A vicious little merchant banker

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.

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).

I posted a link to this article on Kamm’s website. For good or for ill.

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.

“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.

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”.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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?

“’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

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.

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.

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), 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.

“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?

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.

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.

“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?

“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?

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.

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.

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 relatives I just visited in the Ukraine are still telling stories about people being arbitrarily shot in the ’80s.

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?

“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.

“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.”

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…

“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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 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…

(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.

John, the sort of dualist thinking that you’re displaying is precisely the root cause of the atrocities you condemn.

“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.

“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.

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.

@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.

“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.

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.”

“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.

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?

The perfect antidote to this thread would be one on Israel. Those always generate a lot of light, and very little heat.

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.

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, 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.

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.

“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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Christian or abb1, can you explain again why the kulaks had to be killed, rather than simply expropriating their land and redistributing it?

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.

“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”.

“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 like Brezhnev was no Stalin, but it should apply to the 1980’s as well.

As far as the Civil War thing, it’s worth remembering that the South was essentially the aggressor in the conflict.

“On the one hand there are the slave owners – not a particularly sympathetic group. Indeed, they are almost as bad as the kulaks.”

Wait…?!?!? This was said in all seriousness?
Being a Kulak just meant that at some point you might have hired somebody to help you with the harvest (maybe even another “Kulak”). It meant that you sold or purchased grain for seed on credit. It meant that you owned some farm machinery, beyond the very basics. A lot of the time it just plain old meant that somebody didn’t like you and just called you a “Kulak”.

I’m sure there were some “Kulaks” who were exploitative assholes. But most of these folks were pretty much barely above the “dirt poor farmer” level. And common, there were something like between 5 million and 10 million deaths. Were all these people “exploiters”?

Well, since Sebastian is now disavowing his own words, maybe I should quote him, for the museum:

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.

(My emphasis.)

You are saying outright here that claiming that legalizing abortion is exploitation is more reasonable than claiming that large farmers exploited the labor of their farmhands.

Maybe you now wish you didn’t, and just meant to say that slavery is uniquely evil, so that any other form of exploitation can’t compare. (You’d still be wrong, mind.) But that’s not what you wrote. And since I, sadly, can’t read minds, I have to answer your actual words.

notsneaky:
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.

You get the price for the worst non sequitur in this thread. It’s not about “offering mitigation” for specific crimes.

It’s about the fact that you and your cold warrior friends claim that the Soviet Union, and by extension communism, was inherently evil, as shown by the crimes in question, so that nothing positive about it must be mentioned; while at the same time clinging to the ludicrous belief that the US, and liberal capitalism, are inherently good despite their crimes.

(By the way, I prefer being in museum to being on the scrap heap of history, which is where you belong.)

geo,

Thanks for the mild grin.

Certainly we shouldn’t oversimplify, but Marxist sloganeering about ruling classes, duped soldiers, evil industrialists, etc., is at least as much an oversimplification as claims that the war was fought solely out of moral revulsion at slavery.

Notsneaky,

That business about slaveholders and kulaks was a joke, though given the tenor of some of the comments here you can be excused for missing it.

You read this and wonder why people risked their lives trying to scale the Berlin wall.

No you don’t; the USSR was a dictatorship. Nevertheless, all of those achievements are factual, excepting “racial tolerance” (as ANC members who traveled to Soviet Russia discovered).

As I read the linked essay, if you socialism and progressive with capitalism and democracy it reads like any current anti-interventionist argument. As such, it actually makes a lot of sense.

“You read this and wonder why people risked their lives trying to scale the Berlin wall.”

Similarly, thousands of people today risk their lives fleeing the totalitarian tyranny of Mexico. It’s nothing to do with a single border with massive income disparities on either side. Oh, wait.

[yes, I know the massive income disparities reflect communism’s failure as an economic system. This isn’t the same claim as ‘OMG communism is the evilest thing EVAH!’]

“It is not possible to live like a human being without at least some economic and social security and a basic education, which were guaranteed, though at a very low level, by the Soviet-style totalitarian regimes but which some people in their aftermath cannot achieve at all.”

But this is junk too. Certainly in Eastern Europe the levels of economic and social security and basic education IMPROVED in the aftermath. The only difference is that some of the deprivation which was previously unseen and hidden had come to light as a result of increased transparency of those societies.

Personally I’d also argue that a good bit of the drop in “economic and social security” seen in Russia in the 90’s were essentially inevitable given the structure of the regime that preceded it and its collapse. It had little to do with “capitalism” or even “gangster capitalism” that came afterwards and mostly due to the bankruptcy of the whole communist framework as early as early 80’s. Most of the social indicators that people like to quote for Russia in the post-communist era, were on a steep downward trajectory pre- or early Gorbachev, long before any “market reforms” were implemented.
The only possible alternative – and “possible” here means that it might’ve not succeeded either – was the Chinese way of keeping political autocracy but introducing the same economic reforms. The difference is that by the time the Soviet leadership realized that there was trouble it was pretty much too late, whereas the Chinese managed to catch on early on.

Personally I’d also argue that a good bit of the drop in “economic and social security” seen in Russia in the 90’s were essentially inevitable given the structure of the regime that preceded it and its collapse.

