|
Is Communism good? This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes |
|
375 | 66.25% |
| No |
|
191 | 33.75% |
| Total: | 523 votes | ||
|
It was the only way Russia could industrialize, so the answer is... it depends.
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 10:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:40 |
|
|
Kilroy posted:Yeah central planning falls down mostly due to corruption and because the state can and inevitably will gently caress up the targets so you end up with the all shoelaces you could ever want, and no bread. Markets are usually good about not letting that happen. In the case of the Soviets, some of it was poor central planning, but most of it was price controls. The Soviets wanted everyone to have as much as they wanted (food/consumer good etc) at well below market prices. This cause an enormous black market as people simply bought as much as they could, then resold the products once stores quickly ran out of them. The Soviets would push the factories to have quotas to meet these goals but often this was humanly impossible so instead they cut corners or produced too much of an item they actually could make. The system didn't collapse immediately but over decades the rot very clearly set in. Yeah, this is a troll thread and everything but actual Soviet history is interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 10:33
|
|
|
Retarded Goatee posted:no That middleground can only exist with a counterbalance, so humanity is probably going to be stuck with unfethered capitalism and the chaos that comes with it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 10:45
|
|
|
pigdog posted:Everything in the Soviet system from a box of matches up to something like motorcycles had the price printed or stamped on it, and selling it for any more than that would've been "speculation", which was punishable. There was a black market for imported goods, but domestic products that were in short supply were mostly exchanged for other products, or favors. The result was the same from a supply standpoint, anything valuable was snapped up since its "official price" was far below market value. If this was exchanged for currency or favors wasn't that important from an economic perspective (especially since the Soviet Union had near complete currency controls).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2017 11:56
|
|
|
SSNeoman posted:Easy there, communism is a bad system because it cannot be implemented into the world. Every country that tried to do communism failed and had really bloody periods of strife. How about Imperial Japan as well? How about the major European Imperialist powers? How about all those South American military dictatorships? How about all those ancient monarchies? Was Tsarist Russia really swell and the Bolsheviks just hosed it up? The KMT? History is literally with murder and starvation and the only choice is not to try to replicate it. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Jan 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 11:05
|
|
|
gohmak posted:I think the theory goes that capital by its very nature will coalesce with fewer individuals thus eroding socialist institutions. The model you speak of benifits disproportionately societies in which capital resides. How do you get capital outside of developed countries without greatly reducing the quality of living of workers living there (ie free trade)? It is an open question. Higsian posted:The difference between horrible communist regimes and the nazis is that those communist regimes oppressed and murdered in pursuit of their goals, but for the nazis the oppressing and murdering was their goal. I will also just throw this out there before someone denies it, recent academics research has shown that the Nazis purposefully killed significantly more people than the Soviets. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jan 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 14:17
|
|
|
Jaded Samurai posted:You can file that research right here *hands you a shredder*. At least the Nazis explored the idea of relocation for the Jews. The Russian and Chinese agrarian class was executed at a stroke as a matter of course, as though they couldn't afford the paperwork to at least let them file a protest. They probably couldn't. HOLY poo poo you actually believe the Nazis about the Madagascar plan? Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Jan 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 16:29
|
|
|
Kopijeger posted:There were other relocation plans. In Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder claims that there was a proposal to create a "reservation" around Lublin (considered too close to core Reich territory to work) and another further east in occupied Soviet territory. Apparently this was abandonded due to the area not being securely controlled enough, so they settled on the extermination plan. Or maybe it was abandoned it because they wanted to exterminate the Jews as everything about the final solution indicates? This is going to be the Eastern Front of threads.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 16:52
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:Social Democracy is unworkable in the long term because Social Democratic parties inevitably get coopted by capital and turned into milquetoast liberal parties who proceed to dismantle all the accomplishments of Social Democracy. Social democracy really can only exist if capital feels there is a more pressing existential threat to its existence ie the Soviets. Basically, you need radical leftists to take over a major country and at least be some what successful in managing it (not Venezuela). The "goldilocks zone" for social democracy is in the middle of a cold war.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 13:37
|
|
|
White Rock posted:Also Social Democracy can only be achieved when labor is in high demand and immobile. Raising any taxes, setting regulations, or demanding (expensive) worker rights is a sure fire way to get your factory or workplace shipped to Eastern Europe, Mexico or Asia. Admittedly, the threat of another ideological rival may limit this (it is arguable) a bit since the threat to the entire system itself is more tangible. Obviously, globalization happened during the Cold War but it could be argued it really became supercharged during the 1990s. Basically, companies have to feel there is a threat to their existence in order to accept change.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 13:56
