What were the real causes of China's famine in the 50s-60s?

[Hygro]

That sounds like famine inherent to colonial political control. "Bourgeois western democracy economics" doesn't produce external famines today, has never produced internal famines afaik, and wasn't driving colonization by the time of Mao's experiment so surely inthesomeday means something other than non-inherent association between famine and "bourgeois western democracy economics".

 

[Lexicus]

That sounds like famine inherent to colonial political control.

The Dissertation on the Poor Law was arguing for the establishment of a labor market in Britain, not in the colonies. The spread of capitalism around the world through imperialism was indeed characterized by the use of the same methods in colonial administration as had been used in Europe itself a century or so earlier to destroy traditional social structures, replacing them with labor markets. To create labor markets (another way of saying this is to create the arena in which bourgeois-democracy economics applies) it is necessary to destroy all social structures that prevent the individual from being exposed to hunger.

"Bourgeois western democracy economics" doesn't produce external famines today, has never produced internal famines afaik,

Well, ironically I think dogmatic Marxism is actually a form of Bourgeois western democracy economics, so to some extent I disagree with the premises under which this discussion is being carried out, but certainly there are millions of hungry people in the world today because it is not profitable to feed the poor.

 

[W|M]

That sounds like famine inherent to colonial political control. "Bourgeois western democracy economics" doesn't produce external famines today, has never produced internal famines afaik, and wasn't driving colonization by the time of Mao's experiment so surely inthesomeday means something other than non-inherent association between famine and "bourgeois western democracy economics".

There's currently a massive famine in Yemen due to a US-supported Saudi intervention in the civil war there

 

[sophie]

iirc either Quesnay or Montesquieu also complains about the way that the market pulls food (and other necessary goods) away from France and towards other places where the prices are better, thereby weakening French political power relative to the British and Americans (the latter was the main object of the essay).

It seems - based on what I have read - a rather common viewpoint among the physiocrats and philosophes that engaging in trade or market/capitalist endeavors was harmful to the world more broadly, and France in particular.

 

[Hygro]

We're comparing China in the mid 20th century to an imagined China with "western bourgeois democracy economics" and you guys are trying to talk about capitalism in the 18th century.

Well, ironically I think dogmatic Marxism is actually a form of Bourgeois western democracy economics, so to some extent I disagree with the premises under which this discussion is being carried out, but certainly there are millions of hungry people in the world today because it is not profitable to feed the poor.

And as a percentage of humans, increasingly fewer than ever.

Colonialism has always been suboptimal to the perfect arrangement of labor and capital but political (military) competition among top nations made anything other than the too-fast too-furious method of colonial extraction unviable. For the entire time there's been one uncontested world hegemon we have seen far more effective growth of capitalism that feeds more and more people.

It just seems to me that the "famine inherent" to capital's logic is better known as "a complicated series of games in which famine can be an outcome under specific non-universal conditions." Further, that not all capitalist states are democratic states, as democracies are the unit called into question, and maybe that's important.

There's currently a massive famine in Yemen due to a US-supported Saudi intervention in the civil war there

You can link anything economics if you like, but war causes famines and that's pretty well known.

 

[sophie]

I don't have the figures, but are you genuinely saying that famines are more common in capitalistic societies? Because that seems unlikely. I don't know about you, but nobody around here (UK) has starved to death for well over a century. At no other point in history has that every been true.

Yeah, but is that because of capitalism per se, or is that because of the transport revolution?

 

[Lexicus]

I don't have the figures, but are you genuinely saying that famines are more common in capitalistic societies? Because that seems unlikely. I don't know about you, but nobody around here (UK) has starved to death for well over a century. At no other point in history has that every been true.

No, the phenomenon of exposing individuals to hunger is distinct from famine.

 

[Traitorfish]

No, the phenomenon of exposing individuals to hunger is distinct from famine.

There's a peculiar emphasis on death-counts, when discussing Stalinism. As if that was the only really bad thing about totalitarianism, or even self-evidently the worst thing, as is if the malevolence or incompetence of a given regime could be measured solely in those terms.

I can only assume that it's because so much contemporary anti-Communist discourse is driven by soft Holocaust deniers, so attempting to "beat" the well-known figure of six million serves that end.

 

[Lexicus]

There's a peculiar emphasis on death-counts, when discussing Stalinism. As if that was the only really bad thing about totalitarianism, or even self-evidently the worst thing, as is if the malevolence or incompetence of a given regime could be measured solely in those terms.

Er, are body counts not kind of self-evidently the worst thing?

 

[Traitorfish]

Er, are body counts not kind of self-evidently the worst thing?

I don't think so. If they were, then we would find ourselves giving a free pass to totalitarian regimes with a relatively limited body-count. Which, of course, we absolutely do; that's why right-winters feel justified defending Pinochet or Park, and why Stalinists spend so much time trying to bargain down the body-count of the Stalinist purges and the Great Leap Forward.

If you're criticising a particular regime or system, you have to look at the whole thing, you have to explain it. You can't just take a statistic and start ranking, but that seems to be where most people are content to stop.

Lolwut. Possibly the most bizarre statement in this already bizarre thread.

