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Aeolius posted:In terms of how this has been pursued in practice, again, take your pick. I would argue that the USSR, particularly up to the mid-1950's, was one of the best-planned economies the world has seen, and has elements that can be applied just as fruitfully today. (Before the discussion diverts to Stalin: Yes, I am 100% against the death penalty, forced labor, and even incarceration as it currently exists in the world; I'm speaking purely of the economic system. There can be more or less draconian socialist states, just as there can be more or less draconian capitalist states. That's a question of policy, not of the manner in which society reproduces itself.) I'm skeptical that you can neatly separate the political and legal design of the USSR from its economy. While Stalin's repressive policies were excessive in scope they didn't come out of nowhere. The Soviet government faced a lot of resistance to its policies from both internal and external threats. It's hard to imagine that the USSR could have collectivized farming without some kind of legal repression for instance. If you're calling for a dramatic top-down reordering of the social and economic system then you're inevitably going to face resistance and you're going to need some way to overcome that resistance. How do you overcome that resistance without suspending democracy or civil liberties? Or, if you're forced to suspend those things due to some temporary emergency, how do you get them back afterwards? quote:As we discussed some time around November, in subsequent decades it faltered, and I believe the reasons for this lie chiefly in the gutting of its program of subsidies — a program the USA was basically copying via its pentagon system during the "golden age" of capitalism — in favor of more market-oriented incentives, with an important subsidiary role played also by Cold War pressures. I haven't had time to go through your links (one of which appears to be dead) but your response seems to neglect two factors that I regularly see cited when people critique the Soviet economy, specifically the neglect of light industry and agriculture. quote:So, functional changes beyond mere titles would have to, in some fashion, include A) Structuring the state so as to nullify the influence of money/capital in politics and increase civic participation in day-to-day decision making B) Give primary precedence in production not to profit but to the plan. How these are pursued concretely, that's a question for a democratic process, innit? Is it possible to enact such sweeping changes democratically? I feel as though a rapid and decisive change between systems may prove impossible under normal democratic conditions. I'm also not clear on how compatible truly centralized planning would be with a democratic political system. I wouldn't say it's impossible to combine them but typically the more centralized you make something the harder it is to have meaningful democratic input. asdf32 posted:Step back for a second explain why you're examining the Soviet Union again. Besides being [not capitalist] what positive feature of the Soviet system are we supposed to be extrapolating from? quote:If all you want to get is "socialism might work" that's great. But if you're trying to point to things in the Soviet Union that were actually demonstrably better, that's hard to do given the number of successful capitalist states we have to draw upon for alternative examples. I think you'd be hard pressed to find capitalist states that grew as rapidly as the USSR under similar conditions of domestic backwardness and international isolation. Anyway, if you're going to repeatedly state that there are "numerous" examples then you should name some of them.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:02
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:33 |
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You're going to need to explain why you think those three examples are appropriate, why you deem China capitalist, and why you think think the USSR's diplomatic isolation was self imposed. Also, whether or not the USSR's economic isolation was voluntary (a very strange claim to make unless you're intentionally being very obtuse about what you mean) I do not fundamentally alter the underlying point that the USSR was isolated and yet it grew rapidly and successfully in its early decades, which is arguably a much more impressive and hard to achieve feat than Japan or China's export oriented growth models.
