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Admittedly, there was also oil but that is a whole other ball of wax. Also, I guess North Korea is the more recent example. I guess Afghanistan as well but it is a bit more unclear exactly what is happening. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 16:07 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 16:01
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HiroProtagonist posted:Easy to label something a callous decision in hindsight because it frees one from the responsibility of having to make these difficult choices with limited and imperfect information at the time. Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:07
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dead gay comedy forums posted:precisely this Yes. I know what you mean about the famine being inevitable. Considering the bad weather, bad harvest, and diminished agricultural capacity in collectivized areas (due to a combination of peasant resistance and collectivization often leading to productivity decreases), those are the kind of conditions that would lead to famine and, historically, had done so in Russia many times. Regional famines were very common. The 1891-92 famine killed as many as half a million people across the Russian Empire. Up to 5 million people died in the early 20s famine that was partly because of the enormous destruction and dislocation of WW1 and the Civil War, and that number would have been even higher if not for large-scale international relief efforts (incidentally, fun fact about that one is that some Americans were against feeding the starving because they thought it meant helping communism, and Herbert Hoover of all people got to coin the very cool response "twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"). It's a credit to the transformation of the Soviet economy (under Stalin!) that despite this long history of drought and starvation, since 32-33 there has only been one famine in the same territory, and that was in 46-47 when it was, once again, primarily due to the devastation of war being compounded by a bad harvest. Famine stopped being the inevitable result of bad harvests or bad weather thanks to Soviet capital formation and investment, even though the Soviets were never a fully food-secure state - one of the things that often surprises people to learn about the late USSR was that the bulk of the money the Soviets were making through oil exports wasn't being spent on weapons, it was being spent on imported food. At the same time, there's also evidence that despite the priority being capital formation and industrialization, the Soviet leadership did in fact make some efforts at relief for famine-stricken areas. The section immediately following the Kuromiya quote in my previous post reads as follows: Hiroaki Kuromiya posted:Lack of direct evidence of Stalin’s intention to kill millions through famine does not mean that Stalin did not intend to do so. Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that it is not likely that Stalin intended to kill millions. Firstly, as Ellman (2006, 2007), and Davies and Wheatcroft (2004, 2006) emphasise, Stalin did extend some relief in spite of his belligerent rhetoric. In 1932 and 1933, Moscow curtailed grain collection plans for Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Crimea, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga, the Urals, the Central Black-earth Region and Eastern Siberia on nine occasions. Moscow also offered grain and food assistance to these regions (Danilov et al. 2001, p. 862; Vasil’iev & Shapoval 2001, p. 270). Secondly, on a number of occasions, starting with Stalin’s opposition to increasing grain export in September 1931, Moscow curtailed grain exports. In fact, Moscow even clandestinely purchased grain abroad to feed the hungry nation (Khlevnyuk et al. 2001, p. 80; Gintsburg 1999, pp. 124, 126). Yet these measures were too late and too limited in scope to prevent widespread famine. Relief efforts weren't enough and up to 8 million people still died, but there were at least some efforts to recognize the effects of the famine and alleviate them, but balanced with continuing to prioritize industrialization, as LostConfused's quote demonstrates very well. And as HiroProtagonist and Ardennes point out, you can understand why decisions like this were being made even while recognizing, with the benefit of historical hindsight, the awful cost of them. The reason I call this "callous" is that, as I say, at best you can say that the Soviet leadership were acting as cold-hearted utilitarians who thought that extracting the agricultural surplus was worth a few million people's lives, i.e., being insensitive or acting with disregard towards those who would suffer as a result. Some degree of famine was likely inevitable given the circumstances leading up to the winter of 32-33, but I think it likely that acting with a greater regard for the lives of those affected (to give just one example, not doing punitive seizures of not just grain but all foodstuffs from villages and kolkhozes that failed to meet grain requisition targets), while it wouldn't have saved everyone, would likely have led to a substantially reduced death toll. HiroProtagonist posted:Easy to label something a callous decision in hindsight because it frees one from the responsibility of having to make these difficult choices with limited and imperfect information at the time. The last thing I'll add here is just that, while you're definitely not wrong that it's much easier to make these assessments with hindsight, this approach risks assigning too great a degree of central thinking to the Soviet leadership. Stalin wasn't the only person operating with limited and imperfect information, that applied to all the Politburo decision-makers, but there were conflicting voices that advocated policies that likely would have led to a much lower death toll from the famine. Pre-First Five Year Plan, you can consider whether an approach like Bukharin's (trying to get an agricultural surplus not by fighting the peasantry but by enriching them) might have worked or whether Stalin was correct that it would lead to industrialization being too slow, and during the early stages of the famine you can compare the decisions Stalin and the Politburo were making with alternative proposals like the Ryutin Platform. Again, a rational person can look at these alternatives and understand why they weren't followed or can agree with the decision not to follow them, but it's important to recognize that alternatives specifically designed to be less callous and more sensitive to the short-term damage of collectivization did exist, based on the same limited and imperfect information available to Moscow decision-makers. Anyway the crux of the matter for me always comes down to the salient point made by Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts: that rapid industrialization nearly always involved massive damage being done somewhere else, and that the capitalist empires got away with this by outsourcing that damage onto colonial and marginal populations. Famines in India, the damage of slavery, the extractive colonial enterprises set up throughout Africa, this can all be compared to the damage done by the First Five-Year Plan, it's always violently extracting a surplus from one part of the world to fuel industrialization in another part of the world. The capitalist countries laundered their reputation by doing violence to people of colour and colonial populations, then cut the USSR off from world trade and tried to starve its economy, then blamed the ideology of socialism for, in the end, doing on a national scale the exact same thing they had done on a global scale decades earlier. We can, and in my opinion should, condemn Stalin for making that violent tradeoff and costing millions of people their lives, but to do so we also have to equivalently condemn pretty much every other nation-building project in the modern era, because no country was ever willing to accept the kind of slow and steady industrialization that could have been done without these violent costs since doing so inevitably meant falling behind whoever was willing to be more callous and violent.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:10
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar. Are they? What external, as in not internal to the US ruling class, pressure is there on the Biden administration?
