/liberty/ - Liberty

>>62466

We really don't need a reminder though. This post will trigger the /leftylurkers/ and probably degenerate to further shitposting. If that's the goal, then you've got it right.

>>62467

I'm sick of /leftypol/ posting smug anime girls and not even trying to have a debate. Hopefully, this will get them a little more on the defense. As it should.

>>62476

> and not even trying to have a debate

I would prefer if the actual regulars here could focus more on starting interesting and relevant discussions instead of "debating" NEETs on an anonymous image board. No debating can occur. There is no mediator. Nobody has specifically prepared on the topic. There is no undecided crowd to form an opinion. It's just shitposting and wasted effort and would be better off to never give them (you)s.

>>62497

>I would prefer if the actual regulars here could focus more on starting interesting and relevant discussions instead of "debating" NEETs on an anonymous image board.

When I can come up with good ideas for topics, you can trust that I start them. Although I'd like to have a discussion on democides some time, because it's kinda relevant to the cause of small government. I guess most people don't share my morbid fascination with it, and that's fine. This particular thread was low-effort, I could've backed everything up with sauces and specific examples but I'm not doing that when I expect /leftypol/ to shit it up any second.

Also, sad as it sounds, I think we do need some intervention by the BO. Or rather, we don't need one, but it would be great to get rid of the worst shitposts now. By which I mean the ones that have been spammed to death by pedos and counter-pedos. Also, we gotta get rid of that fucking Polish idiot soon.And the Revolutionary American poster needs to fucking chill.

>>62501

>And the Revolutionary American poster needs to fucking chill.

Honestly, if I thought the BO or mods would have handled the situation I probably wouldn't have bothered. It's becoming pretty clear that the BO is squatting the board and nothing else, and there ARE no mods.

I honestly get why people would be hesitant about moderation and such. I've seen hotpocketeers ruin or try to ruin other boards. That said, there's only so much the average /liberty/ anon can do to keep dumb shit from fucking making /liberty/ unbearable. There aren't that many of us at the moment, and that makes the usual anon-level defenses against bad threads that much weaker. /pol/, ironically, could get away with a lot less moderation than they have simply because there's enough of them to drown out shit they don't want (of course, this doesn't stop their BO/staff from being insufferable faggot hotpocketeers anyway).

>>62524

I'd volunteer as a mod. Been a regular for over two years now. If only the BO would read this damn application…

>>62715

>Dat pic

Complete trash, sorry. Even if you take all the figures on this infopic at face value, you will see that the birth rate took a nosedive in the period where it says that Stalin murdered sixty million people. And I did account for the population loss from the wars when I calculated this.

I think Robert Conquest corrected his figure of people killed in the Soviet Union to thirty million anyway. The sixty million figure was from the time when official statistics weren't available, and included wartime massacres. In the meantime, the archives were opened, and they clearly show that at the very least twenty million people died. Those are official numbers.

>Famines

Just a few general things first. Famines are often caused partially by drought, yes. There are exceptions. No drought hit Cambodia under the Red Khmer, nor was there one in Vietnam. These two countries are green and fertile and yet people died from starvation solely as a result of the collectivizations. But often, draughts do play a role. They coincided with the Russian Famine of 1921, for example.

However, draughts also often don't cause famines. Same with shortened summers. Civilizations have existed for over five thousand years and in that time, humans learned how to handle famines. In the past, this didn't always work, as plants like wheat didn't have such a high yield and as the agricultural technology wasn't as highly developed. Back then, it was entirely possible for a famine to hit even when nobody fucked up, but these events grew less and less frequent as history progressed. That's why I took the 20th century as a cut-off point. This was the age where America could suffer the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and still avoid famine. If you look at just about any famine in that time, you will see that it was caused by collectivizations, sieges and the like. Not a single one that I know was "unprovoked" or caused by the market mechanism. There are models on how famine can be caused by the market but they're trash, and there is not a single example to back them up. They assume that some evil corporation will buy up nine months worth of food to sell it at a higher price to poor peasants that never had much money to begin with, or that guest workers come and eat six thousand calories a day for a year straight and similar shenanigans.

The draughts in East Africa and the corresponding famines may sound like they're unprovoked, but the regions that are hit really aren't the free market paradises they're made out to be. They have no real respect for property rights, they're hotbeds of violence and instability, they suffered under socialism and civil wars and they missed out on more than half a century worth of economic development. Probably more. Somalia has three cars per capita, that's less than the US had in 1920. That's the kind of shitty economies we're talking about.

