Classic “Anti-Communist Talking Points” Still Hold Up
Communist Twitter user @stealyoredbull uses shoddy research to run damage control for Communist crimes
Communism and Food
Our communist here cites the literal CIA (as opposed to the figurative CIA) to prove that the Soviets had sufficient food supply/consumption. Even if we disregard the fact that the Soviets required a much higher caloric intake to have the comfort level of Americans, there are still many problems with this claim.
The CIA memo(?) can be found here.
This one page seems very odd to me, not only because it is just one page but also because it lacks actual data and methodology. Of course, this is a summary and not the actual report being referenced. So why don’t the communists cite the actual report? The full report found here, doesn’t seem to present the same findings claimed in the memo. However, I did finally find the original data from Henry Rowen’s Soviet Food Self-Sufficiency, presented to the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, Allocation of Resources in the Soviet Union and China - 1982
I wish communists were less lazy and actually bothered to track down the original data as I did, but let’s move on.
Trusting the CIA is very convenient for the communists due to the fact that the CIA frequently overestimated the Soviet economy and living conditions. Gertrude Schroeder, at the time an economist for the CIA, noted in 1966 that the CIA statistics on Soviet consumption “…undoubtedly overstate the relative position of the USSR because the calculations cannot allow adequately for the superior quality of U.S. products and the much greater variety and assortment products available here.”
Economist Vladimir G. Treml examined the 3,280 calories statistic directly in his paper, Soviet Foreign Trade in Foodstuffs. Treml pointed out that these statistics failed to account for many types of losses, largely due to the diversion of food products prior to human consumption. There are two major sources of this diversion ( 1 ) bread and bakery products fed to livestock and ( 2 ) sugar, bread, and other foods used in home production of moonshine and other alcoholic beverages. In Treml’s estimations, these two factors alone cause a loss of 200 calories per capita per day. This is before accounting for poor harvesting and distribution techniques.
Former Soviet economist Igor Birman also directly responded to the 1982/83 CIA report in his book Personal Consumption in the USSR and USA in 1989. In his book, he criticizes the CIA’s methodology, reporting: “Both American and Soviet statistics differ therefore from the accounts of a national product and personal consumption. These differences hampered many of the authors' calculations. I refer to such cases in my analysis.” Birman’s final adjusted estimates claim Soviet citizens ate 43% of what Americans ate.
Despite Birman’s hesitation to fully trust even his own data (p. 72), it was later revealed to be entirely correct. John Howard Wilhelm noted in the journal Europe-Asia Studies, “Given what has happened and what we now know, Birman clearly did get it right.” He goes on to say, “some of the most 'advanced' techniques were used in studies of the Soviet economy….. But these techniques clearly did not perform as well as Birman's 'anecdotal economics' in getting the Soviet economic situation right.”
You can read more about the Soviet’s food situation here.
Communism and Opinion Polls
I don’t really care for opinion polls such as this. They’re often influenced by propaganda and/or nostalgia and misinterpreted by the communists, but we will analyze this claim regardless.
The entire Pew Research report can be found here, where the link is conveniently absent in the Tweet.
The data referenced in the Tweet is completely fabricated. Looking at the actual polls, it becomes quite clear why some communists felt the need to make up their own out of thin air.
Eastern Europeans still largely supported the change from communism to capitalism.
Life satisfaction improved in all cases other than in West Germany.
The question that is the most similar to the fabricated one is here:
The results here are much more mixed, but the surveyors note:
“Nonetheless, many people in former communist countries broadly endorse the free market economy. This is particularly the case in countries where sizable numbers of people rate their lives better than they did in surveys two decades ago. But in countries where people do not register as much progress since 1991, there is much less unanimity about the benefits of the free market.”
Soviet Democracy
No citations are provided for this claim about the USSR being “far more democratic” than the US. So I did the reading on this subject from scratch.
Historian and Stalin expert David Priestland writes in the journal European History Quarterly:
“Soviet democracy could be defined in less radical terms, as the closing of the ‘gap’ between officials and masses by means of ‘discussion’ and ‘criticism’, but even this diluted model could damage the authority of officials and undermine the legitimacy of the Party.” he goes on to say “…it has to be accepted that the opponents of Soviet democracy within the apparatus were correct in sensing that it was likely to both threaten the economy and destroy the Party, and the form of socialism it defended.”
