Some areas many refugees get stuffed in are near Poland, not very different and in some ways definitely worse since the north-eastern part of Germany (where I live) is the poor part. Polish workers have stopped coming here years ago, because they can earn more at home.

I think it's great news that PIS won in Poland...eventually this might have positive repercussions on Germany and contribute to an end of Merkel's asylum policy.
In any case, Germany is more likely to "go down the drain" than Poland.

Different professions definitely were paid different moneys and/or had more benefits like sending kids to Black Sea with the intention of promoting work migration to harder regions (Siberia has "Nordic coefficient", all jobs got 45% wage increase, was good to work until pension, then move to South) or award harder jobs.

What everyone talking about "bad communism" miss is that you compare top tier of capitalism food chain with all of USSR combined. You left out of equation thousands of people living unfathomable worse for a chance to provide you with better lives right now.
People on plantations work their lives out without access to healthcare, and even to results of their jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0
Practically, West still doesn't shed light on it for the sake of profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
USSR didn't use it as propaganda because it would've been downgrading - "We compete with ~2Blns of people working together against us".
Realistically, if Khrushchev didn't fuck up relations with China to the brink of the war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict
USSR would've been Chief constructor, China would've been main producer and everyone needed roubles, not dollars to buy shit.

After dissolution of USSR things got hairy - people which lived "equally" in USSR, started to compete with their alternatives in a capitalistic market, i.e. agrarians, which lived on welfare/subsidies from USSR started to compete with slaves on plantations.
Poland was lucky - they exported many poles to England and USA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
provided his motherland with cheap US credits and it recovered well.
Baltic countries - they are paid to block access for Russia to Baltic Sea and bitch about evil Russia, so NATO generals can get their wages.
Nobody invests into them as result - "Why, what if Russia would capture them like priebalts say for 25 years".
Yeah, every Russian dreams about possibility to feed these ungrateful pigs again.

No, the problem is the concept itself, not the people. Communism is based on the premise that everyone works the same way and has the same mindset. Humans beings are not like that, we are not sheep nor robots.

Communism is also based on a fallacious economic concept, which again, doesn't work. So yeah, blaming the people is a strawman.

You are wrong.
Communism is based on the principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_need
Everyone was aware that people working hard physical jobs needed more meat, that different illnesses need different drugs and so on.

"Fallacious economic concept" works in China and Vietnam.
Real socialism was something like "you work, pay 90% taxes, government takes all decisions".
Free education, healthcare as result, which still stands almost true.
I paid for my two degrees 6000 roubles, when $ was ~20. Everything else were paid by state.

God knows what happens there, pal. It's been 30+yrs living in South America but I truly wish to come back someday, just to visit. Unfortunately, the hostility to foreigners even in big cities such as Kinshasa is huge :(

You're proving my argument.

China has a capitalist economy.

China indeed is an interesting case.
I see it as megacorporation, people from different branches do compete, but they do work together for Great China.
Compared to West, where we have EU megacompanies trying to break into US market and US companies trying to break into EU market, with tons of shady deals, lobbyism, and backstabbing.

Well, if we talk about thinking differently, people do differ, this is based on surrounding culture, which, in its turn based on historical, economical and social events of the past and present. It's interesting to learn how people perceive the World.
But basis is still defined by Maslow, Doyal and Gough: shelter, food, sex, self-fulfillment

You fail to see, that communism actually does work really well in many small communities for ages, just not on an unpersonal big state level. Millions of people can never really build a community, because it completely lacks the personal level of obligation, duty and trust.

The problem is that without the corrupting influence of capitalism, communism works just fine. It's when people of influence in the communist system start bringing capitalist ideals with them (the acquisition of as much wealth as possible) that the whole system falls apart. Party officials being paid more than workers, Stalin giving himself pay rises to 10,000 times that of ordinary workers etc.

When people strive collectively to achieve a greater goal than accumulating wealth, the system works beautifully. When the system is abused to protect the powerful elite, it doesn't. Soviet communism didn't strive to ensure that people all contributed to the greater good, its legal system simply served to deify and protect the political elite.

What people forget is that self-evaluation and freedom of expression and opinion are core tenets of communist doctrine - in fact, proper Marxist democracy is more than just the faux democracy capitalist nations practice. Not only are leaders elected according to the will of the proletariat, they are bound to observe the will of the proletariat - they're more "executors of will" than "leaders" as such.

Of course people aren't robots or sheep, nor should they be. Debate, cultural diversity, (healthy) differences in opinion and new ideas are always good. But there has to be a legal system in place to protect the greater good, and of course it's going to punish greed.

Define greed please. I doubt you actually know any human that is solely concerned with accumulating wealth a la Scrooge McDuck without any concern for any of: family, sex, creative expression, safety, curiosity... and I could go on and on...

