It’s not like believing in peoples’ liberties makes you a communist. And Stalin wasn’t a communist. Dictatorial regimes are dictatorial regimes regardless of propaganda. Further, afaik, the worlds never known a good example of a communist government. But the democratic republican model has had some decent examples - though not perfect.
How would you propose having a communist nation without a dictatorial and authoritarian government? What do you do with people that do not want to work their offered tasks? What of people that feel that they do more and thus deserve more? The solutions here in capitalism are perhaps not ideal, in the sense of utopia, but they enable society to continue functioning with a relatively small restriction on liberties.
It's interesting talking to individuals who lived through the USSR. Many of the things we take for granted simply did not exist. Hearing a 40 year old man speak so fondly of silly things such as Donald Duck and Disney - not in and of themselves but of the advent of freedom and open culture they represented, is something that's really eye opening. And while you might argue that that's because it was not a real, or a good, communist nation, at some point I think you have to consider that this might be a case of the no true scotsman fallacy. Ultimately, I don't see how you so severely restrict the liberties of the people without having a government that is extremely oppressive.
That’s what scares me. As the generations who experienced the “utopia” first hand die off, new generations are born who think “it’ll work this time”. Nothing that goes so fundamentally against human nature will ever work.
It's worth saying that Orwell was himself a communist who fought in the Spanish Civil war, he was just against stalinist communism (which he didn't see as real communism, and neither would Lenin).
I mean, that's the whole distinction between Marxism and Leninsim, right? The idea of a vanguard party that facilitates the transition to communism? I can't imagine that Lenin would look at Stalinist USSR, and say "oh yeah, we've actually transitioned to communism now".
Does it?
For a part of humans this has always worked. Every mammoth hunted down- was socialized once it was back in camp.
Sure the chief-tain had a say, but in the end, i think for a lot of human history as hunter gatherer without big storage- we ran on socialism.
Which is why it reappears again and again.
Want to talk to socialism that's oh so unnatural? Close your browsers, stand up, talk to your spouse, lie about one of the neighbors having won the lottery. Observe.
Also, for all the bad it does to the economy as a total- at least, it resets the inequality, that prevents alot of Americans today from realizing there full potential.
Somewhere you have to draw a Finnish line, so that the race can start over.
> Want to talk to socialism that's oh so unnatural? Close your browsers, stand up, talk to your spouse, lie about one of the neighbors having won the lottery. Observe.
What are you trying to get at here? What reaction do you think there would be?
I've been thinking about this recently; we're about to lose the last of the people that lived through WWII. I wonder how the generations 40 years from now will interpret those events. I think we're already starting to see it with the rehabilitation of nazi germany in alt-right circles.
Except of course there’s no “rehabilitation of Nazi Germany in alt right circles”. They despise that shit as much as the liberals do. Don’t believe everything CNN tells you.
> we're about to lose the last of the people that lived through WWII.
And for a long time, I've felt that the lessons learned from WWII would be promptly forgotten once the vets died off. It's damn infuriating to see it actually happen, though.
Sadly, the rise of despots like Putin, Trump, Duterte, Xi, Orban, etc. (not to mention the Brexit fiasco) is not a surprise to me. I figured this would happen once enough of the vets died off. [Lack of faith in humanity? Me? Yeah, exactly.]
(US-centric) Frank Zappa's later albums carried the motto, "Register to vote before it's too late." Too bad that there were so many people back then who were either too cool to show up at the ballot box when they were needed most (think 1980), or decided that outright fascism served their interests best.
I have the similar thoughts about capitalism as the Great Depression leaves living memory.
Perhaps it is not any arbitrary and general '-ism' that is so deeply problematic, but the periodic failure or fall below some critical level of a collection of human understanding and willing effort that waxes and wanes with circumstances and lived experience over generations?
Just google “east Germany poll communism”. you will be surprised what poll results consistently shows year after year. (presentage of people thinking it was good times steadily well over 50%)
Because in those times USSR was a "power" - investing in military, ripping of dependent states for food.
Life in USSR was good (especially Russia) in comparison to other states that were occupied by them (meaning USSR stationed army there).
That doesn't really have with the data. A 2009 Pew research poll put the majority of satellite states as having a greater view of communism than even Russia does. Basically it's just the Czech Republic and Poland where the people who don't want a return to communism outnumber those who do.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and go for Hanlon's razor here. Your image doesn't say what you think it does. Here [1] is the pew page where your image came from. You, for whatever reason, decided to not offer the data that actually answers the question of what percent of people approve the change to a capitalist democracy. This [2] is the answer for democracy, this [3] for capitalism.
