this is a great article. It's shocking how many people have never heard of Holodomor [0]. Or the extent of Stalin's brutality long before the second world war began.
Between 15% and 42% of the entire Kazakh population died in this same fell swoop. Essentially, grain silos that the (Ukranian, Russian, Kazakh, [insert peasant population and Republic]) peasants had reserved to feed themselves during a year that had poor crop yields had been previously taken by force to feed people in cities. When the very harsh winter of '32-33 came, that meant death of starvation for all these peasants, of all these nationalities. The breadbaskets of USSR (Ukraine and Kazakhstan) had a particularly high concentration of peasants, and therefore, particularly high death rate.
I think part of this lies with the fact that Stalin and especially Communism had a lot of highly placed admirers in the West. One of those was Walter Duranty, who even won a Pulitzer Prize for for his work as the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He worked to deny and discredit those who tried to tell the world about the atrocities of Stalin.
"Overall, Marxism is a tiny minority faith. Just 3% of professors accept the label. The share rises to 5% in the humanities. The shocker, though, is that as recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists"
It's important to note that in the 2006 study that Caplan cites, which reported that 18% of social scientists identified as Marxists, the other options offered were all about political affiliation rather than economic views (although there is certainly significant overlap between these categories). The prevalence of self-identified Marxists in social sciences, particuarly sociology, may reflect the important role Marx's commentaries on the social outcomes of 19th century capitalism has had in areas like history, sociology, and cultural studies, rather than a commitment to communist economic structures. There are plenty of Marxist scholars who use Marx's methods of analyzing social phenomena without subscribing to his statements about the inevitable triumph of socialism. Marx is generally recognized as a better diagnostician than a prescriptionist, and for fields involved in critical analysis of social-political-economic phenomena it is not surprising to see people who identify (politically) with his work and world view.
> Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”
> But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.
So, it is possible Marx's economic prescription came out of his social diagnosis
No! Marx in Das Kapital and other works dedicated a great deal to make a philosophical framework to study the Capitalist Mode of Production as a phenomenon in Industrial Revolution England. Additionally, he made arguments about how the material conditions shaped human society. (Which you can in retrospective say it was obvious, but it wasn't so at the time and even nowadays history is taught in the Great Man Theory - https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Great_Man_theory )
Marx predicted an uprising in England from Factory Workers, not in agricultural Russia and it was a big source of head scratching for Marxists at the time. The Bolshevik Revolution was at odds with Marxist theory. (Which doesn't mean he was wrong with his description of capitalism at the time)
I'm not sure whether gnarbarian is trolling or just operating outside his range of understanding, but those with an honest interest in the subject will find that Marxist-inflected schools of thought of course comprise many diverse and lively intellectual disciplines, which have influenced many politicians and leaders in decidedly non-Stalinist nations around the world, from MLK Jr. to the probable future Prime Minister of Great Britain.
The other obvious rejoinder to the parent comment is that if Stalinism is "Marxism in practice", than in equal measure the wholesale genocidal slaughter of millions of Native Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Iraqis etc. carried out by the United States can be said to be capitalism in practice, not to mention the century plus of horrific atrocities committed by the capitalist nations of Western Europe and East Asia (of course, many Marxists would say that this is exactly right).
Marx believed that socialist democracy was a dangerous enemy, because it would keep the people placated under a capitalist-government aristocracy, provided for but unfree.
Marx had a different definition of freedom than is understood by liberals and democratic leftists. He used phrases like "dictatorship of the proletariat" unironically.
Isn't North Korea aka DPRK a dictatorship? Pretty much every authoritarian regime calls themselves a Republic / Democracy. It's become a long standing joke by now.
I can imagine some conflation happening in the 1930s, but at least today, there's a stark differentiation between Stalinism and Marxism. 18% of social scientists do not identify as Stalinists.
For anyone interested about the attitude of various Soviet-sympathetic people in the West during the 20th century, I'd recommend reading Scott Alexander's book review of "Chronicles of Wasted Time" [0]. I admit I haven't read the book itself but the review seems to do a good job summing things up.
