The atrocities were real, and they did connect to economics, but to just assert that capitalism is the slavery of U.S. history or that communism just is gulags and bread lines is extremely short-sighted. Neither system was anything like the core principles of the economic models (which are just models, so we should reject anyone who focuses only on the models and not on practical reality, but we can't treat each real-world case as the definitive case either).
I'm not necessarily arguing that that is the case just trying to explain why people make this argument. The idea is that, logically, any economically communist country will, by definition, eventually come to resemble the Soviet Union, China, and other negative instances.
We can debate whether or not that is so, but I think it's a legitimate debate to have, especially being that all known examples have in fact worked out that way.
Voluntary communes and Kibbutzen have failed as well - none have been capable of operating without subsidy.
If you want to pick examples that point various ways, you can note that Cuba has corruption, lack of democracy, is an impoverished island suffering the effects of significant economic embargoes in the global system and yet still vies for having one of the best health care systems. They even a top country in providing doctors to serve abroad in troubled places!
And the Soviet Union was a horrendously corrupt place that failed in most respects to live up to communist ideals and yet still managed to compete technologically with the richest countries on the planet despite being economically far far far weaker in fundamentals. The U.S. only barely beat the Soviets in the space race etc while being massively richer. The Soviets had many orders of magnitude more losses in WWII also.
The history of Communism is one where anti-communists did everything they could to undermine any success, the trials were full of corruption and abuse, and even still they had notable successes.
The kibbutzen failed not strictly because all the ideas were unworkable. They failed because they had to function economically in a larger context. None of them had wealth along the lines of successful capitalists either. Capitalists have only ever operated capably by controlling a lot of capital or getting subsidy, at least in the form of law enforcement that serves the side of capital.
We can conclude that all attempts at communism so far have had serious flaws. We can also conclude that capitalism has always had serious flaws too. Anyone who takes a polarized one-sided view on this stuff can be rejected as just being dogmatic. Piketty is not one of these one-sided dogmatic people, he's actually interested in studying empirical evidence and not concluding more than the evidence can truly support.
That's a bit of an understatement. It has a pretty much 0% success rate, for both coercive and voluntary attempts.
> capitalism has always had serious flaws too
Yes, but nothing like the communist failures, and capitalism has had incredible success stories.
> The Soviets had many orders of magnitude more losses in WWII also.
Nobody doubts the heroism and sacrifice of the Red Army in WW2. That's a whole 'nother topic, though.
> The U.S. only barely beat the Soviets in the space race etc while being massively richer.
The USSR was able to direct massive resources at single problems, at the sacrifice at most everything else, but the US could do it with little sacrifice.
> did everything they could to undermine any success
Nobody made the communist countries perform mass slaughter.
> The kibbutzen failed not strictly because all the ideas were unworkable.
They couldn't feed themselves. No communist system has ever been able to feed itself. All have required imports from capitalist economies, or starved, or tolerated capitalist farmers.
And communist ideas also had zero to do with those countries committing mass slaughter.
Communism, even in a very flawed form, has indeed succeeded. See Cuba. The main reason they would be wealthier with capitalism is because the U.S. would have proactive economic ties instead of working to isolate them. Given their isolation and inherent lack-of-wealth relatively speaking, communism there is at least in a state no reasonable person can describe as 0% successful, even if you have points of criticism.
In terms of kibbutzen, you do realize that the entire premise of self-suffiency, i.e. sustinance farming, is basically the definition of poverty, right? I mean, the whole premise that a small community can achieve for themselves in isolation a whole decent standard of living is nonsense. We acheive the greatest standards of living through widespread connection in larger groups on larger scales. Trade and all and specialization… No effort for tiny isolated communes could ever achieve the quality of life of large cosmopolitan economies, That issue isn't a strictly communist vs capitalist one.
Communism is indeed a simplistic model that is unworkable in a rigid dogmatic sense, just like anarchy or capitalism. There's no example of pure version of any of these ever existing.
Being closed to discussing the actual ideas of communism by just talking about Stalin's atrocities or tiny communes failing is a good way to just close yourself to actually engaging with the intellectual questions. Obviously, all philosophical / political principles are distinct from the complexity of real-world economic practice. We can still discuss the principles as a way to think about and explore the issues. Communist principles, as ideas, have nothing to do with mass slaughter.
..simply do not produce enough to sustain themselves. Capitalist farmers do, with a surplus they sell. All such voluntary collectives have collapsed (unless they get subsidies from the government).
> have nothing to do with mass slaughter
I strongly suggest reading "The Black Book of Communism". Every advocate of communism needs to read it, if only to prepare an answer.
You're right that nothing in the principles of communism suggest mass slaughter. But those who try to implement it time and again resort to it. The reason is fairly straightforward - people resist having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives. The response is to kill them.
Again and again.
"having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives" is also not a principle of communism. Forced labor is not a communist value.
In simple terms, capitalist farmers produce a surplus, kibbutz farmers produce a deficit. Kibbutzen operate within a market economy and have all the resources of it that are available to the capitalist farmer - they still can't make a go of it.
> not a principle of communism.
