammers the hardest in the factories make as many times more money than the one in the suit sitting in the cozy office in the corner, right?

This is literally a scene from a children’s sitcom on Nickelodeon

That dad’s name?

Joseph McCarthy.

These people evidently think that socialism calls for equalisation, for levelling the requirements and personal, everyday life of the members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism, with Leninism. By equality Marxism means, not equalisation of personal requirements and everyday life, but the abolition of classes, i.e., a) the equal emancipation of all working people from exploitation after the capitalists have been overthrown and expropriated; b) the equal abolition for all of private property in the means of production after they have been converted into the property of the whole of society; c) the equal duty of all to work according to their ability, and the equal right of all working people to receive in return for this according to the work performed (socialist society); d) the equal duty of all to work according to their ability, and the equal right of all working people to receive in return for this according to their needs (communist society). Moreover, Marxism proceeds from the assumption that people’s tastes and requirements are not, and cannot be, identical and equal in regard to quality or quantity, whether in the period of socialism or in the period of communism.

There you have the Marxist conception of equality.

Marxism has never recognised, and does not recognise, any other equality.

To draw from this the conclusion that socialism calls for equalisation, for the levelling of the requirements of the members of society, for the levelling of their tastes and of their personal, everyday life—that according to the Marxist plan all should wear the same clothes and eat the same dishes in the same quantity—is to utter vulgarities and to slander Marxism.

Isn’t this what grading on a curve is? Like a really shitty explanation for an utterly normal capitalist thing?

Source: random youtube documentary made with the same amount of academic rigor as “Ancient Aliens”.

What are you talking about? What experts?

Yours is just as valid and I think you’d be equally disappointed if someone shit on it just based on the fact that you weren’t born when Pale stopped existing in 1915.

Everyone’s experience is different, based on a ton of factors outside of who’s currently in power. Distant republics like Armenia, for example, certainly did not have the same experience as we did in Ukraine, but my argument stands.

lol you got reported by daq

genetic ancestry count more than documentary evidence

Another “WE WUZ VI-KANGZ” cryptofascist, probably.