The merchant banker Oliver Kamm has a vicious little post today attacking the memory of the late Ralph Miliband for a paper he published in 1980. Miliband, the father of the current British foreign secretary, was, of course, a Marxist theoretician and a member of the British new left for much of his life. As a member of that left, he authored many papers for journals like the New Left Review and Socialist Register. And again, as a member of that new left, he had an ambivalent relationship to the Soviet bloc. On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief. In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals. The difference is, of course, that they are alive and he is dead. Miliband cannot reconsider.
Kamm’s post attacks Miliband’s paper “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” (Socialist Register, 1980 ) on the grounds that he doesn’t think the crimes of Pol Pot were sufficient to justify the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the paper today, it has an odd and stilted feel: Miliband is wrestling with a set of issues and problems that seem deeply alien today. I think Miliband was wrong about that case, and badly so. But I presume (and hope) that he didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports. What the casual reader wouldn’t glean from reading Kamm’s nasty little post, though, is that the substance of Miliband’s article was an attack on the idea that the socialist ideal should be advanced by “socialist” states invading other countries. In other words, it was principally an attack on the idea that socialists should support the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from such interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.
{ 317 comments }
Something doesn’t quite make sense here. Both Cambodia and Vietnam were in some sense, socialist countries, just as Hungary and Czechoslovakia were.
So would you interpret Miliband as arguing that invasions of socialist countries by other socialist countries sours people on the socialist brand? Seems pretty facile and self-evident. Surely there is more to the essay.
back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief
Phew – that’s OK then.
The more such people are revealed to be the complete idiots they clearly were – in some cases still are – the better.
I don’t think the belief that East bloc state capitalism advanced various social causes was mistaken at all (the fact that these advances have now been lost in the private capitalist restoration proves nothing) – however, I never believed these advances somehow canceled out the essentially oppressive nature of Stalinism, and I doubt Miliband (who must be rotating in his grave over having such a Blairist fop for a son) did either.
The idiot here is cjcjc, (and Kamm, but then we all knew that Kamm is an idiot).
The more such people are revealed to be the complete idiots they clearly were – in some cases still are – the better.
To cjcjc: gonna apply that equally to all those best-and-brightest types who pimped for the Iraq war?
I posted a link to this article on Kamm’s website. For good or for ill.
“New Left” not to be confused with “New Labour”
While Kamm’s post is as a deliberate misrepresentation, wasn’t 1980 was far too late to be merely “lamenting the lack of democracy” of the Soviet bloc.
Milliband’s reasoning was just as odd and stilted even in 1980 but it does serve to remind me of my undergraduate course on international law and the joys of Tunkin, Socialist International Law and the Brezhnev Doctrine as jus cogens. What larks eh, Pip!
Kamn is pushing the same tired old line about how important it is to keep war as a option for achieving our aims in order to prevent Pol Pot and the Tutsis from carrying out their dastardly acts (and they were). The problem is that we never will. We will prefer to put Poll Pot in the UN seat when it suits (as we did). Kamn and co want to go to war and capitalise on our military dominance in securing our own interests.
Kamn is no doubt keen to retrospectively justify holocausts we have recently precipitated through just such wars.
Indeed he may be especially keen justify those that may have loudly advocated such wars.
It might be better to just leave him to babble away to himself on some corner of Cif rather than further indulging him.
gonna apply that equally to all those best-and-brightest types who pimped for the Iraq war?
Fine by me. Though I’m not sure what you mean by “pimped”.
What precisely were these social causes which communism – oh, sorry, “state capitalism” – advanced so much more successfully than western democracies?
I seem to recall a number of people – most of whom the “new left” derided – who were able to see the Soviet regime exactly as it was. No ambivalence.
“1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief”
C’mon. At a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communit Party in 1956, Khrushchev uncovered something of the extent of Stalin’s despotism.
The text of the speech was leaked and appeared shortly after in translation in Britain in The Observer. Among the facts Khrushchev unveiled were that in 1937 and 1938, 98 out of the 139 members of the Central Committee were shot on Stalin’s orders – they were all dedicated Communist Party members by definition and included Bukharin, who was later exonerated and rehabilitated by Gorbachev:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/25/newsid_2703000/2703581.stm
Besides Bukharin, another renown Russian economist, Kondratiev, also disappeared in the purges.
However, there was nothing secret about the article by Stalin which appeared in Pravada on 29 December 1929: “Concerning questions of agrarian policy in the USSR”. Among Stalin’s proposals for policies to resolve the (virtually perennial) crisis in Soviet agriculture was this passage:
“we have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. It means that we have carried out, and are continuing to carry out, one of the decisive turns in our whole policy.”
http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/QAP29.html
Note the prescription of killing by category: “eliminating the kulaks as a class”. The downstream outcome was the 1932-3 famine in the Ukraine (and Belarus). Published estimates of the numbers who died as the result of this orchestrated famine appear to extend from about 4 millions up to 10 millions. A Google search on “Ukraine famine” will quickly yield some.
It is difficult to believe that Miliband, an academic at the LSE, wasn’t aware of all this when many other academics were.
What precisely were these social causes which communism – oh, sorry, “state capitalism” – advanced so much more successfully than western democracies?
cjcjc needs to watch the coda to the brilliant The Lives of Others
But stalinism was only a part of it, what – 20-25 years? They say that America is an idea, not a country – and so was the USSR. And Bob, “eliminating the kulaks as a class” clearly is not the same as “eliminating the kulaks”.
“cjcjc needs to watch the coda to the brilliant The Lives of Others”
Anyone who saw ‘The Lives of Others’ as a celebration of the social gains of communism is in a state of great confusion.
Yes, and to use an essay that was written almost 30 years ago to attack a man who is now dead is something that only Gimlet would think to do.
On his actual posting, the short-arsed little fucker managed to get two things wrong – they relate to Tanzania and Vietnam and his description of their wars as “interventions”. Actually they weren’t – Tanzania was attacked by Uganda, a country that then tried to annex a chunk of Tanzanian territory. Vietnam suffered any number of attacks before hitting back after one of them.
So neither Vietnam nor Tanzania’s positions were in any way analogous with that of the Americans in Iraq. Gimlet probably didn’t know that, which is why he used the word.
http://www.the-exile.info/search/label/Gimlet
Strawman, meet John Meredith. John Meredith, meet strawman.
“And Bob, “eliminating the kulaks as a class” clearly is not the same as “eliminating the kulaks”.”
But in fact it was the same thing. And the smallest interest in Stalinism would have led you to strongly suspect that it was.
“Strawman, meet John Meredith. John Meredith, meet strawman.”
Hang on, I’m not the one who brought it up. Your point is misdirected.
Maurice: I think they have already met. In fact, they are on such friendly terms that you rarely see one without the other.
cjcjc: you’re a a complete idiot.
What precisely were these social causes which communism – oh, sorry, “state capitalism” – advanced so much more successfully than western democracies?