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Feb 6, 2015 21:29
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asdf32 posted:When I say Japan im talking Meji industrialization, not post WWII. Japan was similarly backward and industrialized rapidly in a fashion that wasn't primarily driven by trade (trade at modern scale wasn't really possible anyways). Japan's growth was state driven and ended up requiring imperial conquests in Korea and China. It's an impressive period but it hardly counts as international isolation when you're invading your neighbours to take their resources. If anything it seems like examples such as this one demonstrate that the most impressive periods of capitalist growth relied very heavily on state directed expansion and coordination. That doesn't mean you can't count these as capitalist success stories but let's be perfectly frank about what the implications of that claim are. quote:Again it's sort of hard to claim isolation when your sphere of influence is 50% of the globe. And also, deep in the Cold War while clearly still communist, China chose and succeeded in opening its doors. Oh Jeeze. Ok, first of all I thought we were discussing the USSR's early growth period from the end of the Civil War until the end of the Second World War, during which period the USSR certianly didn't encompass half the globe. And claiming that China "chose" to open its door is an incredibly misleading way to describe what happened. The US decided to open up relations with China as a way of isolating the USSR and regaining ground it had lost during the Vietnam war. It's incredibly misleading to present this situation as proof that the socialist countries could have simply chosen to engage in more trade with western countries. quote:Again the Soviet Union was absolutely a good example of growth for that particular time period, but if I've got all of history to pick and chose economic examples from, the Soviet Union isn't at the top of the pile. It's up there. quote:Another reason for this is that I'd strongly contend with the "they became too profit oriented" hypothesis and instead correlate their stagnation (which was paralleled by other socialist states) to the end of low hanging labor substitution development. There's probably something to this argument but it doesn't really explain how the Soviets achieved so many technological successes, such as in the early space race. The USSR had did a pretty impressive job of developing high technology. quote:You may want to argue about isolation, I'd like to point out that central economies have never thrived at high levels of economic development or modern levels complexity. Meanwhile capitalist standouts like Korea (Japan too) have flown through that transition to attain first world standards of living. Well, once again I'd ask you to offer some kind of definition for what counts of capitalist. While I don't disagree that Japan and Korea are capitalist countries all the success stories you're pointing to were examples of state driven and/or export oriented industrialization. In the case of China it is highly questionable whether it should be counted as a "capitalist" success story at all.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:38
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So I'm not crazy about carrying water for Stalinism but we need to set the record straight on some things. asdf32 posted:Heh and this is supposed to contrast the Soviet Union? You do understand that the Soviet Union had the two largest wars in history fought primarily on its soil during the period that we are discussing, right? The USSR came into existence at the same time that the Germans effectively seized most of the most productive and developed areas of the Russian empire. The USSR was then forced to industrialize itself and it did so without any kind of foreign conquest, which came later from 1939 onwards. In other words the Soviets went from a completely backward, agrarian and utterly devastated society to being a world super power capable of defeating possibly the greatest fighting force in history, the Wehrmacht. So yes the record of the USSR here does favourably compare with Japan's. Stalin certainly didn't have any moral objection to conquering new territory but he wasn't in a position to do so until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came into being, which only happened after the USSR had developed a significant industrial base. Honestly I'm just going to quote myself from a previous thread rather than rehash all this information in a slightly new format: Helsing posted:In the 1920s only about one in five Soviet citizens lived in cities. The rest lived in rural areas, mostly practising very low productivity agriculture. During the First World War the Russian empire had lost roughly between 1.62 and1.94 percent of their overall population, along with massive losses of material goods. Then from 1917 onward there was the Russian Civil War, which killed another 2,712,824 or so people if you add up the estimated casualties of both sides. Now on the population front things could have been worse given that other countries lost comparable or even higher percentages of their populations during fighting (though adding in the deaths from the Civil War gives a pretty stark picture of how horrible conditions in Russia were by the time the Soviets consolidated their power) but the overall picture is a pretty bleak one, even more so considering the Soviets also went through a series of internal power struggles during the 1920s before Stalin consolidated his control toward the end of the decades. So just to be clear here I agree that there are really really big reasons to have reservations about the USSR but downplaying the significance of their economic record from about the 30s to the 60s is ridiculous. What they managed to accomplish is nothing short of