The problem with the previous attempts was prioritizing ideology over real life problems. Doesn’t sound like socialists are capable of understanding why that’s a problem because they believe that conforming to ideology will magically solve all problems. Just like they believed that in the Soviet Union… which is what caused the famines.
The problem with the previous attempts was prioritizing ideology over real life problems
It was actually not the case, the USSR was the most materialist and least idealist country. The 1929 collectivization drive was kicked together with the first 5-year economic plan of the Soviet Union, which drove a growth of 10%+ in economic output YEARLY during the following decade. This was a necessary preparation measure against the constant threat of external invasion for the sin of being communist, as demonstrated during the Russian Civil War when the Reds were invaded by England, France, the USA, Italy, France and Germany, all of whom helped the Whites in hopes of restoring absolutist monarchy and the Russian Empire. Stalin famously gave a speech in 1931 saying that the USSR was 50-100 years behind in industrialization and they had 10 years to make up for it or they would be crushed. 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
If it hadn’t been for the industrial boom made possible by the rapid collectivization of agriculture, the Soviets would have lost to the Nazis, leading to the extermination of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans according to the Generalplan Ost, ideologically very similar to the contemporary genocide of Palestinians by Isn’treal as an attempt of settler colonialism. Additionally, the industrialization led to the total elimination of famine in a formerly backwater feudal Russian Empire, raising the life expectancy from about 30 years in the 1920s to 60+ years by 1955.
There were mistakes and failures in the collectivization policy which led to a degree of unnecessary suffering, but these weren’t due to idealism, Marxist-Leninists are fundamentally materialist in their analysis which is the polar opposite of idealism, they were the consequence of lack of knowledge and of hurries to do the first successful complete collectivization of land of a nation in human history.
The 1929 collectivization drive was kicked together with the first 5-year economic plan of the Soviet Union, which drove a growth of 10%+ in economic output YEARLY during the following decade.
I didn’t know socialists were GDP-obsessed neoliberals here, socialism is good because it outpaces capitalism in GDP growth? How nice.
and they had 10 years to make up for it or they would be crushed. 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
And five years before that, Stalin was collaborating with the Nazis. Strange.
If it hadn’t been for the industrial boom made possible by the rapid collectivization of agriculture, the Soviets would have lost to the Nazis, leading to the extermination of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans according to the Generalplan Ost, ideologically
And at the same Stalin was deporting millions as part of his policy of russification. Do you apologize for all the other Allied Powers war crimes during WW2 as well? Critical support to FDR and the USA war machine?
they were the consequence of lack of knowledge and of hurries to do the first successful complete collectivization of land of a nation in human history.
I didn’t know socialists were GDP-obsessed neoliberals here, socialism is good because it outpaces capitalism in GDP growth? How nice
As a matter of fact socialists are concerned with economic output, but not GDP. If you bothered to open a book, you’d know that the USSR did have a macroeconomic variable that guided some of its policy regarding growth of production, but it was not based off total economic output, only of agriculture and industry. It was Net Material Product. Industrial output wasn’t important because number go up, it was important because it allowed the USSR to become the nation manufacturing most tractors by the late 30s, and it allowed the manufacturing of the rifles, tanks, planes, munitions and artillery that enabled the defeat of Nazism.
And five years before that, Stalin was collaborating with the Nazis
You probably mean two years before that, in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact happened, but you don’t really care about what happened, you’re just replicating anticommunist propaganda because that’s your preconceived view. If you care to read a bit on Molotov Ribbentrop, I suggest you to read a previous comment I wrote about it. Suffice it to say that Molotov is the surname of the foreign affairs commissar that was put in place that very year after 10 years of Maxim Litvinov being the foreign affairs representative, whom if you really care to read about the topic, will know staunchly argued in favour of a collective assault on Germany by France, Britain and the USSR, honouring the mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia together with France as an alternative to the Munich Agreements, and led the USSR to being the only country in Europe offering help to republicans and anarchists in Spain fighting fascism 3 years earlier in the Spanish civil war which happened on the opposite corner of the continent. Europe would rather see the USSR destroyed by Nazism and that’s why they rejected every attempt of a mutual defense agreement, even the one where Stalin offered to send one million soldiers to France in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Nazism, which the French refused. If you still, after learning that, believe that the Soviets “collaborated with Nazism”, you simply have an anticommunist agenda, because that statement represents the opposite of what really happened in the 1930s Europe.