One could argue – one could certainly have argued in 1980 – that they included literacy, universal health care, universal social security, racial tolerance, and controlling violent crime…
As I recall the US government opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and joined China to support Cambodia in the UN and diplomatically.
No documentation or links, but that’s my memory.
“One could argue – one could certainly have argued in 1980 – that they included literacy, universal health care, universal social security, racial tolerance, and controlling violent crime”
You could argue these things but your case would have been no stronger in 1980 than now. The ‘at least the trains run on time’ defence of oppressive states was as laughable then as now and it was clearly evident to those of us who were not determined to ignore the evidence for ideological reasons that citizens of democracies in Europe and the US were at least the equal of the USSR in terms of literacy, health etc, etc and far outstripped them in terms of wealth and freedom (and what is the point of being great at reading if the state won’t let you read anything that interests you?), all achieved without 20 million or so deaths.
But in fact it was the same thing
No it wasn’t. A vast majority of them was deported, that’s not elimination of individuals.
But – come on – the other side of this coin is a typical discussion of slavery and racial discrimination in the US - does it cancel everything else, does it forever discredit the whole idea of the US of A?
Well, does it?
“No it wasn’t. A vast majority of them was deported, that’s not elimination of individuals.”
You know as well as I do that ‘deportation’ meant death for thousands and the complete destitution and immiseration of thousands more. I don’t see the point of arguing the toss about this.
“’eliminating the kulaks as a class’ clearly is not the same as ‘eliminating the kulaks’.”
Who seriously believes that the Cheka/NKVD/KGB were concerned with such fine semantic distinctions.
For a 20th century atrocities league table, try this:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
“But – come on – the other side of this coin is a typical discussion of slavery and racial discrimination in the US - does it cancel everything else, does it forever discredit the whole idea of the US of A?”
No, because the slave-owning states were overthrown by war and a new settlement was arrived at. In the USSR the regime continued as Lenin and Stalin created it until it collapsed under the weight of its own crimes.
The trouble is that Miliband is arguing against what now looks likes a very forced construct i.e. the idea that invasions are good when carried out by countries styling themselves as socialist. Which maybe at the time seemed like a brave argument, but now lends itself to the chop-shop presentation that Kamm is doing.
In fairness to him, it did take a while for the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to produce a positive outcome.
John Emerson is correct on US support for the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion.
Chris,
The title of your post is unfair to merchant bankers of modest stature. Kamm is not their fault. Please consider changing it to A Nasty Smirking Git or something like that.
A shining wit?
The Soviet block didn’t benefit Russian workers very well, but it sure as hell benefited the West’s workers – it was the loaded gun pointed at the head of the plutocracy that forced, for instance, the U.S. government to deal seriously with civil rights, dismantling the legal structure of America’s apartheid regime in the South, limited the success of reactionaries in destroying the strength of unions (which was the biggest cause of the rightwing pigs after WWII), and making it impossible to go back to prewar levels of inequality. Since the Soviet Union fell, the bargaining power of labor across the world has also fallen, resulting in third world levels of inequality in the U.S. – for instance – and the entrenchment of an ever more anti-democratic, ever more corrupt, ever more aggressive oligarchy. Without an international labor movement that can challenge international Capital, these trends will continue.
As for Kamm, vicious doesn’t really describe the guy. Twittish is more like it. His is the very mug of Nu Labour as it collapses – all of Tony Blair’s unctuousness, none of Blair’s charm. A Uriah Heep figure for our time.
John Meredith #20: In the USSR the regime continued as Lenin and Stalin created it until it collapsed under the weight of its own crimes.
That is not true. Someone already mentioned the 20th Congress and Khrushchev’s denunciation and rejection of stalinism. GULAG was dismantled, many victims rehabilitated.
And that’s as long ago as the second half of the 1950s and the 60s; before the civil rights movement in the US, where in the South a person with dark skin still wasn’t allowed to use white-man’s toilet.
Sure, the experiment failed eventually, but not because of any crimes, just the lousy economic system.
John (Meredith), you’re right about the euphemism of ‘eliminating the kulaks as a class’. Only someone who wanted to believe in the inherent goodness of the USSR would accept ‘as a class’ as a meaningful qualification.
But Jimmy’s point about the coda to The Lives of Others should have been obvious, if you’ve seen the film. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the DDR regime, like anything having to do with human beings, was bittersweet.
I know at close second-hand the pressure that liberal democracy put on former East Germans; I was an exchange student to Germany in 1985-86 with a family, the mother of which had two brothers who were allowed to emigrate from East Germany with their families and stayed with us while they got their lives re-started. I watched that experience almost destroy one of the families.
And I visited Dresden in 1992 and got to see firsthand the number of people driving around in their brand-new Audis and Volkswagens (which they bought with the pocket-money they got from their new federal government) but who lived in 500-square-foot apartments in huge faceless complexes (when they didn’t live in crumbling townhouses in the older districts not graced with concrete and steel makeovers) and who were out of work and on the dole because they had the misfortune of being trained to work in industries whose local facilities were obsolete.
The abolition of a dictatorship is always a good thing. But the dislocation, the frustration, the disappointment, and the risks to welfare and material security that came with reunification and the integration of economies were and are real.
And the Germanies had it relatively good; there was no ‘West Russia’ or ‘West Rumania’ waiting to throw money and garlands of flowers at the newly-freed masses. Talk to a pensioner in Moscow who barely gets enough calories in the day to stay alive and watches the new mafioso barreling around the streets in their black Mercedes, or a 22-year-old woman from Suceava tricked by an offer of domestic work into concubinage in Istanbul, and you might have some small idea of why people miss what they felt was the security of the past.
“That is not true. Someone already mentioned the 20th Congress and Khrushchev’s denunciation and rejection of stalinism. GULAG was dismantled, many victims rehabilitated.”
Abb1, the state apparatus continued almost unchanged despite the cutting back on murder. It was a slave state right until the end. The comparison with the US is ludicrous. What happened, do you imagine, to human rights activists in the USSR in the 1980s? You don’t have to imagine, of course, you can just find out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov
“you might have some small idea of why people miss what they felt was the security of the past.”
Of course I realise that nostalgia can be a powerful and dangerous force. The fantasy of a former golden time is tempting when things are hard. But that is what it is, fantasy. Security and prosperity in the former USSR depended entirely on the goodwill of a deeply corrupt political class. And did you ever wonder how those criminal gangs formed so fast? Who do you think was running the enormous black economy before the fall of the Berlin wall?
“The Soviet block didn’t benefit Russian workers very well, but it sure as hell benefited the West’s workers – it was the loaded gun pointed at the head of the plutocracy that forced, for instance, the U.S. government to deal seriously with civil rights”
Tosh. The US government had to deal seriously with the civil right movement because the civil rights movement applied such huge and constant pressure. The idea that moral pressure was exerted from the USSR is daft and insulting to the brave people who really did force the changes.