|
|
|
White Rock posted:Indeed, although i believe it is the material conditions more than the ideology that does this. The fact that china/eastern Europe was communist made it not only ideologically but more importantly, materially impossible to create globalization. Even if communism was dead, if the markets remained closed and first world labor was in high demand social democracy could potentially be alive and well. I don't know if you can ever really separate the two, but obviously globalization happened during the Cold War. The US didn't have a problem with protectionist policy among their allies in Europe and East Asia as long as they remained anti-communist. At the same time, this trade was not yet enough to truly destabilize the material interest of the American middle class (minorities and the white working class felt it either). Detroit's population more or less peaked during the 1950s, and it was clear by the end of the mid 1960s the city was on a downward slant. I don't see a situation where markets remained closed when they were already open (although only to a relatively limited set of countries). The Soviets weakened there was less of a need to worry and by 1985 it was clear the Soviets were no longer a threat. Anyway, if another major leftist country gets a shot they really really really need to back off of price controls for food and consumer goods, they absolutely don't work. One thing a socialist country if it wants to survive if going to have to adopt market pricing of some form. Nationalization and even some form of central planning could work, but not if prices are static.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 14:22
|
|
|
White Rock posted:In a true communism economy prices are set after the production quotas and need, "market" prices are to be avoided. With control over the means of production and the ability to set production levels, prices can be set to reasonable amounts. Failure of price controls stem from not having the controls of the means and materials of production. If you posses the flour and the ovens, you can make as much bread as you like and set whatever price you'd like. The problem is the state usually wants to keep prices well below market levels which invariably leads to a supply issue since the state company doesn't have a positive feedback mechanism to capture that "profit" and its reinvestment. The issue with "orthodox" central planning is often material inputs, we are still in a world where commodities are not "unlimited." You can control the "means" but material is often still in short supply. You can hope the state somehow figures this out, but this often not the case especially as a supply chain becomes more complex and/or there is a limited ability to supply goods. Transparency, and direct democracy are fine but it doesn't solve the essential issue of a rarity of materials. Your country only produces so much flour and people are buying as many loafs as possible, you can try to ration bread but almost certainly you are going to have a black market. Pricing at least gives you a mechanism to control demand to some extent and gives you up to the minute information on demand. Hopefully you can directly subsidize people in a vulnerable situation so actually starvation doesn't happen. Also as shown by history odds are a revolutionary leftist state is probably going to start off authoritarian because civil wars, invasions and embargoes are pretty loving messy. The question is if authoritarianism can be dismantled after this emergency period passes. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 15:20
|
|
|
White Rock posted:Class consciousnesses is built on shared interest. Considering how rough of a shape workers in the first world already have it, that seems to be a recipe for assuring fascism triumphs completely. If you tell people they have to accept an even crappy quality of life then already have they are going to revolt. If the focus is individual nation states fine, but in the end "internationalism" is going to run into a finite amount of resources in the first world including housing. If your population doesn't feel like their lives are getting better under you, it doesn't matter what ideology you have. You could argue that a better redistribution of resource would allow you to handle immigration better but it still wouldn't be infinite. Also yeah there has been a lot of back tracking on that program from 1903, maybe we haven't rolled back completely yet but I wouldn't take too much for granted. (Oh yeah and the distinction between First and Third World is pretty blurry at this point, what does Thailand count as? How about Detroit? Where is the dividing line between the two? Do you just take humanity and split it down the middle?) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jan 25, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 16:10
|
|
|
Bob le Moche posted:If there truly is a difference in class interest between the middle class white citizen and the undocumented immigrant worker, but you decide to side with the former against the latter, then as a communist I must consider you my political opponent. How about the white working class guy making 12 dollars an hour?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2017 16:33
|
|
|
Sun Wu Kampf posted:It pretty much has been considering that any attempt to try communism on a larger scale than a single tiny commune has resulted in a third world shithole. Yeah, it went the other way around in the Soviet Union.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2017 11:33
|
|
|
