Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opinion bears that fact out. So, I'd say the jury's out on just how much of our improvements to standards of living can be attributed to giving 10 people all the money in the world, vs (for example) attributing it to scientific advancement in general.
edit: sadly dang has once again taken it upon himself to stop communists from posting on HN. I'm sure most of y'all agree with this in the first place. at any rate take this as an open invitation to drag me in the comments with whatever ridiculous nonsense you can dream up. I won't be responding to any of it because I literally can't. thanks
Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology.
> rapidly developing industry
What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika."
But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism.
> despite being a feudal backwater in 1917
Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.
People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor. And there are just as many famines and other deaths as well - the distortion of crop subsidies on the food export market has repeatedly caused exactly such famines, and that's all a completely capitalistic phenomenon.
People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems.
That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours.
Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention).
But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!).
Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion?
And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?
> I'm excited to read your next post about how Nazi Germany wasn't really that bad.
Not exactly a good-faith reply to a substantial post, and the quote doesn't even work to the thing you are trying to respond to. Hitler’s bad dude, and he’s usually counted as one of those victims of communism. Can you admit that a number that counts hitler and his soldiers as victims of communism might be a little overwrought?
Deaths due to the prevailing political system are deaths due to the prevailing political system. Slaves forced into a life of servitude due to the prevailing political system are just as much slaves in a Corrections Corp of America prison as in a soviet gulag or a north korean camp, it matters not a whit your personal feelings on the moral complications of the death or the slavery and whether you feel the deaths from some systems are "excusable" or not inherently tied to the system (a grace you of course don’t extend).
Again, the simple fact of the matter is that there are large-scale “excess deaths” and slavery and other morally repugnant outcomes that occur in large scale due to the nature of the capitalistic system and the way it treats problems that are not profitable to solve. If you can't accept that simple fact, then there is indeed no basis for a discussion. Can you even acknowledge that the body count of victims of capitalism is (substantially) greater than zero?
I mean Pol Pot alone... analogous to your hitler comparison, can you not even disavow capitalism in such clear-cut cases of literal murder and death camps? Or Thailand and red drum killings? Do such things not taint the entire concept of capitalism, in the same way that you feel communism has been tainted? Even if the other victims of capitalism don’t matter to you…
At the end of the day the “victims of communism” just isn’t a viable framing for the discussion. Atrocities and both high- and low-level oppression occur under capitalism too but people get very upset if you say it somehow represents a fundamental problem with the capitalistic system, but that’s the standard anything else gets held to.
In the neoliberal consensus, communism is bad because of holodomor or NK slave camps (true) but capitalism is not bad because of pol pot or red drum killings or United States slave camps (false). And that means we can’t even have European-style state enterprises or worker-owned enterprises, because that’s all communism and dirty.
Anyway honestly this is the problem with expats in general, people left for specific reasons and the ones who left are the ones who felt most strongly about an issue. Learned experience is one thing but you’re not exactly getting a balanced take on Cuba from some expat who had their family’s plantation expropriated either. Sure, your family lost your sugar farm, but living standards went up hugely for everyone else.
dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable.
That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone).
You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.
Beyond all the other contestable statements in your comment, I think you might have the biggest problem convincing the former Baltic Soviet Republics that they were doing better under the USSR versus now.
Yes, it's true - they're still very mad that their Nazi collaborators who helped murder tens of thousands of Jews during the war had to face actual justice instead of getting paperclipped off to the West.
edit: sadly dang has once again taken it upon himself to stop communists from posting on HN. I'm sure most of y'all agree with this in the first place. at any rate take this as an open invitation to drag me in the comments with whatever ridiculous nonsense you can dream up. I won't be responding to any of it because I literally can't. thanks