You know as well as I do that ‘deportation’ meant death for thousands and the complete destitution and immiseration of thousands more.
That is not true. ‘Deportation’ meant ‘relocation’. Many of those deported ended up living quite well.
I personally know a number of ethnic Germans whose parents or grandparents were deported to Kazakhstan. They lived there, didn’t suffer at all. In the 90s they moved to Germany and now a fair number of them (especially the older people) are unhappy, disillusioned, disappointed, and are moving back to Kazakhstan.
It does seem odd that Miliband gets condemnation for opposing the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, while the entire American foreign policy establishment gets off the hook.
What happened, do you imagine, to human rights activists in the USSR in the 1980s?
Andrei Sakharov was lucky. What happened to civil rights activists in the US in the 1960 and 70? Bullet in the head, usually.
Meredith, obviously you know nothing at all about the history of the civil rights movement or the Cold War. But good try with that “brave people” crack. Some of those brave people were communists, one of the first groups to organize for civil rights in the South. If you don’t believe me, re-read the speeches of your hero, Ronald Reagan.
There’s simply no question that the U.S. government took all its steps – from Truman’s desegregation of the military to Johnson’s work for the Civil Rights bills of 1965 – with one eye on world opinion, and in particular, on the real fear that the Soviet’s would use endemic American racism to their advantage in the Cold War struggle.
However, nice imitation of Kamm’s smug, insufferable style. Sort of the Tory Humpty Dumpty approach.
“Andrei Sakharov was lucky. What happened to civil rights activists in the US in the 1960 and 70? Bullet in the head, usually.”
But I bet he didn’t feel lucky. Do you consider Aung San Suu Kyi lucky too?
“What happened to civil rights activists in the US in the 1960 and 70? Bullet in the head, usually.”
And government oppositionists in the USSR?
“It does seem odd that Miliband gets condemnation for opposing the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, while the entire American foreign policy establishment gets off the hook.”
I don’t really see that anyone gets off the hook, it’s just that the subject is Miliband.
“One could argue – one could certainly have argued in 1980 – that they included literacy, universal health care, universal social security, racial tolerance, and controlling violent crime…”
Racial tolerance? Seriously? In a country where your nationality as “Jew” was recorded in your internal passport? (Yes, it did cause a lot of problems for a friend in hte Breznev years….although I will admit that I only met him in the Yeltsin ones.)
And of course the other things didn’t get better between 1917 and 1980 in countries that didn’t enjoy state capitalism?
Just as the presence of various leninists and other unpleasant types of leftists are convenient for people like Kamm, people like Kamm is convenient the genuinely indecent leftists, and their apologists.
The difference is that the leftists are mostly harmless, at least for the foreseeable future, and people like Kamm (as a class, he personally isn’t very important) isn’t.
John, I’ll give you credit for moving away from the position that any observation that the transition from command-economy authoritarianism to capitalist liberal democracy was hard is tantamount to a ‘celebration of the social gains of communism’.
But not too much credit. The ‘fantasies’ that motivate recrudescent communist and nationalist movements in the former East bloc aren’t pulling their ideas and appeals out of thin air. Even a change from a worse alternative to a better one means often enough sacrificing some values—in this case, a minimal level of social predictability and material security for a large number of citizens—that are not subsumed in the values for which one opts. How fragile those values were, how dependent on the ‘goodwill of a deeply corrupt political class’ they were, is more obvious to us perhaps than to those suffering under the new state of affairs. (And we at least in the US should be careful about carelessly throwing around comments about the ‘goodwill of a deeply corrupt political class’.)
Arguments of the form x is very bad; y is not x, therefore y is unqualifiedly good (or: y’s flaws aren’t worth taking seriously) are easy to remember and apply but yield stupid conclusions.
“That is not true. ‘Deportation’ meant ‘relocation’. Many of those deported ended up living quite well.”
Abb1, you need to read some different accounts. Of course some people got away more lightly than others, but on the whole the deportations were deeply traumatic and deadly for thousands. Destroying a social class is rarely going to be friendly. I notice that you have changed the subject from the tens of thousands that were killed outright and we haven’t even begun to mention the ex-Kulak persecutions that executed thousands more and sent further thousands into the gulags. Why try to present this in a good light? What is the point?
Aung San Suu Kyi – huh?
But how do you think somebody like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton>Fred Hampton felt, compared to Saint Sakharov, who never suffered any physical harm whatsoever? For that matter, probably never had to skip a meal because of his anti-government activism.
“In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals.”
Nice gotcha, as long as you’re arguing with Kamm. But are the people Kamm admires (and I don’t know who they are) actually very admirable?
It’s a veritable anti-communist convention, I see. Some points, directed at various comments:
1. I most certainly didn’t claim that the very real social achievements of the state capitalist systems justified their repressive nature. In fact, I explicitly stated the opposite. I for one am happy that Stalinism collapsed, although I’m very unhappy about its replacement.
2. The Soviet satellites are only a tiny part of the real-existing socialist world. We have gone over this before, but only a fool could doubt that social progress in Cuba was faster and more general than in the US-supported feudal-capitalist nations of the Caribbean and Central America; or that social progress in Vietnam was superior to that in Indonesia.
3. The defenders of the US ignore, as usual, the immense violence meted out by US imperialism outside the developed world. In fact, tankism and Soviet imperialism never came close to doing the damage US imperialism did and continues to inflict. (I stand by the old slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international Socialism.”)
4. Sneaking in claims that Stalinism was a necessary consequence of the Bolshevik revolution doesn’t make that claim correct. It most certainly wasn’t.
5. Finally, to get back on topic, if you had actually read Miliband you would know that he was very aware of the evils of Stalinism.
“The ‘fantasies’ that motivate recrudescent communist and nationalist movements in the former East bloc aren’t pulling their ideas and appeals out of thin air.”
Yes they are. The stability and prosperity they claim did not exist except for a tight, privileged class. The system was not surrendered it, it collapsed because it was bankrupt
“And we at least in the US should be careful about carelessly throwing around comments about the ‘goodwill of a deeply corrupt political class’.”
That is just the sort of bogus equivalence that will always lead you astray. When did you last feel the need to be polite about the President in order to protect the life prospects of your children?
The relatives I just visited in the Ukraine are still telling stories about people being arbitrarily shot in the ‘80s.
John, you were arguing that – at least this is what it sounds like to me – that “eliminating as a class” meant killing all the members of this class. No matter how you slice it, this simply is not the case, not true, not even close. End of story.
Abb1, your link doesn’t work but your comments about Sakharov are childish. I doubt you really imagine that house arrest by the KGB was a picnic and I am sure you really are aware that millions of others were murdered by the regime. I am mystified why you would want to offer any sort of defence of the treatment of men like Sakharov. Did a kulak say something rude about your mother or something?
What happened to civil rights activists in the US in the 1960 and 70? Bullet in the head, usually.
“Usually?” That’s really silly.
