My speculation is Stalin was just being ruthlessly efficient. The Soviet Union had a food shortage. If that wasn’t addressed there would be widespread unrest. So rather than have everyone hungry and resentful, he designated one group of farmers as enemies of the state, killed them all, and confiscated all of their food to feed the rest of the country. The people who were still alive were now fed so they stayed quiet (and had the example of what happened to the kulaks to serve as a warning). And the people who had been killed were obviously not going to be a problem.
That’s a terrible comparison. I think there’s a significant difference between feeding livestock raw grain and feeding them a processed product designed for humans.
Land redistribuion worked pretty well in Ireland.
Proportionately, this is very close in the running with The Great Leap Forward but it’s hard to tell as it occurred during many other messed up KR initiatives.
Well, we’re focusing on economic features specifically, so I guess intentionally slaughtering millions for their class origins or political views or whatever it was that mattered to the KR does not really count, in the way that trying to make the whole society agrarian and nothing else counts. Of course, it’s probably hard to separate the body-count of each from the other’s.
But, remember, the peoples of the USSR were a lot richer in 1991 than they were in 1917. Even the Stalinist model of totalitarian socialism does work – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period.
OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)
From Economics Explained, by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow:
Sigh
I want to argue against Brainglutton as he’s posted that about fifty times, damn near word-for-word.
So what? It’s relevant in every thread on this topic. Debate it.
What exactly is there to debate? You’ve never posted a single shred of evidence for it. It’s straight Argument by Assertion.
I posted a cite from two respected economists, who are not in any way Communists. And arguments by assertion are always debatable, aren’t they?
I am not going to argue against it. It says what I said, basically. And I like the “military socialism” part - that’s right on the money. Look at our military - it often accomplishes amazing technology, at absolutely ridiculous price that would bankrupt any non-military part of the economy. Yes, it “works” when it is part of your economy - that is, if the rest of the economy can cover the costs. It never works when it is the whole of it.
Still, it is evident that it is possible for central planning to industrialize an economy and run it with some success and growth. The USSR’s problem was that it couldn’t compete with the West economically (for several reasons, only some having to do with the different political/economic systems), and after WWII was obliged to. But it lasted an impressively long time.
Well, that, and it cost the lives of millions.
The USSR began a slow collapse once it could not longer afford to kill off its own citizenry. Sustained looting over half a century is not “impressive” in any sense.
Look, the USSR had an industrial economy where people went to work and made things and did things and managed things, creating wealth the same way, so far as that goes, that workers in capitalist economies do. If the state was “looting” the people, it was only looting them in exactly the same way capitalist employers do. (I’ll make an exception for the gulag slave-labor.)
So did the Russian Empire. Not to put too fine a point on it, but despite gross mismanagement, the Czars built vast industrial base.
In point of fact, the Soviet did roughly double their industrial output of heavy materials between the two world wars. But this was not an especially impressive achievement given that it required the murder of millions, the wrecking of the agricultural base, and vast amounts of forced labor to function. This represented a massive amount of lost labor and demand. Yes, Lenin and Stalin built a big industrial power. But they could have done far more. Russia was filled to the brim with energies just waiting to be unleashed. Whenever they were given a chance, Russians modernized with vigor.
A democratic Russia could have done far better. A democratic Russia wouldn’t have wasted millions of lives, acres upon acres of fertile fields. A democratic Russia wouldn’t have starved on some of the richest agricultural land in the world. A democratic Russia would have urbanized with energy, because that’s pretty much what they were trying to do.
There’s also the fact that in the Soviet Union there were no purely economic decisions because the economy and politics were by intention intertwined. A policy might be disastrous economically but make “sense” politically.