So half the growth rate lmao. About 4% yearly during the socialist period and 2% during the capitalist period. Not looking great for your argument, especially when you consider that the distribution of wealth is abysmally worse now and the poor people get fucked while the rich take 90% of the wealth.
By 1989 Romanians were starving. Supermarket shelves were empty. Money meant nothing.
You’re confusing the post-communist inflation period with actual socialism. You know, the point when people lost their jobs, when the industry of the country was dismantled, when the rural infrastructure was left to crumble, and when people had to massively start leaving the country!
And, hey, where were all the disabled people?
That’s good and honest criticism, thanks for bringing it up. I wasn’t aware of the treatment of people with disabilities in socialist Romania, and it’s good that you showed me the article about it. You see, that’s how you do criticism, not by making up nonexistent genocides.
Political opposition? Freedom of speech? None of that
Dude, I live in Spain. There has recently been a plot that destroyed the leftist party Podemos in Spain by cops manufacturing false documents of funding by Venezuela and Iran, and leaking those fake documents to all media, which echoed it incessantly for years until it was proven fake. Before that, we had the GAL, a secret paramilitary corps of the ministry of internal affairs that was murdering pro-independence Basque activists and tossing their corpses in lye to melt the evidence.
My uncle can attest to that. Oh wait, he can’t. He spoke ill of the regime while in compulsory military training and they “took care” of him.
Wow, almost as if that’s the history of countries with a fascist past! My great grandfather got murdered by the reds behind the frontlines on the civil war, and I’m not praising Franco for killing the reds. You know what? Because my great grandfather was fascist scum and he likely deserved it! Romania also has a fascist past, and it was necessary to rid the country of fascist elements.
But maybe my grandfather can tell you about his career as a police officer-ohnowait he got canned
Oh, your grandfather got canned for having a dissenting political opinion in the police, something that totally doesnt happen at all with modern police in Europe aye? Ffs my cousin is a cop and he’s constantly harassed for being a leftist, and communists are systematically purged of public life and employments for the sin of being reds. Get off your high horse and look at the current reality.
Healthcare? Let’s ask my aunt. Oh shit, wait, we can’t. She died at 5 of pneumonia cause there were no doctors in her village
Surely she would have survived her pneumonia if the USSR had allowed the fascists to remain in government in s fucking backwards peasant country, huh? Dude, you’re blaming communism for the lack of medicine in a fucking village in 1970, in a country they industrialized themselves. If it weren’t for the communists, your aunt wouldn’t even have been born because the Nazis would have ethnically cleansed your homeland!
Industry? Pollution
Oh you’re right, Romania should have invented solar photovoltaic modules in 1955, totally communism’s fault that they didn’t! You’re ridiculous! You can also thank Chinese communism for Romania’s 47% of renewables, I bet half of that is achieved with solar panels, of which China manufactures 95% of the world’s supply! And likely another significant part of that 47% comes from hydroelectric stations from the communist times of Romania ;)
My parents lived through it themselves and I live in Romania today
So capitalism literally uprooted your family from your homeland for 30 years and you’re still licking the boot? That’s absurd levels of cognitive dissonance! Your family literally had to leave the fucking country because of the horrifying 1990s capitalist crisis, and only now can you move back to a somewhat stable Romania (likely highly educated and in a high paying service sector job of the top 10% of the population, correct me otherwise) being one of the few wealthy people enjoying the fruits of someone else’s labor in capitalism.
If you do more research you may have one or two more revelations when it comes to Romania
The wealthy are not taking 90% in Romania. If the far-right and right keeps growing though… maybe. Same goes for the MAGA-friendly socially conservative kleptocratic social-democrat-in-name-only party we have here. There’s a new green social-democrat party that’s the real deal. It’s growing. Fingers crossed. I don’t think we need communism to keep things in check. A solid social-democrat party with a few democratic socialists here and there should do just fine. If the country goes far-right though… we’re fucked.
The thing about supermarkets being empty is real. That was literally one of the things that triggered the revolution. People tend to stay put if their basic needs are met, which is exactly what the communist regime promised to do and did not. Ceausescu sucked at socialism, basically, if you wanna put it that way. He ran the country like a business and didn’t care about the employees. He only cared about himself and his oligarch friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Romania
My uncle was not a fascist. Far from it. Look at who MAGA calls terrorists and “radical far-left lunatics” these days. It was like that. If you disagreed with them, you were a “fascist”.
