Out of curiosity, any reason you are living in Scotland (IIRC) rather than moving to Actually Existing Socialism?
Do you all realize what a tiring line this is?
Listen I'd marry AES if I could.
Anyway I live in America, because I'm American and I have a responsibility to help oppressed peoples liberate themselves here. Surprising as it may be, I care about other people than myself, too.
Interesting you mention Tanzania; at what point would you say it stopped being -or actively pursuing- Socialism that Actually Existed?
I only included Tanzania because of Ujamaa, and because a decent argument could be made that Nyerere at least tried to take Tanzania in a socialist direction. I don't think he did a particularly good job of that, and in the end the Tanzanian-British bourgeoisie did block Tanzanian socialism from really becoming cemented. To be honest I probably shouldn't have included it because no Dictatorship of the Proletariat was ever established, but whatevs.
As for Eastern Europe, how do you account for the fact most political parties and popular opinion made it very clear they weren't thrilled with the Soviet model? While they may not have Shock Therapy, their desire to abandon the Soviet model was pretty clear.
"Their" "They"
What, did the entire Polish People rise up and speak at once? Did they all share the same opinion now or something? And here I thought I was supposed to be the anti-individualist...
I've encountered many different views of Soviet economic planning but I have to hand it to you, I've never once heard it described as working stupendously or just fine.
Anecdote.
It is one thing to praise the rapid mechanization, electrification, and education efforts made by the Soviet Union. Same goes for the frankly monumental post-war reconstruction and urbanization.
Soviet economic planning worked fine for large, capital intensive projects like building steel mills, railways, or mass housing. Once you built all the railways, steel mills, and housing and the people were no longer starving dirt farmers, the Soviet economic planning started to fall apart and they never really got a handle on "consumer communism".
So you're upset because a country a hundred years behind the West, with no imperialism to base its luxury economy on, failed to immediately become materially equal with Western society. Because
that's fair.
Anyway, they did a good enough job with what they had.
I was more approaching it from the position of how silly decade long plans are. In 1988, when the Soviet leadership was drafting their 5 Year Plan (or whatever year they drafted it) they envisioned that by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union would have collapsed and that its core members - Ukraine and Belarus- were ditching it faster than rats fleeing a sinking ship?
I see no reason to believe that Chinese planners are any more prescient than Soviet planners.
Ah yes, because that's totally what making plans entails.
Well, collectivism certainly didn't help matters in 1933. I know that prior exploration of collectivized farming on a limited scale showed promise - raising production while holding down capital needed. That said, given how collectivization got wrapped up in a de facto uprising against Soviet authority it seems a pretty poor idea to get into a situation where some farmers were actively sabotaging agriculture in the middle of a famine.
Of course the petit-bourgeois peasants resisted. And the path of collectivization in the USSR certainly has much than can be criticized.
Stalin himself criticized it. But while the chaos of collectivization prevented an immediate response to the famine, it didn't *cause* the famine by itself, and to pretend that "oh well the Soviets caused the peasants to destroy their crops instead of submitting to collectivization, therefore the Soviets caused the famine" is the height of absurdity and victim-blaming. That's just not how things work.
Where are you getting the tens of millions number from? The Bengal Famine of 1943 saw around 3 million dead from starvation. Plus, as you noted earlier, famine was a chronic problem in non-mechanized agriculture. Indian agriculture, as far as I am aware, was/is highly dependent on the monsoon to a degree larger than European crops are on weather.
That is by no means the only famine in colonial India..
Did you even try to research the issue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalisa_famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doji_bara_famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378
Even
today India suffers a rate of malnutrition death far higher than North Korea, a state infamous in the West for supposedly being a place of "perma-famine."
For a second, I thought dianetics was a Daily Mail thing where everything is viewed in the context of Princess Diana.
That's not entirely inaccurate.
S
I guess it's a reminder to anyone watching that you're not arguing from a moral standpoint, or a humanist standpoint.
That's correct. I, and Marxism, is anti-humanist. We do not take mankind as the origin of our analysis nor perceive that the universe revolves around its existence. There is no reason to assume so. Humanity is governed by the same laws of dialectics that govern the rest of the universe; as our physicists are so fond of reminding us, we are star stuff on a tiny rock existing for a tiny fraction of time in the universe. We don't matter, and analyses that assume that we are somehow special are always going to be off the mark.
That doesn't mean that people don't matter
to other people. I'm not a nihilist and I'm not catatonic. But happy feels don't make the universe go around, and our society, our very consciousness, is the product of material relations and the resolution of internal contradictions in matter. That's what causes the life and death of stars and galaxies as well as life forms, nations and societies...all things. In all that we are just incidental. Far better is it to understand how the things we care about fit into this larger universe, than to poo poo about this Cult of Mankind that humanism has been obsessed with for the last two hundred years.
To answer your snide claim that I do not care about ending starvation: of course I do. and of course I welcome inventions like the Green Revolution and mechanization, things that have indeed happened under capitalism. But your dedicated belief that this problem can be fixed by capitalism betrays all but the most dogmatic analyses of economics and history, which points to capitalism being structurally unable and politically unwilling to actually materially end hunger and poverty, even if many actors *really really want* to do it.
I support socialism because it can, and it does. I don't pretend it's perfect, and it doesn't need to be perfect. But like it or not, that's where humanity is headed, and the sooner we get there, the more lives we can save, the more generations we can help, the faster we can put this dark age of class societies, selfishness, starvation, and poverty behind us, for good and forever. If you can't find a humanistic vision in that, then you have no right appealing to the "humanity" of others for refusing to buy into your capitalist dogma.
it's funny though, because this is a big argument for socialism: the dignity people and how they feel about what they do.
Only to middle-class academics for whom social systems are weighed on philosophical scales to be examined and judged fit by their own academic standards. To the great mass of humanity crushed underfoot, socialism is a matter of life and death. If you think "loss of dignity" is something that actual working class people fear from socialism, then you don't know capitalism, the working class,
or socialism.
