New Ideas From Dead Political Systems

= = = But comparing to the USA was immediately setting an impossible goal to achieve. = = =

Why? Compare the USofA in 1850 to that of 1875, and consider that the USSR had greater natural resources than North America and was starting from a much more capable industrial base than the US of 1850.

Cranky

_It killed quite a lot more people than Nazism but (for the most part, and after the 1920s) in a less obviously criminally insane way_

I think I can’t be parsing this sentence correctly. The really criminally insane killing in the USSR happened after the Kirov assassination, which is 1934 ….

I think I can’t be parsing this sentence correctly. The really criminally insane killing in the USSR happened after the Kirov assassination, which is 1934 ….

What about the “destruction of the kulaks” and associated “famine” in the Ukraine starting after 1929? Millions died in that, 3 million I think. So I agree that the dates are not quite right either, but I think bad things started before 1934.

Shorter D^2: It really was Upper Volta with rockets.

“as always the economists are the most romantic and least realistic of characters, persisting way up into the 1960s with the dream that the underlying model is basically sound, and a few technical changes will make it possible to achieve the vision of plenty.”

It’s hardly fair to call these characters unrealistic.

“The characters’ views were unrealistic,” not “the characters were unrealistically drawn.”

Having grown up in Germany, I can vouch that “what did the Nazi’s get right?” discussions are quite commonplace, although usually amongst trusted friends rather than in public media. By far the most common and widely accepted answer is: the Autobahn. Fiscal and industrial policy (repudiate debt, subsidize national champions) is also often brought up. National pride (patriotic spectacles, cool uniforms, rhetoric of unity and rejuvination) is sometimes mentioned. I’ve personally never heard someone call out monetary policy.

13: Germans are constitutionally incapable of understanding or appreciating monetary policy, as recent events have demonstrated yet again. I don’t want to speculate, but clearly it’s genetic.

There was a lot violence in the Civil War 1918-1920, but it was on a much smaller scale than what happened later in the 1930s and 1940s. It is hard to come up with good estimates, but excluding the massive famine of 1921-1922, the Bolsheviks might be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths during this time. The mass waves of repression in the USSR were concentrated between 1928 and 1953 under Stalin. There were three big ones. The first was the 1930-1931 “dekulakization” followed by the 1932-1933 famine. Officially recorded deaths by the OGPU for kulak special setters during the 1930s are just under 400,000, but they don’t include the years 1930 and 1931. Oleg Khlevniuk estimates that the real number including these first two years is closer to 600,000. The three million figure for famine deaths is too low and would only be excess deaths in Ukraine. If you include the losses in the Volga, Kuban, Kazakhstan, Crimea (which was part of the RSFSR not Ukraine then), and other areas it is around five million. Then there was the Great Terror of 1937-1938. The recorded number of death sentences is a little under 700,000. Finally there were the mass deportations of nationalities during WWII. The Russian-Germans in 1941 constituting about half of this number followed by various North Caucasian groups, the Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks in 1943-1944. The best estimates of excess deaths here comes from Dalkhat Ediev and is close to 500,000. The official GULag death toll including both Corrective Labor Colonies (ITK) and Corrective Labor Camps (ITL) is a little over 1.6 million for 1934-1956. One often sees figures that only include ITL deaths from 1934-1953 which bring down the number significantly to less than 1.1 million. But, these figures are incomplete and do not include transit deaths or deaths after release and release of prisoners about to die was an official policy. GUPVI the other camp archipelago (POWs and foreign internees) recorded in excess of another 500,000 deaths. But, only people who actually survived transit from the Front Camps to the GUPVI camps were ever registered. Those that died before arriving were never registered. Given the existing gaps in the data is quite probable that the number of excess deaths due to communism in the USSR probably over 10 million. That puts it numerically in the same ball park as the Nazis. But, I wouldn’t argue that it was a lot more.

… as a system it does have the characteristic that lots of people and countries at various times did want to have a go at it for themselves, more or less of their own free will.

This seems an odd statement, especially given the “more or less” qualifier. How many countries “had a go at it” without it being the result of “vanguard” revolution, outside conquest, or coup? I doubt that “lots” is the correct word for those that remain.

Lots of people, yes; Machiavelli and Barnum could jointly sort out why. Quitely rarely a majority, or even a plurality, though.

Might one also reasonably say this about the Reagan-era regulatory and financial reforms, and apply similar reasoning.

Indeed, we seem to still be in the grip of a neoliberal “dream that the underlying model is basically sound, and a few technical changes will make it possible to achieve the vision of plenty.” When the technical changes were progressive taxation funding a welfare state, the system admittedly did work for a while, until enough of those at the top decided that they’d just as soon keep it all, thanks. Whereupon we got the technical changes of deregulation, privatization, disempowerment of organized labor, and “trickle-down.” Since the vision of plenty is thereby once more reserved for a tiny elite, what new ideas might we learn from the results of our current zombie political system?

If I were to say that present conditions in Europe and the US remind me of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union, I’d have the germ of a clever bumper sticker, but not much that could be offered as a substantive contribution to CT’s seminar.

Even so, emotional reactions to our present difficulties aren’t entirely without value in making some sense of where we’re headed. When you look at the bloated toads of both parties in the US Senate, and the much younger, but equally smug LibDems and Tories in the British Parliament, how can you not be reminded of the fur-encased and totally dead mugs atop the Lenin’s tomb reviewing stand in days gone by?

Daniel, as always, argues with panache, and with a sense of the inevitable triumph of good sense as he defines it, but I find him unconvincing nevertheless. Even enveloped in the sardonic moral tales of one so thoroughly done with socialism, I find myself dwelling morbidly on the young waitress taking our orders last Spring in a local restaurant, bursting into tears when she realized that we were discussing the merits of single-payer health care plans. It turned out that the younger of her two children had developed a serious, chronic illness. Although both she and her husband were working, they couldn’t afford health insurance, and our state’s version of Medicaid had just dropped them. I also think of President Obama and his kill lists, and Angela Merkel and her stern scheitert der Euro, scheitert Europa, and the smirk that came at the end of it. Just a year and a half ago was that last? Honestly, it seems at this point like a century ago.

Anecdotal evidence, contentless emotional responses, yes. On the other hand, it could be worse doesn’t seem to me like much of a consolation, or very credible as a way to address the realities of our situation.

William Timberman, #23: I think there are political parallels here that are worth paying attention to. Not only the parallels between Western representatives and the “the fur-encased and totally dead mugs,” but also in the ideas about economics.

Keynes skewered Trotsky in 1926 for, basically, having no workable way to implement his ideals and so resorting to ultimately pointless violence. Decades ago, I commented that perhaps we could now start writing articles about the failure of capitalism in Russia, and perhaps we could now write articles about the failure of capitalism in the West. Did Western economists of, say, 2005 understand Western capitalism any better than the Soviet economists of 1955 understood Soviet communism?

The Soviet economists repressed (“were in denial” is the pop-psych term) the knowledge that they were not, in fact, in the dictatorship of the proletariat but in a system dominated by an elite which had little interest in the professed goals political of communism. There was some sincere idealism in the elite, but it was the system was overwhelmingly corrupt and corrupting: liberalization was a slow process, and almost immediately hijacked by the same neo-liberal economists that have so thoroughly wrecked the Westerns systems and the criminals who now dominate Russian economic life.

