So says Robert Lindsay.
Elsewhere among lefties, mtraven promotes Samuel Bowles’ theory of “guard labor”. And in case you missed when I mentioned it a little while ago, Tomasz Wegrzanowski cites Charles Kenny to argue that communism is/was not bad for economic growth.
Advertisement
February 25, 2010 at 6:56 pm
All of these arguments seem silly to me. Communism breaks down the basic structure of the family and destroys the strength of the culture. Both eventually leads to declines in GDP and life expectancy. Of course progressive polices do the same. It just takes longer.
February 28, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Communism breaks down the basic structure of the family and destroys the strength of the culture.
So does capitalism, and considerably more efficiently. Here’s a nice bit from the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers….The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Just to forestall predictable responses, I don’t think much of the solutions proposed by Karl and his followers. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a keen diagnostician.
February 26, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Lindsay’s argument boils down to two points:
1) Stalin killed “only” 2.5 million, not the larger numbers sometimes quoted; and
2) As a percentage of the Spanish population, the (claimed) approx. 500,000 killed by Franco is larger than the percentage of the Russian population he claims Stalin killed.
As to point 1): Does his alleged 2.5 million figure include the Ukrainians who starved to death in the famine Stalin engineered in their country? Does it include deaths officially disclaimed by the former Soviet regime, e.g., of Poles in Katyn forest? Finally, when you admit to numbers like 2.5 million, does it really matter how many more there were? His argument rather reminds me of that of Hitler apologists who claim that the figure of 6 million deaths attributed to him is inflated. Give or take a million or so, does it matter? The threshold of genocide has been amply surpassed in any event.
Point 2 reminds me of the typical leftist response when one points out, say, that the top 1% of personal income tax filers pay 40% of the tax collected – and they reply, well, yes, but they pay a smaller percentage of their total incomes in income taxes than people in the middle classes. It is using percentages and statistics to circumnavigate an inconvenient fact.
Franco was certainly a dictator and certainly shed a lot of blood – he is not a sympathetic figure. Still, anyone who compared life in Spain and in the Soviet Union during their respective despotisms would certainly know that bad as Franco was, Stalin was worse.
February 26, 2010 at 6:28 pm
>>”Here in the US, one never hears the end of the “Stalin the murderer” line.”
He lost me in the very first sentence.
February 27, 2010 at 12:05 am
Wow
The LessWrongers have jumped the gun on this one. I’m too lazy to trot out all the arguments against this monstrous whitewashing of Communist economic record. I wish I was as non-lazy as Super-Economy.
February 28, 2010 at 6:03 pm
I don’t know why the idea that the USSR had any sort of economic success is such an anathema. I’m guessing it’s a residual (or not-so residual) belief that there’s supposed to some kind of correlation between wealth and virtue. To that, all I can say is: hah.
The USSR went from a feudal agricultural backwater to an industrial power that was capable of defeating Germany in just a few decades, and was capable of competing head-to-head with the US in high-tech weaponry in the postwar era. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement. Of course that did not translate into very much in the way of consumer standard of living, and they wrecked their environment in the process. It’s not the kind of success I’d want, but it’s a form of wealth creation just the same.
March 1, 2010 at 3:09 pm
“It’s not the kind of success I’d want, but it’s a form of wealth creation just the same.”
The link between liberalism and Stalinism could hardly be made plainer.
March 3, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Haha
Thats quite funny. Throwing 20 million peasant soldiers and threatening them with death if they desert is not exactly a industrialized way to defeat Germany. And “wealth” does not mean what you think it means. Wealth is calculated by aggregation of market prices, which, reflect actual consumer demand, Communist party does not count as a legitimate source of consumer demand. All those weapon systems do not count for fractions of their value as “wealth” for the public. Shortages and non-availability of basic staples, and basic rationing is the reason that USSR and “economic success” is completely abhorrent. Your notion of wealth has no use for consumers.