What my grandfather did was he refused to beat up a guy for information. He was just a regular cop in a small city. Just a guy who needed a job. He didn’t want to play a part in political oppression. That’s how he got fired.
My family didn’t leave Romania. I did. And they’ve been fine. I left for university. I did Film & TV in the UK cause I liked English-language entertainment.
As for other people being uprooted… People didn’t leave Romania in its communist years because they weren’t allowed to, not cause they liked communism. Plenty escaped. Much like North Korea today.
Also, you keep using socialism and communism like they’re synonyms. They’re not. I’m down with democratic socialism. I am not down with the clusterfuck of oppression and poverty that was the Ceausescu regime. If you feel the same, I’d kindly suggest you don’t associate with it either, cause it is a bottomless can of worms. The more you read, the more shocking it gets. And that goes for plenty other figures of the 20th century. This new generation of progressive democratic socialists is a completely different and much better thing.
Brother the gini coefficient in Romania is 34 and in Russia it’s 35, you are at Russian levels of kleptocracy…
There’s a new green social-democrat party that’s the real deal. It’s growing. Fingers crossed
Keep them crossed lmao those parties are de facto forbidden in Europe. Mark my words: the party will be disintegrated in 10 years. It happened in Spain with Podemos (type of party you’re supporting), it happened in Greece with Syriza… You’re 10 years late to the party, the EU will literally not allow for anything left of corrupt socdems. Mark my words for when in 5-10 years your party is all but forgotten. Electoralism does not work.
The thing about supermarkets being empty is real. That was literally one of the things that triggered the revolution
Sure, the supermarkets got empty in all of the eastern block at the same time, thats why all countries abandoned socialism. I’m aware of the austerity policy in the 1980s, but that’s not because of oligarchy, it’s because Romania took on debt to further invest on its industrial sector, and had to pay back the debt. It caused inflation, but the real shit happened in the 1990s, because capitalism destroyed the economy. Wealth inequality skyrocketed, you complain about oligarchs but it’s literally an order of magnitude now than before. Please, since you speak Romanian, try and find numerical information of wealth inequality in 1975 vs 2025.
What my grandfather did was he refused to beat up a guy for information. He was just a regular cop in a small city
That’s literally cops everywhere. ACAB exists in the west, too. The good souls are kicked out of the police or corrupted.
I CAN TELL you’re not a bot or a troll (fuck I hope I’m not wrong, cause that’d be embarassing). That’s why I’m being relatively chill. And that’s why I’m replying. Who… are you… anyway…? Cause I think you are literally the first of your kind I’ve had an actual conversation with. As a film grad I am genuinely intrigued by the story behind my new far-left “pen-pal” lol Those left-wing parties you said were sabotaged… did you actually vote for them and were disappointed by what happened to them? Is that how you went far-left? Are you young? Are you old? What sort of work do you do?
I feel like I got under your skin and now I feel bad. Cause I’ve legit missed hours of my life being angry at randos on the internet myself.
Cause one human to another: Romania is 20 million conservatives by the Black Sea. You should NOT be this invested in this argument. I am barely this invested in it and I live here. I only defended Romania cause you attacked it. 99% of these people suck. Lol
Get off the commie stuff. It’s too dark. Go volunteer at a charity. Go campaign for a progressive. It will make you feel better. Watch a sad movie and cry it all out of your system. And hell, go out and have some fun too however you can. Things are not actually as bad as they seem and there’s plenty good people out there still. You just gotta look for them.
And genuinely, honestly, if I ruined your day or upset you on a personal level, I regret it. I knew I couldn’t change your mind but I couldn’t help myself. =3
No days ruined, mate, Romanians are pretty chill. When I espouse my communist views to Poles, for example, I get violent threats, so you’re golden.
Those left-wing parties you said were sabotaged… did you actually vote for them
Yup, I’m a Spaniard who did vote for Podemos when they rose, and I’ve seen the capitalist state apparatus + private media demolish the only chance at progressivism this country has had in half a century. Just think about it. How many countries are there in the EU? How many of them have managed to elect a left-than-socdem government since the Euro crisis? The answer is 1: Greece. And if you remember what happened with the Troika and Syriza, you’ll know that the only country which managed to elect a leftist government in Europe was literally threatened to be kicked out of the common currency. When for 2 decades not one single in country in the EU manages to pass progressive economic policy and 100% of them consistently pass neoliberal austerity bullshit, how can you have the slightest bit of trust left in the system? Go ahead and vote for your progressives, I cheer you on that and I’d do the same, but don’t break your heart too much when you see them involved in lawfare/corruption scandals/out of government through a coalition of the rest of parties.