To put it in simple terms, Soviet Democracy existed at various points in USSR history. It was nothing like Liberal Democracy and was largely suppressed because it was a threat to both the Communist Party and the system of socialism.
Soviet Democracy and Stalin
In his aforementioned paper, David Priestland states that “Stalin, of course, did not accept the Left’s calls for greater discussion of policy within the Party, and he sought to tighten central control over policy-making, particularly in economic affairs.” and “Stalin seems to have become worried that the newly enfranchised would use their rights to challenge the regime, and that criticism of individual bureaucrats in the Party would encourage an attack on the Party itself. The leadership responded by rounding up and killing hundreds of thousands of suspicious ‘class aliens’ and by changing the election rules to make provision for only one candidate per seat.”
Stalin evidently was a tyrant, and those who claim otherwise are nothing sort of delusional. So what’s this about the CIA “admitting” that Stalin wasn’t a dictator? Pure nonsense.
I recommend clearing your mind of bias and then reading this excerpt from the report in its entirety:
The author never says Stalin was not a dictator, this is just basic reading comprehension. Stalin was often viewed as a total ruler who answered to no one and performed actions single-handedly. We now know that despite him being a dictator, Stalin still had his Central Committee and other leaders to help him rule over the Soviet Union.
“Collective leadership” refers to the power granted to the Politburo, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as well as the Council of Ministers. It has nothing to do with democracy. The report even refers to the leadership as the “Communist dictatorship.”
National Socialism
Under any common or reasonable definition of the word, the Nazis would be defined as socialists. Marxists try to muddy the waters in this debate by outright lying or simply introducing Red Herrings. The claims “the Nazis were socialists” and “the Nazis were Marxists” are not interchangeable. Socialism predates Marxism, so clearly, Marxism is not a necessary part of socialism. The Nazis were National Socialists. Socialists but not Marxists.
The instances of “privatization” in the Nazi economy are often brought up as if it completely dismisses any notion of the Nazis being socialists, but this is not the case.
The communist cites a 2006 paper by economist Germà Bel, titled Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany. Unfortunately for the communists, they don’t read any of their citations past the abstract. They compare Nazi privatization to the privatization that occurred in the EU throughout the 80s and 90s. But Bel states that “…it is worth noting that the general orientation of the Nazi economic policy was the exact opposite of that of America and the EU countries in the late 1990s: Whereas the modern privatization in the EU has been parallel to liberalization policies, in Nazi Germany privatization was applied within a framework of increasing control of the state over the whole economy through regulation and political interference.”
It seems as though the communist’s own citation was their downfall. Bel makes a few more interesting observations: “The Nazi regime rejected liberalism, and was strongly against free competition and regulation of the economy by market mechanisms. Still, as a social Darwinist, Hitler was reluctant to totally dispense with private property and competition. Hitler’s solution was to combine autonomy and a large role for private initiative and ownership rights within firms with the total subjection of property rights outside the firm to State control.”
Bel is not alone, many economists and historians have noted the absolute control the Nazi state wielded over private property. Austrian Economist Ludwig Von Mises described it best: “The government tells these seeming entrepreneurs what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. The government decrees at what wages laborers should work, and to whom and under what terms the capitalists should entrust their funds. Market exchange is but a sham. As all prices, wages and interest rates are fixed by the authority, they are prices, wages and interest rates in appearance only;” Is it really private ownership if the private owner has little to no say?
If that still isn’t enough, economic historian Peter Temin wrote the same sentiments in his book Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning:
“Both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a larger number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state could therefore direct a firm’s activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises. The pre-existing tendency to form cartels was encouraged to eliminate competition that would destabilize prices.”
I could continue on for quite some time, but I think you get the point.
Nazi-Communist Collaboration
The turn from trying to distance the communists from the Nazis to try to justify Nazi-Communist Collaboration is quite jarring to me.
The main criticism of The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is not non-aggression but the outright collaboration through the Secret Protocol. The Nazis and communists collaborated to invade Poland together and had plans to divide several European countries into “spheres of influence.”
Another part of the pact was the Gestapo–NKVD conferences, in which the Soviets and Nazis shared intelligence and swapped prisoners.
