Thank you, liberal trade policies.
I’m fully aware of that. I guess I supposed that went without saying, given the point I was attempting to make - that the welfare state favored by western Europe was a product itself of the rise communists to power in the Soviet Union.
Socialism and trade are not incompatible.
The problem is that Libertarians and movement conservatives over the past 40 years have constantly equated any type of “socialism” with Soviet-style tyranny, painting even the most benign Scandinavian-style welfare programme as “The Ro-o-oad to Serfdom.” Fortunately for them, their base is a bunch of ignorant rubes who believe them.
The fact is that socialist enterprises, where the means of production are owned by the community, can operate within a capitalist economy. “Community” doesn’t necessarily have to be the bad ol’ state, but that’s how right-wingers always characterise it despite the existence of situations like this:
Yet it is the propertarians who are actually The Road to Serfdom, with their fantasy that everyone can be a feudal lord over their fiefdom. Once the rubes realise that is not going to happen it will be too late though.
On the other hand, countries (even ones ruled by a organization called the Communist Party) also can benefit from some private ownership. I recently visited Vietnam and our guide told us how Vietnam went from a net importer of rice to a net exporter when they broke up the collective farms and let peasants work their own fields starting in 1993.
Of course, and not only in the current crony-capitalist Chinese sense of the concept. Not even Lenin denied that sometimes market socialism could be beneficial:
Conservatives and Libertarians, in contrast, not only deny that socialist enterprises can work in a capitalist structure but also characterise Keynesian economics as some slippery-slope danger. These are the people who’ve set the tone for the last 35+ years.
Yes, but it was clear that he saw it as a temporary thing forced out of necessity, and while Stalin gets the blame for rescinding it, if Lenin had lived, he would gotten rid of it himself (causing the famines that in our world are tied to Stalin).
Yes. But it disproves the claim that Lenin was as inflexibly dogmatic as Stalin was. Also, often temporary expedients become permanent fixtures, and if he had lived who knows what would have happened?
Can you provide some evidence for that counterfactual? Lenin was a ruthless SOB, but he didn’t hold a candle to Stalin.
Lenin never really got the chance to reach his full potential…
Neither did Thatcher or Reagan…
Note: I hate M-L
The problem is the conservative assumption that Lenin reaching his full potential = Stalin. Lenin was actually in the process of taking away Stalin’s power in the party and state when he died.
I don’t like the Leninist one-state party in service of any ideology, but that’s exactly what the current crop of conservatives would like to see the GOP become in service of their vision of a “free” market economy.
Why do you think the famines in the Soviet Union happened? Yes, some of it was just bad luck, droughts, etc., but a very large part was caused by the gross inefficiencies of collective farming. Exactly the same thing happened later in China when Mao did the same thing.
Some useful books:
- Anne Applebaum Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)
- Yang Jisheng Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962 (2012 English translation)
Mao was a fucking moron who ordered farmers to turn farm tools and machines into steel ingots. One moron does not a failure make; if collective farms were so terrible, why are Hutterites and Mennonites the biggest landholders in western Canada?
The kholkhoz at its most inefficient was a product of Stalinism (or Maoism), which was authoritarian and top-down and would not tolerate any suggestions for improvement (indeed, sometimes they insisted on using backwards methods). Stalin would not have allowed them to operate as market socialist co-operative enterprises within an otherwise command economy any more than he would have allowed the larger NEP to continue existing. Lenin might have, although we’ll never know.
Another factor driving Stalin’s version of collectivisation was a borderline genocidal campaign of control to bring Ukraine in line. Again, it’s not clear if Lenin would have done the same.
And why did kibbutzes serve the purpose they did for decades in Israel? With the U.S. equating Likud and right-wing ultra-nationalists and religious fundies with Israel, it’s easy to forget that the state was founded by proud socialists.
Golly gee wilikers, what a drag. I’ll have my cannabis now and a nap. I’m 67, unmarried, no children. What kind of comfort is it for me to know that the worst to come will be after I’m gone?
Very, very cold comfort?
