[oplaadpunt]

No, I don't think it is loaded, or at least not unnecessarily. The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.

[squishysquid]

That they made it in east germany and made up an excuse for being bad at sales?

corning the guys they bring up at the very end is also the company that did pyrex. they spun that business off in the 90s. They don't mention that because you'd recognize it and go "wait my cabinet's been full of that my whole life"

[jajko]

You dont understand communism then, and didnt grow up under such regime.

Most people involved in such projects were far from what you can call communists, not involved with regine, not members of the party (or if they were it was just to be allowed certain positions in the system, literal ticking checkbox on the requirements list), some even secretly hating it and conspiring against it. This reductionism is unnecessary and outright incorrect.

One can claim it was invented in communist East Germany (although the official name was literally German democratic republic), and thats about it.

You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years?

[mfru]

it is wild how often people will respond with red scare rhetoric once the scary c-word drops.

[throw10920]

It isn't that wild, really, that people who have even the most basic awareness of history are concerned about the spread of the single most destructive ideology in all of history.

[takeda]

Communism problem is that it goes together with authoritarianism and corruption.

Yes, you can get both of those things with capitalism, just look at Russia, but looks like they are more likely to happen with communism.

Authoritarianism is responsible for many people's deaths, while corruption is why things were so bad that it pushed for invention of this.

The reason why the glass is not popular right now is because we as consumers are perfectly fine with this. We let companies get away with it instead of voting with our wallets. Nearly all of us are guilty purchasing smart phones that won't last longer than 2 years, pre-paying for games when companies frequently stiffed us that way. Almost no one puts time to research which companies produce quality product so such manufacturers frequently go out of business.

[tomohawk]

Mass killings by communist governments are a thing. And that's just one of the bad things about communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

[olddustytrail]

Mass killings by capitalist governments are also a thing. Why are you ignoring those?

[snowpid]

Please tell me more about capitalist gulags.

[butterknife]

If you insist

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri...

[olddustytrail]

You've had another response but why would you restrict it to gulags? The genocide of the native American peoples seems a more obvious example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_...

[p_l]

> You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years

Try criticising capitalism and you'll soon encounter exactly that rhetoric, even for things that exist only thanks to government direct action (the most socialist org in USA, the Department of Defense, is directly and indirectly responsible for huge part of innovation that people assign to "capitalism" despite it having little to do with it)

[takeda]

More accurate title would be "How Germans invented unbreakable glass due to shortages caused by Communism"

[_19qg]

> The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.

And that's nonsense. The real problem was the reunification and the collapse of the East German economy. The East Germans got rid of their government, peacefully and the result was the unification of a protected plan economy to an open social market system (West Germany did not and still does not have US style capitalism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy ). The East German market was not having access to current technologies and raw materials (for example due to the lack of money to buy on the world market). The companies in the east were not competitive and they lost their protecting system.

There were LOTS of glass manufacturers, both in West Germany and in the surrounding countries. Those were eager to take the market and a small and expensive glass production was an easy victim. There are lots of examples where GDR products were replaced by Western products, which were much more efficient in production and distribution.

It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over. The "communist" economy wasn't communist and it was behind a self-built "protective" wall. When the wall collapsed and the system which protected the wall collapsed (-> the whole eastern Europe incl. the former Soviet Union largely collapsed), then during reunification of East and West Germany, the East German economy also collapsed (products were no longer competitive, lost their markets, etc.). The West German companies did not have the time to protect small scale producers, their problem was to deliver on the expectations of the East Germans: create same living standards, provide access to the larger market without scarce products.

For the East German population it was mostly clear, they wanted to buy western products, which for a long time were either not available or far too expensive or both. East German brands were out of fashion.

The attraction of the West German economy and political system, together with the failure of the East German system (and its soviet-influenced model), caused the collapse of the political and economic system of the GDR.

Later the "Ostalgie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie ) made people aware that there was also a loss: familiar brands were gone, familiar products were gone, jobs were gone, people were gone, (-> many went to West Germany to work there) western products were not always better, ...

TLDR; -> the company was a victim of the turmoil of the reunification and introduction of a larger&open economy.