Surely there is some of that. But you are in no position to argue so since you also insist to compare standards in the SU to those in Western Europe without mentioning the very different state of economic development of Russia and Germany/France/UK in 1914, say.

I’ve read threads on UFO fora that were more coherent.

The thing is, before you can have a discussion you have to agree on what the facts you’re discussing are. Here, it’s people shouting their ‘facts’ past other people shouting their ‘facts’. Waste of time.

It seems obvious that someone can be in favour of abolishing a social class, without wishing to deport, kill or otherwise wrong the people who comprise it. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that this was not a distinction that Stalin cared about, but if you deny it has any meaning at all, then you appear to be trying to suggest that all socialists are secretly in favour of mass murder. Which is outrageous, of course, as well as being either incredibly stupid or dishonest, which is to say par for the course for rightwing Americans’ treatment of anyone whom they regard as being to the left of Al Gore.

Oh yeah, and wtf is this about?

On any of these the SU did no better than Western Europe and on many much much worse, the only possible exception being literacy

Talk about apples and oranges…

The thing is, before you can have a discussion you have to agree on what the facts you’re discussing are. Here, it’s people shouting their ‘facts’ past other people shouting their ‘facts’. Waste of time.

Aw, lighten up, person. We ain’t doin nobody no harm.

Geo’s comments about the causes of the Civil War are not “Marxist sloganeering” but reasonable arguments. Certainly geo is right that Lincoln’s overriding goal was preservation of the Union, not abolition of slavery (the Emancipation Proclamation was largely politically motivated), and that most Northerners would not have gone to war over slavery alone.

All that said, however, I’m inclined to think that geo is somewhat underestimating the impact of the abolitionist movement(s) on the climate of Northern opinion. It seems to me that years, and even decades, of relentless, morally charged denunciation of slavery as a supreme evil must have had some effect on the broader population, even if most of them viewed the abolitionists as extremists. War resulted most likely from the combination of (1)clashing economic interests and systems (wage labor vs plantation slavery) with (2)an issue,namely slavery, that, partly b/c of its moral dimension, proved unsusceptible to compromise.

(I’m not a historian, so apologies if this amounts to beating historiographical dead horses.)

“Do you have any specific Marxist sloganeering in mind? Otherwise this is just a vague, content-free sneer.”

Obviously at the very least the throwing around of the word “kulak” falls in this category. Or referring to communism in Soviet Union as “state capitalism”. Referring to people as “cold war warriors”. Describing the hiring of farm laborers IN GENERAL as “exploitation of farm labor”. And then of course is the gem about people belonging “on the scrap heap of history”.

And yes, yes, yes, I know Godwin’s law. But in this kind of discussion it’s plain unavoidable.

I like how ‘notsneaky’ claims falsehood of any progressive things of the USSR and other things, and then backs up his views with posts filled with words like ‘possibly’, ‘likely’, ‘probably’… If you do not own a clue, just say so! You should learn to listen to people who have actually lived there and know what they are talking about!

“You should learn to listen to people who have actually lived there and know what they are talking about!”

I lived next door where things were more progressive. And they weren’t that progressive.

Oh FFS grow up the lot of you. The USSR, right up to the eve of glasnost, was a place where anyone having the kind of discussion you are so ineptly trying to have would have been spied on, noted down, and for the majority of the USSR’s history at severe if not inevitably peril of imprisonment, coercive interrogation, exile, hard labour and/or plain good old-fasioned death. It was a self-sustaining tornado of human malice, feeding off the bastardised remnants of a not-very-coherent variety of crude nineteenth-century positivism.

“you would find objectionable if it was said about Bush or Clinton or the US”

a) No I f*cking wouldn’t. b) There is a difference between jokes shared in private and an attempt at open, public criticism that I should have thought even a fool could see. c) You are a purblind starry-eyed optimist about the Soviet system, there is clearly no point in reasoning with you. In a vain attempt, however, may I suggest you read even a little of what has emerged about what the Stasi were up to in the DDR, and reflect on the mental gymnastics necessary to imagine that things were significantly better in the USSR itself?

Well, Dave, I know a lot about the USSR, I lived there. I know very little about the DDR, I only went there once for two weeks when I was a kid.

I read a book written by an Australian women about Stasi and it didn’t impress me much. I also watched the recent film about the Stasi, it was better. It became obvious to me that the DDR was different for a number of reasons, the main reason being that it had a border with West Germany, plus American-dominated West Berlin in the middle of it. Especially considering that people across the border were Germans too.

Another thing about the movie is that it’s a story of some famous playwright and his famous actress girlfriend. Sure, I can (slightly) feel their pain, but these are not ordinary people. Decent film, though.

Groan, people are actually sticking up for the USSR as a place where life was good, and I get called unhinged! Funny I don’t remember the widespread clamour amongst the Russian people for the system NOT to evaporate in 89-91. What I do remember is seeing people demonstrating a few years later with pictures of Stalin. Maybe you can comment on the psychology behind that? Is there a word for what happens when Stockholm Syndrome goes mass?

I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’re the crazy ones, really you are. I don’t begin to know what the answers to your problems are, and I stress again that I couldn’t give a rat’s arse for any kind of rightist position on anything, but the kind of rubbish you’re talking about a system second only to Nazi Germany in its systematic denial of basic human dignity just has to be countered, in the name of humanity.