Denialism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact should be seen as a continuation of Nazi-Communist collaboration. You can learn more about the pact and its consequences here.
Citing Fraud Historians
I don’t care to argue this point. It is undoubtedly that most, if not all, Eastern European countries would have switched to liberal democracy much quicker if not for the USSR.
What really interests me about this Tweet is that there is no citation for this claim, we don’t know what book this comes from. So I did some brief digging and discovered that this is an excerpt from the book Blackshirts and Reds by Marxist pseudo-historian Michael Parenti. The purpose of Parenti’s book is to cover up Nazi-Communist collaboration and the crimes of Stalin through the fabrication of evidence and the omission of facts.
Other than the many conveniently missing citations, the best example of Parenti’s laziness and dishonesty is this passage defending the Soviet Famine:
“In the absence of reliable evidence, we are fed anecdotes, such as the story Winston Churchill tells of the time he asked Stalin how many people died in the famine. According to Churchill, the Soviet leader responded by raising both his hands, a gesture that may have
signified an unwillingness to broach the subject. But since Stalin happened to have five fingers on each hand, Churchill concluded—without benefit of a clarifying follow-up question — that Stalin was confessing to ten million victims.”
Now let’s read Churchill’s account from his autobiography, The Second World War:
“‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘have the stresses of this war been as bad to you
personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?’
This subject immediately roused the Marshal.
‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.’
‘thought you would have found it bad,’ said I, ‘because you were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.’
‘Ten millions,’ he said, holding up his hands.”
It is quite clear here that rather than simply casting doubt on Churchill's account, Parenti outright lies and omits the detail that Stalin did, in fact, verbally state “Ten Million.” Fraudulent history at its finest.
Michael Parenti does not engage with or cite historic literature, and the historic literature does not engage with or cite him. He’s nothing more than a crazy old man yelling at clouds.
Communist Elites
Another case of the communist refusing to reveal their sources. Luckily this time the quote comes from a much less malicious and much more credible source: From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe by award-winning historian John Connelly. Though John Connelly is a good source, it is a good idea to provide more context here. Historian Olev Liivik writes about the elite class in the USSR (The Nomenklatura):
“As regards their socioeconomic meaning, privileges could be classified according to their legal and regulatory standing. Based on this, it is possible to distinguish three categories of socioeconomic privileges: public-normative (legally regulated), administrative-bureaucratic (i.e., these were more or less secret or unwritten entitlements) and ‘unofficial’ privileges, which in reality meant access to distribution channels of goods and services on account of the person’s post or position.” he goes on “This created favourable conditions for the distribution, channelling and acquisition of ‘deficit’ goods and services (i.e. those in short supply) and other benefits. Such activities did not necessarily have to be illegal, but they certainly were not legal either; still, as the situation with shortages worsened, such behaviour became a social norm. This did not reduce social or economic inequality but created an ideal environment for abuse, corruption and speculation.”
In terms of inequality, the communist’s claims lack a lot of context. Abram Bergson published a study in The Journal of Economic Literature concerning the economic inequality in the Soviet Union. He found that it wasn’t much more equal than the West.
You can read more about Soviet inequality here.
Communists Doing Bad Science
Shirley Cereseto and Howard Waitzkin’s fraudulent and poorly done study was bound to be brought up. This study includes only one control variable, mislabels poor socialist countries as capitalist, and uses outdated data.
It even concedes that the capitalist countries are better off and richer and refuses to compare the wealthy capitalist countries to the socialist ones. That’s the brief rundown. I responded to the “study” in greater length in another article.
Genocide Denial/Justification
Classic genocide denial language. Nearly identical to the memes used by holocaust deniers.
I couldn’t find any instance of scholars adding Nazi causalities to communist death counts. This appears to be nothing more than a commonly repeated fabrication. It seems to be targeting the “Black Book of Communism,” but that is not the only estimation of communism’s death toll. While the estimations do vary, there is no serious debate on whether or not they are extremely high. In his book, The Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 3, historian Mark Philip Bradley says: “If the precise numbers have always been, and continue to be, in dispute, their order of magnitude is not.”
