|
|
 Originally Posted by boost
A good modern day parallel to Stalin's USSR is N. Korea. It's the same "classless" nonsense being drilled into the public, but with no action to back it up. You wouldn't make the same statements regarding N. Korea, so I'm not sure why you'd make them about Soviet era Russia.
Um, I partly would, but NK is very different from the USSR. USSR didn't destroy its farms and it wasn't set up to serve one man. The USSR grew its primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors a whole bunch. It grew them through socialist means. But it wasn't sustainable because costs weren't set to value. Eventually the chickens came home to roost. It really is that simple. It isn't the manufactured famines that killed the Soviet economy, it was the command economics
Check out these two pics
What we're looking at here is an awesome distinction between capitalism and socialism. The US map shows how the manufacturing belt was grown on capitalist principles. All factories were built for peak efficiency. Raw materials for production and energy are in the Minnesota region and the Erie Canal was dug to the New York harbors. This allowed every area around the Great Lakes peak efficiency in transportation for all necessary material. It kept costs as low as possible and value as high as possible. The results are evident today, and this is still the most powerful region in the world.
Compare that to the USSR map, where manufacturing regions make no sense. They're in a stupid inefficient line topography that's more spread out than the map suggests, far away from any consumers, far away from energy and raw materials. In addition, the US factories functioned on what could be sold for a profit, while the USSR factories did not. Why didn't the USSR operate on costs and values? Because they were socialist. Socialism ignores costs and values, it ignores the rules of supply and demand. When it was more expensive for these USSR factories to make more shoes than the value they received after distribution, they still did it because of the "need" for those workers to work. It took a few decades of this for the greatest national failure of modern history.
Perhaps the pro-socialist counter is that socialist economies don't have to operate on inefficiencies. But that isn't true because the principle of socialism is to prop up the workers regardless of inefficiencies. This means that a pure socialist society is by definition inefficient and doesn't apply supply and demand
My response to your claim that USSR wasn't classless due to Stalin and the corrupt ruling class is that Stalin et al still created that classless society. There was still an enormous mass of USSR citizens operating on socialist principles. If those principles worked then we would have seen it, regardless of whether or not there was a Stalin and cronies to initiate it
|
Reply With Quote