H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934) | Hacker News Reader

H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

newstatesman.com

171 pointsgiorgiofontana137 comments

The little preface says that Wells was critisized for being too 'deferential' toward Stalin (Wells was a socialist, of course).

It is actually striking to me... today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Politicians today don't even expect to talk about ideas, certainly not with journalists for publication, let alone to be challenged on ideas in such conversations.

It's also interesting to be reminded that Stalin was indeed a guy who could talk about ideas.

>today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power.

Just a guess, but are you saying this from an US POV? As an USian, I can't imagine seeing journalists confront or challenge a politician except by accident. Even when those accidents happen, the journalists and civility become the center of a follow-up media frenzy, rather than the subjects (the lives and deaths of millions.)

By contrast, I see confrontation in a lot of (less consolidated, less war-profiteering) non-US media constantly. Paxman would be hounded out of the industry within days here.

You can be selectively confrontational. Even in a dishonest way. Just watch Bill O'Reilly sometimes.

I prefer Stephen Sackur to Paxman. Sometimes with Paxman it seems a bit unnecessary. Stephen Sackur treats the whole thing very professionally, but will still ask the difficult questions.

Came here and read your comment immediately after seeing the link I've left. A (perceived?) weak press in the US has a way to fall before it get to the level seen today in Russia. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/russian-politician-ord...

It's telling when some of the most challenging interviews are done by Jon Stewart, the host of a comedy show.

Sort of embarrassing: http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1761108

What does that link to? If I click that link I get redirected to a page about bunnies and a woman in a bikini.

Shit. I posted my comment from my phone, so it was a "mobile link" (what crap) to an article headlined Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ was President Obama’s toughest interview: Jay Carney

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/jon-stewart-daily-s...

I'm sorry about that.

Yet another newspaper that doesn't understand the Web. That first link still works if I try it from my phone browser, but on my desktop it redirects to the main page.

Who in the world decided this was a good idea?

> It's also interesting to be reminded that Stalin was indeed a guy who could talk about ideas.

He was an very intelligent man who genuinely believed in what he preached. Which is precisely why millions paid for his idealism with their lives.

And a reason why the west survived the onslaught of the Axis powers -the sheer grit, determination and bloody mindedness of the Russians. I recently discovered that the fall of Berlin cost more Soviet lives than the whole war cost the UK. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

> And a reason why the west survived the onslaught of the Axis powers

The reason the West survived the Axis onslaught is because Hitler and his cohorts, unlike Stalin, were morons. Only an imbecile would open a second front with a country with which you have a non-aggression pact [1].

This highlights the frailties of intelligence nicely. Stalin was so thoroughly convinced that this was such a profound stupidity, that he refused to believe it even after receiving intelligence reports confirming as much.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact

I am reminded of Churchill stopping the plan to kill Hitler after they had done pretty much all the hard work apart from killing him because he was afraid someone competent would rise to the top and (rather easily) fight the war to a standstill by letting the generals command their troops.

In general, people who bring themselves to power tend to be extremely competent. Traditional classical Greek "tyrants" had a deserved reputation for solid, effective rule, but things would quickly fall apart after they died.

So whatever else we can say about Stalin, there's every reason to expect that he'd be more than able to talk about ideas.

> In general, people who bring themselves to power tend to be extremely competent. Traditional classical Greek "tyrants" had a deserved reputation for solid, effective rule, but things would quickly fall apart after they died.

Millions of famine deaths under Stalin are attributed to some mix of malice and incompetence. I am not saying that he was totally incompetent. He helped usher in a ton of industrialization that helped the Soviet Union win WWII. He was also quite good at ruling through fear. But the utter incompetence of the agricultural collectivization makes me unable to label him competent on average.

This is a fairly general issue if you're looking at "competence". Without disagreeing with anything you said, let me ask the following:

Assume you're going to collectivize agriculture. How well do you think that will go? What's the best achievable outcome?

"Competence" might mean that you don't collectivize agriculture...

What? I guess George Bush was extremely competent? I have found people who bring themselves to power had a rich father. (This will get deleted. Whenever I talk about the lack of Horatio Alger's, especially in the last 30 years--moderators get angry.)

Bush was a very intelligent man contrary to what many believe. http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Your link has a certain amount of spin going on. Bush was a pretty intelligent man; his SAT scores are known. He got a 1206, the equivalent of a 1276 post-1995 but before the inclusion of the writing test. Certainly (well, I hope) not smarter than the average student at Stanford Business School, but, notably, smarter than Kerry was.

I think the more interesting questions here are, "how much power does the US president actually have?" and "how similar is becoming president to overthrowing the existing government and replacing it with yourself?"

Seeing what Obama is doing, it's pretty similar.

Thank you for highlighting a difficult point! The most instructive item for me was seeing a comparison of video of Bush in his run for the Texas governorship, showing his sharp mind. In such context though, the dissonance. erwee. his stated political objectives and his true violent objectives is disheartening.

Stalin was talking about ideas here, yes, but note that what he is doing in this interview is pretty much only regurgitating Leninist talking points the Bolsheviks had been repeating pretty much unchanged for a couple of decades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/magazine/paul-kagame-rwand...

