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H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

newstatesman.com

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Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#41

Post by JanezStupar »

alyxr wrote: post #33
arethuza wrote: post #4

Not one mention of the terrible famine in the Ukraine which had occurred over the two previous years. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, initially a supporter of the Soviets until he witnessed what their policies actually meant as a correspondent for the Guardian in Moscow: "The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any cons…

He probably didn't mention it because the Holodomor didn't actually happen. http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

Authored by:

  By Mario Sousa
  Member of the
  Communist Party Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries
  Sweden

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#42

Post by mercurial »

osipov wrote: post #22
arethuza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was merely surprised that someone could interview a leader of a country in which millions had died of starvation and not bring the subject up. Edit: Probably rather unwise of me to bring the subject up at this moment in time...

History is written by victors. Your image of Stalin is based on the history that was written about him after his death by people who openly declared themselves as victors over Stalinism. Remember, Stalin's image in 1930s was very different, culminating in Time's Man of the Year cover in 1939.

Saddam was also Man of the Year. It's not a popularity contest.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#43

Post by pessimizer »

vijayboyapati wrote: post #34

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy…

Your claims are a lot more controversial than you're making them appear. It's intellectually dishonest to present them as settled fact.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#44

Post by dllthomas »

cynicalkane wrote: post #30
wsxcde wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's the point being made here? Are you attempting to imply that because Stalin presided over a terrible famine his political ideals must be flawed? Churchill and friends presided over the Bengal famine of the 1940s. Six million people died in a famine during which food was exported out of Bengal to aid the British war effort. Or what about the British East India company raising land taxes from 10%…

There's no part of capitalism that requires the oppression of others, except in maybe some metaphorical economic sense. In communism the ability to oppress is a necessary feature of the system (and if you don't think so, read Marx). The world has seen many implementations of capitalism that don't involve forcing large numbers of people to starve. The same cannot be said of communism.

"the ability to oppress is a necessary feature of the system (and if you don't think so, read Marx)."

That's not been in any of the Marx I've read, to my recollection, though that's nowhere near exhaustive and my recollection could certainly be flawed. Do you have something specific to point to?

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#45

Post by philwelch »

pessimizer wrote: post #40
jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

The little preface says that Wells was critisized for being too 'deferential' toward Stalin (Wells was a socialist, of course). It is actually striking to me... today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Politicians today don't even expect to talk about ideas, certainly not with journalists for publication, let alone to be chall…

>today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Just a guess, but are you saying this from an US POV? As an USian, I can't imagine seeing journalists confront or challenge a politician except by accident. Even when those accidents happen, the journalists and civility become the center of a follow-up media frenzy, rather than the sub…

You can be selectively confrontational. Even in a dishonest way. Just watch Bill O'Reilly sometimes.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#46

Post by dang »

All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting.

Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does.

I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meaning on Hacker News over the years, and (b) editorial judgment plays a role on this site.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#47

Post by alyxr »

JanezStupar wrote: post #41
alyxr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably didn't mention it because the Holodomor didn't actually happen. http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

Authored by: By Mario Sousa Member of the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries Sweden

Do you have anything to say regarding the actual content of the argument put forward?

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#48

Post by rplacd »

vijayboyapati wrote: post #34

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy…

If you don't mind a parenthetical point, I'd argue that Marx's specific analyses and the precise names stuck to them are too limiting at this point - or at least I'm convinced you've conflated two properties that someone pointed out a while ago would make debate considerably more productive (by virtue, I suppose, of making the "heterodox" double-qualifier idelogies suddenly more motivated) when separated - the degree to which ownership and control of the means of production are centralized; and the precise ownership described in the terms of some separate dichotomy. Your point would prescribe for the first - but "socialism" as a name I'd claim has accreted and been recast to the extent that some synthetic history in which the limited-liability company is replaced with the cooperative would be called "market socialist" by last-generation Soviet nomenklatura, and yet "social-democratic and cooperativist" by the Co-operative Party that by agreement constitutes a curiously significant amount of British Labour (and hence the use of a name.) That's neither to argue, though, that the two are a mile and a half away: you're right to say that it did once imply both, and that in past contexts (or that's my impression of Western European economic reform post-World War II) it was overbearing as a trend no matter how the actual distribution of control could be construed.

(Edited for spelling correction, the contextualization at the end, and the note about how overt signs of association affect self-appropriation of names...)

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#49

Post by dang »

vijayboyapati wrote: post #34

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy…

This counts as an ideological tangent, and therefore off-topic. There is no meaningful path from this article to Austrian economics.

Edit: Perhaps this needs more explanation. "Stalin -> communism -> capitalism -> Austrians" is not a meaningful path, because there's nothing specific about it, nothing to tie it to this particular story. It merely uses the story as a launching pad to jump straight into a perennial ideological debate, which—if it continues—is likely to drown out any nuanced conversation that really is relevant to the article.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#50

Post by dang »

arethuza wrote: post #5
nmrm wrote: post #3

This was a particularly interested/relevant excerpt from Wells. I think of the open source ethos as one small example of what he's calling for in the second paragraph: I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not... people in the West for whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who wan…

Credit to Wells for then saying: "They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense." I wonder if Wells was one of the last people to disagree with Stalin who didn't end up with a bullet in the back of their heads?

The Bolsheviks cultivated celebrity visitors from the Western left. It wouldn't have worked to shoot them.

(Edit: Originally this comment had a moderation bit in it as well, but someone rightly pointed out to me that it isn't helpful to wear the moderator hat and make a regular-user comment in the same post. So I've edited that out. I considered restricting myself to only making moderator comments, but (a) that's never been how HN worked, (b) I was a user long before a moderator, and (c) I'd burn out from boredom.)

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