I find it rather strange that people tend to blame the famine on communism and central planning
But at the core the problem was blindly following the suggestion of a leader who is not making evidence based decisions. This will always end in tragedy.
I regret to report that such leaders can and do emerge under every economic system.
Maybe free markets are less susceptible to them because the leaders have less power over people’s lives in free markets.
Perhaps the takeaway should Be to limit the power our leaders have over us because the world is complex and a central plan will never encompass the realities of every individual.
If the People are not presently experiencing a material shortage, then they do not rely on authority figures to go about the daily business of feeding and policing themselves. Without regular contact between the People and the central authority personnel, it becomes impossible for the central authority personnel to supervise and grant/revoke permissions for them. Supervision and permission were the two components absolutely required for the government of the USSR to continue to exist--supervision allows for the early identification of threats to the government structure, and "permission" systems create excuses for the government to deploy the violent martial caste against threats to their supremacy.
(It is self-evident that people don't like living inside systems where they're constantly monitored and supervised; millions of people around the world work very hard to leave supervision-heavy countries for less-supervised ones. Also, children everywhere chafe against school, and prisoners chafe against prison.)
So I don't believe a truly centrally-planned, communist government will ever generate a useful material surplus (food, medicine, tools, etc.). If it did, the People who enjoyed the results of the surplus would immediately stop participating in the centrally planned processes mandated upon them by the planning committees.
Conversely, the first thing any centrally-planned government will do is organize itself in such a way that all important goods become scarce, so that it can guarantee regular contact points with citizens and set up a robust system of permission granting and revocation.
Fun side note: I really love The Culture sci-fi series by Iain M. Banks, for it's depiction of a truely utopian, classless, centrally planned Galactic Empire. As it turns out, this is the ideal form of human social organization provided that the central planning is done almost exclusively by post-singularity benevolent AI ( who are essentially gods). This is about the only scenario where central planning seems viable.
one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill them all off across a vast country he rules by terror - stupid, and a disaster
In a more decentralized setup, it is bottom-up, and suddenly "hey this isn't working" gets propagated. Also, a peer is more willing to call you on your bullshit, but if you're a dictator, you just get yes-men.
Essentially, the setup was such that anyone less than a perfectly informed leader who never made mistakes would wreak havoc.
- The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad campaigns to convince people to start smoking.
- The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants tried to flee they were then banned from leaving.
- In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is living in.
- Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be so weak again.
- The single-minded obsession with steel production.
- In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a haircut that's not on the list will be punished. Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled against the families of the criminals.
It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning markets, central planning) and can therefore only be implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.
On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.
We can try this framing in another 100 yr drought scenario and see what gets blamed.
"So the ideas of capitalism is what caused the Dust Bowl or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role grass/trees played when creating vast plots of dry overplowed land"
Look I'm no great lover of communism, I sat through the same U.S. history classes in the 80's-90's, saw the wall fall on TV, etc. That said I think the one thing no one acknowledges is that people don't start revolutions and try out radical types of government because their lives are going just swell! Shit maybe its to much Civ as a kid, but I think its important to be honest about the pluses and minuses of government and the specifics of the people, region, and time period that these changes occur.
of course they don't, and i deeply sympathise. but what they always seem to end up with like genocidal maniacs like mao and stalin. both communists. and of course, in the west, we had hitler. but after 1945 i would say human life has improved in the west - more than i can say for china (despite industrialisation) and the "former" ussr.
i should say i am someone of broadly left-wing leanings.
no, they were caused by ideological stupidity (stalin: look up "kulaks", mao: see cultural revolution and great leap forward), and both states being governed, by terror, by paranoid megalomaniacs. read a history book.
> this was an issue with the USSR and early China.
did the west not provide the ussr and china with enourmous amounts of military, economic and technical aid during and after ww2 (selling the ussr jet engines, for example)? oh, yes, it did!
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I wouldn't lean on wartime subsidies too much because they are extraordinary circumstances. The USSR focused on self-sufficiency to the point of foreign trade only being 4% of GDP in 1985. China started opening up after Nixon normalized relations.
See also: Frogs and Rabbits in Australia, Deer in Haida Gwaii, Mongooses in Hawaii, the list goes on and on...