>>62730

Forgot flag.

>>62715

>What about before the 20th century? The Irish Great Famine and Indian famines killed tens of millions, and, while I understand that you will attribute them to British government intervention, it seems like a fairly reductionist view of famines which can just as easily be attributed to a variety of factors within capitalism, like the expropriation of foreign resources and absentee landlords.

I cannot think of a famine that was caused by them, except the Irish Famines in regards to absentee landlords. This wasn't caused by the market, however. The British went out of their way to create this state of affairs. This started with the evictions under Cromwell, then the Penal Laws were enacted that forbid Catholics from owning land property, in a country with a Catholic majority. I think these laws were revoked shortly before the famine, but you cannot expect the Irish to suddenly become economically independent after more than a century of being oppressed. They were still in effect during the famine of 1740 though, which was just as bad. You'll see the Great Famine get blamed on laissez-faire policies, but it's obviously a joke to rediscover your love for capitalism after you already redistributed property to create a class of paupers. There were also still the Corn Laws in effect a year after the famine hit, which drove up the price of imported grain. When these laws were revoked, investment in Ireland plummeted, and shortly after the government raised the taxes. And so on. Here's an article on just how much the government messed with the market: https://mises.org/library/what-caused-irish-potato-famine

With India, it was similar. The first of the major famines in British India seems to have been the Great Bengal Famine. At the time of that famine, the British East India Company messed with the country hard, though. There was nothing capitalist about it. The Company established a grain trading monopoly for itself, enacted a fifty-percent land tax and even raised it at the height of the famine and of course there were the mandatory tariffs.

I'll go on with the Chalisa Famine in the next post. But this might take a while, not the least because there's nothing published about it anywhere apparently.

>>62739

By the way, I don't necessarily endorse agricultural communes as such. I don't know what works. But the rent from the land should be socialised

>>62715

>>62732

Alright, continuing with the Indian famines now. One more thing I found: The stockpiles of food assembled by the Mughal rulers were exported by the British during their rule.

The Chalisa Famine was caused by an El Niño event. I looked through several sources but even Matthew White omitted it, so I guess that if mercantilist policies were involved, it was just an extension of the status quo during a really, really bad time.

I'll fast forward a bit to the Great Famine of 1876-1878. I honestly saw this one get blamed on the "free market" because charity was outlawed so as to not "undercut market prices". Which is the opposite of what the market is about, but try telling that to stupid mercantilists.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 is more interesting. That's the one supposedly created by guest workers that ate like pigs, but if you look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see a nice catalogue of food being burned, trade barriers between the provinces, the Brits confiscating boats, the railroads being dismantled or put to use for military purposes, imports being denied, price controls driving down the supply of food, and the government chasing after "hoarders".

>As above. Mercantile Britain was hardly protosocialist.

I should've been a bit more hesitant about this particular claim of mine, in hindsight. There were some large democides that weren't caused by protosocialist or socialist ideas. Most of them were in older times, however, like the Thirty Years War or the Mongol Conquests. Few of them hit Europe after Rome fell.

My definition of protosocialism is quite wide, too, but I think rightly so. Democracy falls under it, racialism and biologism, nationalism. socialism, social engineering, and many other things. That's not just me calling everything I don't like protosocialism, it's that all of these things share the same history and many of the same characteristics. All of them can be traced to the French Revolution or to the philosophers that prepared it.

That brings me to this:

>The french revolution which abolished monarchic feudalism and replaced it with (in the end) liberal capitalism?

Only half correct. The physiocrats, who were pretty laissez-faire, bloomed under the monarchy, not the republic. Serfdom was officially abolished in 1779 over most of France except some isolated regions. Foreign exports were greater in 1786 than during the post-revolutionary period, up until 1848. Relations between nobles and peasants were extremely good in some regions in France, titles were badly recorded and it was easy to get them, and there was a strong bourgeois class. The French Revolution started out the same way as the Glorious Revolution and the War of Independence, as an upper middle class uprising, which wouldn't have been possible in a country of paupers. The mob wasn't involved until later and that's were things went downhill.