Having written that–and I am not sure I will believe it in 20 minutes–some parallels with the current situation in the West seem to me overwhelming and heartbreaking. The recognition that the system was increasingly a plutocracy, dominated by people who gave only lip-service to the stated Western political goals of equality and democracy, was something that eluded most Western economists–and, indeed, political scientists and historians–until the new depression hit, and it became clear where the real power lay.

The failed dreams of academics are perhaps farcical threads in the broader tragedy of the retreat from the democratic dream in the West. It seems to me that Red Plenty, in telling the story of a failure of political ideals in the Soviet Union, mirrors that tragedy.

Strange how it seems to escape almost everyone that every Allied combatant casualty in WW2 was a completely innocent victim of the Nazis. As, of course, was every Allied non-combatant casualty.

Daniel’s naive notion that social and political systems can be tried and fail, with finality and an “end of the story”, seems at odds with the actual cycles of history. All systems of political economy experience entropy, just as physical systems wear out; this is independent of the death toll as well as other measures of performance.

As I think Watson Ladd might be pointing out at 22 (how delphic is the Ladd!), Friedman and neoliberalism seems almost inevitable by the 1970s, in the beginning of the breakdown of the New Deal system. Friedman’s ideology is basically a denial or obfuscation of the mechanisms that made the New Deal work, and fed into the know-nothing economics of neoliberalism, which has rationalized the rise of kleptocracy and predatory finance, while denying what it has been doing to destroy democracy.

I think one could outline a similar story for the course of the dream of European integration. The ideal of a European community began in the 1950s with great idealism and earnestness and no small degree of genuine technocratic competence, and now it seems to be ending, in an amazing degree of elite incompetence and irresponsibility.

Shall we say that these systems have been tried and failed, the story’s over and done, and there’s nothing to learn, or we shall recognize that they had a natural life, as all of us do?

@21 mds
I can read the title now: “Capitalist Plenty”

dammit. Failed to realise = realised. Too many damned negatives.

It was, of course, a major mistake to use America as an aspirational goal. Actually, using any capitalist nation would have been a mistake. Because the way capitalist nations judge “success” in no way gives a true measure of human health, happiness, educational attainment, etc. etc.

Material abundance should never be the goal. Especially when it can never come true for the majority without completely overwhelming the planet’s ability to sustain us. The richest 20% of the world’s population consumes 85% of its resources, which obviously means we are only able to consume as much as we do because most of the world does not. As in, if that bottom 80% consumed as much as the typical American, it couldn’t. An existential sort of Catch-22/paradox. Full on rationing would have to be instituted to prevent the end of clean water, food supplies, arable land, etc. etc. if the developing world ever comes close to matching our consumption rates.

So, the Soviet Union, or any alternative state would have to measure “success” differently. Get things back to basics. Supply safe, healthy food, shelter and clothing for everyone to start out with. From that foundation, add universal education, health care and renewable energy and clean transportation. Provide universal access to cultural/arts and learning centers. Gear scientific research and development toward sustainable, healthy living, in harmony with nature — finite nature.

That’s success. Not creating a dozen different ways to access your email and facebook page.

Start with the most basic material needs, make sure you have universal coverage, and then test the boundaries for each additional step. Don’t do it if you can’t provide universal access as a part of the deal. Don’t do it if its very nature demands exclusion and rationing based upon scarcity and limited supply. For the chosen few. If something requires the existence of a chosen few in the first place, don’t do it.

Because, as the book makes clear, there was no bloody great economic miracle. The Soviet economy grew because of the vast increase in resources thrown at it; there was an enormous increase in investment, much of it highly suspect in its productivity….It was all a con game.

I think this is much too dismissive. First, mobilizing investment and making it actually produce (even at the previous level of productivity) is no small thing. The examples of communist success in underdeveloped countries (most notably China, Mao’s development successes are still underestimated here) have to do with creating national unity and mobilizing resources by force when traditional regimes could not even do this. Second, the comment seems to ignore the very considerable Soviet successes in productivity and innovation in military hardware. The fact that Russia outproduced Germany in both quantity and quality of military output is remarkable — and even given the butchery of WWII it still saved millions of Russian lives compared to what would have happened in a Nazi victory.

Also, though Stalin was clearly brutal and destructive, any estimate of his death count is critically dependent on the baseline used. Most of Stalin’s ascribed deaths are not executions but famines and disease. You certainly can’t say the baseline level of famine or disease in Russia is zero in a non-Stalinist regime. Otto Pohl @17 seems to be drawing on a literature that makes some effort to set a baseline for excess deaths, but any calculation will depend very critically on the details of that baseline. I’d love to see the calculation. In any case, once you count the deaths from the war Hitler started I strongly doubt Stalin comes out worse.

They are a consequence of the way human beings interact, not a consequence of statistical mechanics.

And as such, not really reducible to something a physicist would find congenial….

“Competing with the US as a mistake”

But, as was pointed out in another thread in this symposium, competing with Sweden, or even Britain, would be even less appealing. The postwar social democracies achieved what the Communists only promised, in terms of a high material standard of living combined with historically unparalleled security from poverty arising from old age, unemployment, illness and so on, and without any bloodshed.

As has been pointed out in previous threads of course, the existence of Stalinism was an important reason for capitalist acquiescence in social democratic reforms. But it’s better that Western social democrats have to fight against longer odds than that nearly half the world should live under the likes of Stalin and Mao.

Mr. Quiggin,

First off, want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed your recent book, Zombie Economics. A fine work, and quite accessible to those of us who aren’t economists.

As for your comments in #41. Is it really fair to compare post-war European social democracies with Russia in 1917? Did not Sweden and Britain et al already have 20th century economies as foundation by the 1940s? Whereas Russia was basically a feudal society when it tried to thrust itself from the 18th to the 20th century. Marx said you couldn’t skip stages. You couldn’t go from feudalism to socialism. Russia attempted a bastardized form of just that leap, without any allies, without any help, without a Marshall Plan, and in the middle of a World War. It also had to fight a civil war, expanded and sustained via foreign powers. Under the circumstances, I think it’s amazing that it ever got off the ground and lasted 70 plus years.

In short, if Russia had had the advantages and the international help afforded those European social democracies — and the lack of aggressive enemies fomenting civil strife — chances are it would have done much better. Chances are good that it wouldn’t have felt the need, tragically, for extended dictatorship and draconian, anti-democratic actions, decade after decade.

I once was a supporter of Social Democracy, meself, along the lines Tony Judt proposed. I still think it far superior to neoliberalism. But, after further reflection over the course of the last decade or so, I now see it as weak tea and insufficient for what ails us. Basically, it has no answer whatsoever for the (apocalyptic) conflict between rising human consumption and diminishing, finite resources. It has no answer to the deadly clash between humans — our accelerating numbers and global footprint — and nature. And I find myself repulsed even by the idea that the haves can find massive inequality, poverty and sickness “acceptable”, as long as we have basic welfare protections. For us, of course. Not for the billions of people whose lack of consumption makes our excessive consumption at least temporarily possible.

In short, Social Democracy is a compromise and it settles for far too little. We can do better, and we owe that to present and future generations, as well as the planet.

Watson Ladd,

Pretty basic. The math doesn’t work out. Again, the richest 20% consume 85% of the world’s resources. Obviously, it would be impossible for the bottom 80% to consume at any where near the levels of the richest 20%. Again, the math doesn’t work out. The World Wildlife Fund estimates we’ll need two entire earths to meet demand by 2030, while other environmental groups estimate four.