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy - socialism - could replace capitalism. There was a major debate at the time, now known as the economic calculation debate[1], between socialist economists Harold Laski and Oscar Lange on the one hand and liberal economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the other. In the 20's Mises had made the stunning argument that allocation of capital was impossible without the price function that is inherent to the capitalist system[2]. Laski and Lange obviously disagreed and provided the socialist counter argument. It was many years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that socialist philosopher and historian Robert Heilbroner admitted in the New Yorker "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort".[3] Still, many do not understand or appreciate the importance of economic calculation and the price function in the rational allocation of capital, which has implications not only for states, but for corporations[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

[2] https://mises.org/econcalc.asp

[3] Reflections after communism, Robert Heilbroner (apologies to those without a subscription) http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/09/10/1990_09_10_091_T...

[4] http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_1.pdf

Your claims are a lot more controversial than you're making them appear. It's intellectually dishonest to present them as settled fact.

Hardly. If you suppress overt pricing system, hidden ones always emerges. Usually, they're based on "favors" and "threats." Of course, they're a lot less effective and far more dangerous since they're dictated by, and subject to, the whims of the socialists.

"Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya - a well-known Soviet actress - under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her 'scream or not, doesn't matter.' Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, from which she survived."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

If you don't mind a parenthetical point, I'd argue that Marx's specific analyses and the precise names stuck to them are too limiting at this point - or at least I'm convinced you've conflated two properties that someone pointed out a while ago would make debate considerably more productive (by virtue, I suppose, of making the "heterodox" double-qualifier idelogies suddenly more motivated) when separated - the degree to which ownership and control of the means of production are centralized; and the precise ownership described in the terms of some separate dichotomy. Your point would prescribe for the first - but "socialism" as a name I'd claim has accreted and been recast to the extent that some synthetic history in which the limited-liability company is replaced with the cooperative would be called "market socialist" by last-generation Soviet nomenklatura, and yet "social-democratic and cooperativist" by the Co-operative Party that by agreement constitutes a curiously significant amount of British Labour (and hence the use of a name.) That's neither to argue, though, that the two are a mile and a half away: you're right to say that it did once imply both, and that in past contexts (or that's my impression of Western European economic reform post-World War II) it was overbearing as a trend no matter how the actual distribution of control could be construed.

(Edited for spelling correction, the contextualization at the end, and the note about how overt signs of association affect self-appropriation of names...)

This counts as an ideological tangent, and therefore off-topic. There is no meaningful path from this article to Austrian economics.

Edit: Perhaps this needs more explanation. "Stalin -> communism -> capitalism -> Austrians" is not a meaningful path, because there's nothing specific about it, nothing to tie it to this particular story. It merely uses the story as a launching pad to jump straight into a perennial ideological debate, which—if it continues—is likely to drown out any nuanced conversation that really is relevant to the article.

If you're serious about not letting every story dissolve into the same tedious arguments we've seen for the past few years, I would be so happy.

Definitely serious, and interested in your suggestions re how.

I got your email. It'll be awhile before I have the time to compose my thoughts on the issue.

Yes, there is a specific path. One of the major themes of the interview is how socialism is efficient (and the future)", "capitalism leads to chaos" that may seem foreign to a lot of people now because pretty much no one believes in it anymore. At the time of the interview, a lot of people did[1]. Every econ 101 book (from high school/university) I've had refers to the debate about the economic calculation problem, and they're pretty clear about which side was right. This is not some "perennial ideological debate" anymore, but an interesting and very important historical development.

You messed up here. The relevance of the economic calculation problem should be obvious, and is not more ideological than the top comment of this post.

[1] Wells: "Recently I was dining with the Royal Society, our great English scientific society. The President’s speech was a speech for social planning and scientific control. Thirty years ago, they would not have listened to what I say to them now. Today, the man at the head of the Royal Society holds revolutionary views, and insists on the scientific reorganisation of human society. Your class-war propaganda has not kept pace with these facts. Mentality changes."

Oh man i hope you manage to continue this bold and positive direction in moderation! At times it seems I have to wade through an entire thread just to see one or two comments about the content and not about something vaguely related.

Worse, the constant reinforcement of this sense that comment threads will be full of random unrelated diatribes leads more people to post their own such comments. It is incredibly hard to take a stand against them because they are often well spoken and interesting in their own right.

This interview took part when the economy in the UK and USA had hit the skids, while the USSR's economy was chugging along like gangbusters. In fact, a significant number of English and west European workers moved to the USSR to work since there was a labor shortage. American firms went there as well.

Whatever the economists were talking about, the US had just started to change to an incredibly centralized, semi-planned economy based on military spending as well as things like the NSF. The US is still like this, the military budget is over half a trillion a year, and the brass has been publicly begging Congress for decades now to not make so useless tanks and such. It is a job and research program, it in/directly financed the transistor and IC and microprocessor, it created the Internet and so forth.

Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great. Khrushchev made a lot of changes, and problems began cropping up (bread shortages, less capital spending etc.)

You can't make a comparison with the US as an unplanned economy, since this was the beginning to changing it to a semi-planned economy with a (conservatively) $600 billion a year "military" budget. You can't say Stalin's economic policies failed, as they were successful under himself, and Khrushchev majorly changed them in the same way FDR changed the US policies.