And at the same Stalin was deporting millions as part of his policy of russification
Millions were deported, but there was no policy of Russification. The only racist deportation events that took place were those of the Koreans and the Crimean Tatars, both horrible mistakes of racist policy that we should criticize, but let’s remind ourselves this is the 1930s, in the US black people couldn’t sit next to whites in the bus. Stalin’s position in the party in 1917 was commissar of nationalities, because he had written an important essay on the problem of how to achieve the preservation of nationalities while at the same time being international solidarity communists.
The USSR was amazingly progressive in terms of diversity and respect of nationalities for its time, which is why each republic had the right to determine its own official language (see Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Estonian, etc.), most books and newspapers in those republic were printed in the official language, people had a right to an education in their own language, and while Russian was encouraged as a língua franca, it was not generally imposed instead of smaller local languages. For example, Mari language in the Republic of Mari El was taught in Mari El schools all the way to the 90s, when schools stopped teaching in Mari and started teaching in Russian. If you look at the number of Estonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian or Armenian speakers over time you will find that at least it’s stable, with most of those languages growing over time. You can compare that with for example Occitan language in southern France, which in the 1920s had 1.5mn speakers and now barely has 100k. That’s what successful policy of Frenchification looks like, yet I don’t think I’ve seen you once complain about Occitan people.
Do you apologize for all the other Allied Powers war crimes during WW2 as well?
Please go through your comment history and tell me how many comments you have making it a point to talk about western power war crimes not as a tool to shit on the Soviet Union, but to actually criticise them.
Socialism is when the government does stuff
Socialism is famously when you get almost total land redistribution among peasants in collective farms, yes, I don’t even see your point here.
So you’re saying it’s fine that 8 million people starved because ideological bullshit goals were achieved? Fucking commie Marie Antoinette over here. Let them eat ideology!
So you’re saying it’s fine that 8 million people starved because ideological bullshit goals were achieved?
Not because ideological goals were achieved. If you read my comment you’ll see I’m concerned with material outcomes. Eliminating Nazism saved tens of millions of lives. Industrializing the Soviet Union eliminated hunger and gave universal healthcare, saving tens of millions of lives. Compare the life expectancy of the USSR in 1929 with that of Brazil 1929 (countries with similar level of development) and you’ll see that the rapid industrialization by the 1970s had led to such massive improvements of life expectancy that tens of millions of lives were saved in comparison with Brazil, no other country industrialized so quickly up to that point in history. I care about saving tens of millions of lives, yes, and you’re also inflating the number of deaths from starvation
The problem with the previous attempts was prioritizing ideology over real life problems. Doesn’t sound like socialists are capable of understanding why that’s a problem because they believe that conforming to ideology will magically solve all problems. Just like they believed that in the Soviet Union… which is what caused the famines.
It was actually not the case, the USSR was the most materialist and least idealist country. The 1929 collectivization drive was kicked together with the first 5-year economic plan of the Soviet Union, which drove a growth of 10%+ in economic output YEARLY during the following decade. This was a necessary preparation measure against the constant threat of external invasion for the sin of being communist, as demonstrated during the Russian Civil War when the Reds were invaded by England, France, the USA, Italy, France and Germany, all of whom helped the Whites in hopes of restoring absolutist monarchy and the Russian Empire. Stalin famously gave a speech in 1931 saying that the USSR was 50-100 years behind in industrialization and they had 10 years to make up for it or they would be crushed. 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
If it hadn’t been for the industrial boom made possible by the rapid collectivization of agriculture, the Soviets would have lost to the Nazis, leading to the extermination of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans according to the Generalplan Ost, ideologically very similar to the contemporary genocide of Palestinians by Isn’treal as an attempt of settler colonialism. Additionally, the industrialization led to the total elimination of famine in a formerly backwater feudal Russian Empire, raising the life expectancy from about 30 years in the 1920s to 60+ years by 1955.
There were mistakes and failures in the collectivization policy which led to a degree of unnecessary suffering, but these weren’t due to idealism, Marxist-Leninists are fundamentally materialist in their analysis which is the polar opposite of idealism, they were the consequence of lack of knowledge and of hurries to do the first successful complete collectivization of land of a nation in human history.