Bitter fly posted:German communists disliked the fact that Lenin encouraged violence for his revolution, instead of a peaceful transition. Lenin and Stalin weren't Marxist, they were violent opportunists. There has never been a communist government. Also, it is debatable humans can achieve a communist government either. Both Lenin and Stalin were both Marxists, and very clearly products of the late Tsarist period. Violence was a way of life at that time, and both the Reds and the Whites spoke in the same language. If anything late Tsarist Russia was a darwinist challenge where only the most radical and violent groups could survive. On a broader note, I do have a issue with calling the USSR state capitalist. If you don't want to call it communist or even socialist fine... (I guess) but we have present-day examples of functional state capitalism in an arch-typical form (Russia/China) that look very different than Marxist-Leninist states. Whatever the USSR was, it was more than state capitalist even if it clearly failed in its ideological intentions. Also, the best solution is rationing during war time/emergencies and eventually allowing a mix of subsidies/market pricing during period of stability.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2017 01:57
|
|
|
Capitalism perpetuates itself through more than a cultural mindset, hell look at the history of the last 200 years, if anything capitalism is rigidly enforced with both physical and economic coercion. That not only takes a state (or a structure that essential acts like a state) but a willingness to regularly devotion of resources in order to maintain dominance. I am not devoted to state socialism, but if you look at the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, how well would they have fared if they were anarcho-communists? (Admittedly, there were honest left-anarchists in the war...they successes were limited (Makhno could only hold portions of SW Ukraine).) State socialism developed because in all honest it was very efficient for the needs of war, and in all honesty any left-wing insurrection will likely face similar opposition. So there is a honest question here do you remain ideologically rigid and likely be crushed or you become more ideologically flexible in order to survive?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2017 14:06
|
|
|
Cicero posted:Yeah I'm aware of that backstory, but I don't think it really answers my question. Like even if he was right about capitalism eventually collapsing, surely one could infer that the revolution would still happen one area at a time, over a very long period of time; it would have to at least temporarily coexist with existing capitalist nation-states. A similar scenario is how over the last couple hundred years we've seen most of the world transition from some kind of autocracy to some kind of democracy, but it's taken a really long time; if every fledgling democracy depended on its neighbors also being democracies then they never would have taken off in the first place. It why it is hard to see the Soviet Union (and possibly other future revolutionary states) not "devolving" into "socialism in one country" at some point By 1920, it was very clear the revolution was only going to go so far and that the Red Army was reaching the limits of its effectiveness. Moreover, the NEP itself and then rapid industrialization were responses to the isolated nature of the Soviet Union. There are obvious agency in how the Soviet Union developed, but in all honesty it is only until you get to the early 1930s were there doesn't seem to be a strong reasoning behind what is going on (ie Stalin). If anything you can see why Russians and other people from the former Soviet Union can be so fatalistic. They were serfs under a monarchy where life expectancy was hovering in the 30s, then they suffered though 3 revolutions as well as wars in the space of 15 years during which millions died . After all of that they were left in a battered and isolated country that was led by an authoritarian vanguard party that eventually was taken over completely by Stalin who did his own handy work.... and then the Second World War happened. Granted, the reason why the revolution happened in Russia itself was probably because they were simply the most miserable and industrialization has reached a critical mass in just enough cities to make a proletarian focused revolution possible.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2017 15:26
|
|
|
Bulgogi Hoagie posted:i happen to spend a lot of time in russia and most russians i've asked aren't big fans of communism either buddy I am currently living in Russia right now, and a lot of people do look more fondly at the Soviet period. They may not ideologically care about communism, but they desperate want some stability back in their lives. Basically, to sum up this thread, nothing can actually be fixed with capitalism unless you have some type of ideological weight to force it to change and since that doesn't exist, it won't. icantfindaname posted:same with russia btw, there was an article in the nyt the other day about what if kerensky had won, and i see not much reason to think a left-liberal government in a large poor eurasian country would have performed better than the same thing in india Granted, there was pretty much zero chance Kerensky's government would have survived. The Bolsheviks basically walked into power because the government had so little support and the army was already collapsing on itself. Even if you took all the leftists out of the equation, eventually monarchists/whites would have turned on him as well (Kornilov). Even if put his government in complete isolation it was pretty doubtful Russia was ever going to develop without crash industrialization, especially since after the war it was even farther behind than before it. Also, India's issue was mostly geopolitical. India for most of the Cold War desperate tried to stay non-aligned and not move to far into either orbit. They more or less suffered for this since they weren't able to get the same type of trade relationship with the US that Western Europe/Japan/SK did. By the 1990s, there was no point in staying non-aligned and trade with the US (and the rest of the West) dramatically increased India's trade surplus and hence growth. Granted, the US/Europe wouldn't have given a poo poo about Russia if the October Revolution never happened in the first place and Russia would have just been ignored unless probably some right-wing nationalist government took power there eventually (sound familiar?). Ardennes fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 28, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 00:09
|
|
|
Yeah, state-planning (Gosplan) and ownership existed during the NEP period. Also, the Soviet Union almost certainly needed crash industrialization by the mid-1920s and the state needed a greater share of agricultural output...pretty much everything else is heavily debatable.
Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 29, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 21:36
|
|
|
Bulgogi Hoagie posted:so we agree that full on central planning economy with no free market whatsoever is really bad? im glad The issue for the Soviets is by the 1920s is that while private agriculture was doing better (and prices were lower to an increased supply) then Soviet Union was running out of surplus revenue to invest in heavy industry (the prices for industrial goods spiked). Maybe some elements of the NEP could have been retained but the Soviet Union did need some type of "Five Year Plan" especially inordinate investment in coal, oil, and steel production. Granted, I also think price controls are pretty garbage in the long term. They may be useful for a relatively emergency situation in a large country, but if they go on too long your economy is going to completely meltdown. I think the primary issue with talking about command economies is exactly what causes them to fail. Usually, it isn't "corruption" itself but tying industries to unworkable prices or setting unrealistic quotas. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 29, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 21:49
|
|
|
Cicero posted:Command economies probably could be more effective using modern technology, but a) their economic weaknesses seem to usually stem from ideological stubbornness/blindness (with the price controls that Ardennes brought up being a good example), not lack of access to the right tools, and b) the bigger problem is that every country with a fully socialized economy and every country with a government that's trying to get there, always seems to become authoritarian (Venezuela being the latest example). Capitalist countries have a variety of successes and failures with democracy, but communist countries always seem to fail at permitting actual representative government. Nevertheless, there is a broader issue of revolutionary states tending toward authoritarianism in the first place because of initial "siege mindset." Someone mentioned the Bolsheviks "ruining the idea" but ultimately there was very little way for whatever faction that came out of the Russian Civil War (if not most extremely bloody civil wars) without becoming authoritarian. People tend to mention Kerensky as the "last hope of Russian democracy" when Kerensky himself was an autocratic. In all honesty, even if the revolution didn't happen first in Russia, the state it happened to most likely would have suffered a similar spiral especially as foreign government openly invaded it. Of course, other issue is what was the alternative? Liberal/Progressives (they existed in Tsarist Russia) has failed to come up with any meaning element of change and the right simply just wanted the autocracy to continue indefinitely. Again, I don't see other states suffering that different of a fate. As for command economies, they are very good at initial industrialization and during "emergency" periods (i.e wars or something as damaging as them). They lose their effectiveness as the products a society craves becomes more diverse and unpredictable. In addition, predicting demand and correct pricing becomes more difficult. I actually don't think the contemporary era is actually a good fit for a traditional command economy in most circumstances, although I good see the government retaining control of the "commanding heights" of an economy. However, the problem of our era is that there is no long the ideological competition to make the "middle ground" possible. If anything the Soviets were a key competent in a broader ideological dialogue across the 20th century that no longer exists and it clearly shows. There are real fundamental problems with how capitalism currently functions, and without an alternative system to comparable against there is no longer to "push" the system in correcting itself. Also, I wanted to mention that a GMI system would also largely prove inadequate because it assumes a base of revenue that is impossible under our current system. Also, that the state probably should promote full employment during a period of increasing automation. If anything it makes more sense have a WPA-type employment or at least have people conduct "make work" jobs like the Soviets then just have a completely unfocused populace.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 13:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:40 |
|
|
Typo posted:though I have to admit it prob wasn't so bad living in Communist Czechoslovakia or Hungary or a Leningrad/Moscow in the USSR but those were areas with highest standard of living in the east bloc and I'd still still pick living in London/paris/nyc over those Yeah, Moscow wasn't so great during the Tsarist period if you didn't have money. If anything the gap between the West and former Russian Empire was smaller during the Soviet period. Hell, if anything what caused the gap to widen again was the "reforms" of the 1990s. (Also, life under Salazar and Franco was pretty poo poo even if they weren't the Khmer Rouge.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Mar 31, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 17:55
|
|