stormthebeaches wrote:So? The current society is perfect? I'm not sure why people see communism as a perfect society. It is not.
No society will ever be perfect. However, Communism is more flawed than say, a liberal democracy. Or a social democracy
The level of flawedness is usually a question of richness of a given society (as signified by per capita income) than its particular social order. There's more than a few dirt-poor liberal democracies, whose citizens are living in a society far more "flawed" than, say, that of the former USSR simply by virtue of poverty and very low incomes. However, we were speaking about the theoretical ideal of communism, which is basically a classless society. I am not sure why this shifted to a discussion of practical communism.
The industrial revolution in Europe also happened very quickly. Over the period 1855 to 1875, Austria's railroads increased in length by almost ten times. France and German railroad length almost quadrupled during this period as well. I can provide more statistics if you would like be needless to say, Europe also industrialized very quickly under capitalism. Whilst I'm not sure about the deaths during the Industrial revolution I doubt it was in the millions.
I know your going to bring up that the USA only outlawed slavery in 1865. In response to this I will point out that the main states to industrialize in the USA were the northern states (the south was mainly agricultural) which rarely used slavery because it was illegal, uneconomical, or both.
I might point out that the studies on the efficiency of slavery in the South show that it was economically efficient in at least some sense. I'd refer you to Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman. Then I'd point out that 1855-1875 is an arbitrarily selected 25-year period. The death tolls of the industrial revolution were undeniably quite large. I have not counted every worker who died building every factory and every canal, but I did look over some major projects and it often happens that they have a hefty death toll. I have also looked into the living conditions at the time, and I found out that they were remarkably similar to the conditions in Stalin's new industrial towns (e.g. Magnitogorsk) - very crammed spaces (often less than 1 m square per person), lacking sanitary facilities, etc. I know more about the conditions in the colonies, because I've looked into the construction of colonial railroads, and none of them were particularly easy to build; thousands of people died to build them (if not dozens of thousands, as was the case with the Free Congo State).
However, I haven't been able to find anything about slave labor in the Panama canal's construction. You mention the Irish immigrants, but I have to ask, how much of their labor contributed to the construction of the Panama? These slavery had been outlawed for decades by the time construction of the Panama canal began. Not to mention that the Irish slaves would have been a minority of the Irish coming to the US.
No, I mentioned the Irish in connection with the canals like the Rideau, etc. Not in connection with the Panama canal. Likewise, I only objected to the Suez labourers being called "free". The abolition of slavery in Europe par se means little in my view, when the hideous death tolls were being racked up in colonial construction projects here and there. I don't give a fuck how good a place to live Belgium was - the real suffering came in the Free Congo State, where 30 or even 60 thousand people died building Leopold's railway, and in a multitude of other places. In Canada, for example, where the construction of the railway by Chinese immigrants who were given a pathetic ration below the necessary and several thousand of whom perished. And such examples are ubiqutous and numerous across the world.
The potato disease destroyed the potato crop, which was 60% of Ireland's food products. Was the drought in Ukraine that bad? Secondly, whilst it is true that food was being exported from Ireland, three times more food was also being imported into Ireland. The problem here lay in the distribution of the food to those who needed. This is quite different from Ukraine, where the exports vastly outweighed the imports (was any food being brought into Ukraine?). Of course, even if we establish that British government is as much to blame Irish potato famine was Stalin is for the famine in Ukraine, that hardly absolves Stalin. The Irish famine is regarded as a great tragedy in British history and the people who were managing Ireland at the time are regarded as criminals.
Actually, the Soviet government also initiated a wide flurry of relief measures and food supplies, however, none of them were enough to alleviate the situation. The drought was pretty bad, and it became worse due to overreporting by local officials. Your claim that "three times more food was brought into Ireland" seems to be false if this is true:
Wikipedia wrote:Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine
A net exporter means Ireland exported more than it imported. Which obviously disallows for any claims that the problem was mere distribution, or that England had nothing to do with it. And obviously the famine in the 1930s is an example of criminal mismanagement.
Funny you should mention Churchill. He is not that highly regarded in the UK. He gets credit for leading the nation during WW2. But his antics before the war are looked down, as well as his power clinging nature after the war.
Indeed, I know all that. However, there is a certain segment of the idiotic-patriotic population who start jumping the gun when I use this comparison. All too often, alas - I was just checking we're using the same standards.
There could be other reasons. Maybe there were less deaths on the Volga-Don canal were smaller because it was being run by a more competent individual. Or maybe the Volga-Don canal was just an easier project.
It involved about the same number of workers (around 100+ thousand), had a similar amount of work (100 km), quite in the same ballpark as the Moscow-Volga canal and the White Sea canal. It was managed by the very same person, Sergei Yakovlevich Zhuk. All three major canals were built under his guidance. The first canals had a huge deathtoll, but the last one - a small one. Incidentally, the last canal project also widely employed heavy machinery, which explains the huge difference.
I must apologize. I thought that deportation only meant people being driven out of the country. My mistake.
Even speaking about people deported out of the country, the USA deported 1,3 million illegal Mexican immigrants out of the nation. The deportations can be external and internal as well.
What's the difference between a Maoist party and an M-L party? Not arguing, just asking.
Marxist-Leninist parties don't accept any authority beyond Lenin (or Stalin - some reject his works, some accept), in theory. Maoist parties accept Mao's theory of peasant war and other stuff by Mao. That's probably the theoretical difference. In practice, for the most part, Maoist movements have been marked by a strange anti-intellectualist drive (e.g. the Khmer Rouge) and agricultural primitivism. Wikipedia has it better:
Wiki wrote:Maoism departs from conventional European-inspired Marxism in that its focus is on the agrarian countryside, rather than the industrial urban forces.
This had a most radical example in the Khmer Rouge which followed a path quite different from most communist nations and depopulated Pnom Penh, destroyed education and industry to return to a "prime" agrarian communism (Year Zero). That is a radical departure from what Marx himself said (the constant growth of industry to provide abundance), and most orthodox communists at least tried to follows, and can thus hardly be considered Marxism.
On a side note, just how Communist is the Indian Communist party? For all I know it could be as Communist as the Chinese Communist party (ie, not communist at all).
Who knows - after all, neither CPI, nor CPI(M) have full power in India.
The problem is that neither of these three choices are ideal. We've seen how one-man autocracies turnout. Technocratic collectives are better, but still less desirable to democracy. Direct democracy is the best choice of the three but that only works in very small societies/communes. This brings us back to the original problem with Communism. The original Communists wanted to set up a system of small, isolated Communes but this practice would not work in todays world. The Marxist version of Communism explicitly calls for an all powerful state and then trusts this state not to abuse the huge amount of power that it has been given
I never said they were ideal. I merely said that the possibility of having vastly different political systems even in a practical communist nation.
Broomstick wrote:I'm sorry, Stas, but I think you have used an English word incorrectly here and I wish to make sure I understand what you're saying lest you be misunderstood.
U.S. Supreme Court has referred to forced internal removal as deportation. I've read that internal deportation is still deportation. It's that way in Russian, and I believe it's the same way in English, or at least in the wikipedia article.
As for your note about the Panama canal, I said that the Lesseps company used forced labour in Egypt, but I did not say anything about Panama in particular. I might also add that a lot of deaths during the construction of the White Sea canal were due to harsh climate-induced disease due to poor housing and all that. Which is, in a morbid way, quite similar to what has happened during the construction of the Panama canal and many other canals in the Old and New World alike.
I just assumed that since slavery had been long outlawed in Europe by this point the workers would have been volunteer.
