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Reducing widespread human rights abuses in the Soviet Union to “one famine” shows a heady mixture of deliberate ignorance with hubris that only a western university educated leftist can posess.
The sad thing is, famines weren’t that widespread after a while, unless your standard of “famine” is “not eating beef steaks in a country where beef aren’t that common”.
Mao and Stalin are both often cited as killing more of their own citizens than Hitler managed to do.
For Stalin is was a result of the 1930-1933 changes in policy to heavily prioritize heavy industry over food. Honestly hard to blame him, going from a war to a bloody revolution then overthrown for militaristic autocracy probably complicated a lot of things with no time between to normalize.
For Mao is was the result of making all private agriculture a offense worthy of capital punishment and instead made a grain quota for peasants to fill and send to the central government for distribution, then heavily investing in steel production and urbanization. Peasants didn’t fill the quotas because the surpluses just didn’t exist, if the central government just took what they wanted then in those cases the farmers just starved reducing next year’s yield. Mao’s came much later so he had no excuse.
So, yeah, they didn’t get to eat meat every day. Or bread. Or even cereals.
The ussr was infinitely better for human rights than what came before or after in Russia and the baltics, and was better than all “free nations” at the time until the late 1970s, when a few European nations decided to ignore France, the UK, and the US and write their own laws.
The WHAT?
Please explain to me how sending most of the Baltic intelligensia to die in Siberia and replacing them with Russian settlers who held most positions of power was better for my rights than what I have right now.
Please tell me how great my grandmother in law had it living in the outskirts of Archangelsk in a wooden barrack because she was sent there against her will, how much more rights and opportunities she had back then.
Please explain to me how great the industrial management in the USSR was, where they built a bunch of heavy industries in countries that had few mineral resources to support them locally, leading to plant closures in the 90s.
Before WWII, Estonia was a bit richer than Finland. Not it is lagging behind by decades.
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Life expectancy doubled under Stalin.
So he could see them suffer longer.
Anti-communists continue to be deeply unserious people, my God.
Except you know, no homelessness, by Stalin’s time no starvation, free healthcare, guaranteed days off, guaranteed vacation time, wages significantly higher than the majority of the population has ever seen, oh and free education.
Yeah, you couldn’t be a Nazi or other enemy of the state, how oppressive.
There was mass starvation under Stalin. His rule started in 1929, directly before the 1930-1933 famine resulting in somewhere between 5 to 9 million deaths which occured as a direct result of policy changes.
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They haven’t yet, and there’s no profit motive for it so it really can’t happen.
While I can’t speak to the veracity of your claims about the quality of life of the Soviet Union under Stalin, there are in fact many capitalist countries that have been able to achieve these feats that you mentioned.
The housing first policy in Finland has practically eradicated homelessness where only 3,429 were homeless in 2023.
Similarly in the Nordics, the majority of the population Sweden (72.2%), Norway (71.8%), and Denmark (71.8%) is food secure. The US to an extent has also been able to mitigate against food insecurity with the existence of food stamps and free/reduced school meals essentially meaning starvation is rare in some parts of he country.
Also, the NHS provides all individuals residing in the UK with free healthcare, so… yeah.
Furthermore, all employees in France are guaranteed up to 5 weeks of annual paid leave.
In Switzerland, for a full-time job, the median monthly pre-tax salary was a tidy CHF6,788 which is approximately 7500USD. I guess you can tell that this isn’t a small amount of money compared to the low wages received by workers in the Soviet Union under Stalin (which if i might remind you, the piece-rate system was later revised under Khrushchev).
And finally free education. While most nations in Europe (Germany and the Nordics) offer free to low-cost education, you need not really look further than the US to see that while not entirely free, public schooling and community colleges provide accessible enough education to many that need it.
You can see it’s not really about the capitalism, but the governments that run it
They can’t
Look at the other comment i posted in response
It’s a good thing there were no genocides, slave grades, and constant wars before capitalism. Pheww
Scale. It’s about scale. Capitalism gave the economic incentive to take these historical evils and industrialize them to a scale not even imaginable before. A scale so large that even you, today, with the world at your fingertips are unable to comprehend, evidenced by the fact that you are currently failing to comprehend it.