Groan, people are actually sticking up for the USSR as a place where life was good,

Quotes, please? And no, refusal to declare every single feature of life in the SU hellish doesn’t count as saying “life was good” there.

What I do remember is seeing people demonstrating a few years later with pictures of Stalin. Maybe you can comment on the psychology behind that?

Easy: life had gotten even worse for many people.

abb1 (#30): Sure, the experiment failed eventually, but not because of any crimes, just the lousy economic system.

I’m well behind the curve in reading through this thread so I presume that someone has addressed this nonsense already. However, this sentence is simply the most revolting piece of trash I’ve ever read on a blog.

abb1, you really need to bone up on your Soviet history. After a fair weekend’s worth of reading, come back to us and let us know if you still think there were no crimes involved in ‘the experiment’.

Cheers,

I was born there and I was a citizen, long time ago. I think my experiences are more or less typical for Moscow, though Moscow itself was rather atypical, probably still is.

notsneaky in #145:
“But this is junk too. Certainly in Eastern Europe the levels of economic and social security and basic education IMPROVED in the aftermath.”
Really? In this case Hungary is not part of Eastern Europe.

Rofe, I said that the experiment failed solely because of the lousy economic system; how does it follow that there were no crimes?

the merest mention of some things … is enough to set of a storm of angry comments

Which I think is the sure sign that these topics were/are a propaganda battleground once. People tend to have strong unyielding opinions (even in the face of facts) either having been subjected to some sort of “brainwashing” or when it’s personal. Neither case allows them to argue the point rationally and critically which leads to the vitriol at the expense of a rational view which might actually help understand the issues better.

“Hey, Dave, it’s bad everywhere. Here in Switzerland I just paid $125 fine for letting my Yorki off the leash in a totally empty public park; see – those jack-booted ‘securite’ thugs oppressed me like the commies never had or would. Talk about human dignity. Once I paid a speeding ticket for driving 53km/hr in a 50km/hr zone in Zurich; had I refused to pay they would’ve seized my assets, I’m sure; probably locked me up in some dungeon.”

Wow. Just, wow!

Surely that is someone impersonating abb1. Even he can’t be crazy enough to compare getting a leash-ticket in Switzerland to having to deal with the Stasi.

I’d say that trying to put a rosey hue on one of the most miserable regimes in human history should generate angry comments in response.

Could you quote the part of Chris’ post, or of Miliband’s essay, that attempts to do this?

Sebastian, why would you have to deal with the Stasi? If you’re an upstanding citizen who follows the law, doesn’t let the dog off the leash, drinks his beer from a brown bag, doesn’t smoke pot, and isn’t trying to escape to the west – you have nothing to worry about. Most people understand this and behave accordingly, adapt to their environment. This is not that complicated. If the environment is too hard to adapt to, then the whole thing falls apart quickly, you’ll see suicide bombers and weird stuff like that.

““Really? In this case Hungary is not part of Eastern Europe.”
Alright, you people are freakin’ insane, regardless of where you grew up or whatever.”
Excuse me, for a moment i was blindfolded by the facts. But I live here:)

“Excuse me, for a moment i was blindfolded by the facts. But I live here”

Then Hungary must’ve really really fallen behind Poland since the mid 90’s.

That may be true but the possible variance in standards of living between Poland, Czech R., Slovak R., Hungary and East Germany is way too small to be able to say that “things are worse now then in 1988” for any of them.

Well, this is purely anecdotal; someone I know drove across and he says that East Germany looks abandoned, everything’s closed, no lights, no nothing – and as soon as you enter Poland you see signs of life everywhere again. Not a scientific experiment.

Sebastian, why would you have to deal with the Stasi? If you’re an upstanding citizen who follows the law, doesn’t let the dog off the leash, drinks his beer from a brown bag, doesn’t smoke pot, and isn’t trying to escape to the west – you have nothing to worry about.

I hope this is sarcastic. As I understand it the Stasi entered every aspect of life through a broad network of civilian informants and might ask you to spy on your friends and neighbors at any moment. But you have nothing to worry about if you’re an “upstanding citizen”? WTF?

This is great :)

atrociously evil and responsible for tens of millions of deaths

… these are two different things, not necessarily related to each other or causative …

US government is also *directly* responsible for millions of deaths, so is it also evil then? :)

To find the UNusually high number of people who want to escape you have to spy on just about everyone, so your second paragraph basically negates your first. The idea that this kind of surveillance would leave untouched basic human life and work is absurd on the face of it. Though why anyone would want to escape a repressive police state is a mystery to me. After all, according to you they leave you alone UNLESS YOU ALREADY WANT TO ESCAPE.

It wasn’t just “critics” and investigative reporters who pointed out that the nearly decade long U.S. bombardment and then carpet bombing (1965 – 1973) of Cambodia handed power to the lunatic Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

The U.S.’ own CIA was pointing it out at the time — noting that Khmer Rouge recruitment in villages went up staggeringly after each U.S. bombing of the rural towns & villages.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html

Of objectively disputable points made by Miliband in the essay, it would be his desire that somehow internal resistance within Cambodia could have overturned the tyrannical regime without the Vietnamese invasion.