Political scientist and genocide expert Benjamin Valentino estimates in his book “Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century” that the death toll of non-combatants is as high as 70 million. In his book, Red Holocaust, economist Steven R. Rosefielde estimates the number is more than 60 million. Historian Stephen Mark Kotkin estimates more than 65 million. There is a very broad consensus on this.
Next, the Marxist attempts to push the nonsense claim of a capitalist death toll. This claim just identifies all of the deaths in the world as deaths caused by capitalism and identifies the entire globe as capitalist. A claim that would not be taken seriously by any rational adult, but even granting the premise that the entire world is capitalist to the communist, this argument fails to defend communism on statistical grounds.
The communist cites some research done by teenagers on Reddit as the big proof of capitalism’s evil. Let’s assume all of this is true, and capitalism is responsible for 20 million deaths annually.
What the communists fail to understand this is in the context of a world populated by nearly 8 billion people, meaning that this death toll is one-four-hundredth of the world’s population. Now let’s compare this to the Holodomor and the Soviet Famine, which led to the deaths of 3.9 to 7 million individuals. 13.3% of the population of Ukraine and 22% of the population of Kazakhstan died, death tolls far higher percentage-wise than the faux capitalism death toll.
Furthermore, these types of excess deaths have been decreasing globally over time. Logically if we are to associate capitalism with these death tolls, we must attribute the millions of lives saved to capitalism.
Communism And Innovation (or lack thereof)
This Tweet fails to actually refute the valid point that communism and/or socialism stifle innovation and innovative people. Especially considering it is comparing two state-owned space programs to each other, not exactly capitalism vs. socialism, more like socialism vs. socialism.
Interestingly enough, there may be an argument that the Soviet space program was more capitalist than the American one. Unlike the American space program, which had NASA as a single coordinating structure, the USSR's program was split between several competing design groups. The internal competition helped boost innovation and offered incentives to outperform other groups.
Why did the Soviets even go to space? From an economic viewpoint, a Soviet space program makes no sense at all: such a program only makes sense from a geopolitical viewpoint. The Soviets were lacking far behind their peers in terms of quality of life and technological development. The space program only hurt the citizens of the USSR. If America had bothered to divert such a large amount of resources at the expense of its citizens, then conceivable, that we could have reached space years before we actually did, but that is only speculation.
It is, of course, also important to remember that both America and the USSR heavily incorporated Nazi scientists and technologies into their space programs. The Soviets launched Sputnik I and Sputnik II with two R-14A rockets, which were scaled-up versions of the German V-2 rocket.
The Soviets depended on Western innovation in many other areas other than the space program, such as getting started with tractors and technology for farming. Agricultural economist Dana G. Dalrymple wrote about Soviet tractors in the journal Technology and Culture, stating that “…in 1924 there were only about 1,000 tractors in operation, by 1934 the number had increased to over 200,000.” Dalrymple goes on to say “This technology, however, did not spring from the Russian soil; it came almost entirely from the United States. Through the mid-thirties, most of the tractors in the Soviet Union were of American manufacture or copied from American designs. When copied, they were manufactured in plants designed, built, and operated under American guidance. And, in some cases, Americans guided the Russians in the use of tractors. The United States, in short, played a most significant role in bringing the tractor to the Soviet Union.”
In his book, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930 to 1945, economist Antony Sutton provides many more examples of the USSR depending upon Western capitalist innovation for technology.
As far as the claim that “the Soviets developed the first mobile phone” goes, this is just more fabrication. Kupriyanovich’s phone was a portable radio phone. Mobile radio phones had been around for decades in the western world.
Socialism’s Failure In Venezuela
Another very odd hill to die on. Venezuela has a poverty rate of 76% currently, yet it is held up as a socialist success story. Some of the propaganda posters featured in the Tweet predate the serious parts of Venezuela’s economic collapse. They didn’t age very well.
A couple of economists sought to see the effects that Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship had on the Venezuelan economy and revealed their findings in 2016 when they published a paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. In the paper, they point out, “We find that although average incomes rose somewhat during his time as president, they lagged far behind where they might have been if Chavez had not taken office. During his leadership, life expectancy grew while mortality and poverty rates fell. Yet we find no evidence that these gains are any different than they would have been with another national leader.”