And boy, did they go downhill! The French Revolution killed between one tenth to one thousandth of the population of France (not counting the Napoleonic Wars), by my own calculations. That makes it one of the major democides even if the total numbers aren't that "impressive". However, look at the small time frame and you'll see how bloody it was. It killed about as many people as the Witch Hunts, but it did so within a few years and not within centuries. Priests and nuns got drowned in the rivers, entire families were systematically eradicated, citizens were hunted down by death squads, it was a shitty time.

>Isn't your entire point the 'wisdom of the masses' and 'vote with your wallets' argument?

We don't believe in wisdom of the masses. We believe in the wisdom of the individual in handling his own affairs: If everyone handles his own affairs, all affairs are handled well. Demoracy, on the other hand, is the idea that if everyone handles everyone elses affairs, everything goes well. Yet that has neither historically been the case nor is it in any way evident that you can let the masses vote on problems that less than one percent of the population can even grasp.

>>62739

No big surprise on that graph. The October Revolution ruined the economy. There is one funny anecdote by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, of a women that told him how great the cars in Soviet Russia were. He then pointed out that the car she was looking at was produced in 1917.

Russia had a strong middle class before the Revolution. Lenin was part of the low nobility, Trotsky of the bourgeoisie, and Stalins father owned his own shoe shop before he was twenty (he was a worker before that). Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka, was an aristocrat; his little sister tragically died during a hunting accident on the family estate. Another high ranking member of the Cheka was Moses Uritzki, the son of a jewish merchant (he was shot by another jew who thought that he was a disgrace for jewkind). With that many members of the upper class and upper middle class, you gotta ask yourself where all the peasants went.

Serfdom was formally abolished all over Russia in 1861. At about that time, the land was distributed more equally among Russian peasants than among British ones. And concerning the famines, you're completely misinformed, sorry. There were famines in the Tzarist era and some were pretty bad, yes, but the only one that seems to have been as terrifying as the ones under the Soviets was in the 17th century, when agricultural sciences were still undeveloped compared to today and a drought actually was kind of an excuse for famine. The Soviets also had famines in 1920, 1933 and 1947 that killed more than a million people. The 1933 killed as many as seven million people, in fact. Not a good record if you ask me.

>>62744

You might be right about the famines. Wikipedia says 'One of the most serious crises before 1900 was the famine of 1891–92, which killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people', whereas the later famines killed multiple millions each.

>>62715

All of their answers are going to be ridiculous false syllogisms. Whenever you point out the failures they fall back on "not real capitalism".

Their concept of human freedom is nonsensical and basically boils down to a lack of intrusion. Under this concept of freedom a homeless person has more freedom than a billionaire in the USA because the billionaire has to pay more taxes.

Under socialism you have real freedom. You have the freedom to pursue different things in life regardless of whether or not you have the money for it. We all help each other maximize our social mobility in a non hierarchical voluntary fashion. I'll help you achieve your goals because you'll help me achieve mine, we all have equal access to resources and means of production and the only barriers are the ones reasonably set forth by the participants. Under capitalism you have no freedom. Instead of the traditional form of slavery where a master owns you you'll be subjected to a different kind of slavery where you'll be rented.

>>62787

I'm very skeptical of GDP. It's biased in favor of government spending, and it doesn't represent the welfare of citizens. Somewhere on that curve, seven million people died of hunger. If that's not an economic catastrophe, I don't know what is, but from the looks of that graph, you'd think it was merely a period of stagnation.

Even if we suppose that GDP is not a bad measure for economic development (it isn't terrible, at least), then your graph doesn't establish that the Soviet Union really helped the economy grow. From the looks of it, the growth under the Czars was just as rapid as under the Soviet Union during some periods. To say that the Soviets did a good job, we'd have to compare the actual GDP with the hypothetical GDP if the Tzars stayed in power. I consider that a pretty useless exercise, but that's the methodology you'd have to use.

>>62789

Exactly. That the Soviets helped eradicate famines is simply a myth. I don't even know where it comes from, because they obviously suffered famine after famine. In my eyes, that alone is enough to call bullshit on the Soviet Stronk meme. Eliminating famines after 1947 (!) is like doing five pushups for the first time of your life at mid-thirty: Absolutely pathetic. Capitalist economies are called failures for less. All you need is a prolonged period of stagnation and people lose their mind, yet manmade famines are excused in socialist countries.