It’s clear that what Miliband is mourning is not the fall of the Khmer Rouge murderers, but the crushed possibility of some self-liberation by Cambodians themselves, and this is why he regrets the Vietnamese invasion — that Vietnam had done so for reasons inherent to the Vietnamese regime, not that of the empowered liberation of the Cambodian people.

I’m no expert, but I’ve never encountered any sort of evidence-based analysis which argued for the possibility of such an internal overthrow. It seems more likely to me that the misery would have long continued without the Vietnamese action (which the U.S. vehemently opposed).

Jonathan, I don’t know, but I suspect the number of potential escapees wasn’t that high even in the DDR.

Surveillance is necessary, because escaping, unlike other kinds of destructive behavior, has to be detected and stopped before the actual crime takes place; in this sense it’s more like terrorism than like drinking in public.

The logic is the same with all of the examples I mentioned:

IF a large enough number of people will be
taking drugs/drinking openly/taking dogs off leash/escaping
THEN the society will collapse

And if you believe that your society has a great value – and those on top always do – then you need to prevent people from engaging in destructive behavior. The easiest way (the only way, perhaps?) is to catch and punish the offenders thus intimidating the rest, send them the clear signal that it isn’t worth it.

There’s nothing special in the DDR’s example of it. One could easily write a book about the DEA or Homeland Security that would be much scarier than the Stasi book.

Tell you what, we can have a nice conversation about the positive aspects of life under National Socialism next.

Well, there goes Godwin’s Law, atomised by the power of rhetoric.

The Soviet Union is history. My university degree is in history and my understanding is that when one discusses history, one does so rationally, weighing up all the evidence regardless of whether or not it suits one’s argument. And this means that, when discussing the USSR, one <i<must be allowed to say there were good things about it, if they can be found, and one must be able to put the actions that took place there, however terrible, in the context of the circumstances that existed at the time and the actual beliefs and motives of the particpants. This way, ahd only this way, we can write and study history.

On the other hand, we can cry “apologist” at anybody who says anything that might seem to us to express approval for any aspect of the USSR. This quite common, and has always been common, but it isn’t history: it’s anticommunism. Or we can shout “would you say that about tNazi Germany?” But that isn’t history either, it’s rhetoric.

The Soviet Union fell because it deserved to fall and because it proved itself thoroughly inferior to its political and economic rival to the West. This being so, why all this hysteria when people say anything other than “it was total evil”? What are people afraid of? It’s not coming back.

Incidentally, on the original topic of Ollie Kamm and speaking ill of the dead, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that he gets off on it, and boasts about it, as this piece makes manifest.

Hmmm. So we have an argument that I have not made and a speculation about what I would say if something happened that has not happened. Really, this is not very good, is it? Would you not prefer to engage with my argument?

I think you’re missing the point that there is a difference between doing something, and getting off on doing it, not to mention boasting about it. (There is also, I think, a difference between “pointing out” and “claiming”.)

Dave, I feel that you exaggerate the significance of the ban on leaving the country, from average person’s point of view. Sounds like it’s very important to you and that’s fine, but there’s is a very large number of people out there who are outraged by a whole lot of various prohibitions and limitations (or lack of thereof): marijuana, abortion, death penalty, you name it.

As far as the labor-camps for Noam Chomsky are concerned, once again, if we are talking about the post-Stalin era, you’re completely off base here. Sakharov, who, arguably, is the Soviet equivalent of Chomsky, hasn’t spent a day in jail (not to mention non-existing labor-camps).

Writings of Sakharov and other critics of the regime were widely available by samizdat. I remember reading one (rather naive, as I see now) Sakharov’s piece where he was arguing that the existence of millionaires in capitalist West – he thought it was a negative phenomenon, as they are, clearly, parasites – nevertheless has to be accepted as a necessary evil; after all there are only few of them and they don’t really harm anybody, you know, being busy spending their millions, just being happy parasites. Naive, so naive.

Anyhow, Chomsky’s Zmag, if you ever held in your hands and browsed its paper copy, has almost the exact appearance of a samizdat publication.

Dave, you beat me to it on both points.

In other words, abb1 is apparently content to take the regime’s point of view – that “escape” is a crime rather than a straightforward attempt to improve one’s lot, an attempt that is defined in free societies as “emigrating”, “leaving” or simply “moving”.

And when one is content to take the regime’s point of view, one is also happy to overlook the distinction between living abb1’s estimation of day-to-day life working, fishing and raising a family (of course with the compromises one makes under the latent threat of denunciation by a co-worker, friend or family member – the consequences of which vary by regime) versus an Archie Bunker life of working, fishing and raising a family (sans the threat).

So, abb1, we see where you’re coming from. No thanks.

Cheers,

christian, I specifically distinguished between former SU and former Soviet bloc, which you would’ve have known had you’ve actually read what I said.

versus:

But this is junk too. Certainly in Eastern Europe the levels of economic and social security and basic education IMPROVED in the aftermath.

notsneaky, so what you are now admitting is that in the largest part of Eastern Europe – the former soviet Union – economic and social security did not improve. In other words, you simply happened to be wrong. Of course, your generalization is still wrong – clearly, economic life did improve in some – most – former satellites, and not in others (lie Bulgaria, for example).

You also seem to accuse me of making excuses for Stalinist crimes. I’m not – this is simply a lie, brought about by your inability to view historical developments rationally. Anyway, please quote me excusing any crimes of Stalinism, or apologize.

