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That's a wild overstatement. There have certainly been massive socialist famines, but there's also been massive capitalist ones (see: colonies of the UK in the
by scarmig 13y ago
That's a wild overstatement. There have certainly been massive socialist famines, but there's also been massive capitalist ones (see: colonies of the UK in the 19th century). And socialist famines don't happen everywhere socialism is instituted (people did not starve en masse in East Germany), and in many of the places where famine actually did occur, it's probably better to view it as a success of central planning (in the limited sense that mass death was a purposeful, desired outcome, not something coming about because of economic incompetence).
Amartya Sen has done a lot of research on this: the big factor that determines whether famines happen or not is less planning than it is democratic political structure.
- watwut 13y agoCentral planning in Russia was really incompetent and food shortages in Russia (not Ukraina) while Stalin was in power were often result of incompetence. In short, they used the fields in a wrong way.
- scarmig 13y agoIncompetence is a matter of degree, as is famine. I'd be the last to say that Soviet economic competence was close to ideal. Indeed, it was significantly worse than even Tsarist economic management. But food shortages aren't the same as famines, and in the famines (assuming we're talking about the famines of the early 30s), economic incompetence wasn't the primary driving factor, although this may be simply a case where we simply have different definitions of incompetence. Stalin explicitly wanted millions of Ukrainians to die as collective punishment for not being sufficiently red, and it's fair to say that he thought it was better to have a dead peasant than a peasant not part of a collective farm, where they and all their activities could be made easily legible to the Soviet State and placed under bodily control. Those millions of deaths racked up could have been avoided if Stalin had wanted to, even within the rubric of central planning. It's really not even a matter of the famine being something that could've been "averted": the famine wasn't a natural occurrence but something engineered. Central planning, particularly central planning under a dictatorship, being highly conducive to psychopaths killing millions of people is something I'd agree with, but it needs explicit argumentation.
- jbooth 13y agoThere's a spectrum, obviously, but the post I was responding to, as phrased, seemed to be oversimplifying and basically arguing against letting the invisible hand, defined as a bunch of selfish a-holes creating market forces, work at all. (The poster clarified downthread that that's not what they meant, don't want to misrepresent them here.) I don't disagree with your conclusion about political structure, but if we're talking about pure collective planning with no reliance on private allocation of capital, that's never actually been done with a democratic political structure anyplace larger than a kibbutz. Democratic socialism, IMO, is much closer to well-regulated capitalism than it is to communism.
- mattmanser 13y agoObviously? This was your assertion: State-allocated capital without a private finance sector has failed miserably It is completely wrong. It is a lie. You weren't obviously talking about a spectrum, you were talking crap.
- jbooth 13y agoCan you show me any success stories of absolute communist states with no private sector? Just one, maybe? Who's lying? The spectrum comment referred to the socialism/communism terminology, with socialism generally seen as involving a heavily-regulated free market and large public sector, as opposed to communism where the private sector is outlawed. A spectrum.
- 13y ago