>>62794

So that's your response to all of this:

>>62730

>>62732

>>62743

>>62744

>>62745

>>62792

'Exploitation' is how developing countries get access to capital. If these countries were socialist, nobody would invest there and they would be trapped in a cycle of poverty.

The USSR and China only managed to develop at a massive human cost, and with massive dictatorships which forced the cost to be paid. Capitalist countries can develop without anywhere near the cost in starvation. Think about it!

>>62792

>The USSR brought itself up from being a backward 3rd world nation

False. Russia under the Tzars was less backward than Soviet Russia for at least two decades, and that's if we only look at the material side of things which you commies constantly do, because you're totally not greedy spergs at all. It had more freedoms, a more equitable distribution of land, less political terror, and fewer famines.

>to one of the biggest super powers and achieved most of the advancements in the space race.

Well… no. All it did was launch shit into space. The US did most of its research, and the USSR leeched off of it. Sputnik in particular was a piece of scrap metal launched into space to impress the world, at horrid costs and with no real scientific value. Of course, that kind of behavior was par of the course for the USSR, because communists are not only temperate, they're also humble. Guess that makes sense with enough dialectical materialism thrown in or something.

>Cuba has the best lung cancer treatment in the world which may turn out to be a cure and was the first nation to successfully prevent the transfer of HIV from mother to child. All countries that have ever had 100% literacy have been socialist. Under Mao's China life expectancy doubled.

And here we are with the good old statistics and data, with no qualitative analysis whatsoever. Cuba is reported to be killing sickly children in order to whitewash its statistics, and it definitely has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Mao did increase life expectancy, yes, but he had the chance to go the way of least resistance. Advancing your country to the age where infant mortality isn't 200 per capita is not that hard when the rest of the world has already gotten there. The technologies are invented, the capital goods are fairly cheap, even an unwashed moron like Mao might've managed to increase life expectancy under these circumstances.

And your literacy rate? Fuck your literacy rate. The world wouldn't be at a loss if 90% and not 100% of all people were able to read. Unless you wanted all of them to sit down and read the lectures of the Dear Leader, that is. If you can shut up your ego for a second and stop looking at the world as a bunch of numbers to be optimized, you'll see that many people don't need to be able to read, just as they don't need advanced geometry and the classics of literature to have a fulfilled existence.

>That's just a few examples of successes in socialist countries. The death toll of communism is widely disputed among even pro-capitalist scholars.

If we're really, really generous, we might haggle it down to fifty million. Below that number, we'll probably have to ignore official statistics (which weren't available when guys like Rummel and Conquest came up with their guesses, mind you) and blame every single famine on a drought. Kind of odd, though, that almost all of these droughts and long winters

Part 2:

>>62792

>>62799

>Massive economic sanctions and trade embargo have had devastating effects on socialist countries since the collapse of the USSR. If any business conducts trade with Cuba they are barred from entering US ports for 6 months and the only way around this is to get a government approved license which has only been given out 7 times in almost 60 years.

Which begs the question: How come it's the embargos from capitalist countries that hurt that much? You had a whole communist block at your disposal: China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Russia, Rumania, Mongolia, and the list goes on. Some of these were among the most resource rich countries in the world. And yet they never advanced to the point where they could hurt the capitalist economies with embargos? That they broke down and left Cuba at the mercy of the capitalists just reinforces that point.

>Every year 20 million people, mostly children, die from lack of food, clean water, easily treatable diseases etc and in most of these countries there are capitalist entities exploiting them for their natural resources and cheap labor.

And that game again. That's what we call a double standard. A fullblown famine in a socialist country is not added to the death toll of socialism because it was the result of outside factors. Yet any premature death in a country with a mixed economy and a socialist past is counted as one more murder (by omission?) committed by global capitalism. How high do you think Maos death toll would be if we counted all the deaths from easily preventable diseases from before he increased the life expectancy to levels adequate to the 20th century?

>The reason they aren't being taken care of is because it simply isn't profitable to do so and under capitalism the profit motive reigns supreme.

Stalin exported grain to buy capital goods during the 1933 famine. Sorry, but if we make a contest out of being greedy materialist fucks, you'll win, hands down.

>We currently produce 17% more food than is necessary to adequately feed the entire world's population but most of it gets wasted due to capitalism.