Okay christian h., I’ll see you Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as Soviet or Soviet Bloc states where economic and social security did not improve upon Soviet takeover.

What do you bid in return, i.e. Eastern European states where economic and social security improved?

Cheers

“He was however sent into internal exile, was he not?
”

Abb1 is under the impression that internal exile in the USSR was a kind of expenses-paid holiday. And she simply ignores all labour camp and lunatic asylum prisoners of conscience that Sakaharov campaigned for on his release. He must have been making it all up, the ingrate. And when some of the men were eventually released by Gorbachov from their non-existent camps and hospital wards, they must have been making it up too. A complex business getting all these people to join in the masquerade.

“You could equally use it to justify slave-holding”

Yes, it is funny how CT-ers rarely feel the need (only for the sake of balance, you understand) to piously acknowledge the ‘social benefits’ that accrued through slavery in the US. Mind you, I may be speaking too soon.

abb1 – the real shame is that the cartoonish “The Evil Empire” attitude obscures, and is used – by people like you – to obscure, just how evil the Soviet empire truly was.

Your chortling at “The Evil Empire” doesn’t change that evil, all the way down the list from outright murder to the ways people had to twist their morals to live with it.

Cheers,

The point of the exile was to prevent him from contacting foreigners, giving interviews and so on. He lived in an apartment in a city, in the European part of the country. I got the impression that he even had a car, and possibly a chauffeur? Not sure.

Chomsky actually did spend time in jail, a few times.

And she simply ignores all labour camp and lunatic asylum prisoners of conscience that Sakaharov campaigned for on his release.

There were no labor camps after 1960. Indeed, I heard that a few dissidents were diagnosed with schizophrenia and held in a clinic. That’s bad.

During about the same period in the US the FBI was carrying out operation COINTELPRO, in some cases simply murdering black activists. That’s worse.

And what about all those (documented) stories about the Feds flooding inner-city ghettos with drugs? You think it’s better than the ban on leaving the country?

Okay, christian h., real slow now:

. . . economic life did improve in some – most – former satellites . . .

This is a quote from you (#227 above). I (admittedly glibly) contend that you are wrong. The states I cited all had higher standards of living before Soviet rule than after.

Unless, of course, you want to take their economic conditions in May 1945 versus a decade later.

Clear enough?

Cheers,

Well, the latter examples didn’t really happpen very much in the USSR, did they?

I do think that the US government, in this period, did manage to shoot a number of political dissenters individually and the Soviet government by this stage tended not to (although there is Novocherkassk, is there not?) but in general it does seem to me that the ability to organise, to speak and to publish was considerably greater in the US.

“I do think that the US government, in this period, did manage to shoot a number of political dissenters individually”

Which ones?

And please, before you start, don’t ask us to recognise the ‘social benefits’ of nazism.

Like I said, communism is an idea. An implementation can be terrible or only bad, or maybe it’s impossible to implement at all – I don’t know, but the idea itself seems fine. To me, at least.

Nazism, on the other hand is substantially based on racism, the idea that I find irrational. The most successful implementation of Nazism sounds like a very bad possibility.

Maybe, just maybe, the final 40% of Soviet history – your golden age free from labor camps – came about because Soviet citizen had been beaten, bled and cowed into submission.

That’s must be part of the truth, I think: but true also might be the suggestion that if you repress on a wide enough scale you terrorise everybody including your own functionaries and supporters, and eventually nobody wants that to continue. Historically, most repressions wind down eventually.

Okay, then I’m trolling.

Apart from justifying the Soviet Union, what are you doing?

Cheers,

As soon as Stalin died they stopped it, that was the end of it.

Really? There was freedom of speech, freedom of publication, freedom to travel abroad, freedom to organise independent trades unions?

Sigh. Everything in 252. up to and including “rule than after” should have been italicized. We need preview!

Can’t quite believe this is still going on, but hey, it’s Friday afternoon…

Sort of like ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’, but in reverse, isn’t it? “Ok, I’ll give you the gulags, the purges, the Ukrainian famine, the internal exile, the one-party state, the ban on independent labour organisation, the antisemitism, Katyn, the Doctors’ Plot, Lysenkoism, Chernobyl, AND the invasion of Czechoslovakia; but apart from all that, you’ve got to admit, communism was a lovely idea, wasn’t it?”

Meanwhile, one simple fact that we have to keep returning to – as soon as the CPSU lost the ability to maintain control by force, the USSR evaporated, poof! just like that. Given a choice, people took it, and the Soviet system was over.

Now, meanwhile, most interestingly, we find an ex-KGB man running Russia, hopping from the presidency to the premiership just today, surrounded by immensely rich and immensely ruthless individuals, and with the support of a huge majority of the Russian people. Perhaps it wasn’t all down to the Marxism after all, perhaps the Russians just don’t want ‘freedom’ when they can watch their leaders buying up football-clubs and sitting on more money than some countries, and still vote for them in hordes, as long as the vodka flows. Maybe they never really got serfdom out of their system; maybe the Russian soul really does yearn to wash its feet in the Indian Ocean [ooh, there’s a nice image!]; maybe they’re just weird. But it would be far from me to utter such an ethnic slur. So what’s your explanation? [But please, PLEASE don’t make it an international capitalist plot, I can write that one myself, and it’s sooo boring.]