Two to four earths to support demand by 2030. And that’s not taking into consideration the possibility that developing nations might increase their consumption at faster rates, as they grow in size and technological reach.

Species are dying off at rates not seen since the Ice Age. Fish stocks all over the world have reached endangered levels. Safe, drinkable water is disappearing all over the world, including the American Southwest. Human pollution threatens land, sea and air.

(And I’m not even factoring in Climate Change and its effects.)

And all of this is happening while we have massive inequality and more than two billion people living off just $1.50 a day. All of this is happening when billions of impoverished people around the world have a smaller global footprint than a few million Westerners and the wealthy from other developed nations. Imagine the pressure on the earth’s resources when those billions start to consume even a fraction as much as the working poor in developed nations.

IMO, we have a moral and ethical duty to end poverty, inequality, sickness and lack of access to health care and education around the world. But we have so drained the world of its resources, we can not do so without first reducing our own obscene footprint on this planet. The rich nations must radically reduce consumption, reverse the damage done by our growing pollution levels, and work toward “steady state”, sustainable, green, clean economies, agriculture, energy and transport.

I’m not talking about rocks here. I’m talking about safe food, drinkable water, breathable air. I’m talking about sustainability.

Watson Ladd,

@44

No. Marx talked about stages and said socialism could not follow directly upon feudalism. He also said communism could not come before socialism, which in turn needed late capitalism’s surplus. Which makes sense. If we attempt a truly egalitarian system, we need a surplus to distribute. It won’t work if we distribute a deficit — of production, food, clothing, housing, etc. etc.

Also, you totally misread me about consumption. I don’t see inequality as the gap in consumption at all. I see it as the gap in quality of life, and the things that make up that quality of life: Access to health care, safe shelter, food, water, high quality education, access to cultural/arts venues, etc. One doesn’t need to buy Ipods and have 50 pairs of shoes to have a high quality of life. One’s overall health, safety and access to education are far more important. One’s safe and healthy environment is far more important.

Where are the most toxic centers of our accumulated pollution? Among the poor. And in the poorest nations. Right off the bat, that’s a huge gap in quality of life.

NIMBY is the Western Way.

When I spoke of consumption, I did so to demonstrate that we are “free” to consume as much as we do because most of the rest of the world does not. There are too few natural resources to sustain all of us consuming at the rate developed nations do. Our selfishness, our greed, makes that certain and drives the planet closer and closer to catastrophe.

@45
“Pretty basic. The math doesn’t work out. Again, the richest 20% consume 85% of the world’s resources. Obviously, it would be impossible for the bottom 80% to consume at any where near the levels of the richest 20%. Again, the math doesn’t work out. The World Wildlife Fund estimates we’ll need two entire earths to meet demand by 2030, while other environmental groups estimate four.”

I agree with your point, I disagree with your conclusions.
(a) It is a CHOICE for humanity to decide that it is more important to sustain 7 billion lives in abject misery than to sustain .5 billion lives in wealth. For you to claim that the one choice is better than the other just because it is is not very convincing.

(b) You seem to be trying hard to make the claim (without actually making it) that it is somehow the fault of neoliberalism and capitalism that the earth is so overcrowded. This strikes me as a ludicrous claim. There are many things to fault about neoliberalism and capitalism, but the belief that everyone can have as many kids as they like forever without ill consequences is a delusion shared by almost all societies past and present, no matter what their social organization.

Maynard,

@49

You present false choices. There is no reason on earth why 7 billion people would have to live in abject poverty. We could easily feed, clothe, educate and provide quality health care to every human being on the planet, if we, in the developed world, radically reduced our consumption, stopped stripping poorer nations of their natural resources, stopped exploiting them, stopped exploiting our own poor and dispossessed.

And, no, I’m not blaming capitalism for over-population. I’m blaming it for stripping acre after acre of natural resources in pursuit of profit. Take away the profit motive, and we have no need to wipe out fish stocks, grain stocks, treat animals in the most disgusting ways possible, destroy clean water and on and on and on. Profit drives over-consumption and waste, and the added layer of profit increases the need to strip the land of its riches. Capitalism creates unnecessary garbage by the trillions of tons, because it can not grow if it isn’t producing that garbage. Capitalism is easily the most wasteful, exploitative economic system ever conceived, as it’s based on endlessly increasing consumption at a profit. Conservation is its enemy. Sensible, logical, essential reductions in consumption kill profits. It will not abide reducing global footprints, because there is no money in conservation or pulling back, obviously. That means buying less. That means producing less. That means producing and buying what we need, instead of what Madison Avenue tells us we want. Instead, it wants to endlessly expand markets and produce more and more consumption.

Capitalism has the Grow or Die imperative, which runs completely counter to any hope we have of sustaining life on this planet long term. Our resources are obviously finite and shrinking by the minute. As the effects of pollution grow and swamp acre after acre, destroy rain forest after rain forest, we have less and less safe water, secure food and so on.

I honestly can’t understand how anyone could miss this fact. It’s a big old snake, biting us all on the nose, but very few people see it. Yes, we would certainly have conflicts between humans and nature even without capitalism. But no economic system has ever accelerated, intensified or added fuel to that conflict like capitalism. Its very essence is in direct conflict with the health of the planet. Its very meaning is to subjugate and rape that planet in pursuit of dollars and nonsense.

We must end capitalism and replace it with an alternative, or this planet will go under.

@51

(a) And Plume, in your replacement world, what stops people from behaving the way they have throughout history and having as many children as they want?

(b) Once again you simply assert that a world with 7 billion people living an impoverished lifestyle (and spare me the strawman arguments about iPods and 50 pairs of shoes; the issue is things like eating meat, or being able to drive and fly as convenient — things that people, including people in poor countries, WANT) is better than .5 billion people who DO all share these abilities.

The issue is very simple.
(1) Do you agree that there has to be SOME limit to how many people live on the earth?
(2) If you agree that such a number does exist, why does it make sense to set that number high (with everyone living with limited resources) rather than low (with everyone have many more resources available)?

Maynard,

@53.

No, I’m not asserting it. You are. I’m saying there is no reason why those seven billion people have to live in poverty. None whatsoever. Hell, the Fed handed out 16 trillion dollars to bankers and fat cat private citizens recently. It did so and there wasn’t a blip on the inflation screen. Add to that the fact that there are several hundred trillion dollars in derivatives floating around the world now — if not more — and that tells us all we need to know about the complete absurdity of money and who controls it.

As David Graeber showed us in his Debt, governments created coinage. And they still create it. They still print it, and it’s largely arbitrary. We could easily switch to a system whereby money finally takes the next logical step and becomes infinite. It might as well be that way now, with the absurdity of several hundred trillion in derivatives, etc. etc. But instead of limiting the distribution of that absurd amount of money to fat cats and banksters, everyone gets a living wage, and education is free and health care is free and no one goes hungry and no one goes homeless.

Do away with profit, do away with money as we’ve understood it in the past. We go to virtual digits, which are infinite, and we distribute those virtual digits equally across the board to all who labor and we will never lack for jobs. Four wage levels set in stone. Prices for everything set in stone. No greater ratio than 4 to 1, top to bottom for wages. Apprentice, Apprentice-Artisan, Artisan, and Artisan-Organizer. Something like that. You work, you get digits added to your account. You purchase something, you subtract them. We all own the means of production, together, equally. No ruling class. No political parties. Just a new constitution, full equality under the law, full, true, participatory democracy, and no private sector. One’s home is off the grid of the Commons, but all production remains inside the sphere of the Commons.