Venezuela’s literacy campaigns are another aspect of their brand of socialism that the champagne socialists of the US praise heavily because devastating poverty is okay as long as a few more people can read. A 2006 study analyzed the Mission Robinson program to see how it affected literacy rates. The authors concluded that: “Most of our estimates of program impact represent quantitatively small and rarely statistically significant effects of Robinson, while some point estimates are actually negative.”
Venezuela’s downfall is often blamed on US sanctions. I dispel this myth in one of my other articles.
Holodomor Denial
While this article doesn’t outright deny the Holodomor famine happened (as some vile communists do) it does try to downplay it and Stalin’s role in it.
One of the arguments presented is that the Soviets sent food as an aid to Ukraine. Historian Olga Andriewsky notes: “Finally, new studies have revealed the very selective—indeed, highly politicized—nature of state assistance in Ukraine in 1932-‐1933. Soviet authorities, as we know, took great pains to guarantee the supply of food to the industrial workforce and to certain other categories of the population—Red Army personnel and their families, for example.”
It seems as though this aid was to protect Soviet interests and not the Ukrainian victims of the famine. Andriewsky continues: “The bulk of assistance was delivered in the form of grain seed that was ‘lent’ to collective farms (from reserves that had been seized in Ukraine) with the stipulation that it would be repaid with interest. State aid, it seems clear, was aimed at trying to salvage the collective farm system and a workforce necessary to maintain it. At the very same time, Party officials announced a campaign to root out ‘enemy elements of all kinds who sought to exploit the food problems for their own counter-revolutionary purposes, spreading rumors about the famine and various horrors'”
You can read more about the Soviet “aid” here.
No matter how hard communists try to obfuscate the details of the Holodomor, they can’t cover up all of the evidence we have at our disposal. Even though they claim Stalin had no ill intention toward the Ukrainians, Stalin personally signed an order on January 22nd, 1933, blockading citizens of Ukraine from fleeing starving villages. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
If all of this still isn’t enough evidence then I will direct all of the illiterate communists to a recent study that dispels all of the myths concerning demographics and geography. This paper has not made the rounds yet but I hope to bring a lot more attention to it. The authors point out that “Government policies motivated by ethnic bias can account for up to 92 percent of the deaths of ethnic Ukrainians living in Ukraine at the time.”
Communists can no longer argue against the fact that Ukrainians were targeted by Soviet policies.
Slander Hungarians
This is a more vile fabrication. This Hungarian flag dates back to the 1840s and has nothing to do with fascism or fascist ideology.
Lying About The Referendum
The referendum had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with the Union of countries itself. The question in the referendum was:
“Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?”
Communism and Homelessness
I don’t think anyone has ever seriously made this argument. Regardless, the response to it is utter nonsense. Socialist Cuba didn’t recognize private home ownership until 2018. In 2018 the Havana Times reported: “Cuba's housing situation and infrastructure on the whole are in a critical condition. This country is almost entirely falling apart.” Cuba’s homes are very poor quality so it’s much of a flex to say they have a higher homeownership rate.
I certainly wouldn’t consider modern Vietnam to be communist. It may be interesting to look into its high homeownership rate in the future, but right now, it seems irrelevant.
In China, rather than owning a home, people lease their homes from the state. How can you compare Chinese tenets to American homeowners? If we added Americans who lease their homes to our homeownership rate, then that would quickly close the gap.
As for the Soviet Union, they did not end homelessness. That is a myth. Read more about homelessness in the USSR here.
North Korea Apologia
Once again, there is no citation given. From what I could track down, these excerpts are from official North Korean government propaganda that they published on one of their websites.
I don’t think anyone seriously claims that North Koreans have absolutely no food or clothes or that they don’t have the legal right to have these things provided. But a legal right and what happens in practice are two very different things. North Koreans have a long history of being deprived of basic necessities due to the state’s aggressive assault on private economic affairs. Many citizens were forced into gray markets so they could grow their own food since the state was not dependable enough to provide it. Andrei Lankov, a specialist in Korean studies, writes: “Working on illegal private fields has become a primary source of employment for North Koreans who reside in villages and small cities. In contrast to most socialist countries, household plots were virtually outlawed in North Korea. Nonetheless, starting in the early 1990s, private fields were illegally set up on steep slopes that were originally considered unusable for agricultural purposes. Here, despite the inhospitable soil, private farmers were able to gather crop yields that exceeded those of public agricultural cooperatives by one and a half to two times.”