Also the price argument is tautological and not falsifiable. Something is valuable because something is valuable. Let us say that Bitcoin is a giant Ponzi scheme (which it is), a $6 billion bogus market cap of worthless hashes. In fact it was a $14 billion market cap four months ago, now $6 billion. Is all the equipment buys, and wasted electricity and so forth a rational allocation of capital? Couldn't it be better used to make something useful? Well it's a rational allocation because of the price which makes it rational which points to the price. It's a circular, tautological, unfalsifiable argument. When Bitcoin's market cap crashes below $1 billion, and then lower, the price argument you mention won't have its defenders admit they're wrong because it is tautological.

I got a bit of cognitive dissonance here. But I guess it connects, in a way.

>> Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great. Khrushchev made a lot of changes, and problems began cropping up

OK, this was in the middle of the great depression in USA/Europe -- while Soviet had tens of millions of dead/prisoners (hunger, political executions, camps, etc) in the 1930s.

So I can believe there was a lack of workers and lots of jobs in Soviet... :-)

And since many of the new immigrants (some from Sweden) were executed and put in camps, the lack of workers would continue...

From a strict economic perspective, if not humanitarian, I guess that could be called "great"? In a similar way that the Nazi Germany had "great" revenues from stealing murdered/fleeing jews' belongings.

(The discussion of markets and valuation I leave for economists, they've been discussing that a long time. I tend to think the capitalist method is less bad than the alternatives I've ever heard of, even despite the bubbles ever two decades.)

>...Under Stalin the USSR's economy was doing great.

How are you defining "great"?

>...Also the price argument is tautological and not falsifiable.

The importance of the price system for efficient resource allocation is pretty much accepted by all mainstream economists to the point of being taught in introductory economics textbooks.

Not one mention of the terrible famine in the Ukraine which had occurred over the two previous years.

As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, initially a supporter of the Soviets until he witnessed what their policies actually meant as a correspondent for the Guardian in Moscow:

"The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering"

Have you ever read "The Grapes of Wrath"? Did Stalin cause the famine in the United States? It is purposeful selective attention to call out the terrible famine in the Ukraine in the 1930. My ancestors died of the same famine in Russia and I know of many Russians who lost members of their family to hunger in 1930s. There was a widespread famine at the time, caused by collectivization and industrialization policies to migrate from inefficient, low capital, individual-based farming practices to highly efficient, large scale, high capital practices. In Soviet Union it was an inhumane, ruthless collectivization. In United States it was a bit more humane, financial capital driven policy of moving individual farmers off their land. In both cases, there was no nationalistic or genocidal component. Attempts to portray the famine as targeted at Ukranians serves no purpose other than to divide Russians and Ukrainians and pit them against each other. Recent events in Ukraine show that this is exactly the policy of the United States.

[Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United States. And, yes, I have read the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is required reading in many United States schools.] No, the situations in the two countries were not at all comparable. First of all, there was no widespread famine in the United States. I have close relatives who lived through that era in that place (they never moved from their family farms) and are now more than ninety years old. Second, there was no governmental effort to keep the people who thought they were best off moving from moving. Third, both before and after the interstate moves, most of the people who moved were land-owners. Fourth (maybe this should be first on the list), all of the adults in the United States during the Great Depression, other than most black people in the South, were voters and able to influence the political system. Just outside the region I wrote about first here, the region you mentioned first, were grassroots political movements to represent farmer rights. (Nothing of the kind existed under Stalin's dictatorship.) Here in Minnesota, the state branch of the Democratic Party is actually formally named the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, having been formed by a merger (just about exactly seventy years ago) between the state Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, a third-party movement so powerful that it elected a governor during its heyday.

So, no, in the United States we look at the historical experience of Stalinism as a wholly negative example, one of the worst examples of mass irrationality and needless human suffering in the twentieth century. Where the various branches of my family have lived for generations, we know better than to take Stalin's policies as models of modernization or anything worthwhile.

The causes of the famines in US and SU were related. The policies to deal with them were different. Note that the OP implied the famine under Stalinism was directed against an particular ethnic group in the SU. My argument refutes that. Your argument does nothing to back the position of the OP.

And what is OP? ..... Don't bother, too late now and life is short.

OP = original poster. A synonym is "parent comment" or "grandparent comment." In this case it refers to arethuza's toplevel comment.

As a side note, HN is increasingly turning into reddit and with offtopic articles like this one has become a place for political propaganda.

I was merely surprised that someone could interview a leader of a country in which millions had died of starvation and not bring the subject up.

Edit: Probably rather unwise of me to bring the subject up at this moment in time...

History is written by victors. Your image of Stalin is based on the history that was written about him after his death by people who openly declared themselves as victors over Stalinism. Remember, Stalin's image in 1930s was very different, culminating in Time's Man of the Year cover in 1939.

Could it be false that he was a mass murderer and a bank robber? (That's tangental to the original question of famicide, but it's interesting to think that his atrocities were fabricated.) Is there any evidence of this? It seems extremely unlikely, but I'm wondering what you're basing your comments on.

Evidence of what?

There are thousands of declassified soviet documents including death lists personally signed by Stalin himself.

I think the question is not weather they actually happened but if we can judge those events by modern moral code of 21st century. We are presented history as string of events and bullet points without much consideration for tradeoffs, alternatives and broader historical context.