“John, you were arguing that – at least this is what it sounds like to me – that “eliminating as a class” meant killing all the members of this class.”
No, I am arguing that it should have been obvious that this meant lots of Kulaks would be killed and tens of thousands of them were. Even Stalin could not kill every one, although if he had had 20 more years, I am sure he would have tried with Brezhnev, as ever, working hard to keep up with the old man.
On the specific issue that Miliband is writing about he was clearly, with the benefit of 20-20 hindisght, mistaken. The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge was a Good Thing. However the points he is making in the excerpt cited are not, in themselves, unreasonable.
War is not a panacea. The Military Intervention Fairy will not, necessarily, wave her magic wand and make the Bad People go away. If the Khmer Rouge had been a common or garden tyranny there would, after all, be a very strong case for saying the invasion was a mistake as the consequence was a civil war which lasted for eleven years. Or, as Miliband himself put it:
Like the Russians in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese have been drawn into a permanent struggle with Kampuchean guerillas, with the usual accompaniment of repression and the killing of innocent civilians. The invasion has also weakened Vietnam’s international position, and strengthened reactionary forces in the region and beyond. Here too, it does not seem unreasonable to ask ‘What kind of security is this?’”
Sound familiar? It isn’t difficult to see why Kamm might find this line of thought objectionable.
“Nice gotcha, as long as you’re arguing with Kamm.”
Not really since Ralph Miliband is one of the ones whom Kamm respects, albeit with reservations:
“he late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, is a man for whom I have a certain intellectual respect leavened with real contempt.”
Well, my last comment is “awaiting moderation”, probably because it’s lengthy. John, your defense of the US as morally superior is pathetic. You ignore, as is usual for such defenses, the violence inflicted by US imperialism world-wide.
It’s certainly correct that a US citizen is less likely to be killed by his or her government than a Soviet citizen was. But it is also correct that a random human being is much more likely to be killed by agents of the US government than they were being killed by agents of the Soviet Union.
John Meredith: You’re so vehemently arguing that socialist states did not have anything good in them that I can only conclude it’s personal for you… Which must mean you’ve lived in one. But by the total cluelessness of your arguments, I can see that this is not the case. This means you’re playing a provocateur’s game…
If you haven’t actually lived in the USSR or other socialist states, it’s hard to claim intimate and detailed knowledge of the situation there. For example, don’t claim that universal health care wasn’t there. It was and it partially still is – Russian medicine is still better than most Western countries. So is Cuban! And here I’m not talking about having 10 MRI machines per hospital. I’m talking about the doctors’ ability to actually help a patient – in the West it’s usually limited to (a) it’ll pass, or (b) have some antibiotics… ;-)
And another comment in general – please, stop using examples to justify general arguments! A story from a friend or a distant aunt doesn’t actually tell us anything about the situation at large…
John, I just want to let you know that your rant sounds to me like the exact equivalent of Jeremiah Wrights’ in those video clips. Not that anything is wrong with that; I can see that you too are genuinely outraged.
Cheers.
“It’s certainly correct that a US citizen is less likely to be killed by his or her government than a Soviet citizen was. But it is also correct that a random human being is much more likely to be killed by agents of the US government than they were being killed by agents of the Soviet Union.”
I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘random human being’, but whatever it is I suspect that a fair number of people would disagree with you in the Ukrain, Byelorussia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbijan, Lithuania, Moldavia, Latvia, Khirgizstan, Tajikstan, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Estonia, for example. 20 million or so killed by agents of the Soviet state there. What was the tally for the US?
“I can see that you too are genuinely outraged.”
I am. I am only surprised that you are not. If the US government killed 10,000 small farmers in Alabama based on how many pigs they owned and ‘deported’ the rest to Alaska, however, I think you too would recognise it as a crime and would not feel moved to offer mitigations.
I think that you’re adopting a Manichean attitude john. If I can summarize the matter in which you are coming across: you appear to be claiming that communism was pure evil, it was always evident that it was pure evil, and anyone who disagrees is in favor of genocide and an all-around bad person.
There was an underlying ideology that a lot of people found appealing. Communism arose as a response to very specific – and in many cases horrific – defects in the capitalist system. There were other choices, of course, like the regulated market (and socialist safety net) that characterizes the western world today.
It proved in practice to have a set of pathologies, and in particular the universal one associated with de facto dictatorships – namely, that the personality and character of the dictator determines the outcome, and they can be bad indeed with a sociopath at the helm. Eventually the ideology itself imploded.
It’s simply poor scholarship, or dishonest hack work, to take writings out of the context of their time. The train of logical thought that Chris is referring to is roughly comparable to the gits who periodically complain about Huckleberry Finn – on the grounds that it has racist language. It portrays people using the actual language that they did use, and the racists in the book do not come across well. We’re looking at a similar misreading of Miliband.
John, this is probably pointless, but I’ll give it another go: People suffering now, under a new system, who remember—in ways both meaningful and accurate—not having things so badly under the old system, are not delusional. People who point this out to dunderheads who insist that anything short of lockstep admiration for the new system are not glorifying the old or covering over its crimes.
And who said anything about ‘equivalence’? I merely pointed out that we in a country whose government makes light of the lies it tells its citizens, routinely violates national and international laws and refuses to account for its behavior before legislative or judicial inquiry, staffs the government with political appointees who run federal agencies as extensions of political parties and funnel federal money into the hands of their allies—all surrounded by an extensive network of lobbyists and spin artists, and all reported on by a class of political journalists who worship the powerful and who can’t be bothered to tell fact from fiction if the truth inconveniences anyone who could deprive them of their status—should take a couple breaths before we start complaining about the corruption of others.
Maybe I don’t have to worry about being ‘polite’ about the President to protect the life chances of my family. But I often wonder—just to mention two examples—how the lawyers advising the inmates at Guantanamo are watching what they say to their clients, and what sorts of things make it impossible for you to board an aircraft in the United States. I don’t think living in the US is the same as living under Stalin or Honnecker or Ceauşescu, but I often worry it’s not different enough.
First off, John, you shouldn’t get your numbers from “The black book of communism”. Not everyone killed in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1945, say, was actually a victim of the Soviet system.
Also, if I only counted those killed in the US (like you only count people killed on soviet territory) then maybe you’d agree that someone living in the US is, and always has been, more likely to be killed by the US government than by the Soviet government. That’s precisely the point – you simply ignore millions murdered by the US because they are brown people.
Anyway, you might want to talk to some people in Iraq, Indonesia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mosambique, the Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Lebanon, and other places.
s/b ‘who insist that anything short of lockstep admiration for the new system is a betrayal‘. Please bring back the preview!
If the US government killed 10,000 small farmers in Alabama based on how many pigs they owned and ‘deported’ the rest to Alaska, however, I think you too would recognise it as a crime and would not feel moved to offer mitigations.
The US government did kill 10,000 small farmers in Alabama, it happened during the civil war. Same underlying reason – industrial revolution, radical change of the economic system. People in Alabama still remember it and many of them are still quite unhappy about it.