North Koreans have resorted to many other private economic actions outside of agriculture as well, such as prostitution, private libraries, inns, and cafeterias. On the whole, according to various estimates, the private sector accounts for 30 to 50% of North Korea’s GDP, and it continues to grow.
Denying The Internment of Uyghurs In China
I will not spend a lot of time on this claim since there are plenty of in-depth resources available online already.
Despite long periods of denial from pro-China communists, a May 2022 hacking of Xinjiang police computers revealed a plethora of evidence that the claims of anti-Uyghur abuse were always true. The communists have had a very difficult time reconciling with this huge leak. Most just simply ignore it. That same month a peer-reviewed paper covering the evidence was published in The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. The paper reads, “The main difference from previously leaked internal documents is that the Xinjiang Police Files provide us with attendant image material that not only features cropped headshots but, in most cases, wide-angled portraits. These provide an ideal basis for authenticating the material and for providing further authoritative evidence for the securitised nature of Beijing’s re-education campaign.”
Who Defeated The National Socialists?
The dishonest communist gives us many more unsourced highlighted pages with no context, this time, they’re traced back to two authors: Paul L. Williams and Charles Higham. I find no evidence of Williams or Higham being credible or trustworthy. Many of their claims seem exaggerated, but without a doubt, there is truth to their observations. There were several examples of businesses collaborating with the Nazis, although this was the extreme minority of cases. Concerning business support for the Nazis, historian Henry Ashby Turner writes in German Big Business and The Rise of Hitler: “Those firms and organizations that regularly engaged in large-scale political funding continued--right down to the last election prior to Hitler's appointment as chancellor--to bestow the bulk of their funds on opponents or rivals of the Nazis. The few sizeable contributions that appear to have reached the Nazis from big business sources shrink in significance when compared to the amounts that went to the bourgeois parties and to the campaign to re-elect President Hindenburg.”
Other historians such as Richard J. Evans and John Toland share similar views as Turner. Evans writes in The Coming of The Third Reich: “The Nazi Party depended on such commitment [finance from the grass roots]; much of its power and dynamism came from the fact that it was not dependent on Big business or bureaucratic institutions such as trade unions for its financial support.”
Any business that supported the Nazis’ shops certainly be condemned entirely, but because it was a minority of the Nazis’ support, I do not see how this proves America didn’t defeat the Nazis. The Nazi-communist collaborations played a far greater role in the crimes of the Nazis than businesses did. Stalin wanted a long and deadly war to happen between the Third Reich and the rest of the west so that he and the communists could benefit. Historian Sean McMeekin writes in Stalin’s War: “It was, Stalin explained, ‘in the interests of the USSR, the Land of the Toilers, that war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc.’ The only danger was that one bloc might defeat the other too quickly, before they had bled each other sufficiently. ‘Everything should be done,’ Stalin continued, ‘so that [the war] drags out as long as possible with the goal of weakening both sides.’”
The Nazi war effort was dependent on Soviet petroleum, grain, cotton, manganese, and other raw materials. Stalin intentionally orchestrated a world war to weaken capitalist nations and temporarily allied himself with the Nazis to do it. Labeling Stalin and the Soviet government as the ones who defeated Hitler and the Nazis completely ignores these inconvenient facts.
Of course, when the Soviets’ did go up against the Nazis, they relied heavily on supplies from America’s Lend-Lease Act to win the war. Stalin himself said, "The most important things in this war are the machines... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." On August 31, 1941, the president ordered Secretary of War Stimson to allocate for the USSR, directly out of US Army stocks, 1,200 warplanes “of all types” (to be “diverted from Lend-Lease contracts for the British”), 20,000 submachine guns, 2,194 transport trucks, 729 light and 795 medium tanks, 991 anti-tank guns (37 mm), 1,135 mortars, 152 heavy 90 mm guns, and 155,341 miles of field telegraph wire, along with locomotive and steam engines, electric furnaces, machine tools, searchlights, sound locators, and surgical and hospital supplies. There were also TNT explosives (527,153 pounds), rubber tires, leather for Red Army boots (3 million pounds worth for immediate delivery), motor fuel and aviation gasoline (2.1 million barrels in the first shipment), aluminum (2,188 tons), 3 million pounds of copper wire and cable, 9.7 million pounds of barbed wire, tungsten, and molybdenum. As Stalin said, these supplies proved vital for the Soviets.