No one goes hungry, or thirsty, or homeless. Ever. No one lacks health care or education or access to cultural venues.

It’s there for the taking, if we just give up the immoral, unethical practice of capitalist exploitation and the birth lottery.

Maynard,

@56

Who said anything about oil? You have a very bad habit of projecting your own demons onto others. Please make an attempt to argue against something I actually said, as opposed to what you project out of your own imagination.

Yes, we could get what we need from wind and solar and geothermal. We will be needing far less when we do away with profit and the consequent rape of the planet due to its pursuit. We will need far less energy when we switch to growing food organically, via small, local farms, as opposed to massively wasteful and inhumane factory farms. We will, in fact, need less of everything when we dump capitalism for something that actually fits human nature and the limits of this planet.

Humans passed through 200,000 years of communal living, before capitalism hit the scene. And we still, even with its brainwashing and destruction, continue to organize our families communally. We share. We distribute pretty much equally across the board within the family structure. We often do so even with neighbors. We invite friends over and share amongst them equally. We don’t charge them for their meals. We don’t have a tier for pricing or access. Hell, even at work, we’re constantly helping out our neighbors in the next cubicle without charging them a thing, sharing our knowledge and expertise, receiving the wisdom of others at no charge.

Capitalism is the antithesis of human nature. It “fits” the minority of sociopaths in our midst, but not the majority. The majority wants to get along, and has no desire to subjugate others or rape the land. Small “c” communism, in fact, is far more natural to our species.

It’s time we admit it and d0 what is natural and what is best for nature. And a major bonus for the switch? Time. We gain enormous amounts of time. If we are no longer working to make ownership rich, we can work far fewer hours to produce what we need.

Capitalism is cancer.

I’m not sure how you think thing work, Plume. Let’s say everyone in the developed world died tomorrow. What do you think would happen? Do you think the developed world is so rich entirely because the world is full of tasty natural resources, and the developed world steals them?

The Soviet economy grew because of the vast increase in resources thrown at it; there was an enormous increase in investment, much of it highly suspect in its productivity. There never could have been a golden future of plenitude and consumption just the other side of the hill, because the economic growth and the repression of domestic consumption were the same thing. It was all a con game.

Why is it a con game, though, and how was it highly suspect in its productivity?

I reckon, any large, national scale project involves the repression of domestic consumption. And why shouldn’t it lead to at least somewhat higher level of it just the other side of the hill? What about, say, construction of interstate highways?

37

There has been a lot of calculations on Soviet excess deaths. But, I am not sure how fruitful they are at this stage. Everybody now has access to the recorded numbers and everybody still disagrees on the ratio of excess deaths to birth deficit when looking at demographic losses. But, the range range been narrowed considerably. The number is certainly in the millions. Even extremist revisionists like J. Arch Getty who claimed in the 1980s that the Great Terror of 1936-1938 had less than 50,000 victims have conceded on this matter. David Irving went to prison for Holocaust Denial, but nobody has ever suffered any reproach for denying Stalinist crimes.

B. Wilder:
I am saying the inevitable internal dynamics of institutions matter.

There is nothing inevitable about institutional dynamics. Talk of cycles, patterns, rhythms, schedules is, IMO, ahistorical (with the possible exception of Kondratieff cycles, but they’re limited to economic data). You can pluck out one set of dates and someone else can pluck out another set of dates. (Pieter Geyl is still worth reading on these sorts of issues, IMO – Debates with Historians.)

Yes, there are eras and periods that can be marked out in retrospect but they do not fall into predetermined intervals. You say you are not talking about magic but every mention of regular schedules, patterns, etc. is close to magic, IMO. It’s what Strauss and Howe do with their simplistic notion of generational change: if you like that, fine. (Admittedly at least one good historian, David Kaiser, does.) I find it quite unconvincing.

I wonder about the effect of ritual continuity on these cycles. The Roman Church still has its Popes, the US still has its Constitution. Meanwhile, France has gone through five Republics in 250 years, and Germany and Russia, well…. Does this have any significant effect on who or what we think we are, and does it matter, do you think — or have I been reading too much Gibbon lately?

Walt,

@59,

I did not say “entirely”. But, yes, that’s a huge part of it. Once Europe’s ruling classes stripped Europe of much of its natural wealth, it moved on to other places overseas and stripped them, exploited them. From the British and Dutch “tea companies”, to the conquest and subjugation of the Americas, to the conquest and subjugation of the Pacific islands, Africa and so on. In search of wealth, European powers stripped the land and the sea of its natural beauty and riches. The dawn of capitalism pretty much coincides with the so-called “Age of Discovery.”

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

And all of that prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution, which would be more aptly named, Industrial Subjugation.

But, no one’s talking about everyone in the developed world dying. I am saying that our lifestyle is not sustainable, and it’s totally dependent upon the fact that billions of people aren’t consuming as much as we do. Again, if they did, there wouldn’t be enough to go around for us to party like it’s 1999. Basic math and physics. It’s a kind of perverted musical chairs. With fewer chairs available and an existential crisis on deck.

We have X amount of natural resources. The developed world, especially the well to do in that world, gobble up the majority of all resources, and put many times more pressure on the environment than their fellow humans in the developing world. They produce the majority of pollution in the world, even though their populations are much smaller. The United States, for instance, creates 33% of the world’s pollution with less than 5% of its population. If the folks in the developing world ever consume or pollute as much as a typical middle classer in the West, then the earth will collapse. It will reach its breaking point and won’t be able to sustain existing populations.

Capitalist industrial production did make a small percentage of the world filthy rich. But the costs were apocalyptic. My guess is that if there are still humans around in a thousand years to write histories — and I have my doubts — they will not have good things to say about the industrial age. From their blighted hovels, I imagine them writing that the final nails in the coffin of humanity were hammered home in the late 21st century, perhaps the early 22nd, and that the period from roughly 1800 – 2100 sealed our doom.

It didn’t have to be this way.

tim Worstall: “Eh? According to Angus Maddison GDP per capita in China in 1978 was $600 a year. Around and about the long term average (from Brad Delong) of humanity from around the Pharoahs onwards.

What development successes?”

Considering that China achieved massive levels of urbanization two thousand years ago, I think that this statistic is not trustworthy.

“The Soviet economy grew because of the vast increase in resources thrown at it;”

Actually, there’s a lesson there. The crashes of the current period and of the Great Depression are caused by the willingness to let massive amounts of resources — namely labor — lie idle. For no good reason.

Moral: when there are a bunch of people with no jobs who want to work, the government should directly employ them doing something useful. (Like, right now, maybe they could insulate houses, install solar panels, etc.) Dopey lesson — but very important.

Maynard: in brief, institutions fail because the principal-agent problem is not solvable in the long run. You could also say that it’s because too many people are greedy and power-hungry — which is the reason for the principal-agent problem.

People will always game an institution until the institution is run for the benefit of those in the institution, rather than for its original purpose. They can last a few hundred years; then you have to reform them or replace them.

Watson,

@72. What reversal? Profit is theft, and it’s praised to the high heavens.

And your first sentence is just baffling. Can you translate?

Plume, it’s not possible to make a trillion dollars by robbing people who only have a dollar each: you run out of people pretty quickly

Obviously, the colonial powers weren’t stealing dollars (or local currency) from the conquered. They stole land, minerals, timber, plants, animals, etc. etc. Land being the greatest of their thefts. See Lewis Hyde’s recent Common as Air for a sharp take on Britain’s destruction of the Indian commons, for example — as well as its own history of Enclosure.