remarkable, even acknowledging the fact that they paid for a lot of it with blood and state terrorism. quote:Technology always can be transferred but it actually was, and because of reduced complexity it was actually easier in many ways to transfer technology than today. Consider that electricity, the internal combustion engine and the telephone represented state of the art at the turn of the century. There is a reason why names of individuals like Bell, Tesla and Mercedes are still attached to companies in these industries. A single workshop with a handful of people represented a car factory at the time and therefore that knowledge could be easily transferred and replicated. Both the Russia and Japan had auto manufactures by 1915 for example. The Soviets didn't outproduce the Third Reich by setting up "single workshop[s] with a handful of people". You're either being really disingenuous here or you genuinely don't understand the scale of Soviet industrialization and are talking out of your rear end. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the Soviet economy but the idea that it's growth wasn't remarkable or extremely impressive by world historical standards is ridiculous. quote:That a healthy state is probably the most important thing for economic growth? I agree. Wait, so you're saying the USSR had a "health state"? Really? The obvious implication here is that economic development is almost impossible without a strong state that is willing to ignore market signals or comparative advantage in favour of developing strategic industries. quote:We weren't actually. The soviet Union's golden years were from 1928-1970 per an earlier discussion. More than half of that came after WWII. You're ignoring the forest for the trees here. The USSR's development record cannot be looked at in isolation from its historical situation or the massive wars it was engaged in. quote:So prior to that China wanted to trade with the U.S. but the U.S. just didn't let them? It's probably some of both. I do not even understand what you're trying to argue at this point. The USSR could not just choose to trade with the USA or the rest of the capitalist world. There was some exchange in specific areas during the 1920s but the idea that the USSR's economic isolation was self imposed is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. You can read a paper here that briefly details the Soviet's attempts to attract foreign capital in the 1920s. While the move toward autaurky in the 1930s probably discouraged further investment the overwhelming reason that the USSR didn't have access to foreign capital is, first of all, that the Soviets were poor, and second of all that the western powers had no reason to lend resources to a system that they accurately perceived to be a direct threat to their own. Western policy makers in the 20th century (and before) have been pretty blunt about the fact that they want third world countries to follow capitalist development, which means that they had a very strong motivation to impede Soviet economic growth wherever they could. quote:Yeah maybe it's "up there" but go back to the original argument that got us here. It was the idea that Soviet economic history provides examples we might want to replicate today. First it assumes we can separate its economic achievements from the political baggage. But even allowing that, I'm still not seeing exactly what I should want to take. Personally I would not want to emulate the political structure of the USSR and I agree with you that it isn't altogether clear how much we can separate the Soviet economy from Soviet politics. However, the record of Soviet development is notable because it suggests there's way more room for manoeuvre when it comes to developing economic policies than what many people would think. quote:Yeah they did. It came partially at the expense of the consumer sector. Also space and military are always government driven so it's not like their U.S. competition was drastically different in those sectors (as it was in the consumer space). Yeah but the relevant point here is that the Soviets developed a big enough economy (starting from an extremely low level of development) that they were able to compete with the world's richest capitalist power. And before you try to play this off as being purely a by-product of their large population and natural resoruces maybe you can explain why other large and resource rich countries like Brazil or India weren't also pioneering space travel in the 50s. quote:Not Socialist. Socialism means having all or nearly all capital publicly owned. Capitalism has private capital and markets. I admit there is probably room for refinement of these terms but in this specific example, China, it's not terribly contentious to use the word "capitalism". Ok. So you agree that European imperialism was an example of capitalism then? quote:The Soviet Union actually had plenty of interaction with U.S companies like public contracts with Ford for example prior to WWII. Exactly what technology do you think the Soviet Union was lacking access to prior to WWII? The USSR was a backwards agrarian country devestated by war and famine and massively lacking in capital. Your attempts to downplay this fact are starting to sound either ignorant or extremely disingenuous.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:19
