Dr_Manhattan wrote:
Often what people never talk about is the fact that a lot of the "failures" of socialism or communism (they're different) stem from trade embargoes and global economic disasters. Any other time, there were no complaints except from those who wanted private enterprise. The Great Depression is a time when the stock markets collapsed, when the market could be considered "free". People literally killed themselves over it. The US government stepped in after that and America hasn't had a major economic failure of that magnitude since (I don't really know how other countries handled it). Holodomor happened as a result of the Great Depression (the Great Depression was a worldwide event). Russia had to do what they had to in order to feed their citizens. The Great Depression, like the Black Death, gave rise to crackpot ideas like Lysenkoism, where crops were planted too closely to one another, leading to massive amounts of crop death. The truth is, in events like this, people are naturally at a loss as to what to do to mitigate the effect of the disaster. Things we take for granted now, like agencies tasked with managing disaster areas, they didn't have in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The Spanish Flu, a pandemic that happened around the time of WWI, killed millions of people. The Swine Flu's death toll was around 500k in 2012 (global estimates). The point is that failures of a country's economic system aren't always indicative of the effectiveness of that system.
Hmmm...
Well, don’t mean to be rude but the USSR was already heavily embargoed and isolated from the world capitalist market: the economic hit from the Great Depression itself was minimal.
The reversal of the NEP and shift from the newly established private farming system back to feudal servitude rebranded as ‘collectivisation’ was widely unpopular and brutally enforced.
As were the agricultural produce quotas which were set unrealistically high in the hope of outproducing the western powers: so high that armed collection created famine in areas with high yields.
Taking away the seed grain in a desperate attempt to meet those quotas massively reduced the acreage of crops sown in each successive year, compounding the famine.
Stalin and Politburo knew: starving the peasantry into submission, with particular emphasis on Ukraine and Kazakhstan, was a calculated policy decision.
And sick irony:
All justified in the name of a man who sacrificed his business to stick up for farmers who were being dispossessed of the land their families had lived on for centuries.
-addendum-
Although, that said in general it is correct that periodic long lasting periods of market underperformance do tend to correlate with large, often reckless, and frequently odious social, political and economic projects that come from outside of the preceding mainstream thought on these issues.
Ideology of said projects varies wildly depending on time and place however.
Edited: I made two spelling mistakes.
28 Jan 2020, 5:39 pm