And your last sentence strikes me as truly naive, not to mention pure hagiography. Britain had its time of dominance in the world like all other empires. Through force of arms. But if you choose to believe in myths, so be it.

72 and 77

Theft of land was greatest in the settlement colonies like Rhodesia. These colonies, however, were limited due to tropical disease. The number of British settlers in India, Ghana, or Nigeria was very small. Land in these places for the most part remained owned by locals. For these colonies the main profit was from the extraction of cheap raw materials which were then made into much more expensive manufactured goods. Palm oil into soap, cocoa into chocolate, and cotton into textiles. But, it turns out that actual political control of colonies is not necessary to maintain this type of economic arrangement. Unilever and Cadbury still buy cheap raw materials from Ghana and sell relatively expensive finished products in the UK and elsewhere in the world including back to Ghana. In contrast Kingsbite has effectively no market share in the UK. There is no need to buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.

Shatterface,

Buddhism goes back 2500 years. I described established Buddhist doctrine/practice.

As I said, I’m conflicted about it as well, but eating meat is accepted Buddhist practice. Buddha himself did.

“We have X amount of natural resources. ”

No, really, no we don’t.

We have some number of renewable resources which are, by their name, renewable and thus not limited over time.

We also have some number of not renewable resources which are indeed limited. But there are two very different limits. Just to take, as an example, the tellurium we use to make a certain kind of solar cell:

1) The number of atoms of Te on the planet. Even though this is indeed a very rare metal in crustal abundance this is some 120 million tonnes.

2) The interesting or important limit. Almost always an economic one. For example, with Te, given that we use some 125 tonnes a year, it is the cost of extraction which is the limit, not the gross availability.

Agreed, 2) does fail when we talk about some potentially renewable resources. We’re entirely and shit out of dodos for example…..

Watson Ladd @ 68 “Bruce, why those dates? If I pick out a bunch of dates at random from the United States then there will be something going on. Even if you force a 36 year cycle, then why not 1814, 1845, 1881, 1917, 1953, 1989?”

In one sense, I suppose it doesn’t matter. History doesn’t end, or even pause — as you say, something is always going on. Even completely arbitrary dates at least give one perspective, relief from short-sightedness. Tracing a long journey, pace by pace, doesn’t let one see the path; milestones are better and crossroads better still, for marking progress and direction. Arbitrary dates, an arbitrary distance apart would be milestones. What’s intriguing, though, is how particular pairs of dates link events in the evolution of institutions: countries are rarely in throes of revolution, and, yet, the revolutionary moments do seem to be spaced fairly evenly. That regularity gives more force to notions of institutional anacyclosis in political history and is intriguing to students of the business cycle and the recurrence of financial crises. The crossroads of history, where institutions are remade and nation-states choose their destinies, do seem to be encountered at regular intervals. In U.S. history, 1788 – 1824 – 1860 – 1896 – 1932 – 1968, in retrospect, stand out, and one can hang a narrative of long phases of political and economic history on them, covering the party system and economic institutions. Nothing happens instantly, and if you shifted the dates forward by 8 years, say, your narrative would still be identifying the same phases, just centering on those phases differently — you might be talking about Reconstruction and enacting the 14th amendment, or the gold standard, instead of the election of Lincoln and secession, for example. The important thing isn’t the dates qua dates — the dates aren’t magical — the important thing is recognizing the path, getting perspective on the evolution of institutional systems of politics and economics. Institutions are a kind of meta-bargain resolving conflict and setting the terms of cooperation, but the conflict, and its associated struggle, does not ever just go away. Institutions work by channelling and constraining the strategic jockeying, but that strategic jockeying wears away at the institution, itself, changing it, wearing it out, much as sugar in your bloodstream fuels your body, energizes your youth, but also ages you, contributing to the breakdown of your old age, in diabetes and arthritis and yellowing teeth. Political institutions can become progressively paralyzed, and/or corrupted, depending on how the game plays out; as Minsky (and Kindleberger in a similar vein, or Mancur Olson in a different one) argued, financial and economic institutions can be initially stabilizing or otherwise successful, and, then, their success in achieving stability can lead to de-stabilizing patterns of risk-taking, or the vesting of interest in success breeds corruption and hidebound conservatism. Or, they simply fail in particular respects, and the consequences of those shortcomings are amplified by repetition, until a restructuring is forced by breakdown. The regularity of generational change and the limits human life-span places on official careers are an important factor stabilizing the expiration dates on institutional systems.

1809 – 1845 – 1881 – . . . 1989 would be pretty revealing dates for Russia, but much less so for the U.S. For the U.S., they are milestones; for Russia, more of them come close, I think, to the crossroads.

Relatively few countries are so independent of their neighbors, that their development can be driven forward by endogenous forces alone. There’s a lot of jostling going on, particularly in continental European history, and increasing synchronicity as the industrial revolution spreads out as globalization. A war or famine can accelerate the turnover of generations, concentrating power for a long period after in the hands of a narrow cohort, sharpening the effect of generational turnover on the later crisis, and the stresses can precipitate early and deep institutional collapse or reforms on foreign models. 1648 or 1848 or 1918 or 1945 — these are red-letter dates in a lot of national calendars.

In relation to the OP, or some of the other comments, I suppose I am objecting to the excessive reliance of re-ifying “Communism” or “Capitalism” as a “system”, without recognizing that institutional systems come and go, as dynamic adaptations to circumstance and perennial conflict, and with a fairly predictable sell-by date, built-in.

Again, I wish the comments section had a preview window. It would help reduce coding errors like mine above.

William Timberman @ 67 : “I wonder . . . ritual . . . Roman Church . . . France . . .”

Julius Caesar was Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church, before Christ! And, if the idea of France could be destroyed by military failure, surely it would be dead by now.

There are many aspects of identity and social and political organization, with significant purchase on the present, which have improbably long historical life.

I think its odd that our contemporaries have so little interest in either history or institutions. A book like Graeber’s Debt seems to stimulate, and there’s a general sense of decline, and, with Peak Oil and Climate Change, of being on the verge of some new, dark epoch, but, to me, surprising little interest in the Big Picture.
We actually might be in civilizational decline — for real, man! — yet we have no Spengler. Our institutions are failing us, but our dominant mainstream policy ideology, Neoliberalism, is profoundly anti-institutional and ahistorical.

The idea of the Roman Empire was regularly trotted out as an organizing principle for centuries, from Charlemagne down to the Kaiser and the Czar, who were still using Caesar’s name for a title. Qin Shi Huang was invoked for similar purposes through two millenia of imperial Chinese history. Watson Ladd, in an earlier comment, mentioned in passing how the 3rd millenium BCE Akkadian empire of Sargon the Great became a model for Mesopotamia, and the Assyrians used his line as a standard of legitimacy for many centuries.

Maybe, I’m wrong, but I wonder just how anchored we are, in any of that sort of thing, and, if not, why not?

Plume: “It would be impossible for output not to have increased in 500 years, given the massive increase in the number of people adding to total output.”

As you add to the number of people fishing the same lake, at some point, adding more fisherman will decrease the number of fish caught.

I cannot speak for Walt, but I suppose, as an on-looker, that he, and others, have been trying to get you to be a little less morally outraged, and a little more analytical.