Chris, I’m no admirer of Oliver Kamm, but there seems to be a implicit condemnation of Miliband pere in that. After all, the year before (1979) ITV had broadcast a documentary by John Pilger.
Despite that embargo, Cambodia (Year Zero) is available on Google Video. IIRC after 29 years, the reports Miliband didn’t believe all of included Pilger with a pile of skulls. At the time, again IIRC, Pilger was a Mirror journalist – he’s still too much of a fellow traveller for a certain section of the blogosphere. He criticised US foreign policy, so it’s not like he was some black propaganda spreading bogey man.
Perhaps R Miliband missed it. Or perhaps he was willfully ignorant.
Having said all that, Kamm’s penchant for writing ill of the dead is indeed nasty. The best defence I can think of is “Oh come on, it’s not as bad a genocide.”
Maurice, your need to impute stupidity or cupidity to anyone who disagrees with you is indicative of how ideology has closed your mind tight. Of course some people lost out in the transition from the slave state of the USSR to the gangster state of Putin. Nonetheless they are wrong when they claim that the USSR was economically or morally viable, at best fantasists and at worst cynical political operators. Of course, the ones who lost most and who had most invested the the previous system tended to belong to the deeply corrupt political class who managed the system at the expense of the oppressed millions.
And who brough up equivalence? You did. If the faults in the political system in the US are such that you should not feel justified in criticising the USSR, you are suggesting that the faults are equivalent to some significant degree.
You don’t think life in the US is different enough from living under Ceaucescu? Good grief. You either lack information or imagination. Still, you must at very least notice that you are entitled to mention your concerns. Did you hesitate for a moment before making that remark whether or not you and your family would be arrested or killed in consequence? That’s how different it is.
“The US government did kill 10,000 small farmers in Alabama, it happened during the civil war. ”
Abb1, grow up.
John still ignoring the fact that while we can freely condemn the US here, it may well be different for someone in Iraq.
Also, you just proved you know nothing about Russia at all – after all, you seem to claim that the former Party functionaries are the people who suffered most in the transition to private capitalism. That’s completely incorrect. It is the workers and peasants, the classes oppressed in the Soviet Union, who suffered most and are still oppressed.
“Anyway, you might want to talk to some people in Iraq, Indonesia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mosambique, the Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Lebanon, and other places.”
How many killed by the in total in those countries by the US? And are we including all war dead in tallies? Does that look better or worse for the USSR, do you think?
“The US government did kill 10,000 small farmers in Alabama, it happened during the civil war. ”
Abb1, grow up.
Well, you certainly have Kamm’s no-nothing dismissive tone down pat.
“John still ignoring the fact that while we can freely condemn the US here, it may well be different for someone in Iraq.”
No newspapers in Iraq that are openly critical of the US? No bloggers?
John Meredith: You’re so vehemently arguing that socialist states did not have anything good in them that I can only conclude it’s personal for you… Which must mean you’ve lived in one. But by the total cluelessness of your arguments, I can see that this is not the case. This means you’re playing a cynical political operator’s game…
If you haven’t actually lived in the USSR or other socialist states, it’s hard to claim intimate and detailed knowledge of the situation there. For example, don’t claim that universal health care wasn’t there. It was and it partially still is – Russian medicine is still better than most Western countries. So is Cuban! And here I’m not talking about having 10 MRI machines per hospital. I’m talking about the doctors’ ability to actually help a patient – in the West it’s usually limited to (a) it’ll pass, or (b) have some antibiotics… ;-)
And another comment in general – please, stop using examples to justify general arguments! A story from a friend or a distant aunt doesn’t actually tell us anything about the situation at large…
I don’t think living in the US is the same as living under Stalin or Honnecker or Ceauşescu, but I often worry it’s not different enough.
There’s no arguing with this kind of lunacy.
(Of course the “Abb1 grow up” should also have been italicized.)
How many killed by the in total in those countries by the US? And are we including all war dead in tallies? Does that look better or worse for the USSR, do you think?
Jesus. Do I understand correctly that you find the victims of US imperialism to be of no account provided it turns out there were fewer than you imagine the Stalinists murdered? You really are the worst moral relativist I’ve ever encountered.
How many killed by the in total in those countries by the US?
Alrighty then: perhaps you prefer “Killed by regimes propped up, if not installed outright, at the behest of the US government, and backed up with the firepower of the US military.” If that’s a meaningful distinction to you, you truly are a moral wretch.
John, the sort of dualist thinking that you’re displaying is precisely the root cause of the atrocities you condemn.
Sorry, John. I tried my best, but my hysteria dial only goes up to about 2 or 3, so I’ll have to stop. I should have known better.
But, on the bright side, if the folks over at The Encyclopedia of Decency ever decide to make an online bingo game with their list of argument tactics, I’m going to use your posts to fill in my card.
“It is the workers and peasants, the classes oppressed in the Soviet Union, who suffered most and are still oppressed.”
Blimey, the peasants. Still there after 50 years of Marxist-Leninist progress. They rarely get a good deal but I have a feeling that there are not too many of them longing for another bout of de-Kulakisation.
John Meredith: “because someone in Iraq criticizes the US occupation, they are free to do so.”
Unbelievable. Remember when they shut down Sadrist newspapers? And the million or so dead, you’ll just continue to ignore them because they kind of undermine your absurd defense of US goodness?
“Jesus. Do I understand correctly that you find the victims of US imperialism to be of no account”
No, you understand incorrectly. I simply object to you using them as a subject-changing device in order to help you apologise for the crimes of the USSR. The moral relativist here is not me.
“Sorry, John. I tried my best”
No need to apologise Maurice, your best was unlikely to be good enough given the weakness of your position. At least you learned a bit of civility along the way.
Blimey, the peasants. Still there after 50 years of Marxist-Leninist progress. They rarely get a good deal but I have a feeling that there are not too many of them longing for another bout of de-Kulakisation.
John, I’d like to know if you still claim that the ones “who suffered most” from the transition to private capitalism in the former Soviet Union are former Party grandees. Like Putin, for example.
It’s just complete crap, and you know it. Childish jokes don’t change this.
“Unbelievable. Remember when they shut down Sadrist newspapers? ”
Yes I do, but they did not shut down all dissident opinion, only calls to violence (illegal in the UK too, by the way). You do not think these details are important but people living in oppressive regimes do.
@cjcjc, #64: Remember this joke?
A man falls off the top of a 100-story building. As he passes the 75th floor or so, a window-washer on a scaffold sees him and asks how he’s doing.
‘Pretty good, so far,’ the man replies.
I simply object to you using them as a subject-changing device in order to help you apologise for the crimes of the USSR.
I did not, at any time, apologize for the crimes of the USSR. If you want to claim so, please quote my apologia. If you can’t do that, shut up.
“John, I’d like to know if you still claim that the ones “who suffered most” from the transition to private capitalism in the former Soviet Union are former Party grandees.”