Seeing this is big part of how I went commie, yes. I’m about 30 years old, I just found a decent-paying job in my so far successful STEM-field career.
I only defended Romania cause you attacked it. 99% of these people suck
As much as you feel that way, things aren’t much better right now in most places. People are generally good, it’s capitalism rotting our personalities and distorting our ideas. Things will get better, you’ll see, and you’ll love your country and its people. We’re romance language buddies!
Get off the commie stuff. It’s too dark.
It’s the opposite of dark. Darkness is capitalist realism: the doom of knowing that the system will not steward itself through free market relations into saving us from climate change. Darkness is being incapable of saying anything when our homelands exploit and murder billions in the global south, support genocides in Palestine and wars in Iran, and knowing that things will get worse when the inevitable far-right wave crashes into Europe in the following 5-10 years. Darkness is working for a capitalist firm and seeing your rights and your capabilities constantly eroded, your pensions and your healthcare underfunded, and the education of your children destroyed in favour of the private sector. Communism actually brings an answer to all of these questions, and it’s this answer that makes me so passionate about it. Mate, the world CAN be better than it is, but it won’t become this through elections.
You tell me to volunteer for charity: three days ago I was picking up medical material in my hometown to be sent to our brothers and sisters in Cuba with the flotilla that’s going to be arriving in a few weeks, curtailing the criminal and murderous US blockade on the island and its inhabitants. I raise you one: what if, while you carried out meaningful action such as what I just described, you were receiving and sharing political education, activism, worker organizing, etc? Mutual aid organizations, worker unions, antifascist activity… All of this is not only compatible but actually symbiotic with learning about socialism in theory and in practice.
We cannot have good leftism in the future without honest analysis of the leftism of the past: we need to analyze the mistakes of communism (treatment of people with disabilities in Romania, deportation of ethnic Koreans in WW2 USSR, LGBTQ rights on the eastern block or whatever else you want to bring up) not as blanket condemnation and as rejection of our socialist forebearers, but as honest criticism to improve on where they unfortunately failed due their lacks and the circumstances. Still, the Eastern Block was the most emancipatory, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, egalitarian and liberating socialist movement in the history of the world, and without seeing through the anticommunist capitalist propaganda, we will never achieve half of what they achieved. That’s why I’m so insistent on this topic
So half the growth rate lmao. About 4% yearly during the socialist period and 2% during the capitalist period. Not looking great for your argument, especially when you consider that the distribution of wealth is abysmally worse now and the poor people get fucked while the rich take 90% of the wealth.
You’re confusing the post-communist inflation period with actual socialism. You know, the point when people lost their jobs, when the industry of the country was dismantled, when the rural infrastructure was left to crumble, and when people had to massively start leaving the country!
That’s good and honest criticism, thanks for bringing it up. I wasn’t aware of the treatment of people with disabilities in socialist Romania, and it’s good that you showed me the article about it. You see, that’s how you do criticism, not by making up nonexistent genocides.
Dude, I live in Spain. There has recently been a plot that destroyed the leftist party Podemos in Spain by cops manufacturing false documents of funding by Venezuela and Iran, and leaking those fake documents to all media, which echoed it incessantly for years until it was proven fake. Before that, we had the GAL, a secret paramilitary corps of the ministry of internal affairs that was murdering pro-independence Basque activists and tossing their corpses in lye to melt the evidence.
Wow, almost as if that’s the history of countries with a fascist past! My great grandfather got murdered by the reds behind the frontlines on the civil war, and I’m not praising Franco for killing the reds. You know what? Because my great grandfather was fascist scum and he likely deserved it! Romania also has a fascist past, and it was necessary to rid the country of fascist elements.
Oh, your grandfather got canned for having a dissenting political opinion in the police, something that totally doesnt happen at all with modern police in Europe aye? Ffs my cousin is a cop and he’s constantly harassed for being a leftist, and communists are systematically purged of public life and employments for the sin of being reds. Get off your high horse and look at the current reality.
Surely she would have survived her pneumonia if the USSR had allowed the fascists to remain in government in s fucking backwards peasant country, huh? Dude, you’re blaming communism for the lack of medicine in a fucking village in 1970, in a country they industrialized themselves. If it weren’t for the communists, your aunt wouldn’t even have been born because the Nazis would have ethnically cleansed your homeland!