Not to undermine the argument, but capitalism did not start in 16th century England.
I suppose you can try and pin this on the Dutch. But the economic practices of aggregating ownership around a legal business entity and organizing production towards the maximization of profit were quickly adopted by English shipping magnets from their Dutch peers.
If you think of the first corporation as the start of capitalism the Dutch East India company started in 1602, so that would be 17th century Netherlands, not 16th century England. In any case, I think the obvious choice for a date is 18th century England (together with the Industrial Revolution). Of course, you can trace the origins back much earlier even to antiquity, but capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent.
capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent
That’s a very literalist definition.
More broadly, capitalism is a system of private for-profit renting of capital for the purpose of using excess revenue to reinvest in new capital stock.
The main distinction between modern capitalism and traditional feudalism being that reinvestment aspect (feudal lords historically did a poor job of generating surplus or reinvesting in capital stocks). And the distinction between capitalism and socialism being private ownership versus public ownership of capital.
But all three were functionally “organized around capital”. Feudalist capital was just overwhelmingly real estate based, while the Dutch/English/French capitalists were more interested in industrial machinery (ships, mills, etc).
People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
That’s an important and. Situating coal’s epoch-making capacities within class and colonial relations predating steampower’s dominance yields an alternative periodization. British-led industrialization unfolded through the linked processes of agricultural revolu- tion at home and abroad – providing the labor-power for industry by expelling labor from domestic agriculture and, in the case of the West Indian sugar colonies, channeling capital surpluses into industrial development (Brenner 1976; Blackburn 1998). The possi- bilities for the ‘prodigious development of the productive forces’ flowed through the relations of power, capital and nature forged in early capitalism.
[…]
The erasure of capitalism’s early-modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global natures long before the steam engine, is therefore significant in our work to develop an effective radical politics around global warming … and far more than global warming alone! Ask any historian and she will tell you: how one periodizes history powerfully shapes the interpretation of events, and one’s choice of strategic relations. Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine (Crutzen 2002a), and we have a very differ- ent view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450.
PDF Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036
(middle of the 15th century)
Somebody let Spain know they’re off the hook for all the colonizing, slavery and genocide since they hadn’t invented capitalism yet!
Not to undermine the argument, but plenty of other cultures without capitalism were horrific and did ridiculous wars for basically all of history.
Scale. It’s about scale. Capitalism gave the economic incentive to take these historical evils and industrialize them to a scale not even imaginable before. A scale so large that even you, today, with the world at your fingertips are unable to comprehend, evidenced by the fact that you are currently failing to comprehend it.
The wars of Genghis Khan are said to have killed 10% of the population of the entire earth at the time. Is that enough scale?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire
I’d argue that it was the huge boats capable of crossing oceans, first built around the 14th century, which could comfortably sail around Africa. Look at the borders of the Portugese Empire, doing very similar stuff to what England was doing, but apparently that’s different somehow? It’s the boats that enabled them to become imperialists over huge distances.
You’d argue that because after the age of those ships, while capitalism is still around, we haven’t got any of the things mentioned anymore?
Capitalism is the cancer of market economies.
Around that period there was a huge leap forward in the quality of the boats. England and Portugal were maritime powers. They were limited by the distance they could sail, and suddenly could sail much farther. Enforcing control on the opposite side of the world would have previously been unthinkable. Capitalism isn’t the reason they started conquering the globe. It’s the improved boats that allowed them to travel the globe in the first place. The spirit of imperialism was already there before capitalism came around.
“The spirit of imperialism” isn’t the same as “the yearning for never-ending and ever-growing profits”.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is literally impossible.
What propelled the hunger for exotic colonies? The foreign products which were so esteemed back in Europe.
We could argue all day what specific ideology it is what drove them, but I think it’s enough to say it was greed and cruelty of some sorts.
Greed absolutely. But feels like this meme is pretending that money only started existing in the 16th century and no one was greedy before that.
