/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Coffee is perhaps the clearest example of colonial exploitation in global capitalism, to this day. Imperialist tendencies is perhaps the clearest there. But a socialist alternative has been on the mind for many years, which sadly did not happen, or has ever happened in an ideal manner. Bigger countries in the USSR like Russia have often done aid projects like the West did, for alligned countries but in a typical resource extraction type deal. The USSR builds infrastructure and gets sugar, oil etc. from smaller countries, and it often just made them dependent on the USSR as a result.

But there was a small time period where East Germany was yearning for actual coffee, the fake mixed stuff was not cutting it. An other USSR satelitte state had a small coffee production primarily abused by French colonialists in the past, and East Germany actually went ahead and thought to do it right. East Germany was by far the most advanced and richest of satellite USSR states, and Vietnam was ravaged by the war - so development aid coming from the DDR was actually mutual and beneficial, there was already a big vietnamesse community of refugees at Germany. Tractors, materials to build roads, hospitals, schools etc. were all to facilitate coffee production and tons of vietnamesse came over to Germany to become educated etc. It was huge investment compared to the pure extraction, slavery like conditions that still exist today in comparision with Starbucks or Nestle. It was long term too, not for short term profits. It takes over 8 years to actually grow coffee, and the deal was to keep jobs stable and safe and then the DDR would have a deal to get 20 years of coffee from Vietnam. Likely it would have been the trade mark soviet coffee, like Cuban sugar etc. Unfortunately or fortunately Vietnam had capitalistic renovations, the wall fell, but still Vietnam became the 2nd largest coffee provider, largely thanks to the infrastructure it built through east germany, and in the end was not dependent on the one who built the infrastructure in the first place like it was in the past in the capitalist west or socialist east. Like the story of the internet, an invention by the state, radically evolved through the market. So Vietnam coffee never became a socialist coffee, produced under conditions that I think Lenin, Marx etc. would have approved of, but the spirit was there since the beginning.

We never saw what a Russian + German Revolution would have looked like, and how they would have had a mutual partnership of development, but I imagine it would have looked like Eastern Germany and Vietnam? It is an interresting and in the end sort of tragic piece of history, like so much of socialist history.