In this particular example of Ukrainian famine, Stalin is potrayed as a maniac who starved millions without mentioning the global socio political climate of the time. Could russia have defeated Hitler had they not industrialized in that short span? Could they have done it without killing millions? Those are interesting questions to me.

Certainly much or his image in the 1930s was formed by propaganda. Khrushchev's leaked 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes seems to be the dynamite that threw communists globally into despair for a time. Were they the "victors"?

Saddam was also Man of the Year. It's not a popularity contest.

Indeed, it was often an infamy contest, when it mattered. Does anyone even read Time anymore?

Actually, it is, but I get your point. To quote Wikepedia: As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Khomeini as Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States due to commercial reasons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

Honest question, what's the point being made here? Are you attempting to imply that because Stalin presided over a terrible famine his political ideals must be flawed?

Churchill and friends presided over the Bengal famine of the 1940s. Six million people died in a famine during which food was exported out of Bengal to aid the British war effort. Or what about the British East India company raising land taxes from 10% to 50% during the great Bengal famine of the 1770s. A famine which killed 1/3rd of the population of Bengal. Also a famine which saw the British East India company's profits increase from 15 million to 30 million (non-inflation adjusted) rupees.

Do you think any of this counts against capitalism or do you have any reasons why we should disregard these anecdotes but count the Ukrainian famine against socialism?

There's no part of capitalism that requires the oppression of others, except in maybe some metaphorical economic sense. In communism the ability to oppress is a necessary feature of the system (and if you don't think so, read Marx). The world has seen many implementations of capitalism that don't involve forcing large numbers of people to starve. The same cannot be said of communism.

I think it depends on what you mean by capitalism.

A common notion of it is the "increase shareholder value" version, where the only thing that matters to executives is profit. There, I don't think oppression is a necessary precondition, but it is a necessary outcome. You can see that in the company stores of yore, and the eternal reemergence of monopolies and oligopolies that will treat treat both their workers and their customers exactly as poorly as they can get away with.

There are other approaches to capitalism, of course.

It also depends on what you mean by 'oppression.' To make an analogy, Marxists also consider externalities oppressive, because they're talking about the system as a whole. Libertarian/liberal ethical systems tend to focus on individual actions. A transaction between two parties where one isn't pointing a gun at each other is categorically not oppressive to libertarians/liberals, but may still be an oppressive action to a Marxist.

"the ability to oppress is a necessary feature of the system (and if you don't think so, read Marx)."

That's not been in any of the Marx I've read, to my recollection, though that's nowhere near exhaustive and my recollection could certainly be flawed. Do you have something specific to point to?

Tell me where in the world people did not live communistically prior to 10,000 years ago.

So according to you, the entire world lived under a system that required the oppression of others prior to 10,000 years ago, when everyone lived in migrating hunter-gatherer bands where all wealth was shared. This was a system that forced people to starve, according to you.

Don't be naieve, you tell me that a band of hunter gatherers would hesitate to kill/oppress another tribe if they were strapped for resources?

"According to you", the entire world lived in a system where everyone was picking daisies and being sweet to each other prior to 10,000 years ago?

Also, how is communism like how people lived prior to 10,000 years ago?

What resources does a highly migratory hunter-gatherer band actually have to take? The whole point is there is no surplus production. Also, how exactly would one band of hunter gatherers continually oppress another band of hunter gatherers over a period of time? It's not really possible, for a variety of reasons.

How is communism like how people lived 10,000+ years ago? Communism is how all people lived 10,000+ years ago.

> What resources does a highly migratory hunter-gatherer band actually have to take?

Food.

> how exactly would one band of hunter gatherers continually oppress another band of hunter gatherers over a period of time?

They wouldn't, they'd just kill them before the need arises. But if they really wanted to, out of greed or laziness, they'd do what humans have done for thousands of years. Establish a hierarchy based on power and violence, and extort taxes.

You need surplus to establish a hierarchy. A migratory hunter-gatherer band has no surplus - people collect enough food to feed themselves, their children, and perhaps some older people, and that's it.

Once there is a hierarchy with taxes and such you no longer have a migratory hunter-gatherer band. So you're talking about what happened during the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. I am talking about what happened before that.

You don't need a surplus to establish a hierarchy, you need a deficit. Deficit creates the need for structuring. If you're in a band and you can't get enough food to survive, there's going to be some tough decisions to be made. Who gets a cut and who doesn't is decided by those in power.

Besides that, I don't think it's absolutely necessary for a hunter gatherer band to be migrationary, that's only when a tribe becomes too big and exploits its territory faster than the territory can recover.

No - my point (as I mention below) was that I was surprised that Wells didn't ask anything about it even though he almost certainly had seen reports. My criticism is directed at Wells in this case.

steve_benjamins points out below that this really wasn't that kind of interview, which is a good point.

Your description of the Bengal famine differs in many regards from that given in the wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943) If you have sources, can you update the wikipedia entry. (Honest question - I know very little of this famine so don't know which is the more accurate description.)

You might find the following to be a valuable starting point:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/soutikbiswas/...

> Churchill and friends presided over the Bengal famine of the 1940s.

I don't see this as condemning capitalism but rather Imperialism.

The Ukrainian famine was partially caused by forced Collectivization of farms and Dekulakization. I'm guessing that imperialism greatly contributed to the Bengali famine.