W Timberman 67
“The Roman Church still has its Popes, the US still has its Constitution”

And Britain still has its monarch! Sorry; but I felt that, between the call for a new Spengler and the fog of chicken noodles, what this thread needed was a reference to the Diamond Jubilee.

Crooked Timber is a pretty sympathetic forum, on the values, but it is also a place, where a premium will be placed on analysis, carefully modulated rhetoric, and something resembling good conversation. I think the passion of your moral outrage blinds you to some of the qualifications and distinctions necessary to careful analysis. It makes it hard for you to make yourself understood, and hard also, to make yourself pause long enough to understand what someone else is saying.

In your reply @92, to my single sentence comment @91, you write no less than 10 breathless sentences — two of them starting “But . . .”, and not counting three sentences of politeness. In my single, plain sentence, I did not distinguish per-fisherman output from total output (both would be true) — but you felt it necessary to correct me.

Walt wrote two brief comments, making no assertions — basically just asking (Socratic?) questions, and you’ve worked yourself into a wordy exasperation. @92 you thought my single sentence @91 “very true” and identical to what you’ve been arguing, but by @94, that same single sentence is, in your mind, an “objection” to what you’ve said.

Anyway, I’m done here, with this post and thread. I just wanted to give you a little feedback.

My link is broken. Trying again–

link

Bruce Wilder,

You said:

“but it is also a place, where a premium will be placed on analysis, carefully modulated rhetoric, and something resembling good conversation”

I saw no careful analysis of my comments. Just silly projections and assumptions, based upon nothing on the page. I saw straw men. Nothing more. And if you think it’s “good conversation” to patronize another poster with “trying to get you to be a little less morally outraged, and a little more analytical” . . . then I suggest you reassess.

You might as well have asked me to be less “emotional”, like some castaway from the 1950s.

Stop digging, Bruce.

The most one can say is that when women in EXTREMELY FERTILE societies gain more rights, they reduce their number of children. That is a completely different claim from the claim that is assumed in this thread, that, @76

“given economic independence education, access to birth control,and the right to use birth control, along with low child mortality rates, women will voluntarily reduce the birth rate to below replacement level.”

Don’t believe me? Look at the damn data.

The claim was that they will reduce birth rate to below replacement rate, i.e. less than TFR of about 2.1. The claim wasn’t that the lowest TFR in the world is found in the nations with the best conditions for women. Neither was it claimed that TFR could not decline under other conditions. What nations on that list are supposed to be counterexamples, i.e. they provide women education and economic and reproductive independence, but still have TFR > 2.1? The only one I count is Israel.

Walt,

@104

To be honest, I’ve never looked at the data regarding your question. But if I had to guess, I’d say per capita output has risen over the course of the last 500 years as well as aggregate output. A lot of factors no doubt come into play there. Again, capitalist organization, which is collectivist by design, has much to do with that. Mechanization, assembly lines, etc.

More adults work for other people now than they did 500 years ago, and their productivity is stressed to a far greater degree from above. It’s regimented, managed, pushed hard by management. That management, in turn, has output goals to meet.

Centuries ago, most adults worked their own farms, or owned their own small shops, or worked for very small employers, and their every move was not micromanaged like it is today. What we do now in the workplace is put on Excel sheets, with numbers crunched and pressure to improve quarter after quarter. The “management revolution” and complex divisions of labor are very recent developments, as is the enormous stress involved in late capitalist calls for endless productivity gains.

The complexity of tools to measure gains is fairly new as well, and certainly must drive increased goal-making. The software revolution and the Internet Age have put even greater stress on productivity improvements, which I know about first hand. It’s my line of work. And my own experience tells me that the obsession with data collection by management can actually increase workload and decreases productivity at times, as it adds stress to the front lines and no doubt management as well.

So, yes, overall, I’d say output per capita is up. But I don’t see a corresponding increase in quality of life or health or happiness with that increase.

But that’s just my take on the matter.

Yup, division of labor leads to both greater productivity and greater alienation. Bummer.

But at least with the internet now we all can criticize after dinner. That’s something.

Donald Johnson @ 98:
J. Otto Pohl covered this already, but Hitler and Stalin’s civilian bodycounts were similar , according to Timothy Snyder (a Yale historian) …

Note, though, that Snyder is specifically restricting himself to the period 1930-1945; it’s a comparison of Hitler and Stalin during the time both were in power (with an extension back to 1930 in the case of Stalin, to accomodate the famine of 1930-33).

He is also, I think, deliberately excluding those who died in labor camps on both sides (going by the quotation in this letter from Snyder: “My purpose in Bloodlands was to describe and explain the deliberate murder of fourteen million people by German and Soviet policy in the lands between Berlin and Moscow between 1933 and 1945. This figure does not include casualties of war, nor people who died as laborers in camps.”) Anne Applebaum, in her book Gulag, suggests that the best (highly uncertain) estimate for those who died in the gulag/labor-camp system during the entire history of the Soviet Union may have been closer to 2.7 million. (Which as she points out, may underestimate the total slightly, since camp administrators would sometimes release prisoners who were on the brink of death, so that their deaths wouldn’t officially count in camp records.)

Matt @ 103 (& Maynard Handley @ 102):
The claim was that they will reduce birth rate to below replacement rate, i.e. less than TFR of about 2.1. The claim wasn’t that the lowest TFR in the world is found in the nations with the best conditions for women. Neither was it claimed that TFR could not decline under other conditions.

Actually, Plume’s claim was: “Wherever feminism takes hold, birth rates go down. Wherever patriarchy is dominate [sic], they go up. ”

In reality, the surest precondition for lower birth rates/fertility rates seems to be the combination of urbanization and affluence (which very often go together). One suggested explanation is that extra children are economically useful to families in a farming society — more hands to help with chores — but an economic burden for city dwellers. As societies become more affluent and developed, the cost of raising children (more and fancier clothes and toys, schooling expenses, etc.) also goes up.

More freedom and autonomy for women — including general education — undoubtedly helps, as does lowering the cost and increasing the availability of contraception via family planning initiatives. But it’s probably misleading to suggest that it’s only the prevalence of feminism that matters.

In fact, there’s a weak trend in Europe where the countries which have most strongly implemented feminist policies — e.g., places like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries — have higher TFR than more traditional-minded countries like Italy and Greece. It’s been suggested that this is because policies like generous maternal and paternal leave — including in some cases forced paternal leave –, state-supported child care, and social attitudes which encourage men to take more child-raising and household responsibilities lessen the burden on women, which makes it easier for them to contemplate having a second child….

Improvements in the efficiency of taxes or spending reduce political pressure to suppress the growth of government and thus increase or prevent cuts to both total tax revenue and spending.

We are doomed, doomed, I tell ya.

Improvements in the efficiency of taxes or spending reduce political pressure to suppress the growth of government and thus increase or prevent cuts to both total tax revenue and spending.

This is why we cant have nice things.

@J Otto Pohl

SS General Von dem Bach Zelewski, who certainly ought to have known, told the Nuremberg tribunal that “a speech made by Heinrich Himmler at Weselsburg at the beginning of 1941, prior to the campaign against Russia, when … spoke of the purpose of the Russian campaign, which was, he said, to decimate the Slav population by 30 million”. Every single Jew in the areas under Nazi control, everybody with one Jewish parent and an unspecified number judged to exhibit “Jewish traits” can be added to this target. These plans were interrupted, and that rather than some strange and purposeless evilness tally is the decisive difference between Nazi and Stalinist crimes, to say nothing of the fact that Hitler launched a World War.