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Jan 11, 2022 16:12
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genericnick posted:Are they? What external, as in not internal to the US ruling class, pressure is there on the Biden administration? 1) both involve a joe 2) china
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Jan 11, 2022 16:13
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https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1480909906404429825?t=AZzHB_6OmthxVwkfsgZmFw&s=19
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Jan 11, 2022 16:14
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar. joe biden is the leader of the global hegemon, this comparison is nuts lmao besides, the whole point of the post you quoted is that there were hard material (not "ideological") reasons for what was done Doktor Avalanche has issued a correction as of 16:18 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 16:15
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar. this is a pretty deranged comparison, lol
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Jan 11, 2022 16:18
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HiroProtagonist posted:this is a pretty deranged comparison, lol no its hard to hold leaders responsible as they face hard choices
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Jan 11, 2022 16:20
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Mr Hootington posted:https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1480909906404429825?t=AZzHB_6OmthxVwkfsgZmFw&s=19 This is also more or less what Vijay Prashad, the director of an internationalist organization called Tricontinental and a Marxist intellectual who did an event with Qiao in May 2020, told me when I asked him about the Uyghurs. “The ‘cultural genocide’ charge is one that I’m not entirely sympathetic to,” said Prashad, who has visited China numerous times but has not been to Xinjiang. “Education policy is a big part of poverty alleviation,” he added. “The fact is that most modern societies have forced people to have an education.” In his telling, what is happening to the Uyghurs is analogous to what countries like the United States and Australia did to their Indigenous populations, or what the British Empire did in his native India—but somewhat to my surprise, he didn’t mean that in a bad way. “That’s the price that people pay,” Prashad told me. “You can’t preserve some cultural forms and alleviate or eradicate absolute poverty.” i bet that "in his telling" is covering for that not being what he said at all
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Jan 11, 2022 16:22
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? no, because Joe Biden's COVID response was not based on limited and imperfect information.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:24
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Doctor Jeep posted:This is also more or less what Vijay Prashad, the director of an internationalist organization called Tricontinental and a Marxist intellectual who did an event with Qiao in May 2020, told me when I asked him about the Uyghurs. “The ‘cultural genocide’ charge is one that I’m not entirely sympathetic to,” said Prashad, who has visited China numerous times but has not been to Xinjiang. “Education policy is a big part of poverty alleviation,” he added. “The fact is that most modern societies have forced people to have an education.” In his telling, what is happening to the Uyghurs is analogous to what countries like the United States and Australia did to their Indigenous populations, or what the British Empire did in his native India—but somewhat to my surprise, he didn’t mean that in a bad way. “That’s the price that people pay,” Prashad told me. “You can’t preserve some cultural forms and alleviate or eradicate absolute poverty.” might be yeah, since thats the only part of that paragraph that isnt direct quotes
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Jan 11, 2022 16:28
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quote:On his last day in office as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. For someone who served in an openly Islamophobic administration to co-opt the just cause of Uyghur human rights is perverse, but one danger of ceding criticism of China to the right is that the US response to a legitimate human rights crisis ends up being led by xenophobes and warmongers. lol, what left is there to lead the us response to anything at all? the left is in no position of influence here either way.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:32
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Post on your main, coward.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:33
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FishBulbia posted:1) both involve a joe How does giving a substantial chunk of your working age population brain fog help against China? I mean, there were clearly policy errors in agricultural policy and Bolshevism ultimately being an urban ideology was probably at the root of that. They also clearly prioritized their urban base compared to the peasants to some extent, but as far as I can see the threat the Biden administration is desperately trying to ward off is statuary sick pay and a re-tightening of Labor safety regulations.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:33
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Doctor Jeep posted:This is also more or less what Vijay Prashad, the director of an internationalist organization called Tricontinental and a Marxist intellectual who did an event with Qiao in May 2020, told me when I asked him about the Uyghurs. “The ‘cultural genocide’ charge is one that I’m not entirely sympathetic to,” said Prashad, who has visited China numerous times but has not been to Xinjiang. “Education policy is a big part of poverty alleviation,” he added. “The fact is that most modern societies have forced people to have an education.” In his telling, what is happening to the Uyghurs is analogous to what countries like the United States and Australia did to their Indigenous populations, or what the British Empire did in his native India—but somewhat to my surprise, he didn’t mean that in a bad way. “That’s the price that people pay,” Prashad told me. “You can’t preserve some cultural forms and alleviate or eradicate absolute poverty.” https://twitter.com/vijayprashad/status/1480660783616999430