PseudoScientific Socialism
Just because you call something “scientific” doesn’t make it so. The Marxist view of communism is still entirely utopian and unachievable.
Fredrich Hayek describes this pseudoscientific socialism with great accuracy in his lecture Socialism and Science: “Socialism is related to Science in various ways. Probably the least interesting relation today is that from which Marxism lays claim to the name of ‘scientific socialism’; and according to which by an inner necessity, and without men doing anything about it, capitalism develops into socialism. This may still impress some novices, but it is hardly any longer taken seriously by competent thinkers in either camp.”
Marx’s many predictions didn’t fare very well against reality. He predicted that the socialist revolution would occur first in the most advanced capitalist nations, and once collective ownership had been established then all sources of class conflict would disappear. Instead of Marx's predictions, communist revolutions took place in undeveloped regions in South America and Asia instead of industrialized countries like America or the UK. The philosopher, Karl Popper wrote, “The Marxist theory of history, in spite of the serious efforts of some of its founders and followers, ultimately adopted this soothsaying practice. In some of its earlier formulations (for example in Marx's analysis of the character of the 'coming social revolution') their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified. Yet instead of accepting the refutations the followers of Marx re-interpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable. They thus gave a 'conventionalist twist' to the theory; and by this stratagem they destroyed its much advertised claim to scientific status.”
Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, documents three of Marx’s predictions and how they failed when compared to reality:
Read Hayek’s full lecture on Socialism and Science here.
Exploitation, and The False Dichotomy Between Personal and Private Property
I don’t intend to go in-depth addressing the private/personal property dichotomy or exploitation theory, but I will recommend reading Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s book Karl Marx and The Close of His System, which can be found here.
“What is wrong with Marx' theory of exploitation, then, is that he does not understand the phenomenon of time preference as a universal category of human action. That the laborer does not receive his "full worth" has nothing to do with exploitation but merely reflects the fact that it is impossible for man to exchange future goods against present ones except at a discount. Unlike the case of slave and slave master, where the latter benefits at the expense of the former, the relationship between the free laborer and the capitalist is a mutually beneficial one. The laborer enters the agreement because, given his time preference, he prefers a smaller amount of present goods over a larger future one; and the capitalist enters it because, given his time preference, he has a reverse preference order and ranks a larger future amount of goods more highly than a smaller present one. Their interests are not antagonistic but harmonious. Without the capitalist's expectation of an interest return, the laborer would be worse off because he would have to wait longer than he wishes to wait; and without the laborer's preference for present goods the capitalist would be worse off because he would have to resort to less roundabout and less efficient production methods than those he desires to adopt. Nor can the capitalist wage system be regarded as an impediment to the further development of the forces of production, as Marx claims. If the laborer were not permitted to sell his labor services and the capitalist to buy them, output would not be higher but lower because production would have to take place with relatively reduced levels of capital accumulation” -Hans-Herman Hoppe
Socialism Has Always Failed
With Russia and nearby Eastern European countries lagging so far behind the rest of Europe, it is hardly surprising that they grew rapidly with the introduction of so much Western technology. The question isn’t how fast they grew, and how things improved over the course of several decades. The question is: Would they have been better off without communism? The answer is a resounding yes.
Socialism is always doomed to fail. Without private property, you cannot have natural prices for the factors of production. Without prices for the factors of production, you cannot determine the price of an input and the price of an output. This means you can’t determine whether any certain method of producing is efficient or not, or which course of action one should take to produce the goods. While after you attempt to produce goods there is no way in which you can determine if it is efficient or inefficient or if you are making a profit or a loss. Without prices you cannot establish a quantitative relationship between these different methods of producing goods, therefore, you cannot engage in economic calculation.
