5 ms·

Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, be

Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opinion bears that fact out. So, I'd say the jury's out on just how much of our improvements to standards of living can be attributed to giving 10 people all the money in the world, vs (for example) attributing it to scientific advancement in general. edit: sadly dang has once again taken it upon himself to stop communists from posting on HN. I'm sure most of y'all agree with this in the first place. at any rate take this as an open invitation to drag me in the comments with whatever ridiculous nonsense you can dream up. I won't be responding to any of it because I literally can't. thanks

dannyobrien 3y ago
Beyond all the other contestable statements in your comment, I think you might have the biggest problem convincing the former Baltic Soviet Republics that they were doing better under the USSR versus now.
- deciplex 3y ago
  Yes, it's true - they're still very mad that their Nazi collaborators who helped murder tens of thousands of Jews during the war had to face actual justice instead of getting paperclipped off to the West.
  - chrysler 3y ago
    [dead]
dvt 3y ago
> raising the standard of living Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology. > rapidly developing industry What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika." But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism. > despite being a feudal backwater in 1917 Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.
- paulmd 3y ago
  People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor. And there are just as many famines and other deaths as well - the distortion of crop subsidies on the food export market has repeatedly caused exactly such famines, and that's all a completely capitalistic phenomenon. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems. That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours. Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention). But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!). Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion? And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?
RedCondor 3y ago
dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable. Great posts, though!
worrycue 3y ago
I wonder how much of the USSR’s success (until it wasn't) can be attributed to Marxism-Leninism rather than the fact that the country produced oil. It’s like attributing the success of Saudi Arabia to its theocratical monarchy. Oil is basically a cheat code for countries. If you have oil, you will do OK regardless of political/economical system. Even then, the quality of life in the USSR was pretty poor compared to the capitalist West.
- paulmd 3y ago
  That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    I’m not saying oil rich countries necessarily have strong diverse economies. I’m saying that they do OK regardless of their political/economic system. Saudi Arabia and Russia has been trucking along all these decades despite their less than ideal economies all thanks to oil.

dannyobrien 3y ago

Beyond all the other contestable statements in your comment, I think you might have the biggest problem convincing the former Baltic Soviet Republics that they were doing better under the USSR versus now.

deciplex 3y ago
Yes, it's true - they're still very mad that their Nazi collaborators who helped murder tens of thousands of Jews during the war had to face actual justice instead of getting paperclipped off to the West.
- chrysler 3y ago
  [dead]

dvt 3y ago

> raising the standard of living Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology. > rapidly developing industry What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika." But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism. > despite being a feudal backwater in 1917 Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.

paulmd 3y ago
People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor. And there are just as many famines and other deaths as well - the distortion of crop subsidies on the food export market has repeatedly caused exactly such famines, and that's all a completely capitalistic phenomenon. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/327/7424/1129.full.pdf People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems. That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours. Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention). But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!). Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion? And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?

RedCondor 3y ago

dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable. Great posts, though!

worrycue 3y ago

I wonder how much of the USSR’s success (until it wasn't) can be attributed to Marxism-Leninism rather than the fact that the country produced oil. It’s like attributing the success of Saudi Arabia to its theocratical monarchy. Oil is basically a cheat code for countries. If you have oil, you will do OK regardless of political/economical system. Even then, the quality of life in the USSR was pretty poor compared to the capitalist West.

paulmd 3y ago
That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.
- worrycue 3y ago
  I’m not saying oil rich countries necessarily have strong diverse economies. I’m saying that they do OK regardless of their political/economic system. Saudi Arabia and Russia has been trucking along all these decades despite their less than ideal economies all thanks to oil.