February 27, 2010 at 11:44 am
“they pay a smaller percentage of their total incomes in income taxes than people in the middle classes”
That seems wrong. With a flat tax it should be equal, and our income tax is more progressive than a flat tax.
flenser: I often hear that line, but that could be a self-selection effect.
Contemplationist: Just one LWer, I didn’t notice others commenting on it.
February 27, 2010 at 2:54 pm
As to the income tax claim, I’m only repeating what I have heard and read from many leftists. I believe they base it on the facts that significant portions of the incomes of the wealthy come from C-corp dividends and capital gains (federally taxed at 15%), from ‘carried interest’ in hedge funds, which is treated as capital gains, and from tax-exempt municipal bonds. When total tax paid on a total income originating in large part from such sources is calculated as a percentage of that income, it yields a lower effective rate than the effective rate paid by a working- or middle-class taxpayer whose income is mainly from wages.
The intentions of such an argument are first, to distract attention from the vast disproportion in the amount of total tax revenues that come from high-income taxpayers, and secondly, to suggest that those taxpayers could ‘afford’ to pay at a higher rate.
The latter point is quite doubtful, since 1) capital gains are not taxable till realized, and a raise in the capital gains rate may well discourage enough taxpayers from realizing capital gains that revenues actually fall; 2) C-corporations can simply eliminate dividends if they are not effective ways to enhance shareholder value (i.e., reversing the example of Microsoft, which never paid dividends until the dividend tax rate was lowered to 15%); and 3) muni bonds will remain tax-exempt for the foreseeable future, because they are not so much a ‘loophole’ for the rich as an they are indirect subsidy enabling state and local governments to borrow at rates below those that taxable debt instruments pay.
February 27, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I’ll readily admit that we tend to be too hard on Lindsay’s hero, but Franco’s legacy, morally and politically trumps that of Stalin.
Ends justify the means and all that, right, fellow traveler Lindsay?
Communism was instituted primarily in developing countries, and economic growth of newly developing countries, overseen by intelligent authoritarians is sort of a given.
How sustainable or comparable to free market growth this could be, is anyone’s guess.
February 27, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Yes, I hear that line sometimes (not often), but only because I’m a right-wing extremist who hangs out online with other right-wing extremists like you guys.
But the notion that “one” hears that statement as one stands in line at the check-out counter or hangs out by the office coffee machine or watches American television is comical. Let alone that “one never hears the end” of it! Even on right-wing blogs, it rarely comes up.
March 1, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I’m afraid that Lindsey is not welcome in Havana anymore!
http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/castro.shtml
March 1, 2010 at 10:15 pm
I agree that capitalism has degraded traditional ways. I think Schumpeter may even be correct that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. But I view the process as good on net and the possibility of destruction unfortunate.
mtraven:
The consensus seemed to be that the USSR spent a significantly greater portion of their GDP on the military. Caplan makes that argument in Growing Poverty: The Hidden History of Stalin’s Industrialization.
mtraven is correct to describe it as “some form of wealth”. They were able to sell military equipment for higher amounts than most of us could afford. Pyramids are also “some form of wealth”. Most of us wouldn’t consider either to be worth the cost though.
Was the USSR really capable of competing with us on high-tech weapons? My impression is that ours generally beat theirs head-to-head. They also supposedly needed much larger payloads for nukes because the guidance wasn’t as accurate.
Sabotta, could you summarize that article? I’m too lazy to read.
March 1, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I’m too lazy to summarize.
March 3, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Contemplationist:
As I said, Russia was able to sell military equipment after the breakup of the USSR. So I do consider it “wealth”, even if the price of the sold goods was less than the amount spent to produce them.
I disagree that Marx was a keen diagnostician. He believed that capitalism would cause the immiseration of the proletariat, whereas the opposite happened.
April 7, 2010 at 11:27 pm
[...] so many things that everyone believes to be true, this statement is, in a general way, false. Via Entitled To An Opinion, a link to the Less Wrong blog (great title by the way) which proves that actually, Communism was [...]