[quote]jj-dude wrote:
[quote]florelius wrote:
Sovjet: Me and I guess ryan to agree with you irish that the sovjetunion was not a win from a humanitarian perspective, but as I sad earlyer, the sovjet union proved that it is possible to trancend from agricultural based economy to an industrial based economy without an marked-economy. Offcourse the transition was brutal, but so was the english transition to an industry based economy for the english worker or the irish farmer. Or what about the american economic transition to an industry based marked economy, the cotton created by the blackslaves in the south financed the american transition. So the sovjet transition doesnt equal that socialisme is brutal. its better to say that most historical evidence points to that a transition to an industry based economy is going to be brutal.
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I have a free moment, so I’m going to hop in here. “Not a win”? 35 million dead is “not a win”? What would it take to make it downright unpleasant?
The way the Soviets modernized runs as follows: The intelligentsia blamed the peasants for Russia’s backwardness and detested them. When the Bolshevik’s seized control, this hatred became a point of policy: The new Soviet Union was to be a Worker’s paradise, and peasants were preventing this.
You claim the USSR modernized without a market economy – NO. Not at all. What happened is that the wealth of the peasants was sold off to Western countries to buy the machinery needed to make the USSR a modern country. Then the peasants (at least the ones who didn’t starve to death) were transported to places like Siberia to be worked to death building the infrastructure for this paradise. When the Soviets ran short of cash they also sold off museum/historical exhibits (such as from the Tetryakov Gallery) and the Russians are still trying to get back all those icons, FabergÃ??Ã?© eggs and other items. They did embark on a huge training program for engineers (in the 1920’s) to support this new economy, but when the engineers started telling them things like setting up smelting plants inside the Arctic Circle were going to fail, the engineers themselves were put on trial as enemies of the people. the so-called Engineering Trials of the 1930’s. All in all this mode of modernization still had the USSR lagging slightly behind the West in the 1930’s (during the Depression, I might add) before finally levelling off to its moribund steady state in the late 1950’s from which it didn’t budge, even though the official (falsified) statistics showed astonishingly high sustained growth of over 10%. It was widely reported that the Soviets were simply going to outgrow the West (this was a common refrain during the 1960’s on campus’s everywhere) and so the whole Cold War was going to be moot.
(Again, when the USSR fell and an actual assessment was made, the entire Soviet economy was roughly the size of the Netherlands. The standard of living in the USSR was lower in 1989 than in 1914. Any statistics coming from the USSR are probably false. Indeed, the first major census under Stalin accurately reported millions of deaths and a shrinking population from forced collectivization. Stalin had them shot for treason and subsequent census figures always showed strong positive growth. This set the stage for all official reporting.)
Your history about the role of the Blacks “financing” modernization in the US is about 180 degrees off the mark. It was investment in the northern US – completely free of slaves – that fueled this transition. Black slave labor was increasing the price of cotton and the whole southern US was in an extended depression from about the mid 1830’s on. The Civil War was an attempt to keep this industrialization out of the South. By the start of the Civil War, the value of slaves was so low that many large southern plantations were on the verge of bankruptcy --they could no longer use slaves as collateral for the yearly loans needed to function, and the care and feeding of slaves in the off-season was a huge drain financially. In other words, the politically correct assessment that it was the slaves that caused industrialization is flatly wrong but rather it was industrialization that eliminated the need for slaves. Your analysis, incidentally, is standard Marxist fare in which workers are equated with slaves, so according to the theory, slavery (or something close to it for the workers) must cause a shift to a market economy. Nope.
Oh and the reason the transition was so brutal for the Irish was precisely because the Crown made it a national policy to reform land usage along mostly ethnic/religious lines. If you were Catholic, you basically couldn’t own land. Large English-owned plantations to grow wheat were planted for export only, so there was the surreal situation that the potatoes and Irish were dying in droves amid record wheat harvests. The Crown refused to admit there was any sort of a problem and it was up to Irish immigrants in the US, Canada and Australia to privately finance relief. If the state messes up and refuses to admit it, where does that leave the people? These policies directly caused the Great Famine and the parallels to certain Socialist agrarian reform practices are interesting.
And as always, I could just be full of shit…
– jj[/quote]
with not a win from a humanitarian point of wiew, meens shitty from a humanitarian point of wiew.
about the black slave labour financing the industrial revolution in america:
point 1: the industrial revolution started before 1830.
point 2: merchant in the north-east did buy the cotton from the southern plantation owners. from there the merchants in the north-east sold the cotton on the international-market, and the profitt from this cotton trade helped finance industrialisation in the north-east.
about the irish famin: I agree on your brief summary on how the british handled this humanitarian catastrophy. but that you manage to imply that the actions of the british where somewhat similar to socialist agrarian reform is beyond me. its like WTF haha… The british government at that time where on the “classical liberalist” buzz. They thougt that the market would cure the famine, so they wouldt stop importing grain from Irland. the socialist way of dealing with this, would have been to stop grain trade beetwen irland and britain, so the irish peasants could have eaten the grain instead of starving. In the future, dont try to blame one of the worst humanitarian catastrophys of capitalisme in the western world on socialisme.
but as always, maybe me to is full of shit 