I didn’t know socialists were GDP-obsessed neoliberals here, socialism is good because it outpaces capitalism in GDP growth? How nice.
And five years before that, Stalin was collaborating with the Nazis. Strange.
And at the same Stalin was deporting millions as part of his policy of russification. Do you apologize for all the other Allied Powers war crimes during WW2 as well? Critical support to FDR and the USA war machine?
Socialism is when the government does stuff
As a matter of fact socialists are concerned with economic output, but not GDP. If you bothered to open a book, you’d know that the USSR did have a macroeconomic variable that guided some of its policy regarding growth of production, but it was not based off total economic output, only of agriculture and industry. It was Net Material Product. Industrial output wasn’t important because number go up, it was important because it allowed the USSR to become the nation manufacturing most tractors by the late 30s, and it allowed the manufacturing of the rifles, tanks, planes, munitions and artillery that enabled the defeat of Nazism.
You probably mean two years before that, in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact happened, but you don’t really care about what happened, you’re just replicating anticommunist propaganda because that’s your preconceived view. If you care to read a bit on Molotov Ribbentrop, I suggest you to read a previous comment I wrote about it. Suffice it to say that Molotov is the surname of the foreign affairs commissar that was put in place that very year after 10 years of Maxim Litvinov being the foreign affairs representative, whom if you really care to read about the topic, will know staunchly argued in favour of a collective assault on Germany by France, Britain and the USSR, honouring the mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia together with France as an alternative to the Munich Agreements, and led the USSR to being the only country in Europe offering help to republicans and anarchists in Spain fighting fascism 3 years earlier in the Spanish civil war which happened on the opposite corner of the continent. Europe would rather see the USSR destroyed by Nazism and that’s why they rejected every attempt of a mutual defense agreement, even the one where Stalin offered to send one million soldiers to France in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Nazism, which the French refused. If you still, after learning that, believe that the Soviets “collaborated with Nazism”, you simply have an anticommunist agenda, because that statement represents the opposite of what really happened in the 1930s Europe.
Millions were deported, but there was no policy of Russification. The only racist deportation events that took place were those of the Koreans and the Crimean Tatars, both horrible mistakes of racist policy that we should criticize, but let’s remind ourselves this is the 1930s, in the US black people couldn’t sit next to whites in the bus. Stalin’s position in the party in 1917 was commissar of nationalities, because he had written an important essay on the problem of how to achieve the preservation of nationalities while at the same time being international solidarity communists.
The USSR was amazingly progressive in terms of diversity and respect of nationalities for its time, which is why each republic had the right to determine its own official language (see Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Estonian, etc.), most books and newspapers in those republic were printed in the official language, people had a right to an education in their own language, and while Russian was encouraged as a língua franca, it was not generally imposed instead of smaller local languages. For example, Mari language in the Republic of Mari El was taught in Mari El schools all the way to the 90s, when schools stopped teaching in Mari and started teaching in Russian. If you look at the number of Estonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian or Armenian speakers over time you will find that at least it’s stable, with most of those languages growing over time. You can compare that with for example Occitan language in southern France, which in the 1920s had 1.5mn speakers and now barely has 100k. That’s what successful policy of Frenchification looks like, yet I don’t think I’ve seen you once complain about Occitan people.
Please go through your comment history and tell me how many comments you have making it a point to talk about western power war crimes not as a tool to shit on the Soviet Union, but to actually criticise them.
Socialism is famously when you get almost total land redistribution among peasants in collective farms, yes, I don’t even see your point here.
So you’re saying it’s fine that 8 million people starved because ideological bullshit goals were achieved? Fucking commie Marie Antoinette over here. Let them eat ideology!
Not because ideological goals were achieved. If you read my comment you’ll see I’m concerned with material outcomes. Eliminating Nazism saved tens of millions of lives. Industrializing the Soviet Union eliminated hunger and gave universal healthcare, saving tens of millions of lives. Compare the life expectancy of the USSR in 1929 with that of Brazil 1929 (countries with similar level of development) and you’ll see that the rapid industrialization by the 1970s had led to such massive improvements of life expectancy that tens of millions of lives were saved in comparison with Brazil, no other country industrialized so quickly up to that point in history. I care about saving tens of millions of lives, yes, and you’re also inflating the number of deaths from starvation