Either you have a very unusual motion of soft holocaust deniers or - more likely - are trying to tell yourself that criticism of communism is incorrect people it mostly from bad people. The vast majority of people here are strongly critical of communism, and I've never met anyone who denies the holocaust in anyway

Most people are not strongly critical of Stalinism, because most people aren't strongly anything of Stalinism. It's not something that the great majority of people, even here, spend any significant amount of time thinking about. And why would they, it's a discredited and obsolete ideological system, the only people will worrying about it are either motivated by some scholarly or theoretical interest, or because they're still fighting battles from the 1940s. Most of those still beating the Cold War drum of anti-Communism- another obsolete ideological system, if sadly not a widely discredited one- are fighting those battles looking East from the Elbe, so to speak.

 

[Lexicus]

I think I see your point. What about those who are defending Communism, are they also fighting battles from the 1940s?

I think "those worrying about it" covers both defenders and attackers.

 

[Camikaze]

Lolwut. Possibly the most bizarre statement in this already bizarre thread.

Either you have a very unusual motion of soft holocaust deniers or - more likely - are trying to tell yourself that criticism of communism is incorrect people it mostly from bad people. The vast majority of people here are strongly critical of communism, and I've never met anyone who denies the holocaust in anyway

I'm not sure what TF is specifically referring to, but I assume part of it the almost official soft Holocaust denial in places like Hungary, which is very much wrapped up in anti-communism (or anti- 'communist successor party which is now in opposition to the ruling right-wing party'). So it's not to say that criticism of communist regimes, particularly from the west, necessarily involves a minimisation of the Holocaust, but rather that where the Nazi and Stalinist pasts still hold contemporary relevance, they are often approached in a partisan manner.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm not sure what TF is specifically referring to, but I assume part of it the almost official soft Holocaust denial in places like Hungary, which is very much wrapped up in anti-communism (or anti- 'communist successor party which is now in opposition to the ruling right-wing party'). So it's not to say that criticism of communist regimes, particularly from the west, necessarily involves a minimisation of the Holocaust, but rather that where the Nazi and Stalinist pasts still hold contemporary relevance, they are often approached in a partisan manner.

I think the major point is that the whole exercise of counting up the bodies of various totalitarian regimes really started as a way of attempting to prove Stalin was "worse than" Hitler, in the context of Cold War politics. That whole intellectual endeavor can be characterized pretty accurately as a form of soft Holocaust-denial. And it's ultimately fed into the dynamic you describe in many Eastern European countries. There are any number of narratives that are relevant to this, from the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" to outright minimization/apologism for Nazi crimes on the basis that "Communism is even worse!"

 

[Mize]

Stalinism and the USSR in general, through all its –isms and different eras lasted much longer and was much more thorough in uprooting the 'old ways'. Let’s not count total bodies for the Reich and USSR or Mao China. Let’s only count military and police officers, mayors, teachers, people of the system in general executed or otherwise replaced by imprisonment, forced deportation, demotion, etc. Kulaks, factory owners. I actually don’t know the numbers, so cue real historians here.

These are life-changing experiences for the people that lived through them and they still affect their heirs morally and legally today, maybe even more than the war itself.

The Nazis were in charge of the show alright, but they pretty much let the same (kind of) people run the machines.

That, I think, is why in the former USSR and many ex-WP aligned countries there is widespread and very strong anti- and pro-Stalinist political rhetoric, much more so than pro-Nazi. Mostly because the ideology is not only not shunned, but also proudly inherited from parents and grandparents who ‘had it good’ back then and got a lot out of the regime.

Not only that, but Russia’s military and foreign policy vector is pretty much the same since before the existence of the USSR. So yes, some countries need to counterbalance obvious attempts by Moscow at tilting their political landscape in her favor by using the 'good old times' as a talking point. Resorting to Nazi rhetoric is pathetic though.

But this is going too much towards politics. Here’s a historical Soviet joke:

Nixon asks Khrushchev ‘Why do you have political prisoners in the USSR?’

‘Why do you beat your negroes?’, Khrushchev replies.

Edit: feel free to punish me for my gross oversimplifications with a public lashing of purge-victim counts, etc.

 

[Traitorfish]

I can readily believe that all those who have holocaust denying sympathise are strongly anti-communist. It was the insinuation that *most* of those who are anti communist have holocaust denying sympathies that I objected to. There are - thankfully - a great number more people who are repulsed by both

I think the core disagreement here is you not understanding what "anti-Communism" means in a twentieth century context, and why it's a specifically right-wing and reactionary strain of politics. It's just not just "Stalin is bad", else everyone from Konrad Ardenauer to Leon Trotsky were "anti-Communists".

 

[Traitorfish]

I mean, I was using the term in an every day sense, I'm not particularly interested in what it means to academic historians today. When acquaintances tell me that the proletariat should rise up and shoot bankers - without a trace of irony - and everyone else tells them that they are being insane, I call that anti-communism. Maybe that's not the technical term, but everyone outside of this thread has always understood what I meant.

But if this is purely about semantics, then there really is nothing left to say.

It's not semantics, because I was the one who introduce the term "anti-Communism" to the thread, and I'm explaining what I mean when I say that. If you're unfamiliar with that usage, fine, perhaps I should clarified in advance, but it doesn't really have any bearing on the original claim.

 

[plarq]

The thread was about Chinese famine around 1960. Due to the lack of concrete statistics, the best way to tackle this problem is to draw analogy to Holodromer, which was better documented. Therefore you will have to bring in lots of discussions about communism and anti-communism. This should not be viewed as off-topic.