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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

who else would you blame it on? communist, centralised states are reknown for causing these kinds of problems - look at the ussr in the 1920s and 30s.

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So I think its fair to say the USSR, China, Cuba, North Kora were a form of communism that had the following characteristics. 1. Authoritarian 2. Central planning (perhaps the same thing) 3. Slow to change These are all valid criticisms based on what we know from history, etc. I think there is a bit of nuance here though based on a glance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines and some basic history. 1. China did experience some horrible famines, particularly the '59-'61. However, they had experienced these, ~20years+/- 10 years, since at least the 1800s, perhaps 1700. That is well into royal rule prior to the revolution. Particularly the 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 (Four famines, ~45Mil dead). Just saying, objectively, not sure the average peasant was more or less likely to experience a famine under the royal rule or communism. 2. Russia and the surrounding neighbors that were consumed by the USSR, seem to have a similar story. The Tsar's in particular were not very good at economics, logistics, or resource management. 3. Post WWII cold war meant virtually every communist country was isolated and sort of by definition a centralized state. They were locked out of the emerging reserve currency (Dollar). They could not freely go to market with their goods. As well as they were all sort of frenemies of each other (see relationship between Korea, China, and USSR for examples).

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.

> people don't start revolutions and try out radical types of government because their lives are going just swell!

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.

In the USSR and China, the large scale deaths were linked to failures during economic development. Despite the failures, there were improvements in quality of life. (The CIA factbook about USSR nutrition being on par or better than the West being one example.) They end up being a class ahead of the poorest of the third world. The issue was that the USSR did not catch up to the leaps the West made. China is catching up using their illiberalism to enforce protectionism and national economic development. If anything, this seems to emphasize that economic development requieres global trade, and this was an issue with the USSR and early China.

> In the USSR and China, the large scale deaths were linked to failures during economic development.

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!

The ideological stupidities were motivated by the goal of economic development. Stalin thought kulaks' economic interests were holding back the centralizing industrialization of agriculture through collectivization. Mao wanted to move from a peasant-based economy to industrial-based through the great leap. (The cultural revolution was a populist cudgel to make the Western educated intellectuals adapt and submit to the local Chinese conditions.)

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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.

So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played

Killing off sparrows is only one example of crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order):

- 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.

The goals of communism are to resolve class contradictions, which "naturally" happened in the case of feudalism ending. Communist states attempt to accelerate and resolve them through stages. This is where they can seem "unnatural".

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.

I'm really not sure that anything in the USSR could be described as capitalism, not even a state managed version of it (which sounds like a contradiction). They really saw capitalism as the enemy and one of Stalin's weird mental hangups was an insistence on seeing Great Britain as the center of global capitalism.

The power and control wielded by centrally planned economies allows for wide-scale top-down dictation which vastly exceeds that of the democratic-capitalistic states. Thus enabling destruction on this scale. It's not about specifics of ideology, it's about how much authority is concentrated in the hands of the central planners. If central planning only works in a world where perfect knowledge of the state of the economy is possible, then central planning can never work.

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.

culture minds are not always so benevolent (though they may tend to be towards culture human citizens) - this is one of the major threads of the series

Also, authoritarian communist states in practice have a very hard time course correcting from courses their leaders decided on.

Just want to expand on this comment, because it can be easily handwaved away with a "our version will be democratic". The level of power afforded to central planners is a stabilizing force away from distributed power, and towards tyrannical governments. Every government's primary objective is to retain power for themselves, else how would they achieve their goals? Every other objective must be subservient to this, because no other objective can be achieved without it. This is true be it a state is democratic, monarchic, communist, or whatever. Give a governing power 100% control of a national economy, and they will use it to entrench their own power. If they fail to do so, they will lose power to those who will. Benevolence cannot be relied upon as a long term stabilizing force.

The ideas of communism are that of the command economy, total centralization. Someone at the TOP decides all of this stuff. This means that if someone at the top (who is not to be questioned, see Mao's other wacky hijinx) makes any kind of error, well, you don't hear about it until it is unavoidably terrible. No early feedback, everyone is afraid to give it to you.

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 political system was democratic centralism where there are levels of indirect democracy starting from the local levels of factories and villages, which elect up to a legislature, which elects an executive top command. Power is indirect granted bottom-up but decisions are wide-spreading from top-down. Ironically, there's a level of decentralization in China that's tolerated as long as they meet government goals. (I'd say at times it's too decentralized, so bad behavior is too tolerated as long as it achieves economic directive goals.)

>So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played

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"

Sounds to me like it was information

one nitwit in a town somewhere decides to kill sparrows - stupid, but not too bad

one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill them all off across a vast country he rules by terror - stupid, and a disaster

It's communism (or more specifically, Marxism). This sort of outcome was predicted by Benjamin Tucker as an inevitable consequence of Marxist socialism in 1888, essay: "state socialism and anarchism", long before any implementation of Marxism came to being

If you really want to get into details, it's Marxist-Leninism. Much of the Soviet-style political system came from Leninist theories of achieving Marxist goals. Lenin said it himself, it's state capitalism. (Stalin then called his implementation first stage of socialism.)

It wasn't just the communists that were not thinking about the consequences, making moronic choices and ruining ecosystems.

See also: Frogs and Rabbits in Australia, Deer in Haida Gwaii, Mongooses in Hawaii, the list goes on and on...

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