Know Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe is a net importer of food. It used to be an exporter, but then the very people that provided the country with food were thrown out. Since then, the country has been on famine-watch 24/7 all year long, every year. Countries like this are not poor beggars that need your help, they're screeching hobos that burned their own house down and then wanted to sleep in your bed. World hunger would be eliminated by now if capitalism had been introduced two decades ago.

And honestly, fuck the rest of this shit. Five hours a week for a "superabundance" of "necessary" goods? Yeah, my ass.

>>62796

Russia and Eastern Europe in general had tons of famines for their entire history due to the area having extreme weather conditions so the fact that famines stopped after 1947 isn't exactly no big deal. Your push up analogy is more like "after being paralyzed for your entire life you do 5 push ups in your mid 30s" that's progress. Also there have been serious issues with mal nutrition under Putin's capitalist system. Also the Holodomor was heavily (though not exclusively) caused by the Kulaks themselves destroying enough food to feed millions as an act of retribution against the Soviets. Keep in mind that the Kulaks property was not justly acquired even by right wing libertarian standards. The Tsar wanted an end to the collective mir system so those that were down with stealing the land from other peasants who were laboring it got to own it.

>>62798

Exploitation is precisely the reason why these countries are suffering in the first place. In Africa where there are tons of natural resources if the workers of mines try and go on strike they are suppressed by capitalists hired thugs.

>>62799

This is just patently false. There wasn't more equitable distribution of land everything was owned by the Tsar or the aristocracy or the emerging capitalist class which came from the aforementioned establishment. It did not have less famines as I previously stated and it did not have more political freedom it was a monarchy. I'm very curious to see where you got that info from (I'm not being sarcastic) because even pro-capitalist historians don't make such claims. They'll make claims like "if capitalism were allowed to flourish it would've been better than the USSR" which okay you may have an argument there but as far as Russia being in a better state under the Tsar, it's pretty much unanimous that things improved after the revolution.

Launching shit into space is one of the greatest achievements of man kind. The US doing "most of the research" that's just false sorry dude, the US made a lot of contributions but so did the USSR. Your argument against Mao is complete nonsense. People knowing how to read isn't important? Are you serious?

>>62800

When you're cut off from conducting trade with most of the world it's going to hurt your economy dude that's basic macro economics. During the height of the USSR those countries had thriving economies and even bourgeois scholars recognize this especially with regard to North Korea and South Korea. The USSR fell because almost all of the countries resources were going toward the military industrial complex due to the ever impending threat of attack from the United States and the capitalist revisionist reforms brought on by later Soviet leaders.

There is no double standard the very question is why do these things happen? If a meteor strikes earth and ruins the agricultural productivity of a country it is not the fault of the economic system of the country regardless of whether or not it is socialist, fascist, capitalist or whatever. The distinction to be made here is that we have the resources to easily solve the problems in question.

Here's what I don't get about your anti-communist arguments, why is it that when major world statist powers interfere in a capitalist economy it's fair to blame the state and not the system, but when statist powers interfere with socialist economies it's never the fault of the imperialists? I actually don't hate you guys and I think your distinction between "corporatism" and "capitalism" is more than fair, but you have to admit that ignoring the interference of other countries in the economies of socialist nations is just illogical. You really can't point to a country trying to develop a socialist economy that didn't get royally fucked over by other "corporatist" states.

Like I said, I don't hate you guys like other leftists do. I would actually love it if we could put our differences aside and overthrow the state and divide the resources accordingly and let you have your free market capitalist economy and us have our socialist economy.

The answer to all of your questions basically boils down to the western imperialists just kill the citizens of other countries and steal their resources and give them to other capitalists to prop up failing economies. The "successes" of capitalist countries isn't because of the good ol' free market, it's from genocide and theft.

>>62804

What utter nonsense. Colonisation was a drain on people and investment and demanded increasingly expensive wars.

Many of the richest capitalist countries never had any empire at all. Even when countries once had an empire, they grew without it, showing that it wasn't the reason for their success.

>>62808

Are you trying to claim that colonization wasn't profitable for the powers that be? hahaha good one

>>62811

>Are you trying to claim that colonization wasn't profitable for the powers that be? hahaha good one

Except he's entirely right, it was a drain on people and it was something that required massive investment and massive amounts of resources for relatively little in actual returns. There's a reason most European countries eventually left their colonies to independence or even abandoned them entirely, it eventually just wasn't worth it. I think the only honest exception this was perhaps India and even that's debatable.

