Well, in that case, please show it. I’ve never heard anything of the sort. Unless you’re referring to the periodic ups and downs, which is far from inherent instability.
Um… and the word “instability” would mean what to you then exactly?
Damn Sam Stone. Did you read my post? I wasn’t simply claiming anything, I was giving people the rescources to find out for themselves. The reason is that this is a whole nother debate. One that takes a while to go through, that i didn’t have much desire to do. Luckily, i was in contact with a friend of mine in Belgium. He forwarded me a short introduction he wrote a little while ago. Quite usefull. Since this is a different debate, I’m going to start a different debate for it. Off we go.
Communism has a bad track record. That’s the long and the short of it. Oldscratch can, and will, claim loudly that it has never once been actually implemented. But not for lack of trying, oldscratch. The USSR was founded on principles very much in line with the Marxist theory of Worker’s Revolt. Yes, the pesants rose up and crushed the imperialists. Good for them. Yes, the Revolution was furthered by a Party organized along Communist lines. So far, so good, according to Marx. But then something happened that the Manifesto never planned for: The Leader of the Revolution died. So we have Lenin on his deathbed and guess who’s been sneaking his way into power? Our friend Joe Stalin. With no clear order of succession outlined in the text, Stalin became the head guy because of his connections. With Trotsky lured away on a trip to Siberia (Stalin sent a telegram that said it was from Lenin), Stalin attended Lenin’s funeral instead of Trotsky, the man Lenin would have chosen had he been able to talk in his final days. That generated a groundswell of support for Stalin, which he used to pervert Lenin’s goals by doing away with the NEP (New Economic Policy, something that allowed Russians to have private enterprise, private farms, and make profit, a position antithetical to the ideals of Communism but a position Lenin was clearly moving towards in his last years), killing the kulaks who benefited from the NEP, and implementing his disastrous Five-Year Plans. The Five-Year Plans beautifully illustrated that a Communist regime cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. It tends to focus on one thing to the detriment of all else. In the CCCP, that one thing was industry. Which meant farms, now being collectivized with the death of the kulaks and the abolition of private ownership of property, were horribly inefficient and underfunded. The Breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine, was losing 5,000,000 people to starvation, such was the gross incompetencies in Communist rule in Russia. The grain that was being produced was being taken by the NKVD (predecessors to the KGB) for redistribution, leading the farmers to deliberately sow less the next year as a form of rebellion. Then the NKVD tried to take draft animals, leading the Ukranians to kill theirs for food or to sell as meat. In short, it was a mess. Stalin backed down from his collectivization scheme some, and gave each family one acre apiece. Those single-acre plots far outproduced the huge collective farms. Why? Personal incentive. If you are starving, you are going to work a lot harder on your farm than you are on some collective farm you’ll never see the fruits of. That’s just what happened. Stalin was just following the Communist scheme, really, collectivizing everything, eliminating personal goods, and making the Party supreme. But his only successes came when he backed down from the Party dogma and tried some Capitalist methods. The same has held true in China and in North Korea, whose only economic successes came when they moved towards Capitalism. No, I don’t expect to convince oldscratch. He’s arguing for his faith here, and he will always be true to the dogma. I just want to fight ignorance.
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Well, pretty grossly oversimplified, but not bad. The problem was, that at that point Russia was no longer a worker’s state. It was, to throw out a fancy term, a socialist country goign through beuracratic deformations? What happened? A brutal civil war, invasions by several large capitalist countries (including the US), the destruction of most industry as well as most of the working class. So they were presented with a problem that was pretty unforseeable, what do you do with a workers state when all the worker’s, the people who had created the revolution, had been killed in defense of it. They couldn’t just give it up to the Whites, that would have resulted in even more massacres and bloodshed. They had to hold on. At this point you have to diverging theories. The theory of permenant revlolution, and Bukharin’s theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky, argued, correctly, that Marx had maintained that socialism couldn’t srvive in one country, especially not one as backwards and devestated as Russia. What needed to be done is an all out effort to spread worker’s revolution where possible. Although this would result, if it failed, in the deaths of most of the members of the party, it was the only feasible solution.
Bukharin, had a pretty well developed theory that socialism could survive in one country. Stalin, being a petty power monger, latched onto Bukharin in his battles with Trotsky. Later he killed him.
Now, if the country had been functioninng properly, you could have had a full democratic governemnt as was envisioned. People would realize that Stalin was a putz, and have chosen someone else, maybe not Trotsky, but whatever. As it ws you had a huge beauracracy that supported Stalin and was the only remaining power in the country. Hence he came to power, democracy was crushed, and you got State Capitalism.
Oldscratch, you failed to see the main thrust of my post. What I was saying was this: Russia’s most successful times were the brief moments they emulated Capitalism. Stalin was an awful man, but his collectivization and state-control policies were very much in line with Communist ideals. They also failed miserably. All of them. Lenin’s brief NEP produced more successful people than did Stalin’s lengthy Five-Year Plans. You can argue that the gulags have nothing to do with Communism, but then I’ll say that the Communist government would not have lasted without them. If the people did not fear Stalin and the NKVD/KGB, they would have overthrown them. They might have created another Communist regime with Trotsky at the fore, but I think, in the Ukraine at least, they would have gone back to the NEP as quickly as possible. All of this theorizing is beside the point, really. Stalin’s government came into power because Lenin’s revolution failed. Lenin’s revolution failed because Communism, as a theory, does not address the basic matters of economy and leadership.
These basic concepts were proven by the failure of the Revolution:
[ul]
[li]Supply and demand has been shown much more effective at giving the masses what they want and need than any state price-fixing scheme central to Communism.[/li][li]People work harder for their own interests than they do for the State.[/li][li]Countries with a strong State model tend towards violence, against themselves and others, and tend to suppress, rather than reward, ingenuity.[/li][/ul]
These facts can easily be applied to Russian Communism, but they also follow from all nations that have ever tried to found themselves along Communist/Marxist lines. China and Vietnam are much like Cuba and Cambodia in that the above facts follow from their history with Communism. You don’t need to debate dialectics to discredit Communism. You only have to look in a history book.
Hope this helps:
http://www.kazm.net/manifesto.shtml
Hate to cite and run but I have nowt to say so I’m off.
Bye.