Before the strict central planning of Stalin, the Soviet Union had a market-oriented policy known as The New Economic Policy. The NEP attracted foreign capital and allowed for a relative amount of freedom in small to medium-sized firms. Although it was not ideal, it was far superior to the communist central planning that came after 1928. Economics and USSR experts Holland Hunter and Janusz M. Szyrme believed that had the NEP been maintained, higher living standards and the ability to withstand invasion would have been possible. They write in their book Faulty Foundations: Soviet Economic Policies, 1928-1940: “Industrial output as well as agricultural output would have been larger. Stocks of fixed capital would have been larger, especially in industry. Morale throughout society would have benefited from higher living standards. The base that Stalin was counting on to defend the country would have been a stronger one.
This hypothesis is backed up further by 4 Russian economists who published a paper examining Stalin’s economic policies in 2013. The authors write: “We find that a conservative scenario for the path of the Soviet economy under NEP (using Tsarist TFP growth) is comparable to the path of Stalin’s economy: The welfare loss due to the labor barrier is outweighed by the welfare gain from higher long-run TFP.” The authors also compared Stalin’s policies to those of Tsarist Russia, and find favorable outcomes for the Tsarist model: “A Tsarist economy, even in our conservative version assuming that it would not experience any decline in frictions, would have achieved a rather similar structure of the economy and levels of production as Stalin’s economy by 1940.” This isn’t surprising since Tsarist Russia experienced a burst in the rate of growth and productivity after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The 4 Russian economists concluded, “We started this paper with a question: ‘Was Stalin necessary for Russia’s economic development?’ In short, our answer is a definitive ‘no.’” And go on to say, “The short-run (1928-1940) costs of Stalin’s policies are very significant for an economy in a peaceful period. Our comparison with Japan leads to astonishingly larger welfare costs of Stalin’s policies.”
All-in-all in their analysis they conclude that first, extending Tsarist Russia into the future would have indeed resulted in lower growth compared to the Soviet Union (but higher welfare!) But second, implementing liberalizing reforms in the Tsarist economy (reducing barriers to entry, and increasing competition) would have been far superior. In the paper, they also consider implementing the Japanese growth model in Russia, and the conclusion is similar. And like Allen, they find that the New Economic Policy would also have been superior to Stalinism.
Other economists have found similar results as the 4 Russian economists. José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente in his book Back in the USSR: What life was like in the Soviet Union:
“Considering more modern data, Tsarist Russia would have indeed kept pace with the Soviet Union, absent the revolution, had it merely kept its rate of growth.”
The silly communist brings up Cuban life expectancy and infant mortality as well. That myth is easily dispelled. Read more here, here, and here.
Defending Gulags?
Defending slavery and mass incarceration probably isn’t what Karl Marx envisioned for the future of communism, but here we are.
The discredited paper by Getty et al. (1993) claims that no more than 2 million people could have perished from collectivization, famine, execution, terror, and forced labor in the USSR during the 1930s. Economist Steven Rosefielde published a thorough rebuttal in 1997 in the journal, Communist and Post-Communist Studies. His paper points out that the numbers presented by Getty et al. severely contradict the estimates by other leading scholars in Sovietology such as Davies, Wheatcroft, Maksudov, Nove, Ellman, and Conquest. Their numbers even contradict those from official Soviet records. Rosefielde points out that “…the Gulag camp and colony population shown in NKVD records reported by Getty, Ritterspom and Zemskov on December 31, 1936 is less than half the figure given by the NKVD to the Census Board in 1937.”
Rosefielde concludes that: “New demographic evidence and NKVD criminal homicide data (TsGAOR) confirm that at least 5.2 million people classifiable as excess deaths perished during the thirties.”
It is also worth noting that the gulag system of slavery was extremely harsh and deadly. In one instance, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, it is noted in official figures that over 12,000 workers died. Historian Anne Applebaum estimates the deaths reached up to 25,000.
Conclusion
The unintelligent communist makes a few more points but they’re hardly worth responding to. I’ve already demonstrated his abysmal research skills and his complete dishonesty. Communism and socialism are failed and dying ideologies. No matter how much these vile communists try to push their fabrications and propaganda, they still will die as nothing more than “wage slaves”. They will still experience the rich benefits of a wealthy capitalistic system that grants them nearly all of their needs and wants, as opposed to living in abject poverty in a socialist economy. As much as I wish they could experience socialism, it will never happen. We can only work to dispel their lies so we don’t get any closer to their regressive nightmare of a society.