Literally every nation polled except Hungary and Ukraine have a majority in support of both changes. A critical point is that this poll was also done in 2009 when economic times were quite hard around the world. Also I expect that answer was on the approve - neutral - disapprove spectrum, so (100 - approve%) is not the same as disapprove.
Finally, there's also the general issue that overtime for whatever reason we, as humans, tend to view the past as much more pleasant than it was. If you polled Americans over some minimum age on whether the country was better off 'x' years ago (e.g. - the 50s) or better off today, I expect you'd see an enormous chunk, and likely a majority, stating that we were better off in the 50s. Even well below that age, I would be mighty tempted to agree as well. It was a time of 'friendlier' economics and people able to graduate debt free working a part time job, and also an era where employees were not just "human resources" -- think about how dystopic that phrase really is! There was a very different employer-employee model than we have today.
And finally there is the issue of a shared enemy. Countries united when they have a common enemy. Even George Bush approached near 90% approval engaging in some pretty bad actions following 9/11 simply because we had a shared enemy. It's called the 'rally around the flag effect'. The Soviet Union had the greatest of enemies, which is something that would have galvanized and unified the people. All we need to do to create world peace and harmony is get invaded by a space fairing civilization! I meant that as a joke, but it's probably quite true...
I see it now in the embrace of nationalism, geopolitics, and war as a tool by current leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere. The people who knew most about war, the survivors of WWII, build the international order, established the UN, and did other things explicitly to prevent war from ever happening again.
The fools of today think they know better. One thing that particularly concerned the leaders post-WWII was that the next war, after more technological advances, would cause unimaginable levels of devastation to humanity. Remember they had seen WWI exceed what anyone imagined, then WWII exceed WWI. Imagine a major war with all the technological advancement since 1945 devoted to killing and destruction.
I won’t take a position here on whether or not communism can truly be achieved or whether the Soviet Union’s attempt is the only way, but you repeat two major misconceptions in your post:
(1) Different people did receive different wages in the USSR, and managers even received bonuses if they met performance targets.
(2) “Communism” as defined by communist thinkers is primarily the state of existence where the means of production, e.g. factories and railroads, are universally accessible to everyone, rather than under private and exclusive control. This doesn’t really imply anything about government at all, and perhaps even presupposes the non existence of the state, which after all is claimed to primarily exist to mediate interactions between the classes.
Definitely a weak point. Of course, the analogous problem in capitalism is where a company is so successful that it can pull the ladder up behind it and inhibit competition.
It is strange reading this - 330 generations ago, the entire world was communist. This began fading away, whereas nowadays only a few people live like this, deep in the Amazon and in other out of the way places. So it was a very natural state of human history from now back to the beginning, and the only way from 330 generations to the beginning.
Whereas the seeds of a capitalist society are at most 20 generations old. The news is full of talk of the royal wedding in the UK - officially ruled by the monarch. The United Kingdom is de jure a feudal kingdom still, if not de facto (I do not mean the UK still is de facto feudal, but that it is a sign of how recent this all is that, de jure, the UK is de jure feudal).
It's strange that such a recent phenomenon, with all its crises and such can be seen as the only way aligned with human nature, whereas one existing from the beginning is described as utopian.
I suspect that as well, but I see estimates for generations ranging from 20 years to over 100. While it's quite far back in time either way, there's up to 10s of thousands of years difference.
These events are determined by things like the reproduction of labor, not Earth's solar orbits, which is why a generational timeline is more apropos. Also we have data from a variety of sources, but do not know the exact day when the first person was enslaved in the Fertile Crescent.
That aside, I mean right before 10000 years ago, before concepts like slavery, class, surplus etc. began their rise.
All human society then were in traveling hunter-gatherer bands.
>It is strange reading this - 330 generations ago, the entire world was communist. This began fading away, whereas nowadays only a few people live like this, deep in the Amazon and in other out of the way places.
We could argue about this all day and not come to real conclusions.
My belief about pre-history is that you were ruled by physical strength, not consent of the governed. I'd call it feudal, but it wasn't that organized, just your local strongman (or local charismatic person) getting... well, whatever you and your friends couldn't prevent them from taking.
Of course, I have no more evidence for my theory than for yours.