It is pretty clear Wells wasn't trying to confront Stalin on historical events here. This was mostly a theoretical and ideological discussion.

>The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind

As opposed to the Indian and Irish famines where strong state intervention would have saved the majority of the people but the sacrosanct ideas of free market capitalism did not allow that. The Ukrainian famine is neither unique nor that bad by world standards. The reason why it was shocking to the West is that it happened decades after most other major powers developed trade systems robust enough to deal with similar catastrophes in their own empires. Russia like always was lagging a decades behind the rest of the West. Much the same way the cultural revolution and great leap forward are shocking, they happened at the same time that men were circling the moon, but in a country which had much more in common with the England of the 1830's or the Russia of the 1910's than any other power then.

He probably didn't mention it because the Holodomor didn't actually happen.

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

You might not want to base a conclusion on the statements of a single web page. That particular web page would have much greater impact if the claims it makes had a bit more evidence behind them, starting with some source material.

If you want to persuade people of that, using "Communist Party Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries" as a source is pessimally useful.

Authored by:

  By Mario Sousa
  Member of the
  Communist Party Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries
  Sweden

Do you have anything to say regarding the actual content of the argument put forward?

It is not very long. No need for me to submit a TLDR;

Everyone with rudimentary knowledge of European history can spot the stark inconsistencies between the official (read peer reviewed) history and this propaganda piece.

So somebody is spreading propaganda and lies. Absolute lack of references and sources leads me to believe that this pamphlet is a piece of propaganda no different from the drivel spread by the neo nazis.

Wow, I guess that means they are biased. Luckily, academics in universities across the US, funded by grants by the Koch brothers ( http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/11/144280/koch-uni... ), are writing objective articles about history, economics, policy and other topics.

Are you implying that people claiming loss of there families were made up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Soviet_and_Western_de...

It's interesting how throughout the 1930s we see almost no mention of this in the New York Times. Which is what your link is pointing to.

Now that armed right-wing bands have staged a coup in the Ukraine, we suddenly are hearing a lot of discussion about this right here, whereas when it was supposedly happening in the early 1930s, we see almost no mention of it in the press.

Because communication channels with the backwater Ukraine are totaly the same in 30's and 10's?

This was a particularly interested/relevant excerpt from Wells. I think of the open source ethos as one small example of what he's calling for in the second paragraph:

I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not... people in the West for whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who want to invest and obtain a profit from this investment, but who do not regard this as the main object?...

During the past few years I have been much engaged in and have thought of the need for conducting propaganda in favour of Socialism and cosmopolitanism among wide circles of engineers, airmen, military technical people, etc. It is useless to approach these circles with two-track class-war propaganda. These people understand the condition of the world. They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense.

Credit to Wells for then saying:

"They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense."

I wonder if Wells was one of the last people to disagree with Stalin who didn't end up with a bullet in the back of their heads?

No. Lots of people disagreed with Stalin all the time. Famous example being Zhukov.

True, but didn't Zhukov (perhaps the greatest general of WW2) come perilously close to being tried in the aftermath of WW2 - largely due to his personal reputation and international standing?

The Bolsheviks cultivated celebrity visitors from the Western left. It wouldn't have worked to shoot them.

(Edit: Originally this comment had a moderation bit in it as well, but someone rightly pointed out to me that it isn't helpful to wear the moderator hat and make a regular-user comment in the same post. So I've edited that out. I considered restricting myself to only making moderator comments, but (a) that's never been how HN worked, (b) I was a user long before a moderator, and (c) I'd burn out from boredom.)

For what it's worth, I apologise, mostly for the initial comment I made that mentioned the Ukraine - it looked very much like a partisan comment intented to reference the current conflict and, in all honesty, it wasn't.

Sorry for any grief caused and keep up the good work.

[I promise to engage more brain cells when posting on obviously highly emotive topics in future and, if I have any doubt, to not post].

Thanks for being so kind about it. It means a lot.

Two thoughts

1. Has anyone suggested making yourself a new moderator account? eg dang_mod for all mod-related comments. It might ease the mental burden for the reader (at the cost of increased mental burden and user-switching for you - so maybe not worth it).

2. As a simpler variant of the above, why not make two separate comments? I expect readers are capable of telling apart your user comment from the moderation if they're cleanly separated.

Edit: The first option would also have the benefit of a user id with its own comment history.

1. That would be easy to do, but it feels wrong to me. Not sure I can articulate why, other than that it's not the way HN has always worked.

2 is more or less what's what I'm going to do from now on.

Stalin referred to his Western supporters as "useful idiots".

Maybe that's why Churchill stopped being a supporter of him.

What happened to Fred Hampton when he disagreed with how blacks were being treated like second-class citizens in Chicago? The Kent State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? The Jackson State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? And so on...

> But I have some experience in fighting for Socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another President in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and Presidents go, but we go on for ever; if this or that President does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the President oppose to the will of the capitalist class?

Thats the truth we have all resigned to ourselves unfortunately.

But then Roosevelt was quite effective in putting the capitalists in their place for an entire generation, perhaps longer, until Nixon and later Reagan turn us to the right again.