Oh you’re right, Romania should have invented solar photovoltaic modules in 1955, totally communism’s fault that they didn’t! You’re ridiculous! You can also thank Chinese communism for Romania’s 47% of renewables, I bet half of that is achieved with solar panels, of which China manufactures 95% of the world’s supply! And likely another significant part of that 47% comes from hydroelectric stations from the communist times of Romania ;)
So capitalism literally uprooted your family from your homeland for 30 years and you’re still licking the boot? That’s absurd levels of cognitive dissonance! Your family literally had to leave the fucking country because of the horrifying 1990s capitalist crisis, and only now can you move back to a somewhat stable Romania (likely highly educated and in a high paying service sector job of the top 10% of the population, correct me otherwise) being one of the few wealthy people enjoying the fruits of someone else’s labor in capitalism.
If you do more research you may have one or two more revelations when it comes to Romania
The wealthy are not taking 90% in Romania. If the far-right and right keeps growing though… maybe. Same goes for the MAGA-friendly socially conservative kleptocratic social-democrat-in-name-only party we have here. There’s a new green social-democrat party that’s the real deal. It’s growing. Fingers crossed. I don’t think we need communism to keep things in check. A solid social-democrat party with a few democratic socialists here and there should do just fine. If the country goes far-right though… we’re fucked.
The thing about supermarkets being empty is real. That was literally one of the things that triggered the revolution. People tend to stay put if their basic needs are met, which is exactly what the communist regime promised to do and did not. Ceausescu sucked at socialism, basically, if you wanna put it that way. He ran the country like a business and didn’t care about the employees. He only cared about himself and his oligarch friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Romania
My uncle was not a fascist. Far from it. Look at who MAGA calls terrorists and “radical far-left lunatics” these days. It was like that. If you disagreed with them, you were a “fascist”.
What my grandfather did was he refused to beat up a guy for information. He was just a regular cop in a small city. Just a guy who needed a job. He didn’t want to play a part in political oppression. That’s how he got fired.
My family didn’t leave Romania. I did. And they’ve been fine. I left for university. I did Film & TV in the UK cause I liked English-language entertainment. As for other people being uprooted… People didn’t leave Romania in its communist years because they weren’t allowed to, not cause they liked communism. Plenty escaped. Much like North Korea today.
Also, you keep using socialism and communism like they’re synonyms. They’re not. I’m down with democratic socialism. I am not down with the clusterfuck of oppression and poverty that was the Ceausescu regime. If you feel the same, I’d kindly suggest you don’t associate with it either, cause it is a bottomless can of worms. The more you read, the more shocking it gets. And that goes for plenty other figures of the 20th century. This new generation of progressive democratic socialists is a completely different and much better thing.
(Edited a thing or two for clarity)
Brother the gini coefficient in Romania is 34 and in Russia it’s 35, you are at Russian levels of kleptocracy…
Keep them crossed lmao those parties are de facto forbidden in Europe. Mark my words: the party will be disintegrated in 10 years. It happened in Spain with Podemos (type of party you’re supporting), it happened in Greece with Syriza… You’re 10 years late to the party, the EU will literally not allow for anything left of corrupt socdems. Mark my words for when in 5-10 years your party is all but forgotten. Electoralism does not work.
Sure, the supermarkets got empty in all of the eastern block at the same time, thats why all countries abandoned socialism. I’m aware of the austerity policy in the 1980s, but that’s not because of oligarchy, it’s because Romania took on debt to further invest on its industrial sector, and had to pay back the debt. It caused inflation, but the real shit happened in the 1990s, because capitalism destroyed the economy. Wealth inequality skyrocketed, you complain about oligarchs but it’s literally an order of magnitude now than before. Please, since you speak Romanian, try and find numerical information of wealth inequality in 1975 vs 2025.
That’s literally cops everywhere. ACAB exists in the west, too. The good souls are kicked out of the police or corrupted.
Your brain is washed squeaky clean
Enjoy your “revolution” that you will defo do from your mom’s basement
Lmao Romania just accepted to host US aircraft to bomb Iran. Tell me again how moral and good capitalist Romania is
Dude, it’s been a day
Get off the internet. Your family misses you 😂
Mean jokes aside…
I CAN TELL you’re not a bot or a troll (fuck I hope I’m not wrong, cause that’d be embarassing). That’s why I’m being relatively chill. And that’s why I’m replying. Who… are you… anyway…? Cause I think you are literally the first of your kind I’ve had an actual conversation with. As a film grad I am genuinely intrigued by the story behind my new far-left “pen-pal” lol Those left-wing parties you said were sabotaged… did you actually vote for them and were disappointed by what happened to them? Is that how you went far-left? Are you young? Are you old? What sort of work do you do?