How vague. Generations? Most people use a thing called "years" and refer to specific and well established epochs of human history and geography, like, say 2600 years ago in Mycenaean Greece.
>It is strange reading this - 330 generations ago, the entire world was communist
I'm sorry but this is a fairy tale view of human nature. People have always been selfish and have formed into dominance heirarchies. All you have to do is look at chimpanzee social behavior to see that unequal, heirarchical societies have been around for at least millions of years. True communism has never existed on a wide scale in human societies.
It’s well worth reading the books on him by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin was incredibly well read, sleeping little and devouring books at the seminary where he studied, and he carried this on through this life. It’s chilling the way he behaved to relatives of those he killed. Stalin had a creepy way of referring to their deaths as though they were unfortunate events that weren’t arranged by him.
Well, I wonder if he did actually think about it as unfortunate that they weren't around, but also that he did what he thought must be done....
I always got the impression (not sure why) that some of those around him during the revolution thought Stalin was not the brightest.... but apparently that was wrong.
I dont know, but he had a weird tendency to talk of Stalin in the 3rd person. It makes a little more sense given that ‘Stalin’ was an assumed name but it makes quotes attributes to him extra disturbing when you notice it.
At the time, Russia was far far behind industrially, even under the Romanovs, and a highly industrialized Germany was rumbling next door.
Kind of like in the early days of the civil war, few union generals were up for kamikazeing their men against heavily fortified confederate positions. In Grant, we found a man unconcerned enough to pull that trigger.
Have to wonder if the reign of Stalin was a consequence of communism, a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance, or maybe a little of both...
That's an unfair and inaccurate characterization of Grant. There were lots of major battles with high casualties when Grant wasn't around. Grant's genius was to maneuver his army after the battle as if it had won. This freaked-out the Confederates, who had gotten used to score keeping by casualties, which never made any sense. In reality some of the battles in which the Union lost on the score were not really even tactical defeats. (Acting as if the battle was a defeat turned it into one.) Grant recognized he had the more powerful army, regardless of the score.
> if the reign of Stalin was ... a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance
He assumed power in 1924, long before Germany was a military threat.
> few union generals were up for kamikazeing their men against heavily fortified confederate positions. In Grant, we found a man unconcerned enough to pull that trigger.
Stalin didn't kill off his subjects because of sudden military necessity. He starved to death tens of millions of Ukrainians simply to implement his agricultural policies. He'd force whole communities to relocate across the USSR. Again and again, he murdered large numbers in his purges, and sent more to Siberian labor camps, out of political paranoia or to implement repression. He was merely a person with no morality and no objection to mass murder. I think that in world history only Mao murdered more (and Mao had a larger population to work with - it's not a fair to Stalin to compare them!).
I read in one history that he kept villages in line by reducing their food supplies to the edge of starvation. Constant hunger was a good reminder to the villagers of being a good Communist: One slip, one act of apparent political disloyalty, and people start dying.
He also encouraged people to turn in family members to the secret police, including children turning in parents. That creates very healthy homes to grow up in. At one point, he wanted a Politburo member 'purged' (murdered or sent to a Siberian labor camp); nobody on the Politburo dared opposed him; they all knew that every one of them had helped to condemn their own family members.
I read an account of his program to build an atomic bomb. The scientists were given the American plans but thought they could improve on them. They were told that if the bomb didn't succeed on its first test, they would all be killed. They went with the proven plans and the test was conducted with an officer of the secret police in the room with them (the test succeeded). They all wrote a thank you letter to Uncle Joe for his great leadership and vision; one didn't sign the letter and he disappeared or died (or both).
There are so many great stories about good old Uncle Joe!
> Have to wonder if the reign of Stalin was a consequence of communism, a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance, or maybe a little of both...
The reign of Stalin was a consequence of Stalin, a psychopath and mass murderer. The political structure put in place by the Bolsheviks enabled him.
Does any horrible person appear on HN these days without someone saying, 'others did the same thing'. Stalin's not so bad - look at Mao!
When you read this fascinating article from two well spoken, educated, convincing people, you should try and keep in mind the context of 1934. Stalin had only ordered the execution of a few million people, and the system probably had barely killed 10 million or so through starvation, gulags, and routine police brutality.
You could be absent from work for a whole day before automatically losing your job, apartment, commodity tickets, and meal tickets, and facing starvation. It wasn't until 1938 that being 20 minutes late became an automatic firing event, too. Of course, missing your quota could already bring a treason charge.