Side note: that East Germans needed to take care of scarce products (see the cars which had long waiting lists) did not mean that the East German production was environmentally friendly. Just the opposite, East German production was as environmentally unfriendly or even more, as in the West. An environmental movement (like the Greens in West Germany) was not possible in the one-party-rules system of the GDR dictatorship. Later, a lot of production got closed(& sometimes replaced) because of old and dirty factories and production processes.

Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles. This means that in any super market one can buy bottles of, say, beer and one pays a higher price. The markets are required to take back the empty bottles and pay the consumer the "Flaschenpfand" (bottle deposit). Bottles get reused a lot (50 times) and this system has 43% market share. One can imagine that lighter/more durable glass bottles might have an advantage in such a system. Currently we see either heavy glass bottles or lighter plastic bottles (reused 25 times).

[flohofwoe]

> Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles.

This was already standard procedure in East Germany though, pretty much everything from glass bottles (via a "Pfandsystem" much the same as today's minus the deposit machines) to paper to scrap metal was recycled. We even had regular 'waste paper collections' at school which were organized like a competition. This had little to do with environmentalism but instead to get more independent from resource imports.

(as you mentioned, the environment was much worse off in East Germany than it is today, especially around industrial locations)

[lispm]

Thanks for the comment!

Wikipedia describes that here (in German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERO

[kdmtctl]

It was basically the same across the Soviet Block. Used to grow in a former USSR republic and did exactly this.

[darby_eight]

> It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over

Great! Where can i buy coke in this glass?

[_19qg]

You can buy such glass on ebay and fill it with the coke of your choice. Search for superfest and ddr.

[darby_eight]

So much for capitalism providing an efficient market

[_19qg]

They provide the Coke and you provide a glass. Sounds efficient for me. That's how I usually handle it, when buying beverages.

You can get old used Superfest glasses on ebay for 10$ per piece. That's sustainable capitalism: they don't get thrown away and the seller makes a great price.

Plus: you can get the original DDR/GDR design from 30 years ago and fill it with any beverage you want.

[squishysquid]

wherever having a 5$ deposit on a coke bottle makes sense?

[snowpid]

Sorry Eastern Germany was a communist place. Lefties are just angry that it failed so they do the usual excuse ("it was better than Capitalism" to "Usa is the reason why it wasn't working" to "It wasnt real communism." To "we should try communism." )

The most productive areas of Eastern Germany were private but Commies didn't like it so they shut it down in 70s. Hence Eastern Germany became poor.

[flohofwoe]

It was called "real socialism" (or "Real existierender Sozialismus" in German), because the party elite was fully aware that the promises of a socialist utopia collided hard with reality in East Germany (and the rest of the Eastern Europe socialist countries). So the propanda idea was basically to hold the carrot dangling in front of the people of achieving "actual socialism" as a first step, and then at some later point (maybe a few hundred years in the future) "communism" (as envisioned by Marx/Engels) - "just work harder and then it will get better, you'll see Genosse!".

Of course nobody in their right mind believed such bullshit (not even most party members).

Private companies were shut down a lot earlier than the 70's, more like the 50s and early 60s. Later this was relaxed again. It was actually possible again in the 80s to run a small privately owned business (my parents were both self-employed). A privately owned company in East Germany still doesn't mean that there's any competition though, or ability to be better off than a worker in a state-owned company. The entire economic enviornment just wasn't compatibly with the idea of running a business that's not controlled by the state.

Still, compared to some of the poorer Eastern European countries, East German people were somewhat well off. Maybe on a level like Portugal or Greece, but of course piss-poor when compared to West Germany. And in any case much worse when it comes to personal freedom of course (which was a much more critical problem than the economic problems).

Also, all those things don't change the fact that East German engineers sometimes came up with brilliant solutions despite the less than ideal conditions.

[forgetfreeman]

One hardly needs to be either a leftist or angry about anything to accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes. It is fairly uncontroversial that designed obsolescence is ubiquitous.

[throw10920]

> accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes

This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism, but apathy of consumers. The lack of durable products is because consumers don't value durable products enough to seek them out and pay more for them. In a communist or command economy, the exact same thing would happen if the leader decreed that goods needed to be cheaply made. There's nothing intrinsic to capitalism here.