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Reading "The Gulag Archipelego", cured several misconceptions I had about communism. "If only Lenin had survived" is a very pervasive idea I believed, but it f
by hajile 6y ago
Reading "The Gulag Archipelego", cured several misconceptions I had about communism.
"If only Lenin had survived" is a very pervasive idea I believed, but it falls apart when you realize that Stalin's policies were almost all started under Lenin.
Likewise, "They didn't implement it right" falls apart when you realize that they actually had huge buy-in within the country. They started with the ground-level groups and organized up -- just like "real" communists should.
Many other claimed "imperfections" of Soviet Communism seem to be nothing more than fake propaganda to promote a failed, non-theistic religion. The problem is that humans are human. They will do illogical things due to lust, anger, greed, envy, pride, laziness, and gluttony even if those things will lead to destruction on a personal or group level.
A great example was workers being envious of engineers. Those engineers had everything taken not just from them, but even their children were punished for their "success". They were turned into a subservient underclass with the sole purpose of serving the workers (despite the fact that most engineers from pre-Soviet Russia came up from poverty themselves). Adding insult to injury, a completely fake "conspiracy" was generated out of thin air as an excuse to torture and work most of them to death resulting in decades of stagnation and death.
Capitalism at least acknowledges greed and seeks to create checks and balances to power rather than creating new all-powerful entities that become monopolies using "the will of the people" to satisfy their deadly sins.
Communism founds its revolution on promoting envy and greed promoting perceived (or even real) slights until they break out into theft and violence. It should be little wonder that the culture that accompanies this revolution also promotes these attributes to the devolution of society as a whole.
- lucian1900 6y agoThe Gulag Archipelago is widely considered by historians to be fiction. Solzhenitsyn’s own wife confirmed he made it up.
- hajile 6y agoDo you have any sources for that claim? Last I checked, his wife actually helped write the abridged version. More importantly, Russians by the tens of thousands who survived or lived in those times attest to its accuracy. It's not like this is ancient history. People who lived through the latter part of the system are still alive today and still agree with the contents.
- mxmilkiib 6y agoIf only the Bolsheviks hadn't grabbed power in the way they did. If only Marx hadn't been so against utopian socialism.
- mxmilkiib 6y agoThese are valid questions. Why someone should think that ML communism equals all communism?
- xtian 6y agoHow does capitalism as an economic system seek to create checks and balances?
- hajile 6y agoFirst, distinguish from crony capitalism and capitalism. Copyright is not a capitalist idea nor are patents. Government choosing winners and losers via regulations is also not capitalist. Every so-called capitalist monopoly in history has either been vastly beneficial to society or was enforced by the government. Could Microsoft create a non-beneficial monopoly without copyright? Their licensing scheme is entirely dependent on government enforcement. If pricing go too high, another company would move in, reverse the source code, and sell their own. In fact, this motive is so strong that people do this anyway despite the illegal nature of the operation. Standard Oil is probably the go-to monopoly example, but it lacks intent. Oil prices dropped precipitously due to the economies of scale to the point that profit margins were (and still are) fractions of a cent per gallon (most of the "profit" from the cost of fuel is government taxation). This is a monopoly, but one of convenience and mutual benefit. If they started raising oil prices, another company could form. The only sound argument to the contrary is exploiting human ignorance. A knowledgeable person can take advantage of a less knowledgeable person, but this issue isn't solved in any other economic system and in fact, becomes worse historically in Communist countries.
- xtian 6y agoThe whole reason government intervention into the economy was introduced (creating your "crony capitalism") was that falling profit margins meant the only way to maintain or grow overall profit levels was to increase production, which led to periodic overproduction and market crises. This happened repeatedly and created (at the very least) massive amounts of unemployment and waste. Nothing intrinsic about free market competition or pursuit of private profit checked or balanced it.
- hajile 6y agoThe result was the creation of the Federal Reserve. All of the biggest market crisis in US history (either by total or percentage) have happened under the watch of the Fed. In fact, most of them could not have happened without express intervention by the Fed incentivizing bad behavior. If anything, it seems like crashes are inevitable and government intervention has simply made the crashes bigger and longer-lasting.