I feel like I got under your skin and now I feel bad. Cause I’ve legit missed hours of my life being angry at randos on the internet myself.
Cause one human to another: Romania is 20 million conservatives by the Black Sea. You should NOT be this invested in this argument. I am barely this invested in it and I live here. I only defended Romania cause you attacked it. 99% of these people suck. Lol
Get off the commie stuff. It’s too dark. Go volunteer at a charity. Go campaign for a progressive. It will make you feel better. Watch a sad movie and cry it all out of your system. And hell, go out and have some fun too however you can. Things are not actually as bad as they seem and there’s plenty good people out there still. You just gotta look for them.
And genuinely, honestly, if I ruined your day or upset you on a personal level, I regret it. I knew I couldn’t change your mind but I couldn’t help myself. =3
No days ruined, mate, Romanians are pretty chill. When I espouse my communist views to Poles, for example, I get violent threats, so you’re golden.
Yup, I’m a Spaniard who did vote for Podemos when they rose, and I’ve seen the capitalist state apparatus + private media demolish the only chance at progressivism this country has had in half a century. Just think about it. How many countries are there in the EU? How many of them have managed to elect a left-than-socdem government since the Euro crisis? The answer is 1: Greece. And if you remember what happened with the Troika and Syriza, you’ll know that the only country which managed to elect a leftist government in Europe was literally threatened to be kicked out of the common currency. When for 2 decades not one single in country in the EU manages to pass progressive economic policy and 100% of them consistently pass neoliberal austerity bullshit, how can you have the slightest bit of trust left in the system? Go ahead and vote for your progressives, I cheer you on that and I’d do the same, but don’t break your heart too much when you see them involved in lawfare/corruption scandals/out of government through a coalition of the rest of parties.
Seeing this is big part of how I went commie, yes. I’m about 30 years old, I just found a decent-paying job in my so far successful STEM-field career.
As much as you feel that way, things aren’t much better right now in most places. People are generally good, it’s capitalism rotting our personalities and distorting our ideas. Things will get better, you’ll see, and you’ll love your country and its people. We’re romance language buddies!
It’s the opposite of dark. Darkness is capitalist realism: the doom of knowing that the system will not steward itself through free market relations into saving us from climate change. Darkness is being incapable of saying anything when our homelands exploit and murder billions in the global south, support genocides in Palestine and wars in Iran, and knowing that things will get worse when the inevitable far-right wave crashes into Europe in the following 5-10 years. Darkness is working for a capitalist firm and seeing your rights and your capabilities constantly eroded, your pensions and your healthcare underfunded, and the education of your children destroyed in favour of the private sector. Communism actually brings an answer to all of these questions, and it’s this answer that makes me so passionate about it. Mate, the world CAN be better than it is, but it won’t become this through elections.
You tell me to volunteer for charity: three days ago I was picking up medical material in my hometown to be sent to our brothers and sisters in Cuba with the flotilla that’s going to be arriving in a few weeks, curtailing the criminal and murderous US blockade on the island and its inhabitants. I raise you one: what if, while you carried out meaningful action such as what I just described, you were receiving and sharing political education, activism, worker organizing, etc? Mutual aid organizations, worker unions, antifascist activity… All of this is not only compatible but actually symbiotic with learning about socialism in theory and in practice.
We cannot have good leftism in the future without honest analysis of the leftism of the past: we need to analyze the mistakes of communism (treatment of people with disabilities in Romania, deportation of ethnic Koreans in WW2 USSR, LGBTQ rights on the eastern block or whatever else you want to bring up) not as blanket condemnation and as rejection of our socialist forebearers, but as honest criticism to improve on where they unfortunately failed due their lacks and the circumstances. Still, the Eastern Block was the most emancipatory, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, egalitarian and liberating socialist movement in the history of the world, and without seeing through the anticommunist capitalist propaganda, we will never achieve half of what they achieved. That’s why I’m so insistent on this topic
Talk to me in 10 years when you experience the EU"s systematic destruction of leftist parties and the rise of the far-right