I have never claimed that. The quote is your own. I said that the apparatchiks had the most invested in the previous system and lost most when it was dismantled. That is not meant to suggest that many of them did not plunder the new state freely, of course, nor that they were well placed to do so if they were in the upper echeleons.
Maurice, if we are plunging headlong into totalitarianism, at least you can console yourself with the the thought of the social gains that will accompany the inevitable losses, surely?
I said that the apparatchiks had the most invested in the previous system and lost most when it was dismantled.
This is simply not true. As a class, the apparatchiks most definitely didn’t “lose most.”
I note, with something approaching despair, the monumental irrelevance of many many comments above to the text of the post. Miliband may have been many things, but he wasn’t a wholesale apologist for the Soviet system as a perusal of his writings including the paper under discussion would make clear.
“Miliband may have been many things, but he wasn’t a wholesale apologist for the Soviet system”
Well no, but he was some kind of apologist for the Soviet system even as late as 1980, wasn’t he? Not wholesale, and not without serious reservations, but still. And that is quite shocking to some people.
John, by “apologist”, do you mean eg. somebody who regards statements like
as so much moronic ideological guff? If so, then you are going to have to face up the fact that many people in the world, who do not share your Daily Mail approach to historical understanding, are “apologists” of one form or another.
Putting things in perspective is not the same as wholesale apologetics. It is important to understand the nature of a phenomenon under discussion, otherwise all you get is meaningless ravings. We can denounce Yankee Imperialism, Soviet Communism, Religious Fundamentalism and all the rest of them isms, but what’s the point?
If the US government killed 10,000 small farmers in Alabama based on how many pigs they owned and ‘deported’ the rest to Alaska, however, I think you too would recognise it as a crime and would not feel moved to offer mitigations.
I’m hazy on the details, but wasn’t there some historical period when the US government killed rather large numbers of people and ‘deported’ the rest to inhospitable ‘reservations’ at gunpoint?
Oh and #66 (Dave W.) IIRC, and I may not, issues of Socialist Register often appeared just before their year. So it may be that the 1980 issue appeared in 1979. I imagine that give the production lead times for books (especially in those days) the copy deadline was some time in 1979, so it may well be that Miliband submitted his piece before Pilger’s documentary appeared.
“There was an underlying ideology that a lot of people found appealing. Communism arose as a response to very specific – and in many cases horrific – defects in the capitalist system. There were other choices, of course, like the regulated market (and socialist safety net) that characterizes the western world today.
It proved in practice to have a set of pathologies, and in particular the universal one associated with de facto dictatorships – namely, that the personality and character of the dictator determines the outcome, and they can be bad indeed with a sociopath at the helm. Eventually the ideology itself imploded.
It’s simply poor scholarship, or dishonest hack work, to take writings out of the context of their time.”
Right, communism was essentially a religion. Analysis of it has to be done with that in mind. Analysis of the writings of religious adherents have to be done with the fact of their religiosity in mind. It would be nice however, if we could stick to a single standard of analysis when looking at the writings of followers of Hinduism, Christianity or Communism. But for the most part people treat the religion they are comfortable with lightly and the ones they aren’t comfortable with harshly.
“The US government did kill 10,000 small farmers in Alabama, it happened during the civil war. Same underlying reason – industrial revolution, radical change of the economic system.”
Oh good, abb1 buys into the modern racist Confederate explanation for the American Civil War. Certainly couldn’t have been about slavery of black people and the extension of said practice into new states. Nope, nothing to see there.
Christian H—”It’s certainly correct that a US citizen is less likely to be killed by his or her government than a Soviet citizen was. But it is also correct that a random human being is much more likely to be killed by agents of the US government than they were being killed by agents of the Soviet Union.”
This seems muddled. You are going to have to get specific if you want to support this. My back-of-envelope calculation is that you would be hard pressed to add the entire sum total of American ‘imperialist’ deaths in the last 100 years and get even to Stalin’s totals in his worst 5 years. And once you start throwing in everything and the kitchen sink (WWII?, attributing every death in South Africa in the 1980s?, Palestinian deaths?,) any even-handed application of such standard to the USSR gets you worse for them on almost every single point(African meddling for instance)—and far worse in the aggregate.
So I strongly suspect you are wrong.
The perfect antidote to this thread would be one on Israel. Those always generate a lot of light, and very little heat.
“but wasn’t there some historical period when the US government killed rather large numbers of people and ‘deported’ the rest to inhospitable ‘reservations’ at gunpoint?”
Did the US government actually kill “rather large numbers of people” during the Indian Wars? Three hundred people died at Wounded Knee, which is generally held to be the most egregious massacre committed by US troops against Indians. And 150-200 people died in the similarly appalling Sand Creek massacre. Those aren’t insignificant numbers, but don’t they suggest that the total number of Indians killed by US troops was in the low thousands?
Sebastian, the ideological justification/pretext for liquidating the kulak-ness is no different than the one for the civil war. You see, from the angle of revolutionary marxism the kulaks were exploiters, exploiter class – they owned means of production, extracted rent, hired workers, etc. For a revolutionary marxist this sort of thing is the same as slavery, just a more modern variety. I think the civil war is a very close analogy, actually.
“Sebastian, the ideological justification/pretext for liquidating the kulak-ness is no different than the one for the civil war.”
You’ll have to get beyond generalities on this one, because I’m not understanding you. First you claim that the reason for the US Civil War was “industrial revolution, radical change of the economic system.” That, or the issue of actual slavery. Which you seem not to notice.
“For a revolutionary marxist this sort of thing is the same as slavery, just a more modern variety.”
With a sufficient number of prefixes anything sounds reasonable if we’re going to be relativist about it.
“You see, from the angle of revolutionary marxism the kulaks were exploiters, exploiter class – they owned means of production, extracted rent, hired workers, etc.”
Right, and for sufficiently maximalist definitions of ‘exploiter’ you can make anything equivalent to the US Civil War. Some pro-lifers think that women discard fetuses at a whim. Very exploitive, clearly just like the underpinnings of the Civil War. Pro-choicers frame it that pro-lifers want to exploit women as baby factories. Clearly exploitive and therefore just like the underpinnings of the US Civil War. And frankly both of those sides have a better argument than Communists did about the kulaks. (Which is to say the abortion argument would be ridiculous, and the argument about the kulaks is even more so.)
I am not defending communist argument, I’m simply trying to explain. It is what it is. The big idea is to end all exploitation, liquidating exploiter classes is the way, the only way to achieve it. It’s a radical ideology. You can go thru the same exercise with ‘liberty’ or with ‘the nation’, or with the abortions, if you want.
And there’s also the underlying structural reason: industrial revolution, different mode of production, the peasants have to get off the land and into the factories. Ideology serves to provide justification for it.
sebastian, cut the nonsense. Exploitation of labor is very specific, it’s not just a vague notion of “treating someone badly.”