Nazism made a virtue of murder. Nobody could put a ceiling on the numbers that might have died had it not been destroyed in war.

Who might have been cast in the role of Khruschev in the event that Hitler had achieved his objectives? Himmler? Heydrich?

Persecutions based on ethnic origin are not necessarily racist? You have a strange understanding of the word. Judgements and courses of actions taken on or against all individuals in an ethnic group based on a supposed characteristic of that group isn’t racism? I don’t know what dictionary you are using, but it’s crap.

@117

Trite and evasive. You can’t just wave away the well documented plans the Nazis had set in motion or the fact that Nazi violence was the logical outcome of Nazi ideology rather than some incidental fact.

The cooperative planning of of tens of millions of murders is an action.

Plume, here’s some feedback from a fellow Buddhist: I don’t think you’re as analytical as you believe you are. Statements like these,

“Profit is theft” or “Capitalism is cancer” are empty rhetoric. Worse than empty, they hinder us from subtler understanding.

And the statement, “There is no difference between the Buddha and me” is reckless beyond comment.

The word “capitalism” doesn’t have a precise meaning. People use it in many different ways. Many of those uses refer to completely legitimate human activities. And “profit”? The Buddha used the word too, and not pejoratively.

124

Read Hirsch’s article. She adamantly denies that racial discrimination can ever occur along lines constructed along ethnicity or nationality as opposed to biology identical to the way the Nazis perceived race.

So killing twelve million for “the good of the revolution” is so much better than for ” the good of the master race” that it is worth arguing about at length? Sounds like quibbling over the ideological mask rather than any true difference in brutality.

@Sebastian H

So killing twelve million for “the good of the revolution” is so much better than for ” the good of the master race” that it is worth arguing about at length? Sounds like quibbling over the ideological mask rather than any true difference in brutality.

A tedious strawman argument.

Engaging in a conspiracy to murder tens of millions as an objective in itself and in pursuit of core ideological goals is different from the murder of millions in a ruthless but ultimately tangential campaign in pursuit of other objectives.

It is a fact of history that the USSR reformed itself without engaging in genocide. On the other hand, Nazi plans actually set in motion but ultimately curtailed by their enemies in war encompassed much greater violence. Seeing as J Otto Pohl has not attempted to answer the question, do you imagine Nazism would have ultimately produced its own Gorbachev? Or would the campaign against Jews, Slavs, Roma, “Asiatics” etc. have continued without limit?

@J Otto Pohl

I don’t judge regimes by intent or motive, but rather by actions and results.

Very well. Himmler and Von dem Bach-Zelewski engaged in a conspiracy to murder 30 million people as “the purpose of the Russian campaign”. That was an action.

Yet again: Do you imagine that the Nazi regime might in the end have produced an equivalent to Kruschev, let alone Gorbachev?

Mattski,

@123

I’m a Zen Buddhist, to be specific. When I say there is no difference between the Buddha and me, I’m not speaking in terms of virtue, accomplishment, circumstance, history. I’m talking in terms of the actual teachings. That we are all one. The essential teaching of Buddhism is just that. There is no “other.” There is no duality. There is no self. Buddhism teaches there isn’t even a difference between mind and body, which extends to all things. How can there be non-duality and oneness with all things if I am not the same as Buddha.

Again, I’m not speaking literally. I’m speaking paradoxically.

As for “profit is theft.” That statement is the result of decades of analysis, observation and direct experience. It comes after deep and careful analysis, as does “capitalism is cancer.” I’m in my fifties, and I’ve done the work to back up that statement.

I’ll try to quickly break down the profit is theft in the next post, to shorten this one.

131

I am an historian not a writer of alternative fantasy novels. I have no idea what might of happened if the Nazis were not defeated in 1945 and it is irrelevant. I do know that Naziism died permanently on 9 May 1945. Stalinism, however, is alive and well. The USSR also did engage in genocide. What do think the deliberate deportation of the Chechens to deadly material conditions in Central Asia on Red Army Day in 1944 where nearly a third of the population died in less than five years was?

@J Otto Pohl

I refer you to Neville Morley’s posts on contingency on this board over the last few days.

Back in 1941, all that has transpired since was contingent. “The purpose of the Russian campaign” was the murder of 30 million, a number to which the entirity of Europe’s Jews can be added. No equivalent Soviet conspiracy can be pointed to because none existed. In spite of the repression they have suffered, the Chechens live on even though it cannot be seriously disputed that Stalin had the means at his disposal to effect their genocide.

Your arguments are only tenable because you work to a dictionary of your own devising where words like “racism” and “genocide” posses definitions not shared with anybody else. For example your blog post that you linked to above states:

As an example [Rex] notes, “the essentially ethnic relations of Northern Ireland actually have much in common with black-white relations in other countries.” (Rex, p. 72). That is the discrimination against Catholics by the dominant Protestants in Northern Ireland during the 20th century was racial discrimination even though the groups involved are “sociohistorical” ones rather than “racial-biological” ones.

“That is” not what you claim it to be. “That is” nothing resembling what Rex actually wrote.

One of the very few understandings the communities in conflict in Northern Ireland shared was their common ethnic origin, a matter of historical record rather than folklore and the reason they each laid claim to a shared inheritance that was material (the Book of Kells, the Broighter Hoard, etc.) and symbolic (e.g. the Red Hand of Ulster, an Uí Néill emblem) as well as ethnic.

It is total nonsense to redefine this as a racial conflict. Likewise, simply employing agreed definitions of common words causes all your claims to dissolve into gibberish.

A quick addendum. In recent years, another form of cheating has exploded. Making the customer add value to the product they buy.

The “self service” revolution, basically. This is a company’s or industry’s way of passing on costs to the customer indirectly, in ways they probably do not even notice. Dressed up as “convenience”, businesses get to cut back on workers, increase their own compensation and profits even more, because they get consumers to both buy and service goods themselves.

For example: ATM machines. Self-serve gas stations and checkout lines. Surveys after transactions. Businesses get to cut back on the labor force of bank tellers, gas attendants and check out personnel. They get to save on marketing firms because customers do a lot of the work for them via surveys.

Most consumers don’t realize this is happening, that they’re actually being forced to add value — in a sense work for companies that sell them stuff — along with buying products and services. The Do it Yourself movement is pure capitalist genius in this regard, because customers actually “save” a lot less than they think they do. They leave their jobs and go buy something, but they still have to work. And capitalism follows them everywhere.

That’s another reason for the statement, Capitalism is Cancer.

The fact that they continued to speak German, live in German communities, and maintain German cultural practices should have had no bearing on the regime’s perception of their political loyalty.

You must be confusing me for someone who believes otherwise. I’m simply disagreeing with you that what happened there should be classified as ‘racism’; I completely agree that it was wrong.

But in fact the regime started questioning their loyalty only when the war started. The war with Germany. Germans – Germany. Is this not an obvious clue? Is it even remotely possible that the Soviet authorities turned anti-German racists overnight on June 22, 1941?

140

I am referring to the revival of Stalin’s cult in Russia during recent years.

144

There is no way from the quotation that I provided from Rex that it can be interpreted in any other way than Rex claimed that Northern Ireland had a “an essentially ethnic” conflict that was a race relations situation with “much in common with black-white relations in other countries.” You know there is a whole literature on similarities of Northern Ireland to South Africa. Maybe it is all wrong. But, I did not mischaractarize what Rex wrote.