That's putting it too strong. He reigned in some of their worst excesses, which were detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole just as much as it was detrimental to everyone else. "The capitalists" are not a single force - it's a mess of conflicting interests, just as the working class. And many of them have interests that are part aligned by parts of the working class. It's not black and white.

But he wasn't, really. Government can't really do much to constrain capitalism. Most of what FDR did was wildly ineffective. Some of the weirdness in how corporate accounting works now go back to tax dodges then ( and since) . There were 90+% marginal rates; that's rather extreme.

Nixon presided over the end of the Bretton Woods Accord but that particular system was already worn out. Some credit the end of Bretton Woods with the rise of international super capitalism. It's debatable. Nixon... wasn't all that clued in - he started wage and price controls.

The stuff that FDR did was more like trying to coordinate things. Most of it didn't work. They did put large corporate entities into contracting big time, of course, because of the War.

Reagan? Didn't really do much but talk. He had tax increases advertised as tax cuts, but the rest was rhetoric. A lot of Reagan's spending was undoing damage done by Nixon to military budgets. Some of it - like Star Wars - was just kinda crazy. Bluff.

The PATCO strike was rather a one off union busting thing; it really wasn't part of a larger pattern. It's just the the large monolithic corporation was evolving out. With that went the ability of unions to bargain.

McMegan has some thoughts here: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758...

Agree, disagree - she's on the money as to the issues to my limited understanding.

This strikes me as fake. Maybe entirely written by Wells, or someone else.

I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements.

What are these elementary requirements and aren't they now satisfied?

Wells didn't have a recording device, so to perfectly record such large, articulate and complicated back and forths in a conversation probably involved some ghostwriting from memory on Well's part. It was a different time.

> What are these elementary requirements

Food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare, education. The list is long, but basic. I'm sure you can come up with the rest.

> and aren't they now satisfied?

Not for the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of countries. Even in your own, I'm sure imperialist country, huge masses of the population are in want.

Well, let's see, I live in the UK.

We have running, clean water in every part of the country, I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply.

Likewise with food, I haven't heard of anyone actually starving, and while you could conceivably run out of money to buy food, there's a safety net of food banks.

Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years.

Education is provided for everyone to a level beyond what is necessary for most jobs, and that's before you consider the subsidised further education and of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries).

Healthcare is also provided for everyone via the NHS. You can of course get better education and healthcare through private means, but most people don't bother even if they can afford it (unless they can easily afford it).

Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue.

So, is there more stuff we should add to the list that would make it more obvious how huge masses of the population are in want?

I know some people working in this area and they tell me that there is absolutely a problem with hunger in the UK. The existence of the safety nets is more a sign that there is a problem than that there isn't, as such charities get started when people who have the wherewithal to act realise how bad the situation is.

You seem to be dismissing it on the basis of the fact that you simply haven't heard about the problem, which is partly because there is no official monitoring, and the current government like to claim that it doesn't exist.

The red cross apparently stepped in last year to try to help: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-red...

If you want to know more, check out some of the charitable campaigns:

http://endhungerfast.co.uk/

http://www.trusselltrust.org

Which groups are hungry in England? How bad is it?

On a sliding scale: Mentally ill? Illegal immigrants without jobs? Drug users? Unemployed? Retired?

A related question for ending up homeless?

(Not English, just curious about the safety net there. Not trying to argue about anything, please. :-) )

Put it in perspective. When Stalin was speaking, there were people actually dying of starvation, millions of severely undernourished people, and huge structural problems with food production. In the UK today, most people have copious amounts of food, a lot actually goes to waste every day, and while some people might find it hard to put food on the table, it's within the means of private charity to help them without the government having to intervene. The reported increase in the problem seems a bit dubious to me, e.g. here is an actual food bank founder speaking:

Consider again the views of Robin Aitken of the Oxford Food Bank, a former BBC journalist who now collects unsold fresh food from supermarkets and distributes them to charities in Oxford. He says: ‘Some people like to believe that there has been this enormous upsurge in food poverty. My point is that there have always been poor people in this country. You could have gone back ten, 20, 50 years and there would be people who don’t get enough food. ‘The fact is that food banks are a new phenomenon. Now we have got up to 500. If you provide a service, people use it.’ Significantly, he believes that people suffered greater hardship in the recessions of the Seventies and Eighties than today, when food banks didn’t exist.

"I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply."

I've definitely heard of people becoming ill from the supply of water in the UK. The story of the map that showed cholera to be water borne (not airborne as previously believed) is a fascinating anecdote in the history of epidemiology. Of course, that was in 1854, so not terribly relevant to current conditions (I hope!)...

"of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries)."

While there's doubtless more information available on the internet these days, I just want to drop in this reminder that there is also learning material in the books housed in most of those libraries.

> Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years.

And this is where we come to the fact that poverty has been, to some extent, exported beyond the borders of your country. In the modern world you can't just stop the economic analysis at your border, millions (if not billions) of people around the world take part in your economy and many of them are starving or malnurished and probably don't have access to health care or a decent education.

If their cheap labour weren't present, you wouldn't be able to buy a year's supply of clothing for a day's wages.

I'm not sure clothing isn't mostly automated by now. If not, it will be. The larger problem is, Nobody is needed for hand labor any more (or soon that will be the case). What do we do with the uneducated masses then? Educate them? We absolutely don't need a billion more engineers. Then what? I have no answer.