“But it would be far from me to utter such an ethnic slur.”
Ahem…

dave, you really aren’t the brightest light, are you? If you were, maybe the straw men in your feverish imagination would be slightly more convincing.

I meant totalitarianism ended, ended decisively. No freedom of speech, etc., but no one cares what you think, what you read, what you listen to, your private conversations, your private life.

But I don’t know that that’s really true, although of course the USSR was much less repressive in, say, 1970 than in say 1950. But I do think people got penalised for what they read, for instance and that people clearly were reported on in a way that plainly meant there was not quite the space between personal preferences and political actions that I think you suggest.

Mikhail, you seem to forget that one revolution did lead to direct improvements for its society. And also laid the foundation for the resolution of the stain on that revolution.

I would be interested to hear why the American Revolution is credited with these “direct improvements”, rather than the good fortune of being situated on an immense, resource-rich and sparsely-populated continent separated by a large ocean from most possible enemies.

Also to hear why the American Revolution is credited with laying the foundation for the abolition of slavery, when in fact slavery was abolished in all the unrevolted bits of the British Empire a good deal earlier and a lot more peacefully than it was in the US.

As mentioned above, there’s a significant difference between countries that allow you to leave at will and countries that don’t. Perhaps it would be relevant to point out that the Underground Railroad ran north into Canada, not the other way.

the good fortune of being situated on an immense, resource-rich and sparsely-populated continent separated by a large ocean from most possible enemies

To be fair, if you changed the word “ocean” for, say, “distance”, wouldn’t that also apply to Russia?

But that’s a famous guy (even I know the name) who could travel abroad, who represents the nation and all that crap. Even without the fame, just to be able to go abroad one had to demonstrate loyalty, pass a bunch of committees, know the right answers to ‘provocative’ questions, names of all foreign dignitaries and so on and so forth.

I’m talking about the ordinary people.

Being able to travel abroad was a very big deal, great privilege. Like, for example, flying with a US president on his plane: you have to be vetted and found acceptable. You abuse your privilege – you’re in trouble; though you’re not going to jail or anything like that. Another thing is that it sounds like he was trying to smuggle Solzhenitsyn’s books into the country. That’s not the same as borrowing Solzhenitsyn’s book from your friend and reading it in your apartment.

In any case, it has nothing to do with the way ordinary people lived.

Yes, I believe so. Master and Margarita wasn’t even banned, I don’t think, just not published until the 70s or 80s. But I think you could read the Gulag Archipelago in a metro train as well.

I’ll tell you this: sometime around 1980 in a computer center in Moscow where I worked, I myself was printing books on an IBM mainframe printer, off the tape with a bunch of EBCDIC files that I copied somewhere. There was a bunch of different texts on that tape, I am sure some of them anti-soviet stuff, but the only one I remember is a russian translation of some scandinavian hard-core porn. I printed and gave away dozens, if not hundreds of copies of that stuff, everybody knew about it, dozens of people: technicians, programmers, managers. That was something to brag about.

Then at some point, months after it’d begun, someone started a rumor that the KGB found out about it, they are unhappy about it, and that they will come to interview people. Yes, some people got a little nervous – sure, if you’re manager it could hurt your career, especially if you’re waiting patiently for the opportunity to join The Party. In the end there was no KGB, nothing happened. True story, I swear.

Now, OTOH, around the same time a close friend of mine was an unofficial (underground?) Hebrew teacher and, of course, a Zionist and quite involved. I was around that for a while too. That was a bit more dangerous; there was actually an incident when the KGB came and confiscated his books. But that was already an organization of a sort, and at that time they were concerned about thousands of people trying to emigrate.

Anyway.

Bon weekend and happy pentecost.

Can you please re read this fucking thread?

A charming and attractive invitation which I am nonetheless forced to decline.

What about Hungary?
2008 LE=73.18, IM=8.03
Let see the numbers after the idiotic marxist rhetoric:)
So the infant mortality dropped from 23.1 to 14.8 in socialist Hungary – it took ten years to achieve this. In capitalist Hungary the infant mortality dropped from 14.8 to 8.03 – it took 18 years to achieve this (and it is rising again). Fantastic argument!
“inequality … stayed about the same in Hungary (risen a bit in 00’s – this seems to be a global trend), and likewise absolute poverty fell or stayed constant (Hungary),”
You promised numbers instead of rhetoric!

Ok. Sorry. The dr. only insists that things were economically better under communism than they are now, not that they were ever better than in poorer parts of Western Europe. It’s an important point.

My post above gave numbers for life expectancy and infant mortality for Hungary. I assumed that it was common knowledge that per capita incomes in Hungary are much high today than they were in 1988. The data on absolute poverty and inequality can be found just by googling it.

Don’t know about Poland, but where I lived you wouldn’t lose your job for “for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person” and I never heard of “accident while drunk”, never heard of a political assassination inside the country. And you would have to do something fairly drastic to lose your job (of course some jobs were easier to lose than others) – try to emigrate or participate in an anti-government protest or something.

