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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

How do you tease apart the effects of capitalism and industrialism? Or are they inextricably linked in your world view?

East Germany, West Germany? North Korea, South Korea? Case studies in extremely similar starting points which both tried to industrialize from nearly the same starting point, only differing in how the markets were regulated, with wildly differing outcomes.

I imagine if someone could accurately

Look at the noncapitalistic countries that industrialized and compare outcomes.

Russia made gigantic leaps from 1917 to 1956. They went from absolute backwards shithole to contending world power in 39 years (even less considering ww2 was over 10 years before that).

What happened after 1956?

They did so at tremendous human cost. target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor ian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9322" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9... et_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...

You're talking like they didn't get invaded by the germans and lost 20M comrades vs the "atrocious war crimes against the jews" that totalled 6M... Russia took a beating and basically stop the german progress for the WEST to be able to regroup and refight way later.

Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative; I believe this is a widely misunderstood era of Soviet history. The Holodomor and the 1921 famine predate the Barbarossa invasion significantly. The Holodomor was a product of the dekulakization efforts undertaken as part of the forced farm collectivization. The farm collectivization was driven in part by Stalin's ideology (he disliked the NEP for various reasons) and partly by the need to maintain hard currency levels to purchase machine tools etc from foreign states to maintain its industrialization push. The main exports of the USSR were grain and therefore the quotas were enforced by the NKVD at the expense of the lives of a large number of people. In certain areas, Stalin was persuaded to lower the quotas but in the geographical confines of the Holodomor (largely Ukraine SSR) the quotas were largely maintained. Historians still debate whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide (because Stalin wanted to crush any independence movement within Ukraine SSR) or simply depraved indifference. Conservative estimates of the cost of the Holodomor vary from 3.3-6+ million dead.

You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

Fighting a war on two fronts did Germany in. Do some research on what contributed to that 20m and you’ll soon realize the number didn’t have to be nearly that high. Stalin was a political genius, but almost as atrocious as Hitler when it came to human rights

Can you provide me one or two examples from this set? I found a list on Wikipedia [0] of currently non-capitalist countries and many of them sound like perfectly nice places, but I am not aware of when they all "industrialized" and what their socioeconomic climate was like at the time and it seems like drilling deeper is going to require a lot of research. So an example or two that you know about would be helpful.

[0] _of_anti-capitalist_and_communist_parties_with_national_parliamentary_representation" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-capitalist_and_co...

Not all of these countries are "non-capitalist." This is a list of parties that are anti-capitalist/communist, some with only one or two seats in their country's parliament.

The introduction to the article even makes this clear:

> Of the 66 states listed here, 9 of them are republics ruled by a socialist, communist or anticapitalist party, five of them are official socialist states ruled by a communist party, of them four of them espouse Marxism–Leninism (China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam) while the fifth (North Korea) espouses Juche.

You are probably looking for the current article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren..., or the historical article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states.

Like I said, much deeper research ;)

Thanks for the links, they are a much better jumping off point. I cross-referenced [0] with the tables on [1] and population data from [2] to build this list for further analysis:

    Country             *ist since          Total wealth (USD)      Mean wealth/adult (USD)     Median wealth/adult (USD) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 29,000 billion          26,872                      6,689 Pop 1949: 542 million*          Pop growth/year:  12.41 million 22 billion              5,662                       1,382 Pop 1975: 3.042 million         Pop growth/year:  88,476 358 billion             5,391                       2,235 Pop 1976: 49.81 million         Pop growth/year:  1.12 million 263 billion             2,612                       1,587 Pop 1971: 66.42 million         Pop growth/year:  2.14 million 2 billion               5,345                       2,510 Pop 1980: 780,153               Pop growth/year:  -62 4,987 billion           8,976                       4,295 Pop 1976: 635.77 million        Pop growth/year:  17.15 million 40 billion              2,392                       1,151 Pop 2015: 28.66 million         Pop growth/year:  320,000 750 billion             89,437                      38,242 Pop 1976: 9.4 million           Pop growth/year:  21,707 68 billion              4,802                       2,448 Pop 1978: 14.53 million         Pop growth/year:  177,179 22 billion              858                         510 Pop 1964: 11.34 million         Pop growth/year:  867,358 x2F;demography/population/china?year=1949 [2] could be remixed in several interesting ways. Looking at charts like [3] and [4] was illuminating. It seems like the "outcomes" of some of these countries are not unfavorable, depending, of course, on what metric you choose to measure.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_state#List_of_curren...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.KD?location...
[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...

While china is ruled by a nominally communist party, its party is definitely undergoing deliberative market reforms that are inspired by western capitalism.

Consider places that try industrialism without capitalism:  do they perform worse than those with both? I think the answer is yes, by far.For example, there's plenty of communist countries that had industrialism but failed to grow economically as much as capitalist peers as examples. I'm unaware of many (any?) examples counter to this.

I think russia did very well, even better than USA when it brought electricity, modern housing and basic education to rural populace. All without shread of capitalism. What ultimately killed communism was exclusion of russia from global technological progress. When there's no tech advancement central planning is way less efficient in running things. But when you just got new tech and need to undertake huge infrastructural projects to spread it I think that central planning has some advantages over capitalism thanks to not requiring having capital or not bothering about immediate profitability or not having to ensure that same entity that invests gets ultimate benefit out of the investment.

We are at max depth but to address the perceived lack of a shred of capitalism in the USSR, I can't help but point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy which was espoused by Lenin himself and included a large component of free market capitalism. It was the efforts undertaken by Stalin in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization that saw the official state endorsement of capitalism expire. You can see what the effects of that were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/m... and draw your own conclusions.--edit--
Note that I thought this comment chain was at max reply depth, this comment was a reply to scotty79 not the parent.

I agree there was some capitalism, as there is components of it in every economy. Similarly, every economy has mixtures of other systems in it. The issue is how much of the various systems an economy allows. Certainly Soviet Russia was not considered a capitalist system, whereas most of Western Europe and the US were during that period.Your link provides a nice graph [1] showing that USSR and many countries that were capitalist had similar GDP per capita in 1913, but diverged wildly over the following years. I suspect academic has such a graph including more countries along with some rating of how the underlying economic system worked. It would be interesting to see that. I am aware of a decent amount of economic literature that does credit capitalism as a major force for pulling billions out of poverty.
Your page seems to back up my point, does it not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per...

My reply was intended for the other person who replied to you. For some reason I did not see a reply button so I thought we were at max depth.I believe that the graph does in fact support your conclusions.

Can you recommend any good books on the subject?

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