146

But, Snyder’s whole point is that the differences are not as great as the official line suggests. A lot of Stalin’s killings were ethnically based. Much of the grandiose plans of the Nazis could not be fulfilled. So the actual numbers killed are pretty close and the reasons for those killings are not as different as Western scholars have claimed in the past. People trying to rehabilitate Stalin by demonizing the Nazis for things they actually did not do have greatly distorted our view of history. Having a plan to kill 30 million people is not the same as actually killing 30 million people.

Data 148:

Sobolev the head of the CPSU in Krasnoyarsk Kray is the person the letter is referencing. The quotation is below.

_Stop playing internationalism, all these Poles, Koreans, Latvians, Germans, etc. should be beaten, these are all mercenary nations subject to termination…all nationals should be caught, forced to their knees, and exterminated like mad dogs._

Quoted in Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, _Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: Peoples’ Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1995-1940_ Stanford, CA, 2002, p. 60.

Herr Kelleher keeps talking about Nazi plans to kill 30 million people that actually were not killed as the reason why Hitler was infinitely worse than Stalin. The actual murder of 11 million people by the Nazis being insufficiently evil to make Hitler orders of magnitude more evil than Stalin. The fact that 11 million people is about the same number people Stalin murdered makes it hard to make an argument regarding orders of magnitude.

I really don’t see that it would be valuable to settle, once and for all, whether Hitler and Stalin are in the same circle of hell, or different ones. So the hell with that.

It is kind of interesting that people are so invested in making the distinction, defending Stalin from the charge of being Hitler, but it doesn’t seem that hard to explain, based on my very limited knowledge of the relevant history. Both Nazism and Communism were international movements as well as the ruling ideologies of countries. The people who supported Nazism or fascism outside of fascist countries were, generally, a bunch of revolting thugs who nearly all of us now are happy to throw into the trash along with Hitler himself. But the Communists (including those who supported Stalin) outside of Communist countries were a very different matter; their politics included nice things like racial equality, women’s rights, egalitarianism and so forth. Some of them wrote smart things that are still interesting[1]; some of them helped to accomplish real changes for the better in their countries. This doesn’t mean it was okay to support Stalin, of course, but it does explain why people want to defend those who did, and why there’s a real desire to distinguish them from Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. And one way to do that is to try to distinguish Stalin from Hitler.

Am I wrong about any of this? And is there really anything more to this argument?

[1] My assumption is that this is not true of Nazis: I’ve never heard anyone argue for some lasting value in Nazi or fascist political writings. But I’ve literally never read any of them either, so I can’t say that with much confidence.

The discussion is not about Hitler and Stalin, but about two ideologies, that both caused mass atrocities. Some say they are essentially the same. Others say one functioned as intended, while the other just went off the rails, due to a design flaw.

This is a significant difference of opinions. My sense of it is that the first approach is itself indicative of an ideology, ideology called anti-communism, ideology that itself has been guilty of committing plenty of atrocities all over the world.

Dogmatic liberal ‘anti-racists’ also advocate treating various minorities in a special way. And yet they are infuriated when they are called racists. They feel there could be a very good reason to make race- or ethnicity- based distinctions. If you insist on redefining ‘racism’ as ‘treating minorities differently’, then: good for the goose, good for the gander, as they say.

Sure, I can see the distinction. So it’s called ‘racism’ depending to where you send them, is that it? To college – not racism, to a death camp – racism, got it. But I want to know more. Do you have the whole list?

But the same is true of Nazism – look at all those strutting dictators in the Middle East and Africa and South America in the 50s and 60s

Not to mention Fascist-inspired or -influenced movements in various countries all over the world in the 30s and 40s, some of which gave rise to parties that survive (in altered and no-longer-Fascist forms) today: e.g., the Kataeb Party in Lebanon, or the RSS, which later gave rise to the BJP.

And the “Hitler did good things for Germany” trope, unfortunately, turns up now in then in the mouths of some (postwar) politicians. Bal Thackeray, founder of the Shiv Sena party in India, has done this on more than one occasion.

Please ignore the strike-out marks in my post @159; I hadn’t realized that starting a separate word with a hyphen would do that…

It’s just a fact that a supposed equation between the body counts of Stalin and Hitler is frequently used to minimize the Holocaust and actually used directly as an anti-semitic trope (by ascribing all deaths under Communism to some Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy).

I think it’s actually pretty clear that Stalin, while horrible, was not as bad as Hitler. One cannot ignore the massive developmental differences between Germany and Russia; comparing death counts in the two is like comparing death counts in India and Italy. Ascribing all famine deaths in the 1930s to Stalin is like ascribing all of Russia’s historical underdevelopment to Stalin. Germany could have been expected to be a fairly advanced and successful country absent Hitler, the same is not true of Russia absent Stalin.

If you want clear proof of the differences between the two systems you need only look at the treatment of Germany and Eastern Europe under Soviet rule compared to what would have happened to Russia and Eastern Europe under Nazi rule. The Soviets raped and pillaged but there were no mass executions or exterminations of Germans or Poles. Hitler’s explicit intent was to wipe out most of the Slavs and reduce the rest to complete slavery as forced laborers. The Russians instituted represssive dictatorships but not human slavery.

To bring it back to Red Plenty, we see an excellent example of what happens when various believers try to grapple with how their faith and the faith of their leaders intersects with reality. The humanizing thing it shows is that sometimes you can be a good and dedicated person, but if you have a faith which is too far from reality it can suck.

Mattski,

Quick addition to the comments about being the same as Buddha. Zen teaches this, but they don’t teach it in order to avoid working with supreme, even sublime effort to attain enlightenment. There is such a thing as understanding something conceptually and intellectually, and understanding it with every fiber of your being. I have reached the first part of that place. I am far from the second, which will take me Buddha knows how long to reach. Zen teaches the Eightfold Path as well as the importance of Zazen. Zazen is actually emphasized about all other things as a way, a path to achieve true enlightenment. Some Zen masters took dozens of years to find enlightenment. Others, apparently, reached it during their first sesshin, though this is rare. Regardless, a conceptual understand is vital for me to pursue the real task ahead.

It’s not reckless in any way to teach the concept that we are all already Buddha. It might be reckless if that teaching did not also demand that we go far beyond the conceptual, the abstract, the intellectual and into the realm of our whole being and its “understanding.” Again, on a personal level, I am very far from that place.

Doesn’t the golden dawn party in Greece have a larger share of the vote
than any party that might legitimately be called Stalinist?

Plume,

This is for you.

Calling your economic ideas amateurish is not an insult, it is a valid characterization. You show not the slightest awareness how much hangs on your use of the word “fairly” @ 166. “Fairly” according to who?

You’re quite right, we’re told that we all have the Buddha nature. It’s a shame that our suffering seems utterly indifferent as to whether we have it or not, don’t you think? But I didn’t get into this conversation to debate abstruse philosophy. I was trying to echo some other participants in this thread to the effect that you might have more influence with a less overheated, self-righteous approach.

From the story of the mustard seed:

“He who seeks peace should draw out the arrow of lamentation, and complaint, and grief. He who has drawn out the arrow and has become composed will obtain peace of mind; he who has overcome all sorrow will become free from sorrow, and be blessed.”

I refer you to cosma’s post a few down the way on the problems of the command economy. It sounds as if your suggestion would have all the same problems only worse.

Bruce @89: We actually might be in civilizational decline—for real, man!—yet we have no Spengler.

We do, actually: Morris Berman. See his trilogy on America’s decline and fall: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/how-bad-is-it/.