this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Reducing widespread human rights abuses in the Soviet Union to "one famine" shows a heady mixture of deliberate ignorance with hubris that only a western university educated leftist can posess.
The sad thing is, famines weren't that widespread after a while, unless your standard of "famine" is "not eating beef steaks in a country where beef aren't that common".
Not exactly, but whatever.
Mao and Stalin are both often cited as killing more of their own citizens than Hitler managed to do.
For Stalin is was a result of the 1930-1933 changes in policy to heavily prioritize heavy industry over food. Honestly hard to blame him, going from a war to a bloody revolution then overthrown for militaristic autocracy probably complicated a lot of things with no time between to normalize.
For Mao is was the result of making all private agriculture a offense worthy of capital punishment and instead made a grain quota for peasants to fill and send to the central government for distribution, then heavily investing in steel production and urbanization. Peasants didn't fill the quotas because the surpluses just didn't exist, if the central government just took what they wanted then in those cases the farmers just starved reducing next year's yield. Mao's came much later so he had no excuse.
So, yeah, they didn't get to eat meat every day. Or bread. Or even cereals.
The ussr was infinitely better for human rights than what came before or after in Russia and the baltics, and was better than all "free nations" at the time until the late 1970s, when a few European nations decided to ignore France, the UK, and the US and write their own laws.
The WHAT?
Please explain to me how sending most of the Baltic intelligensia to die in Siberia and replacing them with Russian settlers who held most positions of power was better for my rights than what I have right now.
Please tell me how great my grandmother in law had it living in the outskirts of Archangelsk in a wooden barrack because she was sent there against her will, how much more rights and opportunities she had back then.
Please explain to me how great the industrial management in the USSR was, where they built a bunch of heavy industries in countries that had few mineral resources to support them locally, leading to plant closures in the 90s.
Before WWII, Estonia was a bit richer than Finland. Not it is lagging behind by decades.
Life expectancy doubled under Stalin.
So he could see them suffer longer.
Anti-communists continue to be deeply unserious people, my God.
Except you know, no homelessness, by Stalin's time no starvation, free healthcare, guaranteed days off, guaranteed vacation time, wages significantly higher than the majority of the population has ever seen, oh and free education.
Yeah, you couldn't be a Nazi or other enemy of the state, how oppressive.
There was mass starvation under Stalin. His rule started in 1929, directly before the 1930-1933 famine resulting in somewhere between 5 to 9 million deaths which occured as a direct result of policy changes.
No, homelessness existed until Khruschev. Could been solved earlier, but WW2 reduced amount of homes.
They haven't yet, and there's no profit motive for it so it really can't happen.
While I can't speak to the veracity of your claims about the quality of life of the Soviet Union under Stalin, there are in fact many capitalist countries that have been able to achieve these feats that you mentioned.
The housing first policy in Finland has practically eradicated homelessness where only 3,429 were homeless in 2023.
Similarly in the Nordics, the majority of the population Sweden (72.2%), Norway (71.8%), and Denmark (71.8%) is food secure. The US to an extent has also been able to mitigate against food insecurity with the existence of food stamps and free/reduced school meals essentially meaning starvation is rare in some parts of he country.
Also, the NHS provides all individuals residing in the UK with free healthcare, so... yeah.
Furthermore, all employees in France are guaranteed up to 5 weeks of annual paid leave.
In Switzerland, for a full-time job, the median monthly pre-tax salary was a tidy CHF6,788 which is approximately 7500USD. I guess you can tell that this isn't a small amount of money compared to the low wages received by workers in the Soviet Union under Stalin (which if i might remind you, the piece-rate system was later revised under Khrushchev).
And finally free education. While most nations in Europe (Germany and the Nordics) offer free to low-cost education, you need not really look further than the US to see that while not entirely free, public schooling and community colleges provide accessible enough education to many that need it.
You can see it's not really about the capitalism, but the governments that run it
They can't
Look at the other comment i posted in response