Stalin's Economic Policy: Problems and Impact

Walther von Oldenburg wrote:I wanted to continue this topic - and as it fits the thread about Russian economy poorly, I decided to create a new one.

flamming_python wrote:If Stalin hadn't collectivized the grain in 1932/1933 and sold it to the West in return for industrial equipment, the USSR might have been able to avoid the worst of the famine - but would also have gotten nowhere.

And this proves my point just perfectly - that Stalinist/communist economies cannot achieve high levels of development in one area without cannibalizing some other part - if you have to subject sizable portions of your population to famine just to get industry, then your economic system IS NOT healthy - unless your vocabulary is upside-down.

If you ask what I consider a successful case of industrialization - then Bismarck's Germany comes to mind - went from a largely rural country into an industrial powerhouse of Europe in ~30 years - with no famines and mass deaths.

You have USA which had world's largest industry by 1890 and in 1941-45 managed to switch most of it's heavy industry to war production without much damage to consumer economy.

Then you got Imperial Russia - which enjoyed some of the highest rates of economic growth before WW1 - with agriculture, light and  heavy industries developing ALONGSIDE each other - not antagonistically (as in USSR)

Don't bother, he clearly thinks the West is above using forced labor, when the American and British economies financed and profiteered on the transatlantic slave trade, as well as their financial centers (Wallstreet, and the City of London) who financed and profiteered on the rise of fascism in the world

Here's a highly recommended read, it's probably the the best book on the rise of fascism that's ever been written! It's 'Facts and Fascism' by George Seldes, one of the best journalists of the last century, who had support as high up in the U.S. govt. as the vice president of the United States (Henry Wallace under FDR). It was the first book of it's kind, which documented about how the the top robber barons...err I mean business moguls in the West (US, UK, mainland Europe) financed and profiteered on the rise of fascism, including the forced labor camps. It's free online to read, when you find free time read it, it's highly enlightening:

I don't know what point you're trying to make.

Your post is a tu quoque fallacy and a red herring - it does not even touch the subject of Stalin's economic policies - and thus, it's irrelevant.

... Stalin's economic policies were litterally a copy paste of the solutions that were employed by Colonial powers until then, instead of foreign colonies, Stalin had inner colonies.

Imperial Russia was the sick man of Europe, there was nothing there to keep Russia progressing, the fact is that Russia was slowly killing off its potential with archaic structures and foreign funds. If you didn't get the memo Russia was todays Greece on steroids. It borrowed money to such extent that its fragile economy couldn't repay it back in no freaking time. By 1913 half of the Russian public debt was foreign owned...

It is always the same thing with the old Russian nationalists. There's nothing funny or great about Stalin, but to say that the Russian Empire was better, is not only vile revisionism, it is also a cause for concern for nowadays.

One last time. The Imperial Rule was a corrupt and decaying structure that was holding Russia back. The agrarian state of the economy (about 46% of the population was in the fields) and the very important extraction sector (mines) deeply handicapped any Russian aspirations to create a viable middle class. Middle class means urbanization. Add to this poisonous mix a very important penetration of the Russian Orthodox Church and its backwards BS and you have a recipe for disaster...WW1 only made sure the system would die sooner than later.

Walther von Oldenburg wrote:I wanted to continue this topic - and as it fits the thread about Russian economy poorly, I decided to create a new one.

flamming_python wrote:If Stalin hadn't collectivized the grain in 1932/1933 and sold it to the West in return for industrial equipment, the USSR might have been able to avoid the worst of the famine - but would also have gotten nowhere.

And this proves my point just perfectly - that Stalinist/communist economies cannot achieve high levels of development in one area without cannibalizing some other part - if you have to subject sizable portions of your population to famine just to get industry, then your economic system IS NOT healthy - unless your vocabulary is upside-down.

If you ask what I consider a successful case of industrialization - then Bismarck's Germany comes to mind - went from a largely rural country into an industrial powerhouse of Europe in ~30 years - with no famines and mass deaths.

You have USA which had world's largest industry by 1890 and in 1941-45 managed to switch most of it's heavy industry to war production without much damage to consumer economy.

Then you got Imperial Russia - which enjoyed some of the highest rates of economic growth before WW1 - with agriculture, light and  heavy industries developing ALONGSIDE each other - not antagonistically (as in USSR)

It's true that Imperial Russia did achieve a pretty fast rate of development by the beggining of the 20th century.

Bismark's Germany, US, both good examples.

But it's all neither here nor there.

Stalin didn't have 40 years, nor even 30 - he had about 10. He had no way of knowing it at the time of course, but he knew that the USSR would soon face a new conflict and that the political climate in Europe was changing; he set very, very ambitious targets and timetables, and ran the USSR in such a way that it achieved them.

Balancing consumer goods production, light and heavy industries and so on was always a challenge for heavily centrally-planned economies like the USSR's - but that has nothing to do with the deaths that you mention.
The deaths were due to heavy industrial build-up being focussed on and rushed at an incredible speed. Something like this would not have been possible in a capitalist economy - and for all your talk, the fact is that the USSR made the right choice; had it adopted a 'balanced' and slower approach - it would not have industrialized in time.

Yeah it wasn't healthy - but you still haven't given me an alternative as to how that amount of industrialization and economical development could have been achieved; moralization and sermons about human rights wouldn't have helped the USSR; industrial equipment/machinery from the West in return for grain, and running the country as a slave-ship however did help.

Walther von Oldenburg wrote:

flamming_python wrote:Yeah it wasn't healthy - but you still haven't given me an alternative as to how that amount of industrialization and economical development could have been achieved

Pretty easy, just keep NEP - and slowly expand it's scope to all of light industry, using taxes to build heavy industry.