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Additionally, check out Willam Blum’s “Killing Hope” (pdf link), and/or “America’s Deadliest Export”, by same (pdf link).
That quote basically describes every politician from every ideology that has ever lived. You can literally swap out communism for other words and it still reads the same.
Its got no substance or citations of factual events. Basically word salad.
Yeah, the citations of factual events are in the links below the quote. Check out Willam Blum’s “Killing Hope” (pdf link) for more citations than you can shake a stick at.
I’m not going to waste any more hours of my life reading substanceless tankie bullshit than I have, thanks.
Scared it might not confirm your biases?
Do you sit down and read political theory books written by hedge fund managers?
It’s okay to write off low value sources, it doesn’t make you biased.
Yes, in fact, I do. I specifically seek out and read literature from people with whom I have knee-jerk disagreements.
How else will I be sure I’m not trapped in a thought bubble? It’s important to read critically from a variety of sources, while reserving judgement. That’s literally how you learn. It’s too easy to fall for propaganda, otherwise.
Whats your favorite?
Kings sending Conquistadors was not capitalism. Or if it was then the entire middle ages was also Capitalism. Capitalism did plenty of bad shit without covering for the authoritarian sanctioned missions of the 1500s.
Guess you never heard of the east India company.
They were a crown chartered company in the 17th century. Not the 16th. And they were founded to make it easier for the crown to colonize and control those colonies.
It was not chartered for the crown to more easily colonize and control those colonies. It received a chartered from the crown on 12/31/1600 (with non-chartered operations beginning the year before) to serve as a monopoly trading company operating east of the cape of good hope. Initially, they made profits as pirates despite some initial successes.
They open up lines of trade with Mughal empire which starts trade colonialism. After the death of Aurangzeb, the east India company grabs land,extracts wealth through taxes and labor and they enter into being an exploitation colonializer. and then when the state is leaned on more and more, the state takes over operations and nstionalizes the company in 1858.
The British and Spanish were at war. That’s how wars were fought back then.
And they asked for permission to form the company because they couldn’t keep going to India without the Crown’s help. That became clear when they lost an entire expedition. The EIC goes on from there to become the defacto government of modern day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in the Crown’s name. With an Army twice the size of the normal British Army. They also operate an absolute monopoly over the area. The modern day equivalent would be if Amazon was your local store, employer, police, army, navy, justice system, and highest level of government available unless you were insanely wealthy. And whenever they get in trouble, Moldova sends them help.
That’s Mercantilism, not Capitalism. There’s capital involved, but it is not the economic system of Capitalism.
I don’t disagree with anything you said in this comment, but in the previous comment that the EIC was created to control the colonies for the crown. This really only begins to happen after the fall of Aurangzeb.
There’s much more details to discuss about how the EIC plays a role in developing capitalism and capitalist control considered it existed for two and a half centuries. But I think we’re bracketing our discussion to their activities in the 17th century.
They absolutely were creating colonies. They did the same thing in India that colonial powers did all over the world. They kept testing the boundaries. Which is why they fought and lost a war to Aurangzeb. They had always been there to conquer and their first instinct was war, not trade.
I don’t know how you support the statement that “their first instinct was war, not trade”. Even the war you referenced was because trade negotiations broke down. For about 80 years they had been granted trading rights by the Mughal Empire. Skirmishes during that time were with other European powers and not with the Mughal Empire. What events transpired that support their role as colonists and not trade partners?
My second issues is claiming that these activities were for the crown. They were not “founded to make it easier for the crown to colonize and control those colonies.” You are regularly ascribing intention to the founding by flattening activities across 100-150 years.
So… I guess we’re just forgetting about King Mansa Musa, then?
Or medieval trade entirely?
He doesn’t know Capitalism describes a method of production and distribution, he thinks it means western world power currently opposed to eastern world power.
Seems like there’s a lot of that going around here.
King mansa musa does not compare even an iota to the transatlantic slave trade. It’s not about the fact slavery was happening. It’s that capitalism industrialized slave trade to a degree that was unfathomable to humanity before.
It’s not specific to slavery, but the entire claim of “capitalism started in the UK” and that that’s somehow the cause of all the world’s problems.