And are you actually claiming that the Kulaks did not exploit the labor of the rural poor? Is that because you just don’t think there is a such a thing as exploitation of wage labor, or do you have some specific information to share about the great way the Kulaks treated their field workers?
Sebastian, when abb1 writes “same underlying reason – industrial revolution, radical change of the economic system,” I don’t think you’re entitled to characterize this as “the modern racist Confederate explanation for the American Civil War,” which “certainly couldn’t have been about slavery of black people and the extension of said practice into new states.” Yes, the war was about slavery, but not slavery as a moral abomination, rather slavery as a form of labor relations that undermined wage labor. This, I think, is what abb1 meant, and there’s certainly nothing racist about it. It’s also highly plausible.
the other side of this coin is a typical discussion of slavery and racial discrimination in the US - does it cancel everything else, does it forever discredit the whole idea of the US of A?
Yes it does, the idea that is. If by “the whole idea of the US” one means that our society is built on freedom, fairness, equal representation and so on. Coming to understand then that our system is dependent on enslaving others, first in the American South, then in the third world, does indeed pull back the mask to reveal the monster within.
Capitalism is a heat engine. It cannot function without a pre-existing power gradient. It cannot help but to completely consume it’s fuel. Sometimes that means people. One can accept that fact as just the way of the world and make one’s peace with it or not I suppose.
Thanks Chris; that’s a very fair answer, and I confess that I hadn’t considered that. I considered a year to be enough of a difference, but of course some journals appear before their cover date.
I’ll confess a second omission on my part while I’m here. I didn’t follow the link to the lse site on Oliver Kamm’s blog. However, David Miliband will be on Newsnight to discuss his lecture. Jeebus! He named it after his father. Ralph’s ideas do not come into it at all. It was just an excuse for OK to be nasty about yet another dead guy. And a pretty insensitive excuse at that. I don’t much care for DM, but I have lost a father. If the Foreign Secretary wants to honour his late dad, he should be allowed to do so without insult. However, his policies are perfectly fair grounds for critique.
John, it seems to me you’re slithering away from a point made by several people here. There was something of a social safety net in Soviet-style totalitarian regimes, which included free health care and education, full employment, and some degree of protection against random criminal violence (as opposed to systematic state violence, which may have been even worse in quantity but was at least more predictable). To acknowledge this is not at all to “apologize” for such regimes.
“Exploitation of labor is very specific, it’s not just a vague notion of “treating someone badly.””
And it also isn’t slavery, which is something very specific and not just a vague notion of “exploiting someone’s labor”. Which is why I objected to the characterization of it essentially being the same thing.
“Yes, the war was about slavery, but not slavery as a moral abomination, rather slavery as a form of labor relations that undermined wage labor.”
If you are going to assert that the US Civil War was fought over ‘undermined wage labor’ I would like to see some serious cites.
“This, I think, is what abb1 meant, and there’s certainly nothing racist about it. It’s also highly plausible.”
And if you want me to believe that part, the cites probably shouldn’t be to certain Southern apologists.
“There was something of a social safety net in Soviet-style totalitarian regimes, which included free health care and education, full employment, and some degree of protection against random criminal violence (as opposed to systematic state violence, which may have been even worse in quantity but was at least more predictable). To acknowledge this is not at all to “apologize” for such regimes.”
It is apologizing for them because it isn’t particularly accurate. The good free health care and education was to Party members only. The rest was generally at or below the level that a walk-in would get at an emergency room in the US if they didn’t have insurance. There were hours-long lines for bread. Are you seriously picturing a happy walk-in health clinic?
Full employment doesn’t mean the same thing you think it does when the money you earn can’t buy a non-Party member bread without having your mother wait in line all day.
Some degree of protection against random criminal violence? If you co-opt the criminals into the government where is the comfort in that?
(as opposed to systematic state violence, which may have been even worse in quantity but was at least more predictable)?
Are you serious? The purges were almost the epitome of unpredictable. You could be favored one day and off to the gulag the next. You could have a fight with a neighbor over the fence line and if they got your name to the right person as a capitalist you could be dead within a week.
To fail to acknowledge that, is something, but I’m not sure what the word is.
It’s a Ralph Miliband Programme lecture, all David Miliband’s done is agree to deliver it (along with Marxists like John Browne…) and Kamm would know that.
Sebastian: If you are going to assert that the US Civil War was fought over ‘undermined wage labor’ I would like to see some serious cites.
See Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. I also find Charles Beard more plausible than most historians nowadays do. But the main thing is not whether Foner and Beard are correct but whether such non-moral explanations for the Civil War are “racist” and “Confederate,” as you intemperately claimed. I think you owe abb1 an apology.
Are you seriously picturing a happy walk-in health clinic?
No, I’m not, merely suggesting that what was in place was at least arguably better than what has resulted, for many people, from the replacement of Soviet totalitarianism with a considerable degree of anarchy and gangsterism.
Yes, the war was about slavery, but not slavery as a moral abomination, rather slavery as a form of labor relations that undermined wage labor.
What in the world does this mean? Were there droves of northerners looking to go south and pick cotton for a living who were prevented from doing so by the presence of slaves?
And are you actually claiming that the Kulaks did not exploit the labor of the rural poor?
And even if they did, are you suggesting that the Stalinist approach was an acceptable solution to the problem?
On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief.
Yeah, poor misguided Miliband, clinging to the false belief that various social gains and sticking it to the capitalist aggressor could somehow outweigh the lack of democracy. But then that was a very long time ago and he’s dead. Certainly nobody in his right mind would try to make such a case today – oh wait, not so fast:
So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!
bernard, don’t shift the goalposts. Of course I didn’t suggest the Stalinist approach was acceptable. Sebastian, on the other hand, clearly suggested that saying the Kulaks exploited rural labor is less reasonable than claiming that legal abortion is “exploitive” (of whom he doesn’t bother stating). This what I answered.
As for the causes of the civil war, are you saying that it was forced upon the US by masses of anti-slavery activists invading the Confederacy on their own?
It doesn’t matter what the Union soldiers believed they were fighting for, it matters what the Northern ruling class had them fighting for.
And that was a complicated mix of issues, of which moral outrage at slavery was likely a small part, and economic rivalry rooted in the contradictions between the Southern, slavery-based economy and the Northern, wage-labor based one quite a significant one.
Since the supposed freedom of Iraq has come up, I suppose it should be pointed out that Iraq is generally considered unfree owing to the foreign military presence and pervasive atmosphere of violence and corruption. Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that ought to need pointing out, but nevertheless.
What in the world does this mean? Were there droves of northerners looking to go south and pick cotton for a living who were prevented from doing so by the presence of slaves?
Devastatingly witty, Bernard. No, it means that the character of economic development in the West was at stake: either a plantation system with slave labor or a capitalist system with independent farmers and tradesmen as well as large manufacturers employing laborers.