The core of Marxism basically boils down to the problem you set out above. One could summarise the core of Marxism like this:

Capitalism is exceptionally good at improving production, to the point where it will eventually put people out of work, and throw a growing number people back into poverty, and that is when a society is ready for a socialist revolution:

When all basic wants can be met, but no longer are solely for the reason of distribution rather than production.

In The German Ideology (1845), Marx warned that an attempt at a socialist revolution in a society that is not sufficiently advanced was doomed to failure as it would just make want common, and class differences would re-assert themselves. No points for recognising the long string of examples where this actually happened.

Every other part of Marxist theory pretty much serves to underpin or expand on that core.

Unfortunately, garment processing is one field where automation is way, way behind other fields due to fundamental technical problems. There has been little to no progress in the past few decades compared to other related fields, notably fabric production (which is almost entirely automated now).

> Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue.

Local authorities absolutely do not have to provide accommodation for those who apply. Accommodation is provided to people in priority groups.

Even people who have no home and who are living on the streets (which as you say is rare in the context of homelessness) could find themselves excluded by rules for local authority accommodation.

And for the people who do meet the rules there are huge waiting lists. Tower Hamlets has a population of about 250,000 people, with about 24,000 people on the list.

So you are saying there are 24,000 people sleeping rough in Tower Hamlets each night? I doubt it. That's 10x the official statistic for the entire country (England).

No, i am jot saying there are 24,000 rough sleepers. I am saying that even though the rules to get on a local authority housing list are tight there are still 24,000 people on the list for tower hamlets.

Some of these people are homeless but not rough sleepers.

Note that it is possible to be sleeping rough and not meet the criteria for acceptance to the LA housing waiting list.

Let's cut to the chase. Being 'homeless' because you have to stay with friends or relatives is not the same thing as living in a slum or a cardboard box. The only relevant point here is your last one, which I'm sure is technically true (although I'm not sure how temporary accommodation figures into it) but I doubt it accounts for a very large number of people.

A janitor who works and lives in San Francisco would have to have enough money to buy food, pay rent and so forth. Perhaps the reproduction of labor might be included (able to afford to have and raise two kids).

This would be the elementary requirements. So is that the case, can a janitor who has been living and working in San Francisco for the past decade afford to buy food, pay rent, or (depending if reproduction of labor is included) have two kids? These people certainly exist. I suppose the people in the news stories who were just getting by in the Bay Area and are now living in their cars or whatever would be another example. And so forth. You could find other types of cases in Bangladesh, Honduras etc., which might be different in some ways.

Fascinating how important the questions of class and revolution are in this conversation (from both Stalin and Wells).

Equally interesting is how theoretical and ideological the answers are.

Great read!

What I find even more interesting is that in our time class is not a subject at all. We go along like the concept of social classes was never thought of.

And as for the subject of revolution, we glance over it like a ghost from the past. We act as (a society and a culture) though the current system will last forever although history, as both Stalin and Wells points out, shows us that social and economic systems gets replaced, in many cases by force.

With such a huge middle class in the 20th century in the U.S. and the collapse of the Soviet empire, I think a lot of politicians, economists and media pundits felt that class was no longer an issue. I suspect it will become more widely discussed again if our current economic trends continue.

What I'm seeing is that people are raising the questions, but are largely oblivious to the historical discussions of the same questions.

E.g. people are constantly - especially in tech circles - raising the spectre of automation of production and how we will deal with it in terms of unemployment, worrying about large numbers of people being plunged into unemployment, as if this is a question nobody has considered.

But that was one of Marx' core criticisms of capitalism: That he believed that while it would bring production to a point where poverty could be entirely eliminated for the first time in history, rather than doing so, its dynamics would instead lead to the paradox of overproduction and plunging millions (back) into poverty at the same time.

People didn't use to ask these questions, and when they did, if you brought up Marx' you used to get into a flamewar, and death threats were not uncommon well into the 90's. Today you tend to get a reasoned discussion and honest questions.

>>Equally interesting is how theoretical and ideological the answers are.<<

I picked up an interesting fact awhile ago, I don't have sources for you, but: Slavoj Žižek has (had?) a portrait of Stalin in his home, not as a sign of admiration, but as a reminder of how problematic ideologies are.

great comment by nmrm

Stalin, in particular, has been a fascination of mine. Anyone interested in learning how a man can literally seize control of the thoughts of millions of people - utterly - in an age when the radio was considered cutting-edge technology should read "Who Killed Kirov?" (http://amzn.to/1moOVmE) That book haunts me.

The class war part of the interview is interesting because it really highlights the main part where Stalin (and most Leninists) diverged from marxism. You see it clearly in Stalins later statement:

"You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie."

Where Marx saw capitalists (and workers) as forced by circumstance into playing an inevitable role in society - neither inherently good or bad -, Stalin saw capitalists as "wicked men".

In general, a lot of the worst flaws of the Bolsheviks boils down to the near unwavering belief that they were on the side of good in a battle between good and evil, and an idea of a "working class" that they fetishised as near super-human.

While Marx would agitate against specific people, he would not categorise groups of people in moral terms. He attacked ideas and behaviour, and expected people would change with circumstance: The capitalist behaves like a capitalist because that is what he needs to do to protect his own interests, and if he don't act as a capitalist, he won't remain one - he will eventually face financial ruin and become part of the working class, where he will act as a worker.