Basically it's the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, who grew up in a socialist background, becomes a journalist and goes over to Stalin's USSR to report on the amazing new progress being made, only to realize just how false all the reports are -- and what's more, how unwilling his target audience would be to hear it:
[quotes from the review]
>although it is clear to him that the Soviet economy is struggling, every dispatch they are given to send home declares that things are better than ever, that the Workers’ Paradise is even more paradisiacal than previously believed, that the evidence is in and Stalinism is the winner. It doesn’t matter what he makes of this, because anything he writes which deviates from the script is rejected by the censors, who ban him from sending it home. He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership.
[...]
>His final break with the rest of the enlightened progressive world comes when he decides to do something that perhaps no other journalist in the entire Soviet Union had dared – to go off the reservation, so to speak, leave Moscow undercover, and see if he can actually get into the regions where rumors say some kind of famine might be happening. The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles.
Yes. URSS has been very effective in the long-term manipulation of opinions and history. I am french. IMHO, May 1968 events were the consequences of this manipulated opinions. The "anti-capitalist" ideology was very present in governments between 1981 and 2007 (maybe 2017). The "anti-religious" ideology is still present.
You don't necessarily have to be a self-promoting a*hole either, though.
You're welcome. Haven't really checked if translations of Shalamov into English are any good, but originals are. Not something you would read for pleasure though.
Lots of people haven't heard of the Holodomor but even the most vague and generic perceptions of Stalin's brutality are not based on the second world war.
You don't have to be a fascist to condemn the Holodomor.
It's also shocking, though, how unaware we are of atrocities committed by Western powers. It is difficult, for example, to understate the culpability of the British Empire, and its economic system in Ireland's Great Famine.
Much like the Holodomor, it was an engineered famine - there was no shortage of food - it was just not very evenly distributed. The free market, and British colonial policy proved itself to be highly effective at providing a solution to the "Irish Question"[1] - which involved killing a quarter of Ireland's population.
Utter contempt for human life is a function of power, not of economic system.
There was no real free market for the Irish though. The Irish weren't allowed to fish or hunt or eat other crops which were slotted for English consumption. Nor were the Catholic Irish allowed to own land. They were essentially only allowed to eat potatoes... The famine was a genocide justified as divine retribution against the Catholics of Ireland.
That's not the whole picture - Ireland exported food throughout the famine - more then enough food then it needed to feed itself.
The problem was that exporting food to England was more profitable then selling food domestically. The reason that the Irish poor ate potatoes was not because they were forbidden from other food, but because that was all they could afford.
The invisible hand of the market, and the very visible hand of Parliament was content to see a million people starve to death.
Note that one of the causes of the Holodomor was the Soviet Union exporting food during the famine. History repeats itself.
I agree with the caveat that had their land not been taken from them and given to protestants in the first place, they could have done a much better job of feeding themselves.
Nearly all land has been taken away from someone or other, at sword or gunpoint, at some point in time or another. Do markets only work when land is distributed fairly as a starting condition?
Not just content to see them die, eager I think. Maybe not as explicitly eager as Stalin or Hitler, but more than Mao in his incompetence and arrogance.
Might be worth addressing both posters directly as the initial ideological hijack Tech-Noir was rebutting seems to have missed the point that neither sides of that flame-war belong on HN.
You're right, I am opposed to communism, but I am not an ideologue.
I posit that painting both anti-communists and communists as ideologues and rejecting both arguments is a false equivalence since communism is an extreme.
To provide another example it's similar to saying "Anti-Nazis and Nazis are both ideologues, neither of their arguments should be listened to. "
Contrary to what Tech-Noir is slinging, I’m not a mod or trying to act like one. At this point I’m just flagging and moving on and wishing that the article posted didn’t trigger so many people’s pro/anti-communism kneejerk.
> Contrary to what Tech-Noir is slinging, I’m not a mod or trying to act like one.
I didn't claim you were a mod, I said you were effecting the tone of a mod ("Please don't..."), which you were.
> [I'm] wishing that the article posted didn’t trigger so many people’s so many people’s pro/anti-communism kneejerk.
At the time I replied to you, you and gnarbarian made up half the comments here, yet neither you were discussing the article. Your own posts were simply about the Holocaust, Holodomor, Mao, Hitler, etc.
The entire thread from gnarbarian's original post on should be nuked.
0 http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-books.html