Also, I’m not arguing that the level of oppression there was, on average, the same as in the US. Clearly there were segments of the population in the US who experienced the equivalent or higher level of oppression – people in the ghettos, undocumented workers. And in the USSR it was mostly educated folks and intellectuals who suffered – and we relate easier to this kind of oppression. But the point is that after 1953 it was the same sort of thing. I don’t see a qualitative difference. Just a society defending itself against the behavior that threatens its ideological integrity, defending itself in a mostly rational and mostly non-excessive way (with some notable exceptions).

I have one comment awaiting moderation:
“What about Hungary?
2008 LE=73.18, IM=8.03
Let see the numbers after the idiotic marxist rhetoric:)
So the infant mortality dropped from 23.1 to 14.8 in socialist Hungary – it took ten years to achieve this. In capitalist Hungary the infant mortality dropped from 14.8 to 8.03 – it took 18 years to achieve this (and it is rising again). Fantastic argument!
“inequality … stayed about the same in Hungary (risen a bit in 00’s – this seems to be a global trend), and likewise absolute poverty fell or stayed constant (Hungary),”
You promised numbers instead of rhetoric!”
——————-
“I assumed that it was common knowledge that per capita incomes in Hungary are much high today than they were in 1988. ” No, it is not common knowledge! The level of 1989 was acheived in 2005 or 2006. And as some may know we have some problems recently…
“The data on absolute poverty and inequality can be found just by googling it.” Yes, and it tells a different story.

Gosh, we should all bow down before the dead marxist apologists.

Is what Kamm wrote about Monty Johnstone untrue?

“No, it is not common knowledge!”

It is among people who know wth they’re talking about.

“The level of 1989 was acheived in 2005 or 2006. ”

No. There is some variation depending on which measure one uses exactly but;
1. According to Penn World Tables (http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt62/pwt62_retrieve.php)
the 1989 level of per capita income for Hungary was reached pretty much in 1997 (slightly lower, 1998 a bit higher) whether one uses Laspeyers or Chain series. So 7 to 9 years earlier than you claim.

2. According to WDI data
2a. Using inflation adjusted income converted to dollars, the 1989 level of per capita income was achieved in 1998. Note this doesn’t take into account changes in the prices of nontradables.
2b. Using inflation adjusted income in Hungarian currency, the 1989 level of per capita income was achieved between 1998/99. This is probably better but it misses the changes in the price of Hungarian imports.
2c. Using inflation adjusted, purchasing power parity adjusted income, the 1989 level of per capita income was achieved in 1998. This is probably the most relevant measure here.

So it basically looks like it took until 1998 to recover.

Now. Looking at the whole time series and comparing it with Poland. Poland recovered it’s 1988/1989 income by 1993/1994 but the drop in between those two end points was much more severe than in Hungary. This is of course the famous “shock therapy”. So basically Poland, by implementing “neoliberal” reforms chose to have a quick, but painful transition and get it over with quickly, while Hungary decided to drag out the transition over most of the decade.
I dunno about you, but given how the two countries have done since 1988, to me it looks like the problem wasn’t too many “neoliberal” reforms (and common, some of these reforms weren’t even that neoliberal – often much less than what you see in Western European social democracies) but rather not enough of them in Hungary.

“The data on absolute poverty and inequality can be found just by googling it.” Yes, and it tells a different story.”

Did you actually google it, or did you just make stuff up like you did with “not recovered until 2005”? But screw it, I’m tired of doing all the work. Provide some references yourself and I’ll respond. While we’re at it, please provide the reference for your claim that “2/3 of the population thinks this way” from your earlier comment – I’m suspecting this is all made up bunkum too.

Soviet Union in the above should be Russia, but ya’ll know what I mean.

“Was it really impossible to do it more gradually and orderly?”

I think there’s room for reasonable disagreement here. But it is also important to realize that the folks that undertook the reforms were doing something which had never been attempted before, were dealing with a very messed up situation, were trying to do things which a lot of powerful people and groups opposed, were severely constrained in their options by political and social circumstances (not the least of which was of course the break up of the Soviet Union). So yeah, I think with the benefit of hindsight, it could’ve been done more gradually and orderly. But they didn’t have that benefit.

#289
So it is objectionable to blame capitalism for all of the difficulties of the transition period. It is true. And to praise capitalism for all of the social gains of the transition period, say improving rate of children mortality?

Gosh, we should all bow down before the dead marxist apologists.

Is what Kamm wrote about Monty Johnstone untrue?

It is partial, it wilfully misrepresents the man and his ideas and it is characteristically boorish.

When I say “characteristically” I primarily mean characteristic of Kamm, but it is also characteristic of, shall we say, a certain political approach.

No, it doesn’t, does it?

I wonder whether one gets the whole measure of a man’s work and ideas from a couple of references among a lifetime of articles? And I wonder whether your technique is not, characteristically, to present the part in order to obscure the whole?

No, it doesn’t. I just told you that.

Assessing “the whole measure” of this man’s work – a ludicrous formulation, given that he devoted half of a century not to the disinterested pursuit of scholarship but to activism for a totalitarian party – is complicated by the fact that he never wrote a book. His most substantial work was a long pamphlet expounding the libertarian credentials of the greatest tyrant of the 20th century after Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

But I’m supremely confident that I’ve assessed “the whole measure” accurately, nonetheless, from that and from the fact that Johnstone believed British Communists were right to support the Nazi-Soviet pact. These aren’t mere idiosyncrasies, to be considered in the round alongside the fact that he was (spare me the world’s smallest violin, Mr Bertram) “mild-mannered”. Johnstone’s was an ignoble life, invested in a disreputable cause.