In fact, in part I of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

"Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress."

This treatment of a persons class as a matter of circumstance was essential to Marx: Large parts of Marxist theory was based on the foundation that politics in the large is defined by people acting broadly in their self-interest, moderated by their understanding of that interest (e.g. the extent to which a class "buys" the justifications the ruling class gives; consider for example Marx' Critique of the Gotha program, where he points out that the proposed program is meaningless when it writes about "fairness" in part because the current system of distribution is "fair" according to bourgeois standards - without being explicit, the word says nothing)

But the world becomes so much easier to deal with when one can write off ones opponents as "wicked men".

Stalin was a leader, Marx was a philosopher.

> Where Marx saw capitalists (and workers) as forced by circumstance into playing an inevitable role in society - neither inherently good or bad -, Stalin saw capitalists as "wicked men".

Because politicians work for a reality change. It's not so obvious to make effective, concrete, viable change in a country, so you have to take shortcuts. Leading a country for change is like sailing a boat into space, it's dark territory and you know there are huge political and economical risks. The first effective thing Stalin could do was to neutralize self interest, because that's the one smallest thing you can do when you listen about Marx.

It's harder to sensitize everyone about the flaws of capitalism and expect real change. Maybe he could have organized country wide conferences and seminars to talk about the work of Marx instead, but you know that that's not how politics happen and work.

The difference between Marx and Stalin ? One's a philosopher and the other a politician. Even today politics cower at the ideas of Marx because of the story of the soviet union. Nobody can really implements efficient policies that 100% prevent the accidents of capitalism.

Stalin, Marx and Russia is just another example of incoherences between theory and practice.

Marx was a politician first, philosopher second.

Most of Marx' most influential works were political agitation written as part of his work on organising the first and second Internationals, and actively meddling in the affairs of various socialist parties.

He was under regular threat of deportation and arrest for his political work. (edit: and moved countries several times because of these threats)

We only see Marx' as predominantly a philosopher today because his political work was overshadowed by later developments.

> The first effective thing Stalin could do was to neutralize self interest, because that's the one smallest thing you can do when you listen about Marx.

On the contrary - self interest is essential to Marxism. The very core of Marx political agitation was aimed at getting the members of the working classes to understand that their self interests were separate from those of the bourgeoisie.

If you eliminate self-interest, Marxist socialism becomes impossible.

> The very core of Marx political agitation was aimed at getting the members of the working classes to understand that their self interests were separate from those of the bourgeoisie.

That's like teaching sheeps to unite. It's important to enlighten people, but it won't prevent self interests to collide. Politicians in power can't listen to everyone, it's always easier to listen and talk to powerful minorities who have the strongest self interest.

> Marx was a politician first, philosopher second.

I'd say an activist. I don't see Marx as an active member of a political party, making speeches and announcements. He was more of an intellectual.

When I say politics I say the original etymology of the word politics, meaning having power.

The thing that is most interesting is that neither of them seem to have ever heard of "consumer surplus". This is two of the most ... "educated" men of the time; now the concept is much more widely understood. Say what you will of Milton Friedman, he'd done a lot to at least get people familiar with these sorts of concepts.

Very interesting. Was it ever translated into Russian? I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that it wasn't.

Stalin spoke Georgian and Russian, not English.

I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.

Sorry if I was unclear. As a Russian myself, I wondered whether this interview, which we can read here in English, was ever, during the period between 1934 to now, translated from English into Russian. The most direct reason for this interest being to show it to my non-English-speaking friends.

Ah, I get it. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'd bet a translation exists somewhere (because Russians translate everything, or at least used to, and this class of material would be of obvious interest), but have zero idea how to find it. (Edit: uh, other than Google :))

Are you kidding? Of course it was! Simply searching for "уэллс сталин" in google would reveal it. Here, http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_1202.htm

But, anyway, I'm interested which one should be considered closer to the original one. Obviously Wells published it the first time in English. But AFAIK Stalin didn't speak English and I can't find if Wells actually spoke Russian. And in some places of the interview I was actually interested in how exactly Stalin phrased it.

"We Bolsheviks call it “self-criticism”. It is widely used in the USSR."

Indeed! Coming out of Stalin, the irony of these word is unbearable.The first Moscow trial was to take place in two years.

All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting.

Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does.

I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meaning on Hacker News over the years, and (b) editorial judgment plays a role on this site.

Since HN seems to have an interest in Soviet history, I would recommend Darkness at Noon by Koestler and Khrushchev: The Years in Power by Medvedev.

I can't recommend all of Solzhenitsyn enough. You'll be forgiven if you don't make it all the way through "1918"... I, frankly, didn't. Perhaps someday. also it never cease to astound me how deeply Boris Pasternak drew his picture of the thing. The David Lean film is almost better than the book, but the book is amazing.

Also interesting which I found out the other week - Stalin's granddaughter in her early 40s lives in Portland (and looks very much like a local). http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...

So what do you think about the resulting discussion?

Poor.

When ever I mention anything about the current the gap between the rich and poor; I get posts deleted? So, I won't even comment on this article. I hope the Vigilant Moderators are happy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com