Collective ownership of the means of production means confiscating it.
> Forced labor
When the collective decides that certain work must be done, and with no market forces, that means assigning people to the jobs. I.e. forced labor.
If you wanted to say that there are major fundamental problems with having no markets, I'd agree completely. Communism is not a set of ideas necessarily anti-market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Or, to be pragmatic, if we agreed for this exchange that "communism" meant precisely an economic structure without markets, then I'd agree that's simply unworkable. All of my points in this thread rely on my assumption that the term "communism" refers to a wider scope of ideas and models, some of which have some merit but which nobody ever should dogmatically advocate (nor should they dogmatically reject as being synonymous with Lenin/Stalin/Mao).
The people dying in the cases you are referencing did not die because of the ideas of communism. The atrocities were carried out in the name of communism but had no basis in actual communist ideas.
If you want to make an argument that the principles of communism are unethical, that's an independent argument from the claim that certain historic attempts had various atrocities and therefore you reject the principles (even though many of the atrocities are not related to the principles — Stalin disappearing his political enemies has no basis in communist principles…
2. Specifically about giving communism a fair trial despite all past failures because it is "ethical": no thanks. I find its principle of "dictatorship of the proletariat" unethical and proven disastrous.
3. Stalin disappearing his political enemies was rooted at least in part in Lenin's cornerstone principle of "democratic centralism" which was critical ingredient for the success of the communist revolution. Trying to decouple the two doesn't do history justice.
There's definitely philosophical problems with communism and communist thinkers of various sorts. No denying that. But the screwed up crappy attempts at something like communism simply don't invalidate all of the principles which must be considered separately.
Basically, if you run a shitty version of an experiment, you don't get to then claim you proved the null hypothesis. It's one thing to say "we can't afford to experiment" and another to say "we had [shitty] experiments and so now we can conclude things."
You could argue for no more trials and still accept the fact that we never got any good trials from which to conclude enough about the real principles.
I'd also contend that it's unethical for a society to reward all people the same regardless of effort and talent.
Should I make as much money as a singer as Taylor Swift? I have terrible pitch. I can't write music. I can't play an instrument. I have no stage presence.
Now, you might say that based on my talents, I shouldn't be allowed to be a singer at all. But not allowing someone to choose what they do with their life also seems unethical.
That's not the premise of socialism, so it's strawman argument.
EDIT: Just to be clear, i'm not implying that they do not exist. Genuinely don't know of any and would be curious if you do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%937...
I'm not sure. It seems like the British forced India to export its grain. They may have been paying higher prices, but that's not made particularly clear, at least not from the article. And of course, they'd have to be paying pretty substantially higher prices to cover also the very high costs of transport at that time, especially for such a bulky commodity as grain.
That being said, it's certainly possible for something like that to happen in principle. That is, a country exporting a product that its citizens need because others are willing to pay more for them.
I suppose though, the capitalist would argue that that would enrich the exporters of that product, causing them to spend more money in their hometowns, thereby enriching the local population sufficiently to compete with the prices paid by foreigners for whatever the product is.
Two potential problems with that, I guess are:
1. The means of production of product X being owned by foreign companies, which is not uncommon. 2. Even if they are owned locally, the owners of the capital might buy mostly imported items, stimulating the economy comparatively little.
It's certainly an interesting issue. One that is probably best resolved by an empirical analysis of foreign investment and laissez-faire policies in relation to income growth for the poorest people of those countries. Certainly there are great success stories, e.g. South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil maybe to a lesser extent? Cuba is probably the closest thing to a success story in the contrary case (communist policies), and that doesn't seem like much of a success.
Since I am headed for bed, let me preemptively quote from the Georgia's declaration of seperation [2]:
>> The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War#Characterisation_as_...
[2] http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/dec...
If you don't allow the currency to float, your import/export ratios can't respond to market forces, and in a globalized economy this can be catastrophic, especially during a global downturn. To quote from the wiki:
"One of the junta's economic moves was fixing the exchange rate in the early 1980s, leading to a boom in imports and a collapse of domestic industrial production; this together with a world recession caused a serious economic crisis in 1982, where GDP plummeted by 14%, and unemployment reached 33%"
Of course, you can't prove a counter-factual. There's no way to know for sure what would have happened if they hadn't done this. But it seems to me that this, at least somewhat, mitigates the significance of this particular example.
- Those countries were poor and without sufficiently established democratic institutions.
- Those countries had to immediately mobilize to defend from richer capitalist countries (lead by the US) trying to undermine them in any possible way. Constant defense mode leads to totalitarianism.
That doesn't mean that socialism requires totalitarianism by nature.
In fact, the only significant difference between capitalism and socialism is a democratically controlled workplace, which is inherently less authoritarian than capitalistic totalitarian workplace governance.
It's also ironic how people constantly conflate "democracy" and "capitalism" on one hand, and "totalitarianism" and "communism" on the other, while completely accepting totalitarianism during a significant portion of their life -- their workplace.
>> Only now can we fully appreciate the correctness of Engels' remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of combining the words “freedom” and “state”. So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.
Lenin, The State and the Revolution, 1917 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/c...