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Jan 11, 2022 16:39
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genericnick posted:How does giving a substantial chunk of your working age population brain fog help against China? Diamond Joe, Much like Joe Steel didn't actually really care how much of the population died in pursuit of ideological goals. obv if its too much that might cause issues, but in both cases leaders were operating with incomplete info about severity, and didn't really want to be told how bad the situation was, because everything is supposed to be going fine in the greatest country on earth whats a few million peasents or retail workers compared to the neoliberal/socialist rebirth of humanity
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Jan 11, 2022 16:39
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vyelkin posted:Anyway the crux of the matter for me always comes down to the salient point made by Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts: that rapid industrialization nearly always involved massive damage being done somewhere else, and that the capitalist empires got away with this by outsourcing that damage onto colonial and marginal populations. Famines in India, the damage of slavery, the extractive colonial enterprises set up throughout Africa, this can all be compared to the damage done by the First Five-Year Plan, it's always violently extracting a surplus from one part of the world to fuel industrialization in another part of the world. The capitalist countries laundered their reputation by doing violence to people of colour and colonial populations, then cut the USSR off from world trade and tried to starve its economy, then blamed the ideology of socialism for, in the end, doing on a national scale the exact same thing they had done on a global scale decades earlier. We can, and in my opinion should, condemn Stalin for making that violent tradeoff and costing millions of people their lives, but to do so we also have to equivalently condemn pretty much every other nation-building project in the modern era, because no country was ever willing to accept the kind of slow and steady industrialization that could have been done without these violent costs since doing so inevitably meant falling behind whoever was willing to be more callous and violent. put this post on a plaque
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Jan 11, 2022 16:41
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FishBulbia posted:but in both cases leaders were operating with incomplete info about severity again, wrong
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Jan 11, 2022 16:44
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar. if you bothered to read any of the more nuanced replies you would actually realize that your comparison, in fact, completely loving sucks
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Jan 11, 2022 16:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:again, wrong Yeah we had more than enough info about severity to map out how this was going to go by like March 2020. Epidemiologists all over the world were talking about how easily transmissible it was and mapping out some horrific death tolls not long after the Wuhan lock down started. Trivia question: Who said this in early March 2020 and what did they know that Biden didn't? “The crisis we face from the coronavirus is on a scale of a major war, and we must act accordingly. The number of casualties may actually be even higher than what the armed forces experienced in World War II. In other words, we have a major, major crisis and we must act accordingly.” DiscountDildos has issued a correction as of 16:55 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 16:53
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DiscountDildos posted:Yeah we had more than enough info about severity to map out how this was going to go by like March 2020. Epidemiologists all over the world were talking about how easily transmissible it was and mapping out some horrific death tolls not long after the Wuhan lock down started. whoever said that sounds like a doomer
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Jan 11, 2022 16:56
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Either way, we knew that both Delta and Omicron were going to cause huge issues, and the response since June has been largely to ignore it. If guys on an Internet forum have a rough idea of how things will work out, the federal government obviously does. (Also, vaccination is obviously not a defense on its own even if it still is useful.) Obviously, the internal discussion is about “not letting China win” but there is certainly plenty the Feds could have done but aren’t doing so. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 17:23 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 16:57
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https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009388/for-chinese%2C-rising-rent-isnt-just-a-financial-problem https://twitter.com/SixthTone/status/1480706174651613184?s=20 I really like sixth tone. Benagain has issued a correction as of 17:07 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 17:04
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Is anyone else confused how China put external pressure on Biden’s COVID policy?
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Jan 11, 2022 17:09
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addressing COVID sanely would make Chinas policy look appropriate?