What, by the way, do you think that Lincoln meant by: “This Union cannot endure half-slave and half-free”? He was certainly not making a moral case against slavery, whatever his personal dislike of the institution. Would you have aimed a similar sarcasm at him?
There were hours-long lines for bread.
There were no lines for bread. One thing they always had enough is bread. They made it a point to always have bread. If there was a hours-long line for bread somewhere, the apparatchik responsible would’ve definitely lost his job.
Medical care: they had walk-in clinics, something like permanence in Switzerland. You would have to wait, but usually not for hours. If you had fever, a doctor would make a house call, same day or the next day. But back in the late 80s the guy I know, who has MS, told me that he had to bribe someone to get an MRI. There was only one MRI machine in Moscow, probably just a few in the whole country. OTOH, they themselves developed laser eye surgery and it was widely available.
According to novakant, Cuba = Stalinist Russia. Given the underpinnings of the cold war notion of “totalitarianism” I think we can invoke Godwin’s law here.
On Miliband he made it clear his belief was that a whole range of liberal, if you will, rights should be up-held under socialism, see e.g. his postumous ‘Socialism for a Crippled World’
Way back in these posts was the not unimportant point that the US continued to recognise KR as the govt after the invasion because Vietnam was a Soviet ally. A bit more important that what Ralph Miliband was writing at the time. No doubt Kamm can convince himself that the US foreign policy establishment was a completely different animal to Bush’s friends today. Whilst we’re on the Cambodian episode, Kamm and other decents could at least be consistent here. If they’re going to drag out old ill-advised quotes they might also have the, if you will, decency to acknowledge that Pilger was on the main Western journalists to expose the killing fields. For all his faults, Pilger risked his neck to expose atrocities there. Hard to see what Kamm is risking to promote human rights.
According to novakant, Cuba = Stalinist Russia. Given the underpinnings of the cold war notion of “totalitarianism” I think we can invoke Godwin’s law here.
According to Miliband:
The Cuban regime is now a repressive dictatorship
of the Soviet-type model.
“Sebastian, on the other hand, clearly suggested that saying the Kulaks exploited rural labor is less reasonable than claiming that legal abortion is “exploitive” (of whom he doesn’t bother stating). This what I answered.”
No. Sebastian clearly suggested that abstracting SLAVERY into the term ‘exploitive’ and then saying that it then made the reasons for wanting to get rid of the kulaks about the same as the alleged economic reasons secretly behind the Civil War was a ridiculous move—akin to abstracting either side of the abortion issue into ‘exploitive’ and justifying a civil war over it.
“And that was a complicated mix of issues, of which moral outrage at slavery was likely a small part, and economic rivalry rooted in the contradictions between the Southern, slavery-based economy and the Northern, wage-labor based one quite a significant one.”
Some people just don’t understand history or economics. It isn’t as if the South was such a scary economic powerhouse because of slavery that the North had to go in and bash it down.
The issue was whether or not slavery should spread to the West. The reason it was an issue was because each new state gets 2 Senators and if they were free states it would mess with the balance of power in the Senate. It wasn’t because slavery made the South an economic powerhouse. It didn’t, and it wasn’t.
That makes the issue essentially slavery. I realize that lots of people (Marxist and non-Marxist) like to pretend that everything is always about economics, but there you are.
I wasn’t trying to be witty, geo. I was trying to figure out what “undermining wage labor” meant. I assumed it meant doing something to hurt those who work for wages. Apparently not, and it’s all about the ruling classes and exploitation and so on.
I can see that the Civil War is a difficult problem. On the one hand there are the slave owners – not a particularly sympathetic group. Indeed, they are almost as bad as the kulaks. On the other it’s necessary to avoid giving any but the most minimal moral standing to the Union. So, a la the southern apologists, it was all about economics.
Christian or abb1, can you explain again why the kulaks had to be killed, rather than simply expropriating their land and redistributing it?
“There’s no arguing with this kind of lunacy.”
This is exactly right and why I’ve pretty much given up on these kinds of topics. Also, somebody needs to put christian h. in a museum.
I can see that the Civil War is a difficult problem. On the one hand there are the slave owners – not a particularly sympathetic group. Indeed, they are almost as bad as the kulaks. On the other it’s necessary to avoid giving any but the most minimal moral standing to the Union. So, a la the southern apologists, it was all about economics.
Surely this is an attempt at wit. (Not wholly unsuccessful, I grudgingly admit.) But seriously, one ought to disaggregate “the Union.” Most Northerners, rich or poor, certainly did not favor going to war to abolish slavery. They went to keep the South in the Union. They would have agreed with Lincoln: “If I could maintain the Union without freeing a single slave, I would do it.” Many in the North hated slavery for moral reasons—as did Lincoln—but that doesn’t mean that that was what the Civil War was about, any more than the fact that many Americans genuinely hated fascist oppression means that the main reason the US entered WWII was to rescue the victims of fascist barbarism, rather than to help beat back a rival alliance seeking global political and economic dominance.
“Russian medicine is still better than most Western countries. ”
I seriously seriously doubt this. I doubt that Russian medicine is better than Polish medicine. And Polish medicine is in no way better than most Western countries. It certainly wasn’t 25 years ago.
Also in these discussions of “universal health care” in this context the Western useful idiots always fail to realize that the “universal” was on paper only much in the same way as “full employment”. Look, France maybe has “universal health care” in some close-to-true sense of that word and it is probably much better than what there is in US. The Soviet bloc and I’m willing to bet Cuba NEVER had “universal health care”. You wanted to see a doctor, or god forbid go to a hospital? You paid buttloads of money to the right person, the doctor, or a friend in the party or whatever. Otherwise you were not treated.
“If that’s a meaningful distinction to you, you truly are a moral wretch.”
It’s helluva lot more meaningful than the distinction between being “eliminated as a class” and just plain “eliminated”.
F. Blair, as I mentioned about a million times already – they weren’t killed, they were deported. At the beginning they, of course, were asked nicely to join the collective farms, but (naturally) most refused and tried to sabotage the campaign. Not that anything’s wrong with that; perfectly natural, I would’ve done the same.
Imagining myself in this situation, if my land and property was expropriated, I would’ve probably felt like, I dunno, maybe setting collective farm’s barn on fire or something. Class struggle, y’know.
And now, imagining myself a collective farm’s boss, I suppose I would want the expropriated guy to be as far away from my farm as possible. Sine the collective farm boss had all the power at that time, this is exactly what happened.
Does it answer your question?
“I’m hazy on the details, but wasn’t there some historical period when the US government killed rather large numbers of people and ‘deported’ the rest to inhospitable ‘reservations’ at gunpoint?”
“”I think you too would recognise it as a crime and would not feel moved to offer mitigations.”
So yes! That’s the freakin’ point. Anyone who refuses to recognize what the US government did to Native Americans as a crime and feels moved to offer mitigations is pretty much the same kind of a scumbag as someone who makes excuses for USSR. Now, of course Grover Cleveland was no Andrew Jackson, just l