Several of the shops mentioned in the article are in Kreuzberg which was in the west before the wall came down but now has more in common with other eastern districts like Friererichshain or Neukolln than ones like Charlottenburg in the west. These kind of quirky workshop shops or independent shops are more common in those eastern districts I think than in the west now, which has more of the usual sorts of big high street chains.
>Your comment feels more like vitriol than fact statement, regardless of being correct.
It's just about the shortest, blandest way to make that statement. That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive to say X did Y when that is fact (or as close to fact as you can get with a subjective matter like this, nobody is going to say that communism was good for Eastern Europe) says something about culture here in 2019.
> That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive says something about culture here in 2019.
I'm literally writing this comment from mobile while standing in a crowd near anti-communist protest in Prague. I can't really wrap my mind around this culture change.
People are very tired of the mildest bit of social democrat market intervention being denounced as "communism". Like "Nazi" it's a word that has been overused into uselessness, so it gets reflexively downvoted. Besides, communism in the original sense is realistically dead. The Berlin Wall has been down for almost 30 years. So people complaining about it in the present come across as McCarthyite.
(I think your original comment would have gone down better if it had been clearer about the past tense - that communism did destroy a lot of small businesses, but this is not an ongoing thing)
I used have because these businesses remain to be dead, there are not new ones in their place, only a group of shady businessmen that own all the properties and rents them to scam shops. I think that is an important distinction. Today no businesses would be destroyed by them of course, but there is also no business to destroy.
The event's meaning is not the same on this side of the curtain. All but mandatory attendance (sometimes with people literally checking names off a list), officials' speeches and military parades tend to sour the mood somewhat, and, from what I can tell, that memory lingers still. These days, many people just use it as an extra day off.
They don't call it that and don't behave like that, so no. They have anti-NATO, anti-USA and pro-Russia banners (and one pro-China). But there was a march earlier, at another place. I believe the anti-communists were there as well.
I was born in a communist country, you don't need to tell me. There was Labor day march elsewhere, as I wrote in the previous comment. This was a protest. They did not move and actually did call themselves a protest, not march (if you asked about that, they pointed you to the march that was elsewhere and also at another time later in the day).
All right, but I was saying so from the perspective and for the potential benefit of US readers, who celebrate Labor Day in the fall.
As for your other point, at least here in Switzerland, the delineation between "march" and "protest" is not so clear, and May Day usually features both.
In my post-Soviet city that doesn't seem to be the case. I know of a shop that just sells car batteries - literally nothing else. They have maybe 30 products in stock, and can order it if you need something else. I don't think they have a web store.
It doesn't seem that factual, accepted and well-researched when this article directly contradicts your statement:
> In such a skewed retail landscape, many small shops found they could compete by specialising in goods neglected by generalist department stores, especially since retail space was cheap and in plentiful supply behind the Iron Curtain.
So while you may be right, you may also be wrong. Maybe it's not as black&white as you make it out to be.
I think you are misunderstanding the article. Going to the east, these specialised shops directed by the communists, put in place of previous, private ones, have in no way anything to do with the small family businesses you're trying to compare them with. They often literally shot the whole owner family. Everything of this is documented and taught in primary schools all around eastern Europe.
All the small businesses in Prague city centre were destroyed, today it's dominated by various minishops with Russian matrioshkas and other scam shit and Vietnamese (they rent it, not their fault) marketplaces selling fake weed and overpriced chips, drinks and cola, and of course by scam exchange places. This used to be space full of small coffee shops, restaurants, specialised family businesses etc in the 1920's. My home city Hradec Kralove (100k citizens) has nearly completely empty wider city centre - since the revolution, no one even wants to do business there. All small business owners were killed or killed by proxy (uranium mines, all of this uranium was then "given" to/taken by the Russians for free), their property confiscated and never recovered (to whom anyways).
Do you, or does anyone, know enough to give an example of a specialist shop in the East; a button seller, say; that existed prior to the Berlin Wall, that was "destroyed" and what system took it's place to fill the particular need? Like, people still needed fabric and buttons??
Did all single goods-type shops close, like butchers, bakers, etc.. How was supply managed?
Presumably those killed refused to give up ownership to the state?
All forms of private business were forbidden in the Soviet Union. Punishment: 5 years of imprisonment and confiscation of property.
Individual state-owned butcheries were managed by regional centers, which belonged to the ministry of meat and dairy industry. They planned how many pigs would be grown, how they would be distributed among butcheries, etc.
Everything was at the mercy of central planning. If they planned for less than the actual demand (a very common occurrence), then there'd be no meat left by the time the last 40-50-60% got to a butchery.
Personal contacts were very valuable. People in the know could tell you in advance when the next shipment of meat would arrive, or even hide it away for you in a backroom.
Over decades, a huge acquaintance-based shadow economy formed. Positions like butchers and store managers became some of the most desirable jobs in the society, since they effectively decided who got to eat meat (in return for similar favors) and who didn't.
Since there were no real elections and no competition, there was no way for an average citizen to express dissatisfaction neither politically nor economically.
And it was like this with pretty much everything. Even toilet paper was something that had to be hoarded, because its supply was unpredictable. Being a woman was especially difficult as central planners assigned very low priority to female hygenic products.
If you complained enough to get noticed, there were psychiatric hospitals waiting for you because one had to be mentally ill to believe in the superiority of free-market capitalism.
> Presumably those killed refused to give up ownership to the state?
Those killed were killed not because they refused to give ownership (the communists usually just sent people to uranium mines in that case, or later to prison), but because they were undesirable.
Coming from commie part of Europe I feel ya. I've recently saw documentary about Japanese family that makes same product for third generation, this would not be possible here as communists didn't allowed private business, people get separated from soil during collectivization and the link got broken. It will take many years to get restored, if ever...
If you have a family running a bakery, then you have a communist revolution, surely you still want the family to run the bakery? Under federal planning, for example, you just now supply them without charge and receive the needed goods; ensuring the family have what they need. It doesn't seem it's a necessity of communism, rather a specific thing that happened in this case?
Communist’s perhaps biggest point was that the means of production (a bakery in this case) should belong to „the people”, which in practice meant the state.
Yes, perhaps I wasn't clear; you still need people in the bakery - or a bakery - to make the bread, assuming you want people to eat. So, the best people to do it are those with experience as bakers. There seems no reason why in short term you wouldn't use the existing means of production, and the existing skilled people. Obviously the ownership changes.
Your last clause, is the kicker, just as it is now in Western Democracies, the State is supposed to be "the people" here now too, but in both cases it instead appears to be some small cadre of an in-group instead. However, none of that seems particularly pertinent to whether you keep using a bakery and the bakers you have when you transition from private to collective ownership.
Consider an example, Woolworths - a general store in UK and elsewhere - collapsed and in some locations the workers bought it for themselves to run as a collective. The same people did the same jobs, largely, immediately after the change just that the profits [and liabilities] were shared amongst them instead of belonging only to the owners.
> So, the best people to do it are those with experience as bakers. There seems no reason why in short term you wouldn't use the existing means of production, and the existing skilled people.
That is not what happened. What happened is that Stalin ordered to kill them. It was paranoia on top of other things (breaking the nation was not ment just as a side effect). They reorganized the society very quickly once they could start organizing people into agricultural communes (JZD in Czech) and steal everything (literally) from them in the process. Of course we know how well it worked.
EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted for a factual, accepted, well researched and well known statement?