Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is logic that suggests that any regulation of any major market is intrinsically "socialist". Perhaps that's true, but if it's true it's only true in the sense that it illustrates how treacherous the word "socialism" is.
There is the saying "why own the farm If you can own the farmer?", which has been attributed to various totalitarians (and whose true origin I am unaware of), that highlights the fact that owning the actual means of production is unnecessary if you control the owner. This can be through regulation, corruption, or other means. I don't see socialism as a 'treacherous' word, but 'socialism' is more a spectrum than a boo…
My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
181–190 of 276 posts
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 1930s the US was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
Do you really not see the difference between these two events?
I'm trying to draw parallels here, that sometimes shit happens. Russia's mismanagement of agriculture notwithstanding, sometimes you're up against forces you can't control.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 1930s the US was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
The Dust Bowl claimed millions of lives? You're link doesn't support that in the least. It doesn't even mention any famine.
Death by suicide was the most common, as we're seeing now in the more recent economic troubles. Starvation and job security is certainly a motivating factor in any crisis where that becomes a problem.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#184I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor. Elections were won with ~70% of the votes, and I also recall various referendum-like votes which Chavez won easily as well. Another fact that surprised me was that every Sunday he would give these 4h long speeches, and a crow…
> I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor.
This isn't in tension, because communism and democracy aren't opposites. In fact, they are logically independent (even if anti-correlated in practice).
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is the saying "why own the farm If you can own the farmer?", which has been attributed to various totalitarians (and whose true origin I am unaware of), that highlights the fact that owning the actual means of production is unnecessary if you control the owner. This can be through regulation, corruption, or other means. I don't see socialism as a 'treacherous' word, but 'socialism' is more a spectrum than a boo…
Careful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
I don't understand where you believe I am making a fundamental attribution error. I am an extreme libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist (depending on where you draw the line), and from what I've read in your posts over the last years, you are nowhere near that side of the spectrum(s), unless you usually argue in favor of things you disagree with.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
It always amazes me when people vehemently defend the USSR and similar, especially in a place like HN. The USSR was nothing like the United States. You did not start a "radish and milk" store in the USSR without approval from the government. To argue that the USSR was anything remotely close to a free market is absurd and a dangerous reinterpretation of established history. I'm afraid you have very skewed, incorrect…
You did not start a store in the USSR, period. That was one out a few countries where all business was tightly state-owned. You could grow some radishes and sell them at farmer's market, but that's it.
This is just false. All business in the USSR was not tightly state owned. Yes, the "commanding heights" of the economy were. You're claiming Kiev had no privately owned stores? Like many people here you're talking about a subject you don't know much about.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#187I highly recommend reading Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng [0]. It's a factual, first-hand account of the China's Cultural Revolution and what living in a communist / socialist society is really like from an educated person's perspective. My inlaws escaped Saigon when it fell and say the picture is very accurate. The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths. I encourage people…
I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably. Presumably, the real problem we're talking about is state-controlled economies, regardless of the ideologies that set them up.
> I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably.
I was born in the Socialist Republic of Romania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania) in the early 1980s, which was ruled by the Romanian Communist Party (which was the only allowed party). The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism, there were no debates in our local press about which one was which. I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing, where Obama is called a socialist because he tried to make sense of the US health-care system (long story short: he's not).
And on a more general level of discussion, I'm not sure there really is a difference between the two. I've read some left-leaning literature (Marx's Capital I, his "German Ideology" and other younger writings of his, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", Kołakowski's 3-volume "Main Currents of Marxism", some Lukács, Jacques Rancière's "Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France") and no-where in those volumes there was a clear distinction made between "communism" and "socialism". The only nuance I can think of is Lenin's insistence that trade-unionist communism was a bad thing, because that involved making a pact with the "enemy" (the capitalists) and only settling for small gains, ignoring the bigger picture. He was of course right, from a workers' point of view perspective, you either control all means of productions or you risk still depending on the capitalists. 100+ or so years since his early writings the European working class is basically dead.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably. You might be surprised to learn that not even the Soviet Union considered itself communist (they considered themselves socialist transitioning to communist). The reality is that "socialist" is a word without a clear definition, and it's better to avoid using it altogether if you want people to und…
I think "capitalism" and "free trade" are similarly without clear definitions, given the amount of time people spend arguing about them. This seems to be a consistent truth. Perhaps we should develop tools to be able to converse with people who don't use the same definitions that we do?
I agree with you on capitalism, so it is another word I tend to avoid. I try to say things in a way that I will be understood.
I don't know about "free trade," though, what sorts of alternate definitions are people using for that?
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people didn't starve under the US-backed dictatorships, so those regimes have that much going for them. But they didn't starve under Castro either, and living conditions were probably better under Castro than in any country in the Warsaw Pact (see Anthony Daniels' _Utopias Elsewhere_); so I'd guess that most of the story is that Chavez was just that dumb.
An Island like Cuba is just small enough to make actual communism possibly work - it has just slightly less people that the Los Angeles Metro area does - it also has a very homogeneous cultural background. Cuba however isn't quite rich enough in natural resources to actually reach autarky however, if it was, Cuba might be a very different story. I'm not a proponent of anything Authoritarian, but communism on a small…
just small enough to make actual communism possibly work
This is an important distinction. Humans evolved in tribes, and many of our instinctual responses to how we think we should work together are optimized for such a setting. But these things just can't scale upwards. There are many things that work well at a community level that fall apart with larger groups. So when we see a problem in the world and feel our heart-strings tugged, we should be suspicious that our emotional response is something that can really make sense in the big picture.
I do agree that such things might be able to work at small scales. But I suspect that the threshold is well below the size that you're citing here.
Re: My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once again, debates over definitions completely derail any sensible discussion of socialism. The word "markets" as used by people criticizing command economies for not having them does not simply mean "places where radishes are kept with numbers attached to them". It is perfectly reasonable to use the term "market" that way. After all, what else would you call a place where radishes are stored with price tags? But th…
Alternate definition? A market is a place where you exchange currency for commodities. That is a definition of what a market is, not an "alternative definition". There is no being coy at all, I can't even twist my head around how these similar places in the US and Russia are not the same. What is his "alternate definition" where such a place in Russia is stripped of the word market?
Perhaps you can tell us more about how the USSR stock market worked. People in the US know very little about it, even believing it may not have existed.