NEP achieved some impressive results in a very short time - namely total recovery of agricultural production (back to 1913 levels at some time around 1927- and threefold (3x) growth of industrial production between 1921 and 1926. If this policy was kept, then although it wouldn't be possible to avoid famine altogether, it's effects would be milder - sadly, ideological bias did not permit all of this.

History of NEP also shows that under right conditions heavily devastated countries can make a quick recovery - and there is no reason to believe that high rates of economic growth wouldn't persist through the 1930s - and that post-ww2 growth rates wouldn't be higher.

YOu can't keep NEP and Socialism...you simply can't. NEP was killing the country, prices rose like there was no tomorrow. What incentive do you have to give your crops, when you can sell them on the market (black or official). Two plane markets don't work. That's why you need to prioritize one of them. Given the USSR was aspiring to eradicate the market economy, I don't get your point.

The productivity rose basically because the agro-sector had no more volatile costs for itself and had passed all costs to the Urban areas. That's not "healthy" development.

I missed this necro thread back in 2015. Stalin in no way exploited internal colonies. Soviet policy was to put every constituent
ethnic group on the same level without any privileged ethnic groups and economic classes. So Stalin was following the communist
ideal to a "t". The main difference to Trotsky and Lenin was that world revolution was no longer a policy since it had no chance of
being realized and was an infinite drain on the USSR's resources. During the Cold War the USSR sort of pursued a policy of world
revolution but it was more like regime change operations. So the yanquis can't bitch too hard about failing to keep all of the old
colonies under their and western European yoke.

The USSR and its command economy was not based on any sort of colonial model. This has been clearly demonstrated in the post
USSR space where various "brotherly" republics are now in full bore catabolic atrophy in the absence of central subsidies and direction
that allowed them to develop under the USSR. The only thanks the USSR and Russia get for elevating these leeches is hate. Well,
now you can eat your own shit and savour the flavour.

Stalin truly respected the rights and dignity of the ethnic minorities, for example in an essay in 1929 he strongly supported the nuture and development of ethnic cultures, ethnic identity, and languages. Stalin also recognized that the eradication of national barriers should be done voluntarily by all the ethnic groups themselves and before that people should allow the ethnic groups to develop their own distictintve identity and to be free from any kinds of prejuidice.

However the centralized model that Stalin followed actually contradicted and violated Stalin's own ideas. Because under that model all the nations and races were all oppressed by a body standing above them, seperated from them, and could not be controlled by them. Ethnic equality became no longer an affair which could be control by the ethnic groups themselves, but being distributed by a Hegellian God stood above them, and that God could brutally suppress the ethnic groups using the excuse of "common interest", for example the case of the Crimean Tartar.

You cannot access to equality unless you actively take part in the collective management of that equality yourself. The "equality" distributed from a God above you is superficial only.

The centralized system also paved way for the grow in power of the bureaucratic officials who became independent of the working class and gradually excluded the working class from social and economical management, and these bureaucratic officials were the culprits who destroyed the Soviet Union so that they could took a full possesion of the state assests and turned themselves into the new capitalists. And actually the extremism, ultranationalism and all the separatism shits in the SNG republics are, for most of the cases, the tools of the regional bureaucratic officials to create their private fiefdoms and to make wars for enlarging their fiefdoms. The ethnic conflicts actually have the economical and class conflict hidden beneath it.

During her history the Soviet Union managed to enjoy a dramatic and wonderful growth resulted in an extremely powerful production capability and a good welfare system, but she could not overcome the last barrier and were crushed by that barrier itself.

I do not have a good idea why Stalin choose the centralized system rather than the grassroot model proposed by Lenin. Probably the risk of war at that time and Stalin's own personality tempted him to take everything on his hand and used drastic methods so that he could rapidly industrialized the USSR to cope with the oncoming threats. May be Stalin planned that he first turned everything into state ownership and later turned state ownership into common ownership. The problem is that the bureaucratic officials would never release their autoritative power when they had a taste of it, as we can see in the later history of the USSR. And the biggest tragedy of Stalin is that he lost control of his own bureaucratic system and was swallowed by what he created.

GarryB wrote:How is that different from any other centralised model,  ask any country in the EU or US State Governor... the monarchy it replaced was not democracy either, and of course modern democracy where people with money control everything is no different...

I appreciate what you are trying to say but the worst thing about current western culture is that is has skewed too far towards the minority... to the point where weirdos get to flaunt their perverse sexuality in parades and everyone else has to tolerate that.

The problem of the "minority rights movements" in Western world is that they have been degenerated from being the voice of the oppressed to the voice of the narcissists who want to amplify their ego disregard of everyone else. That is the manifestation of the capitalist view of freedom in which there are only individuals, there is no society, no social relationship, and even there is no existence of the outer environment because the individual freedom is believed to be limitless without any outside restriction. Capitalist individualism dumps humankind in such a delusion world like that.

The individualist essence of capitalist freedom also means that social and institutional relationship cannot restrict the economic power and activities of the capitalists, their business activities now only yield under "free market rules", and political rights of the citizen cannot protect them from being exploited by the capitalists or shield them from the economic power of the capitalists. That is why the capitalist freedom is the absolute freedom over individual property where billionaires have a lot of freedom while the workingmen only have the freedom to sell their labor-force in the market.

That is why, like you already said, capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of the rich. The proletariat may be granted citizen rights, but does not have economical freedom, hence does not have the means to protect them from capitalist oppression.

The difference of socialist freedom is this: the collective management. Which means you and I do the things together and we have to consult each other before making the decision. I may be a specialist in some area, for example Biology, but I do not have the right to impose my will on you even in the sector of Biology, I must listen to your opinion, and you do not leave your fate in my mercy but you actively supervise me and vice versa. That protects the freedom of us and prevent the violation of other's freedom.