Next.

One might, by the same measure, judge the whole of somebody’s output by their enthusiasm for wars and invasions, and by their particular enthusiasm for the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the bombing of Japanese cities – an outrage carried out, one might recall, by governments allied with the totalitarian government of the Soviet Union.

But we don’t do that, of course, because to do so would lack context and justice (as well as, rather less importantly, manners). It would also lack balance: we would avoid the need to ask “why does he think that?” or “what else does he think?” It’s “gotcha!” politics and one gotcha! is enough.

Monty Johnstone was, of course, a Communist, and also a severe critic of the Soviet Union. There were many people like that and terms like “apologist” are designed to obscure the reality of such people’s opinions: as if one may only be a critic and if one is anything else, well, that is apologism. It’s not just a crude and dishonest approach: it’s also a onesided one, because it is not applied across the board.

Because yes, of course many leftists believed things about the USSR that they should not have believed. But then again, people believed – and continue to believe – things that they should not about other destructive political phenomena. The British Empire (or for that matter, the genocidal Roman Empire) might be one. The Great War another. The American destruction of Vietnam, or the invasion of Iraq, or what you will. All of these have been and are supported by all sorts of people within the political mainstream and we consider their views with context and nuance. So we should. And we should not stop with them.

But I must resume my weekend. God knows this will probably still be going when I get back.

“There were no labor camps after 1960. Indeed, I heard that a few dissidents were diagnosed with schizophrenia and held in a clinic. That’s bad.”

Really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natan_Sharansky

“After being denied an exit visa to Israel on the grounds of national security in 1973, he worked as an English interpreter for prominent physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, and also became a human rights activist. Sharansky was one of the founders of, and spokesmen for, the Jewish and Refusenik movements in Moscow. This included the Helsinki Watch Group, also known as Yuri Orlov’s group.

In March 1977, he was arrested, and in July 1978 convicted on charges of treason and spying for the United States, and sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. After 16 months of incarceration in Lefortovo prison, he was sent to Perm 35, a Siberian labor camp, where he served for nine years. The fate of Sharansky and other political prisoners in the USSR, repeatedly brought to international attention by Western human rights groups and diplomats, was a cause of embarrassment and irritation for the Soviet authorities. In 1986, he was flown to East Germany and led across the Glienicke Bridge to West Berlin where he was exchanged for a pair of Soviet spies: Karl Koecher and his wife, Hana Koecher. Famed for his resistance in the Gulag, he was told upon his release to walk straight towards his freedom; Sharansky instead walked in a zigzag in a final act of defiance. Sharansky then emigrated to Israel, adopting a Hebrew given name, Natan.”

I remember readin an article in either The eXile or the Moscow Times (probably the former) about the final inmates of Perm 35 getting out in 95 or 96.

But of course, they too were obviously all spies for the US, not simple dissidents sent to a labour camp for what they said or thought.

I don’t know, I really don’t think they practiced forced labor after 1960 or so. If I am wrong, I apologize; didn’t mean to mislead.

Even after Stalin, the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union was comparable to the number of prisoners in the U.S. now.

I guess the lesson is that experiments in ideological consistency are costly.

Chris Bertram,

I see that your comment over at Gimlet’s dive has elicited some comments from the mongish crew. That’s what I call Gimlet’s anonymous creatures who emerge from places like Napier “University” to leave comments in support of their master at times like this. They did it with me until I saw the buggers off.

OK, what this debate boils down to is a difference of interpretation. You may be ahead on points – hence the appearance of the mongish crew, but you are not going to score a knock down, not in a debate like this.

I can think of three occasions in which Gimlet has been made to look very stupid indeed.

1. Gimlet argued that the Korean War came about as a result of Soviet expansionism. The problem was that the source he quoted didn’t say that at all. Gotcha, me Gimlet.

2. A blogger called Sonic made him look very stupid when he didn’t get the sounds better “in the original German” line from the late Molly Ivin.

3. Finally, Neil Clark scored a good hit when he found out that Gimlet had been telling porkies about never having threatened legal action against folk.

So what’s the advice? Wait until the idiot writes something that you can demolish and then go in kicking. He won’t backtrack, but what he will do is start posting like buggery to try and cover his tracks.

That’s worth a laugh.

Richard, read for example the citation in #300. Miliband calls the Cambodian regime murderous and tyrannical, and thinks the idea that such a regime can be overthrown by an invasion ‘attractive’.

His main objection is that letting the enemies of a regime decide when it is tyrannical enough to warrant invasion is a risky business.

That’s the problem here. Kamm is deeply misrepresenting the piece he discusses.

re notsneaky #296
link to the Gallup survey (a presentation, pppt, in Hungarian):
http://www.polhist.hu/letoltes/gallup.ppt
It is easy to “decode”:
slide #7: The period of Kádár (1956-1989) was a dark period
slide #8: The period of Kádár (1956-1989) was an outstanding good period
slide #9: The period after 1989 is an outstanding good period
“kormánytábor”: supporters of the government
“ellenzék”= supporters of the opposition
The left-liberals were the opposition in 2002 and the government in 2006.
(This trend have became more marked in 2008.)