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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Soviet famine of 1932-33? Poor leadership, demographic malice, or failing logistics can cause famine. Starvation is never intentional in any system (though, one would argue, government seizure of grain didn’t help)
It's intentional in capitalism. Any surplus will cause the price to plummet, so for it to function properly there has to be unsatisfied demand. The government even pays some farmers to not grow things on their land.
I'd never heard of that song, so you made me look it up. Thanks, I learned something today.
The government paying farmers not to grow something isn't capitalism. If anything it's central planning.
It seems like the only central planning the US ever does is to prop up capitalism from some inherent flaw instead of just fixing the underlying foundation.
In this specific example, my question is why pay farmers to not grow crops instead of encouraging them to create a surplus and just paying them the difference in the price drop?
The farmers are getting paid to do nothing ergo if you stop compensating them for doing nothing they will grow crops instead to make up for the difference. The government is whole reason this scenario is messed up in the first place.
The difference here is that there is no humanitarian crisis occurring, yet 10% of the population is starving because of profit seeking in agribusiness. On average for most of the existence of the Soviet Union, homelessness was essentially eliminated, every single person had the opportunity to work for a wage, and calorie consumption was higher than any other country.
I can anticipate the response to this. No, I don't think the USSR was a flawless, shining beacon of proletarian democracy. It was a deeply flawed state that had it's own issues. But at least the poorest people had their needs met for most of it's existence.
British people looking through office blinds and grinning
except in a system literally built on the commodification (and creation of artificial scarcity) of the basics required for survival, for the benefit of a tiny group of people
I mean even Lenin admitted that the Soviet Union was just state capitalism so the point still counts. Also it is still baffling to me that we could feed 10 billion people and still have whole populations that are starving. And obviously a system that is just there to be evil will most likely not exsist. But have it as by product often occurred in systems which only focused on (the growth of) power (money is just another form of power). This includes the former west and the former east bloc.
I wonder if they were using more modern fertilizer then. Being able to synthetically produce ammonia happened in 1923.