This is an intelligent, well meaning man - a tremendously well read scholar of economics and political theory - who honestly understood that the only way to achieve real Communism involved the deaths of millions and millions of people... And considered this a reasonable sacrifice.
52 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIt's interesting talking to individuals who lived through the USSR. Many of the things we take for granted simply did not exist. Hearing a 40 year old man speak so fondly of silly things such as Donald Duck and Disney - not in and of themselves but of the advent of freedom and open culture they represented, is something that's really eye opening. And while you might argue that that's because it was not a real, or a good, communist nation, at some point I think you have to consider that this might be a case of the no true scotsman fallacy. Ultimately, I don't see how you so severely restrict the liberties of the people without having a government that is extremely oppressive.
I grew up in the USSR, and this is news to me. Do you have evidence in favor of this claim?
Sure the chief-tain had a say, but in the end, i think for a lot of human history as hunter gatherer without big storage- we ran on socialism. Which is why it reappears again and again.
Want to talk to socialism that's oh so unnatural? Close your browsers, stand up, talk to your spouse, lie about one of the neighbors having won the lottery. Observe.
Also, for all the bad it does to the economy as a total- at least, it resets the inequality, that prevents alot of Americans today from realizing there full potential.
Somewhere you have to draw a Finnish line, so that the race can start over.
What are you trying to get at here? What reaction do you think there would be?
And for a long time, I've felt that the lessons learned from WWII would be promptly forgotten once the vets died off. It's damn infuriating to see it actually happen, though.
Sadly, the rise of despots like Putin, Trump, Duterte, Xi, Orban, etc. (not to mention the Brexit fiasco) is not a surprise to me. I figured this would happen once enough of the vets died off. [Lack of faith in humanity? Me? Yeah, exactly.]
(US-centric) Frank Zappa's later albums carried the motto, "Register to vote before it's too late." Too bad that there were so many people back then who were either too cool to show up at the ballot box when they were needed most (think 1980), or decided that outright fascism served their interests best.
Perhaps it is not any arbitrary and general '-ism' that is so deeply problematic, but the periodic failure or fall below some critical level of a collection of human understanding and willing effort that waxes and wanes with circumstances and lived experience over generations?
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/leg...
Literally every nation polled except Hungary and Ukraine have a majority in support of both changes. A critical point is that this poll was also done in 2009 when economic times were quite hard around the world. Also I expect that answer was on the approve - neutral - disapprove spectrum, so (100 - approve%) is not the same as disapprove.
Finally, there's also the general issue that overtime for whatever reason we, as humans, tend to view the past as much more pleasant than it was. If you polled Americans over some minimum age on whether the country was better off 'x' years ago (e.g. - the 50s) or better off today, I expect you'd see an enormous chunk, and likely a majority, stating that we were better off in the 50s. Even well below that age, I would be mighty tempted to agree as well. It was a time of 'friendlier' economics and people able to graduate debt free working a part time job, and also an era where employees were not just "human resources" -- think about how dystopic that phrase really is! There was a very different employer-employee model than we have today.
And finally there is the issue of a shared enemy. Countries united when they have a common enemy. Even George Bush approached near 90% approval engaging in some pretty bad actions following 9/11 simply because we had a shared enemy. It's called the 'rally around the flag effect'. The Soviet Union had the greatest of enemies, which is something that would have galvanized and unified the people. All we need to do to create world peace and harmony is get invaded by a space fairing civilization! I meant that as a joke, but it's probably quite true...
[1] - http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered...
[2] - http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/leg...
[3] - http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/leg...
The fools of today think they know better. One thing that particularly concerned the leaders post-WWII was that the next war, after more technological advances, would cause unimaginable levels of devastation to humanity. Remember they had seen WWI exceed what anyone imagined, then WWII exceed WWI. Imagine a major war with all the technological advancement since 1945 devoted to killing and destruction.
(1) Different people did receive different wages in the USSR, and managers even received bonuses if they met performance targets.
(2) “Communism” as defined by communist thinkers is primarily the state of existence where the means of production, e.g. factories and railroads, are universally accessible to everyone, rather than under private and exclusive control. This doesn’t really imply anything about government at all, and perhaps even presupposes the non existence of the state, which after all is claimed to primarily exist to mediate interactions between the classes.
It is always some group of bureaucrats and talkers taking over and stealing from the workers they are supposed to be protecting.
Bureaucrats and parasites are also a problem in Western democracies, but less pronounced.