The ways the product of our labor directly allows us to procure / obtain / produce any of the above is obvious, and the problem with communism is how it assumes the collective (it's in the name even...) knows better, can direct your productive choices, and should do so for everyone. This is called the knowledge coordination problem I think and any discussion of communism as economic system that ignores it is in practice dishonest by omission.

I do find the greedy boogeyman propaganda amazing in its effectiveness. Granted it touches on deep, deep stereotypes of othering about usury and cruelty which are millenia old. Still more amazing that anyone really into communism can be dishonest enough to pretend there is not a fundamental conflict between moral conceptions of individual freedom and any sort of economic system (not to say political) based on communism. Because the only way communism can work without coercion is if humans are angels. But we aren't and never will.

It's a catch 22 really. If communists (socialists, redistributionists, etc...) actually gave up on trying to impose their non greedy, pure snow white, obviously better values on the rest of us individualists, they would take a huge step towards making humanity more angelic, and providing a great example to the rest.

So, please don't take me wrong, because I'm not saying you are intent on any sort of totaliarian foolishness, but I would kindly ask you to examine the assumptions on what exactly is wrong with greed, and why the desire of the many for X isn't greedy, whereas the desire of the one for X is. Basically, your definition of the greater good is begging the question as to distribution of wealth, and if you'd define greater good in other ways, for example about reducing poverty, then maybe, just maybe, if you take an objective look around the world then capitalism is doing much better than communism ever did at achieving the greater good. And it doesn't even need angels to work! Imagine that...
Judas, please stop stealing my thunder :D

Here I am writing for 30 min, and you greedy mofo just come along and are all ninja man...

Also you're ableist since I am physically unable to post short concise stuff like that ;)

PS: I'd actually disagree on your final point. When the basic needs are met the barriers to generosity lower. In fact a lot of what others call greed is just unexamined priorities like I tried to point out. Maybe someone's experiences make them believe they need a lot more money to be safe or something.

Ben Franklin once said that democracy was the worst kind of government there was... after all the others. Same goes with capitalism. It certainly is flawed, and definitely isn't operating in free market mode, what with corporations and governments constantly being found in bed with one another. But capitalism is still better than the alternatives. You come up with a Utopian idea that you borrowed from some alien claiming to hail from Atlantis, sign me up for paradise-town. Until then, bared fangs are better than hidden claws. Fuck government corruption, fuck forced taxation, fuck bureaucratic viruses that infect the human condition, and god bless America.

I'm not talking about the overblown caricatures of fictional figures like Scrooge McDuck. It's clear that such people do not really exist (although, if you look anarcholibertarians like Donald Trump and the economically neoconservative wing of parties like UKIP in England and the AfD in Germany, people do come very close).

No, when I talk about greed, I mean the little things that happen in society where one individual exploits another weaker individual for monetary gain. For example, an employer who refuses to let an employee pick up their child from school so that the manager can meet their profit targets. Or the bank employee who, under pressure to meet profit targets from their manager, manipulates a customer into buying something they don't need.

It's these little things that in combination conspire to make the world a much worse place. The problem with you individualists is your black-and-white thinking that because Soviet communism didn't work (nobody's disputing that - well, except Crosmando maybe), and because capitalism is marginally better than Soviet communism, proper communism is automatically invalid as a doctrine. It doesn't work that way.

The funny thing is that, especially in many libertarian societies, it's communist doctrine that keeps things ticking over - people who do things for the greater good as opposed to self-benefit. Food banks, with food donated by people and the people who work tirelessly to administer it. Pro bono work by lawyers, doctors and translators. Imagine what would happen if there weren't doctors in the U.S. that didn't have a charitable bone in their body. And let's not forget regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, which operate solely on anarchocapitalism (Somalia in particular) and which don't enjoy the benefits of such charity.

Heck, even open source is based on communist thought - something which GOG massively benefits from but gives little in return for.

The only thing that keeps the capitalist system from collapsing is charity, which ironically is at odds with the capitalist doctrine. But you individualists and libertarians just don't want to see that - you blame the poor, you blame those in need, you blame the vicitim, as if they were responsible for their own fate and as if it were their fault for not being the winner in all of this. You reduce the human being to a single archetype and pretend that we all forge our own destiny, pretending as if the world was a level playing field. The real world is a very different place.

As for what is wrong with greed - here's the thing. If greed was simply accumulation without consequence, then we wouldn't have a problem. Personally, I really don't have a problem with materialism in its own right. Materialism isn't greed, but excess materialism makes greed unavoidable. The problem is that this greed always comes at the expense of someone else, without exception. Often you don't notice it, or you don't want to notice it, but the effects are sensed somewhere. The fundamental flaw in capitalist doctrine is the idea of creating something from nothing, and that a total is more than the sum of its parts. The fundamental truth is that nothing comes from nothing.