It was the pro-capitalist reforms that turned China into the success it is today, and as China starts to falter with it's unmanageable debt and unproductive, government-directed parts of the economy, the reforms will inevitably be capitalist, pro-market solutions that remove the state and promote competition.
So yes, some economies can succeed despite their socialist, government-controlled economic policies, but when things start to fail, solutions all point to the markets.
https://www.amazon.com/Steeltown-USSR-Soviet-Society-Gorbach...
The factory was producing substandard steel. Often they'd ship it to customers and it would arrive in an unusable condition because it had been stored outside and was more rust than steel. But they'd try and use it anyway, because if they complained the bureaucrats in Moscow would brand them troublemakers and route the next shipment to someone else and then they wouldn't meet their production goals, which meant their pay would be drastically cut, and their family would starve.
Your "blue shirt vs. tan shirt" is absurdly simplistic, and makes enormous incorrect assumptions, like "Is there even a shirt there to buy that day?"
Some other reading for you would be about Krushchev's visit to the US in the 1950's. He visited a few supermarkets and assumed that they had been set up just for his visit (Potemkin villages) as that was what the Soviet Union would have done. Because having that much product on the shelves was absurd.
http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/gallery/090611...
"During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”"(1)
Capitalism has many evils - most notably the tendency to eat its own young - but it does do most things very very well.
(1)- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/world/europe/23cnd-yeltsin...
It is perfectly reasonable to use the term "market" that way. After all, what else would you call a place where radishes are stored with price tags? But that's not what the person arguing with you is saying, and trying to rebut them based on an alternate definition is unproductive.
There is no being coy at all, I can't even twist my head around how these similar places in the US and Russia are not the same. What is his "alternate definition" where such a place in Russia is stripped of the word market?
That's a minor point as you answered the question, sort of. But not to satisfaction. A market in the US or USSR sells commodities at a set price. People buy goods or they don't. The markets operate exactly the same.
As you're attempting to make a rational argument unlike others, I will get to the point. The markets in the US and USSR were the same, despite you following some US ideological line and calling the US one a "free" one. It is production that was different, and control of production. Misdirecting the difference from control of production to "free" markets is just more misdirection and sophistry (which is widespread, not particularly pertaining to you).
That was one out a few countries where all business was tightly state-owned.
You could grow some radishes and sell them at farmer's market, but that's it.
First ones began to appear around 1987 I think in the form of КООП.
You keep using this word market. A market in the US was the same as a USSR market. Yes, other things varied, but markets were the same.
Also you are attributing and inferring some statements to me that I did not say.
The light industry and consumer good sectors of the Soviet Economy were woefully underdeveloped - the Brezhnev Stagnation, didn't improve matters and robbed the Soviet economy of much hard currency that could have been used to invest in the economy - but to an extent just like us - the elephant in the room was the amount of GDP spent on the Military - there is a report of a perhaps apocryphal conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan about how each of their respective generals are always demanding more money, more for planes, missiles, tanks, and more.
The soviets lost the cold war not due to any inherent moral issues with their system (where there were many) - but due to economic collapse.
It (The USSR) was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives. Because it was too busy selling gold and wheat to buy industry from Americans (that's who built all those plants).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
I think I'd skip an industrialization like that.
Then you could enjoy Holodomor every day thanks to the unfortunate fact that you happened to occupy some prime Lebensraum.
Stalin was a mass murderer, but he ultimately made or allowed the correct strategy to put the USSR in a position to defeat Germany, which was a pretty good trick (to put it lightly).
Anyway, USSR lost the most lives fighting Germany and gained least benefits out of that. Just check:
They'll still have massive debt and huge costs of security and investments in freshly acquired "lebensraum". Honestly I think they'll crumble anyway.
I agree with the second one. The "spoils" claimed weren't much compared to the destruction inflicted on their country and people. That has nothing to do with my original comment though.
I see rapid decolonization. Japanese leave rural areas and northern territories. Russians fled Central Asia, pushed off Caucasus, large swaths of land become anthropic deserts. French in no position to colonize Africa anymore, if anything they're getting colonized. Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "sraum".
Arguable, Polish and Balts skip their countries for greener pastures. If anybody in EU will be lacking room they can move there any minute.