Whereas the seeds of a capitalist society are at most 20 generations old. The news is full of talk of the royal wedding in the UK - officially ruled by the monarch. The United Kingdom is de jure a feudal kingdom still, if not de facto (I do not mean the UK still is de facto feudal, but that it is a sign of how recent this all is that, de jure, the UK is de jure feudal).
It's strange that such a recent phenomenon, with all its crises and such can be seen as the only way aligned with human nature, whereas one existing from the beginning is described as utopian.
That aside, I mean right before 10000 years ago, before concepts like slavery, class, surplus etc. began their rise.
All human society then were in traveling hunter-gatherer bands.
Could you share some of these sources?
We could argue about this all day and not come to real conclusions.
My belief about pre-history is that you were ruled by physical strength, not consent of the governed. I'd call it feudal, but it wasn't that organized, just your local strongman (or local charismatic person) getting... well, whatever you and your friends couldn't prevent them from taking.
Of course, I have no more evidence for my theory than for yours.
I'm sorry but this is a fairy tale view of human nature. People have always been selfish and have formed into dominance heirarchies. All you have to do is look at chimpanzee social behavior to see that unequal, heirarchical societies have been around for at least millions of years. True communism has never existed on a wide scale in human societies.
You fire them, I guess... Just like everywhere else.
I always got the impression (not sure why) that some of those around him during the revolution thought Stalin was not the brightest.... but apparently that was wrong.
Kind of like in the early days of the civil war, few union generals were up for kamikazeing their men against heavily fortified confederate positions. In Grant, we found a man unconcerned enough to pull that trigger.
Have to wonder if the reign of Stalin was a consequence of communism, a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance, or maybe a little of both...
Grant is just an aside anyway. Primary point is that there were many variables in play, and pinning it all on economics isn't going to explain much.
He assumed power in 1924, long before Germany was a military threat.
> few union generals were up for kamikazeing their men against heavily fortified confederate positions. In Grant, we found a man unconcerned enough to pull that trigger.
Stalin didn't kill off his subjects because of sudden military necessity. He starved to death tens of millions of Ukrainians simply to implement his agricultural policies. He'd force whole communities to relocate across the USSR. Again and again, he murdered large numbers in his purges, and sent more to Siberian labor camps, out of political paranoia or to implement repression. He was merely a person with no morality and no objection to mass murder. I think that in world history only Mao murdered more (and Mao had a larger population to work with - it's not a fair to Stalin to compare them!).
I read in one history that he kept villages in line by reducing their food supplies to the edge of starvation. Constant hunger was a good reminder to the villagers of being a good Communist: One slip, one act of apparent political disloyalty, and people start dying.
He also encouraged people to turn in family members to the secret police, including children turning in parents. That creates very healthy homes to grow up in. At one point, he wanted a Politburo member 'purged' (murdered or sent to a Siberian labor camp); nobody on the Politburo dared opposed him; they all knew that every one of them had helped to condemn their own family members.
I read an account of his program to build an atomic bomb. The scientists were given the American plans but thought they could improve on them. They were told that if the bomb didn't succeed on its first test, they would all be killed. They went with the proven plans and the test was conducted with an officer of the secret police in the room with them (the test succeeded). They all wrote a thank you letter to Uncle Joe for his great leadership and vision; one didn't sign the letter and he disappeared or died (or both).
There are so many great stories about good old Uncle Joe!
> Have to wonder if the reign of Stalin was a consequence of communism, a peculiarity of a dire military circumstance, or maybe a little of both...
The reign of Stalin was a consequence of Stalin, a psychopath and mass murderer. The political structure put in place by the Bolsheviks enabled him.
Does any horrible person appear on HN these days without someone saying, 'others did the same thing'. Stalin's not so bad - look at Mao!
It was a "let's not chalk it all up to socialism" comment. Not even a fan of socialism--just think that line of discussion misses the point.
Homicidal maniacs have seized the reins under almost every known economic arrangement.
http://www.historynet.com/will-rogers-benito-mussolini.htm
You could be absent from work for a whole day before automatically losing your job, apartment, commodity tickets, and meal tickets, and facing starvation. It wasn't until 1938 that being 20 minutes late became an automatic firing event, too. Of course, missing your quota could already bring a treason charge.
This is an intelligent, well meaning man - a tremendously well read scholar of economics and political theory - who honestly understood that the only way to achieve real Communism involved the deaths of millions and millions of people... And considered this a reasonable sacrifice.