Also another thing to keep in mind is that he never said that the government never necessarily saw it as profitable but rather that it was a;

>Drain on people and investment and demanded increasingly expansive wars

Which was entirely true. It was a massive drain on investment and the people who actually ended up paying for it. Another thing he claimed was that

> Even when countries once had an empire, they grew without it, showing that it wasn't the reason for their success.

Which was also true, many countries that held (or even those that didn't hold empires and territories in Africa, etc) still maintain fairly high status and tend to have relatively well functioning, not because of their 'exploitation' of Africa but rather because of the innovations and the growth that occurred within their own economies naturally as a result of the market.

>>62811

It was profitable for some people but it's not the reason capitalist countries prospered

>>62815

Are you implying the U.S. isn't heavily dependent on the petrol dollar? Which is completely backed up by the foreign wars for the control of the resources of western Asia.

>>62816

Some interest groups benefit, but it's hugely expensive for America, and not necessarily better overall. It leads to huge borrowing, which reduces the amount of savings available for investment.

Anyway, American meddling in the ME came long after it was already a powerhouse. It couldn't have done what it did unless it was already quite rich

>>62816

America as a whole? No.

>>62466

Well, the Jewish Holocaust is fake, so please correct your list.

>>62869

All genocides are fake, you should know this already. Why would anyone actually mass murder a group of people over trivial differences?

>>62869

I'm not convinced of that. It aligns too much with the program of the Nazis, it conforms with much of the evidence that I have seen (like patents for mass crematoria), it fits the character of the Nazis and the spirit of their ideology… basically, you're asking me to believe that a totalitarian, belicose regime which routineously exterminated entire villages, killed a million people in Leningrad by starving them to death, tortured and murdered its opposition with impunity, "euthanized" handicapped people etc. etc. somehow spared the one group that it hated more than anyone else, and whose genocide it endlessly talked about for years on end. See the problem with that?

>>62802

Not responding to all you said, just to make that clear. I don't like getting hung up on points that seem to be peripheral.

>Russia and Eastern Europe in general had tons of famines for their entire history due to the area having extreme weather conditions so the fact that famines stopped after 1947 isn't exactly no big deal. Your push up analogy is more like "after being paralyzed for your entire life you do 5 push ups in your mid 30s" that's progress.

My analogy was too generous, if anything. Even a country with a shitty economic policy will benefit from the progress of the countries that are more sensible. At a time when capital was steadily and rapidly getting cheaper, it was to be expected that even the Soviet Union would benefit from this. With that in mind, yes, it's pretty damn sad that it had any famines at all. Some couch potato doesn't get stronger just because everyone around him is working out, but a crappy economy improves if every economy around it does, and you need some seriously bad policies to halt or reverse that trend.

>Also the Holodomor was heavily (though not exclusively) caused by the Kulaks themselves destroying enough food to feed millions as an act of retribution against the Soviets.

I have yet to see a shred of evidence for that. It contradicts every credible report of that event that I have ever read, it begs the question how the Kulaks had so much power after over ten years of Soviet rule, and it's just way too convenient for a dictator who exported grain during the famine. Again: He exported grain. Him claiming that it was really the Kulaks is not credible when he's standing next to millions of dead Ukrainians with a gun in his hand. If Stalin had imported grain, and if he didn't have a secret police at his disposal to inform him that some Kulaks just burned a few thousand tons of stored grain, then I could give this theory some consideration.

>This is just patently false. There wasn't more equitable distribution of land everything was owned by the Tsar or the aristocracy or the emerging capitalist class which came from the aforementioned establishment.

Except there was. From page 486 of Leftism, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn:

>Cf. N. S. Timasheff, "On the Russian Revolution," The Review of Politics, Vol. 4, No.3, July 1942, also citing Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, London, 1939. Writes Timasheff, "The Russian peasants had received at the time of the liberation of the serfs more than half of the arable soil of Russia, namely 148 million hectares (versus 89 million which remained the property of the landlords and 8 million which were the property of the State). Half a century later, on the eve of World War I, the situation was quite different. Only 44 million hectares were still the property of the landlords, the rest, as well as about 6 million hectares of State land had been bought by the peasants." (p. 295) It should be mentioned here that one hectare equals about 2.5 acres. The agrarian situation of Russia before the Revolution can also be gleaned from the article on "Russia, the Agrarian Question," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edition, vol. 31, pp. 402403. If we compare the agrarian situation of Russia with that of Britain we see that in the 1870s 5207 proprietors of more than 1000 acres owned over 18 million acres or 55 percent of the surface of Britain. Cf. Brockhaus Lexikon, 14th edition, 1898, Vol. 8, p. 493.