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Not only were some of those deaths almost certainly avoidable, I would also say that the structure of the Soviet economy was inimical to the self stated goals of Lenin, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership. Within a couple generatiosn the state apparatus they had built reverted to a form of capitalism far more brutal than that practised by the USA (domestically at least). So even on its own terms the Soviet economy was a failure that sowed the seeds for its own dissolution. As for whether Marxism should take any blame that's a harder question to answer, though on some level I think that attempting a massive transformation of society is inevitably going to create a lot of chaos and bloodshed. In fairness, though, liberalism could not have come into existence without the genocidal extermination of the North American natives, the enslavement of Africa or the multi-decade bloodbath that was the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. So while Stalinism is noteworthy in terms of how it compressed centuries of brutality into a few decades, communism's record of atrocity isn't unique. And if the extermination of the North American natives is too distant a point of comparison for your tastes just read what Britain was doing in India during the 19th century. British administrators were literally outlawing famine relief because it would interfere with the free market setting the prices for food, and the death toll from that decision was catastrophic. Engineering or ignoring famines out of fidelity to your chosen ideology isn't a uniquely communist phenomena, it's just something empires do when they can get away.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:35
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Even if the famine in Ukraine was not consciously intended to destroy the Ukrainian independence movement it sort of beggars belief that more could not have been done to prevent the mass starvation of millions of people. Same thing with the purges and the horrific police state that Stalin constructed. Even accepting that the potted cold war era histories of the USSR are incomplete and propagandistic cannot diminish the awfulness of Stalin's regime. Stalin pretty much doomed the USSR by saddling it with a state apparatus that was inevitably going to generate a class of privileged nomenklatura who, unsurprisingly, reverted the system to an even worse form of capitalism than what had previously existed. I really do not see why Stalin should be praised when the state he created failed in its self stated goal of creating a socialist society. Yes living standards in the USSR were better than they were for third world countries. Yes the USSR falsifies a lot of liberal myths about economic development. No, Stalin was not some great leader worthy of our reverence and affection. Disinterested posted:It was a bit less orchestrated and the authorities eventually worked out that letting everyone starve was not A-OK, but tens of millions of people is a rather unimpressive learning curve. British authorities went out of their way to prevent famine relief in India because, on the one hand, they thought it was a waste of money, and because, on the other, they thought that famine relief distorted the Malthusian nature of free markets. Sir Richard Temple is a great example of this. He successfully prevented a famine in India by distributing food and was widely condemned for this back in Britain. So the next time a famine rolled around he avoided any kind of famine relief, leading to millions of deaths. Its easily comparable to what Stalin did in Ukraine. quote:After being educated at Rugby and the East India Company College at Haileybury, Temple joined the Bengal Civil Service in 1846. His hard work and literary skill were soon recognised; he was private secretary for some years to John Lawrence in the Punjab, and gained useful financial experience under James Wilson. He served as Chief Commissioner for the Central Provinces until 1867, when he was appointed Resident at Hyderabad. In 1867 he was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (KCSI). In 1868 he became a member of the supreme government,[which?] first as foreign secretary and then as finance minister. Lest that be too distant in the past let's revisit Britain's Indian policy in the 1940s: quote:And it was India that would be the greatest stain on Churchill’s record at its otherwise splendid climax. As prime minister from 1940 to 1945 he obstinately thwarted any attempt to move toward a settlement with Gandhi and the Congress nationalists. Worse still was the awful Bengal famine of 1943. Like the Irish famine 100 years before, it was not caused by the London government, but in both cases official indifference and inaction gravely aggravated the horror, and destroyed any moral authority the British claimed to rule those suffering peoples. Churchill's response to the Bengal famine was to send a telegram to the British viceroy asking why, if food was really so scarce, hadn't Gandhi died yet?
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Feb 11, 2015 01:29
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:33 |
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I'm not in a position to make long posts right now but will hopefully sort through the backlog of responses I need to make in a couple of days. Before I do that I have a request for you asdf32. Can you please substantiate your arguments by citing actual evidence instead of making assertions. In particular I want to know why you think Germany suffered worse than the Russian Empire in the 1914-1933 period (in particular, why you think Germany suffered more severe economic losses in WWI and its aftermath). As bad as the treat of Versailles was it hardly compares to Brest-Litovsk. And over than a single catastrophic thrust by the Russian army in 1914 the Germans fought the war almost entirely on foreign soil. It's frustrating when I try to make my case by referring to actual losses of materials, land and population suffered by the Russians and you respond with a one liner about how Germany suffered worse. Quite aside from the truth or falsity of that statement it's not a great way to debate. Start showing your work please.
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Feb 18, 2015 01:44
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