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Jan 11, 2022 17:14
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FishBulbia posted:whats a few million peasents or retail workers compared to the neoliberal/socialist rebirth of humanity why, those two things with a slash between them don't seem similar at all!
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Jan 11, 2022 17:17
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Red and Black posted:Is anyone else confused how China put external pressure on Biden’s COVID policy? we have to prove to the unfeeling oriental that we're willing to sacrifice millions of people just as they self-evidently are
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Jan 11, 2022 17:22
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Red and Black posted:Is anyone else confused how China put external pressure on Biden’s COVID policy? it would be better to let millions die than admit the Chinese were right about something
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Jan 11, 2022 17:22
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FishBulbia posted:Goddamn, would you be so forgiving to say, joe biden's covid response? where ideology prevented the solutions from being considered and greatly exacerbated deaths. The two are actually remarkably similar. absolutely brain-dead
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Jan 11, 2022 17:25
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Or Washington is fearful enough about losing it is willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives, but not actually seriously reform how the country is actually run, because those lost lives are considered the “path of least resistance” in political circles.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:26
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Mr Hootington posted:https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1480909906404429825?t=AZzHB_6OmthxVwkfsgZmFw&s=19 https://twitter.com/TweetDisliker/status/1480930842314776580?s=20 it's been hard to articulate why David Klion sucks, and this article really helps establish what a loving hack he is https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1230215632706293760?s=20
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Jan 11, 2022 17:28
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China can weather the slight economic downturn caused by lockdowns. The US wouldn't have been able to maintain number. Desperate to have short term number, the US funneled the prole into the fire, even if long term it harmed number.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:30
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FishBulbia posted:China can weather the slight economic downturn caused by lockdowns. The US wouldn't have been able to maintain number. Desperate to have short term number, the US funneled the prole into the fire, even if long term it harmed number. You realise the rest of the world can't tolerate the supplies from china drying up? In material terms. It's not about china losing money its about the rest of the world not having stuff some of its really important stuff. 0 covid in china is a necessity.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:34
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FishBulbia posted:China can weather the slight economic downturn caused by lockdowns. The US wouldn't have been able to maintain number. Desperate to have short term number, the US funneled the prole into the fire, even if long term it harmed number. Granted, as I told the doomsday econ thread, “number” hasn’t the slightest thing to do with deaths or the actual functioning of the economy. As long as the US has a soft monetary policy, “number” will be fine…it is just the rest of the country that will suffer.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:34
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Chinese lockdowns seem extreme, but at the same time controlling the spread means 90% of the work force can still remain engaged and fuel limited growth. In the US we started out covid by fueling mass panics that made people WANT to stay home, without controlling the spread - which massively reduced labor productivity to the point where oil had a negative price. Now they've convinced people not to be afraid of the virus thanks to vaccines, just in time for Omicron to rock the labor force and make them stay home anyway. American policy is simply bad for any number. We keep fiddling with the dials just to make everyone sicker and the economy less productive.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:38
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FishBulbia posted:China can weather the slight economic downturn caused by lockdowns. The US wouldn't have been able to maintain number. Desperate to have short term number, the US funneled the prole into the fire, even if long term it harmed number. Yeah, but none of this is pressure applied by the Chinese. What you're describing is the US falling to internal pressure from its own capitalist class
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Jan 11, 2022 17:40
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Chinese lockdowns seem extreme, but at the same time controlling the spread means 90% of the work force can still remain engaged and fuel limited growth. In the US we started out covid by fueling mass panics that made people WANT to stay home, without controlling the spread - which massively reduced labor productivity to the point where oil had a negative price. Now they've convinced people not to be afraid of the virus thanks to vaccines, just in time for Omicron to rock the labor force and make them stay home anyway. Ok, but what about quarterly gains!?!?
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Jan 11, 2022 17:42
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Ardennes posted:Either way, we knew that both Delta and Omicron were going to cause huge issues, and the response since June has been largely to ignore it. If guys on an Internet forum have a rough idea of how things will work out, the federal government obviously does. (Also, vaccination is obviously not a defense on its own even if it still is useful.) I honestly don't think the federal government is smarter or more well informed than cspam
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Jan 11, 2022 17:44
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Red and Black posted:Yeah, but none of this is pressure applied by the Chinese. What you're describing is the US falling to internal pressure from its own capitalist class I don't think the USSR would've actually collapsed if it accepted outside food aid, or reprioritized food production over industrialization. do you guys also think Trotsky would've taken over without the purges? I also do generally agree that industrialization is an incredibly violent process even when it happens "naturally," I don't get how that excuses the people responsible though. It's like excusing war criminals by saying "hmm, war is bad, so whomst among us can judge" FishBulbia has issued a correction as of 17:49 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 17:46
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