Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newstatesman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 141 posts

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

#51

Post by Tycho »

alyxr wrote: post #35
Tycho wrote: post #17

This strikes me as fake. Maybe entirely written by Wells, or someone else. I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. What are these elementary requirement…

> What are these elementary requirements Food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare, education. The list is long, but basic. I'm sure you can come up with the rest. > and aren't they now satisfied? Not for the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of countries. Even in your own, I'm sure imperialist country, huge masses of the population are in want.

Well, let's see, I live in the UK.

We have running, clean water in every part of the country, I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply.

Likewise with food, I haven't heard of anyone actually starving, and while you could conceivably run out of money to buy food, there's a safety net of food banks.

Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years.

Education is provided for everyone to a level beyond what is necessary for most jobs, and that's before you consider the subsidised further education and of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries).

Healthcare is also provided for everyone via the NHS. You can of course get better education and healthcare through private means, but most people don't bother even if they can afford it (unless they can easily afford it).

Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue.

So, is there more stuff we should add to the list that would make it more obvious how huge masses of the population are in want?

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

#52

Post by dang »

alyxr wrote: post #32
listic wrote: post #8

Very interesting. Was it ever translated into Russian? I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that it wasn't.

Stalin spoke Georgian and Russian, not English.

I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.

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

#53

Post by steveklabnik »

wpietri wrote: post #38
cynicalkane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it depends on what you mean by capitalism. A common notion of it is the "increase shareholder value" version, where the only thing that matters to executives is profit. There, I don't think oppression is a necessary precondition, but it is a necessary outcome. You can see that in the company stores of yore, and the eternal reemergence of monopolies and oligopolies that will treat treat both their workers and…

It also depends on what you mean by 'oppression.' To make an analogy, Marxists also consider externalities oppressive, because they're talking about the system as a whole. Libertarian/liberal ethical systems tend to focus on individual actions. A transaction between two parties where one isn't pointing a gun at each other is categorically not oppressive to libertarians/liberals, but may still be an oppressive action to a Marxist.

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

#54

Post by firstOrder »

Tycho wrote: post #17

This strikes me as fake. Maybe entirely written by Wells, or someone else. I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. What are these elementary requirement…

A janitor who works and lives in San Francisco would have to have enough money to buy food, pay rent and so forth. Perhaps the reproduction of labor might be included (able to afford to have and raise two kids).

This would be the elementary requirements. So is that the case, can a janitor who has been living and working in San Francisco for the past decade afford to buy food, pay rent, or (depending if reproduction of labor is included) have two kids? These people certainly exist. I suppose the people in the news stories who were just getting by in the Bay Area and are now living in their cars or whatever would be another example. And so forth. You could find other types of cases in Bangladesh, Honduras etc., which might be different in some ways.

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

#55

Post by listic »

dang wrote: post #52
alyxr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalin spoke Georgian and Russian, not English.

I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.

Sorry if I was unclear. As a Russian myself, I wondered whether this interview, which we can read here in English, was ever, during the period between 1934 to now, translated from English into Russian. The most direct reason for this interest being to show it to my non-English-speaking friends.

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

#56

Post by firstOrder »

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 interview took part when the economy in the UK and USA had hit the skids, while the USSR's economy was chugging along like gangbusters. In fact, a significant number of English and west European workers moved to the USSR to work since there was a labor shortage. American firms went there as well.

Whatever the economists were talking about, the US had just started to change to an incredibly centralized, semi-planned economy based on military spending as well as things like the NSF. The US is still like this, the military budget is over half a trillion a year, and the brass has been publicly begging Congress for decades now to not make so useless tanks and such. It is a job and research program, it in/directly financed the transistor and IC and microprocessor, it created the Internet and so forth.

Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great. Khrushchev made a lot of changes, and problems began cropping up (bread shortages, less capital spending etc.)

You can't make a comparison with the US as an unplanned economy, since this was the beginning to changing it to a semi-planned economy with a (conservatively) $600 billion a year "military" budget. You can't say Stalin's economic policies failed, as they were successful under himself, and Khrushchev majorly changed them in the same way FDR changed the US policies.

Also the price argument is tautological and not falsifiable. Something is valuable because something is valuable. Let us say that Bitcoin is a giant Ponzi scheme (which it is), a $6 billion bogus market cap of worthless hashes. In fact it was a $14 billion market cap four months ago, now $6 billion. Is all the equipment buys, and wasted electricity and so forth a rational allocation of capital? Couldn't it be better used to make something useful? Well it's a rational allocation because of the price which makes it rational which points to the price. It's a circular, tautological, unfalsifiable argument. When Bitcoin's market cap crashes below $1 billion, and then lower, the price argument you mention won't have its defenders admit they're wrong because it is tautological.

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

#57

Post by firstOrder »

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.

Tell me where in the world people did not live communistically prior to 10,000 years ago.

So according to you, the entire world lived under a system that required the oppression of others prior to 10,000 years ago, when everyone lived in migrating hunter-gatherer bands where all wealth was shared. This was a system that forced people to starve, according to you.

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

#58

Post by firstOrder »

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

Wow, I guess that means they are biased. Luckily, academics in universities across the US, funded by grants by the Koch brothers ( http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/11/144280/koch-uni... ), are writing objective articles about history, economics, policy and other topics.

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

#59

Post by gaius »

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?

Stalin referred to his Western supporters as "useful idiots".

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

#60

Post by jamesbritt »

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…

It's telling when some of the most challenging interviews are done by Jon Stewart, the host of a comedy show.

Sort of embarrassing: http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1761108

Post reply on HN