However, the Kingdom of Mali profited greatly from slavery, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade simply being a later chapter in its long history of trading slaves.
As for capitalism; King Mansa Musa went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and deliberately crashed the value of gold in Cairo, the then trade capitol of the world during the middle ages. He did this as a move to bring, and steal, trade interests for Mali.
UK conquered effectively the entire world. They are literally the source for global capitalism as it exists. If your hangup is “well, UK didn’t really start capitalism” then your on a semantic that makes any further argument with you disingenuous, either due to you willfully manipulating the conversation or ignorantly being unable to comprehend what is being said. Either way really.
This isn’t semantics, it’s facts. Strong words coming from you, calling me disingenuous, when what you’re doing is defending a grossly oversimplified, inaccurate, and mostly dumb meme.
Open up a history book. Might do you some good.
Get a history degree. Beat you to it. Teaching your children too.
Then retake your history degree. Clearly you forgot a few things along the way.
Feudalism isn’t capitalism.
You see, kids, capitalism didn’t start until the 16th Century. The world was in black and white until around the 1950s, then soon afterward boomers created racism, pollution and inflation. Then we got the Internet and began the Enlightened Age of Memes.
This is literally true, I lived all of it.
A famine that wasn’t caused by the ideology directly, but by picking the wrong guy to run agriculture. It wasn’t communism that caused the famine, it was Trofim Lysenko’s unscientific ideology; Lysenkoism.
…plus Authoritarian Communism shouldn’t count, amd the death tolls of Capitalism, Colonialism, and The Catholic Church have all been higher in total.
Although you can say that the fervent devotion to communism was what got Lysenko’s ideas of what was essentially a Marxist botany theory got implemented.
That’s not a condemnation of communism, but it is a condemnation of how you can let any ideology get out of control.
Capitalism didn’t invent slaves lol
No, but they created entire industries based on the sale if humans
Civilization is a product of slavery and it started in mesopotamia
Don’t forget Lysenkoism, capitalist love using that too
Lysenko was powerhungry and created a famine because of political reasons, so I mean what is it not to dislike about him?
As in they use him to “debunk Socialism/communism”
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Pure vibes based politics
You can take your hot take somewhere else, because it won’t be here
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If you’re talking about communism in the USSR, people having “nothing to strive for” and being “depressed and drunk” were definitely not the primary issues. That’s a seriously uninformed and sophomoric position, and you should read up on history a bit if you’re curious. There were serious issues relating to central planning that were the cause of the famines, their military logistics issues, and corruption at the local level. Not to mention the various internal and external conflicts that plagued the USSR. These did not relate to some vague notion of people being unmotivated, depressed, or drunk.
Bonus historical fact: Russia’s rampant alcoholism has roots in the Czarist period where the Czar decided who could distill and sell alcohol. At various points, this meant aristocrats only and then a state monopoly. During the czarist period, vodka sales to Russians made up like 20% of the state’s income - so the czarist state had a vested interest in maintaining the demand for vodka. During the communist period, the government tried to ban or limit vodka production and consumption numerous times (decreased worker productivity, made people bad parents, etc) - but that went about as well as prohibition has gone in other parts of the world.
Why do we call it a sophomoric opinion or attitude? Why not a freshmanic opinion or attitude? After all a sophomore has at least one more year of university than a freshman.
Sophomore literally comes from “wise fool” in greek. Sophos = wisdom, moros = foolish
Not sure if this is why, but I would say that a sophomore is much more annoying because they have that one year. It’s like when you talk to a person who just took their first university level psychology course, and suddenly they think they can diagnose everyone they meet.
A “Freshman” attitude might be more one of respectful learning.
I literally just made that up, but it sounds right.
It’s like both sides forget that free market socialism exists too.
people had nothing to strive for and got depressed and drunk.
Have you ever considered questioning that some of the things you learned about the USSR, when we were literally calling them the “evil empire,” and were in a constant state of existential dread over the possibility of nuclear war, might have been propaganda? And that maybe some of these things are worth further investigation? Especially when they sound that absurd?
I dunno, just a thought.