The main example of "old school" colonization (other than the Chinese example mentioned below) I can think of in 2016 is the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories.
Colonies provided wealth and a logistical advantage to their owners. UK and France both fought hard to hold onto theirs well past the end of WWII. More recently, Russia considered Crimea important enough to accept the economic punishment annexing it entailed.
> Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Do you have a good source or book that I can read about this? I would like to know more.
> Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "scram".
The Nazis are not known for paying careful attention to the climate when drawing up their grand plans. Lebensraum was their official policy, and I doubt they would have left the local population alone, considering what they did to other undesirables.
Anyway, there's no reason to think that Germans would easily defeat post-Imperial Russian Republic (given no Bolsheviks and therefore no civil wars, no mass emigration, famines or murders). Soviets basically lost half of pre-WWII years on chaos.
Russia without Soviets would look more like 350M strong Norway than like 140M strong Nigeria how it ended up.
That's how the British empire industrialized (in India, Ireland) etc.
The western countries bordering Ukraine had food shortages the same year the Ukraine did, no mention of that.
Also if you read New York Times during this period, the reporters travelling the Ukraine said there were no famine conditions - the Times said this, not Pravda.
Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?
Of course this is a point too subtle to work on Hacker News.
The data on both sides is wobbly to the point of being undependable. Until modern social security systems kicked in the number of people living in the US was largely a hypothetical quantity, especially in far-flung rural areas, the very sort of which were impacted by the Dust Bowl.
The 1930 census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_United_States_Census seems to be fairly comprehensive, but you have to wonder how far into the wilderness these people were willing to go to tabulate who was living in the extreme edges of the American frontier.
I haven't seen much talk of large scale deaths(>10,000)due to the dust bowl. In fact I can't really find much on dust bowl deaths (other then an uptick in the suicide rate) except in places that seem to be excusing the Holodomor.
People and nations can buy and beg food, its political and economic systems which turn crop failure into famine. Hell sometimes you don't even need a crop failure.
> If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
> "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying" [20] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".[21]
> It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's personal exchanges that he was fully aware at the time of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year. Both British intelligence[22][clarification needed] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[23] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[24] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.
---
In contrast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)
> he travelled to the Soviet Union and eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed
> > I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
> > In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
> > 'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
Muggeridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge "a forceful anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy."
Jones: (from your link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)#Life... "In 1931 he was offered employment in New York City by Dr Ivy Lee, public relations advisor to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation, and Standard Oil, to research a book about the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he toured the Soviet Union with H. J. Heinz II of the food company dynasty, producing a diary published by Heinz as Experiences in Russia 1931, a diary which probably contains the first usage of the word "starve" in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. In 1932 Jones returned to work for Lloyd George and helped the wartime Prime Minister write his War Memoirs.
During the 1930s, he was a reporter for the Western Mail.[2] In late January and early February 1933 Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on February 23 in the Richthofen, the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany, he became the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler as Jones accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city."
It's called the Cold War. Liars lied about liars. All of your sources are committed anti-communists willing to do whatever it took to bring down the USSR. Do you really think they wouldn't lie about this stuff?
A famine is different from a crop failure. Crop failures can help cause famines,but typically famines happen because political and/or economic failures. For example in cases of extreme authoritarianism(like the USSR and China - PRC) and colonialism(Ireland, Nepal).
see http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-...
The PRC just surpassed US GDP on some measures, whereas in the 1940s it was a western and Japanese occupied backwards basket case. Is that the downfall you mean?
Or do you mean Russia, which couldn't win a war with the Japanese in 1905, never mind Germany a decade later? The New York Times columns of 1918 said Mr. Lenin's government would fall any day now. What actually happened is as Europe and the US fell into depression in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing. It repelled an attack by a military alliance of virtually all of continental Europe in 1941 and Red Army soldiers planted the red flag in 1945. Then it launched the first satellite, man in space etc. After becoming a superpower, the central committee of the CPSU decided to pack it in in the late 1980s, and attune itself to the economic and political system of the rest of the world. Even Molotov never believed in "socialism in one country", and he was the one proclaiming it.
Some downfall, foreign-dominated backwaters rose to become world superpowers.