Most people in capitalist countries never leave the economic bracket they were born into. Capitalism is a primitive system of elites and peasants, filled with squalor and death.
Most people in capitalist countries never leave the economic bracket they were born into. Capitalism is a primitive system of elites and peasants, filled with squalor and death.
No.
Then why DO you accept it? You seem to agree that things are like that. Yet you accept the world as it is so much as to argue with people who refuse to accept it and wish to build towards something better. The world was made this way by people, and we as people can change it.
I don’t accept it. I acknowledge that it is the case and see its inevitability but I don’t accept it.
I don’t think we can change the way the world works. We didn’t make biological life. Big fish eats little fish. The strong prey on the weak. Prime example: Stalin preying on the Ukrainians and stealing their food. This is the nature of biological life. There’s no escaping it.
Stalin did not ‘steal the Ukrainians food’ and there is no actual historical evidence to back that up. There is evidence of natural famine conditions all across Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan through that period, and then never again even during WWII. There is evidence of Stalin and the Central Committee eventually responding to these famine conditions, shipping in scarce food from other areas of Russia, and holding party members who did not properly report their yields accountable. You can lay some level of blame on the Central Committee for trying to use food, their only widely available resource at the time to trade with Western powers for currency in order to buy industrial equipment, but there is no evidence that the famine conditions were intentional and plenty of evidence that the Central Committee, Russian soviets, Kazak SR and Ukrainian SR governments did their best to alleviate the crisis and then make reforms to assure that it wouldn’t happen again, with no evidence of the same response from Western powers with whom were learning about the crisis, who instead gloated about the internal failings of the soviet system.
There is also plenty of documented and letter evidence that Stalin and other Russian and Ukrainian soviet leaders were particularly sensitive to the needs of the rural and urban poor during the revolution and civil war period, with them requesting Lenin (who would usually grant it) that they give the food they were getting from the loosely organized soviets to feed the poor instead of hoarding for their soldiers.
There is plenty to criticize Stalin about, particularly his methods of handling inter-party disputes, but the idea that he ‘stole food’ is ahistorical nonsense.
Your ‘le human nature’ argument is literally a child’s propagandized understanding of history. But whatever, you’ll just say ‘I disagree’ and then fuck off, so idk why I even bother.
Everything you’ve said here flies in the face of what I’ve learned from multiple sources and you’ve provided no references to back up what you’re saying so I’m extremely skeptical.
I recommend Fraud, Famine, and Fascism by Douglas Tottle.
That said, there seems to be a lot more recent scholarship on this that I have not personally read, including some stuff about rejection of foreign aid and a secret decree preventing migration that I was not aware of so I will have to do more reading on the issue in question. Maybe Stalin did ‘steal the food’.
That said, pretending the current market economy set-up and it’s incentives are inevitable or ‘natural’ is foolish. There will be alternatives and there will be change, it is the only constant.
Stalin’s giant spoon was just human nature.