>>62802

>>62889

>It did not have less famines as I previously stated

It did, if we disregard the 17th Century, as we should. Like I said: Back in 1600, you could blame a famine on a series of bad harvests. In 1933, not so much.

>and it did not have more political freedom it was a monarchy.

That's a non sequitur. Monarchies have frequently been freer than democracies. The Tzars executed fewer people than the Soviets after them, and during the First World War, they even executed fewer deserters than Great Britain (I'm not sure if they executed any at all). There were no equivalents to the purges in the USSR, banishment to Siberia actually meant banishment and not being put in a labor or death camp, I have yet to hear of a single socialist or communist who was disappeared. They were arrested, some were executed (for planning to blow up the royal family…), but none was tortured to death.

They weren't an isolated case. France was nicer under Louis XVI than after the French Revolution. All the great atrocities that I've heard of during that time were committed by the revoutionaries. It's also telling that the French Revolution had wide support by the clergy and aristocracy at first, and yet there were no serious crackdowns against them. The Marquis de Sade could openly call for the storming of his prison without fear of being cut to pieces, as happened to the defenders of the Bastille.

>I'm very curious to see where you got that info from (I'm not being sarcastic) because even pro-capitalist historians don't make such claims. They'll make claims like "if capitalism were allowed to flourish it would've been better than the USSR" which okay you may have an argument there but as far as Russia being in a better state under the Tsar, it's pretty much unanimous that things improved after the revolution.

It isn't. Seriously. Source above, plus all that I have said before. The death tolls of whatever the Tzars did simply don't add up to half of the official numbers, and gruesome details are even suspiciously absent in the propaganda disseminated by the Soviets. You practically cannot read about the Nazis or the Soviets without stumbling over a dozen atrocities, but I could hardly find any of this bloodcurdling stuff when I googled whether there was torture under the Tzars, and nothing that was relevant to the modern age.

>Launching shit into space is one of the greatest achievements of man kind. The US doing "most of the research" that's just false sorry dude, the US made a lot of contributions but so did the USSR.

On both sides, it was a vanity project, but more so on the side of the USSR. Just compare the weight and the scientific payload from Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1. Compared to Explorer 1, Sputnik 1 was an embarassment.

>Your argument against Mao is complete nonsense. People knowing how to read isn't important? Are you serious?

Yes, I am serious. You don't need a population in which everyone can read. Some people simply don't need this skill. Farmers, hairdressers, carpenters, athletes and so on don't have to be able to read. It isn't required to make them valuable to society nor for them to have a fulfilled existence. The average American reads four books per year and you can bet that they aren't Heidegger and Kant, so what loss would there be if the literacy rate were 90% instead of 95?

>When you're cut off from conducting trade with most of the world it's going to hurt your economy dude that's basic macro economics.

Mark the "most of the world". Why did it hurt so much to be cut off from the USA but not from the USSR?

>During the height of the USSR those countries had thriving economies and even bourgeois scholars recognize this especially with regard to North Korea and South Korea.

North Korea was far more developed than South Korea at first. Then socialism hit, and from then on, the country mostly stagnated, while South Korea improved and eventually even thrived. Korea is a terrible example.

>The USSR fell because almost all of the countries resources were going toward the military industrial complex due to the ever impending threat of attack from the United States

The US could sustain its massive military expenditure, but the USSR couldn't. That's a point in favor of the US. If the USSR had been superior to the US, it would've kept up with the US while spending less on the military in relative terms. It's the same with North and South Korea nowadays: The North spends a fifth of its budget on the military and is still inferior to the South, which spends less than three percent.

>and the capitalist revisionist reforms brought on by later Soviet leaders.

And how would that work? How did these reforms hurt the country? It's proven a priori that markets are superior to planned economies.

>>62802

Getting too tired to give a proper response. Just wanted to say that I respect this attitude, I really do:

>Like I said, I don't hate you guys like other leftists do. I would actually love it if we could put our differences aside and overthrow the state and divide the resources accordingly and let you have your free market capitalist economy and us have our socialist economy.

Bumping for the newfriends.

sage for oldfags