> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me.
The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work - the Kochs, the Waltons, the Johnson family. The Rockefellers fell off the list in the past few years, $2 billion is the individual cutoff and I suppose Forbes doesn't know of any individual in the family worth more that that. But I can assure you if they and their three siblings are worth 1.5 billion each, and their first cousins are all worth 1.5 billion each, they are not out there breaking the bricks.
It's amusing to hear about meritocracy and the rat race for education, skills etc. when these heirs are the people controlling the economy, and causing so many economic and other problems due to its increasing lopsidedness towards them. What are their skills and professionalism that are valued? The money they suck off from those who work is the truest lowest common denominator, rule by parasites. At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.
I am supposed to get into a tizzy about someone with less skills getting the same pay as me, when the money is being sent off to the heirs who do no work? I certainly would prefer that the people actually doing the work alongside me get the money.
> At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.
Following your logic so did Hitler. Whew, my first Reductio ad Hitlerum ever, but to my defence you've started with tasteless jokes.
It's easy to fell into this 'communism was good idea but bad implementation' meme. I've lived in communism era in western Europe and believe you me same things were happening as you describe (Kochs, Waltons etc), there was still '1%' just not mentioned in newspapers as 'those who got wealthy by hard work'. Lower and middle classes were basically under oppressive regime.
> Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.
Russia went from one of the leading european powers to a country ran like a prison. It's easier to score up country-wide achievements like moon probes if you have slaves instead of citizens — a system that even the legendary lead engineer Korolev was a victim of.
> we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work
If successful people couldn’t pass ownership onto their heirs, the value of ownership itself would drop dramatically. If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died. Neither of these is good.
Most complaints about rational capital allocation, including this one, are based on a failure to generalize or punch through enough layers of indirection.
Hot take: if the Waltons (and their ilk) had not built the walmarts of the world, to maximize profits by externalizing costs (food stamps for employees who are not paid a living wage) and then dodging the taxes that pay for that externalization, then yes. Things would undoubtedly be better.
Pretty sure that if there were a much higher estate tax and other ways to de-incentivize generational wealth inequality that people would still find ways to exploit a semi-capitalist system by arbitraging the interface between public good and private service (c.f., the modern 1099 economy)
> If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died
How confident are you in those conclusions? There are plenty of very rich people who claim that they don't intend to leave much for their heirs.
> when the money is being sent off to the heirs who do no work?
Do you want to use your resources to help your children thrive? If so, then you've got to be OK when extremely rich to exactly that. It might not seem "fair" when you asses heirs as individuals, as if they appeared out of thin air - but they didn't. The original founder decided to pass on his wealth to his children, as most of us would.
> Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes (left and right) when given the choice.
If by given a choice you mean people are usually not given a choice, but in
mid-1600s England, late 1700s France, mid 1800s USA, and most of the world in
the early-mid 1900s, then yes. Or there can be changes in the forces of
production and its various superstructural elements that cause this to happen.
People are drifting away from the center and status quo in Greece, but
unemployment was at 28% in 2013, and is still above 20%. Thus many people are boun
bouncing between anarchism, fascism, and communism. The current prime minister
is head of a party of what were called in the 1980s "euro-communists" - people
on the right wing of the communist movement (the KKE are the left wing
communists).
> Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability.
And how often does this happen? It is about as common as a sighting of the Higgs boson - and you need a large sample group. Of "identical" twins separated at birth (identical twins are not genetically identical) and sent to two culturally/class-based different families, with little contact.
The Pioneer Fund (you can read about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund ) funded studies like the Minnesota Twin Family Study, but it was found to have many deficiencies, such as what I noted. Often twins in the cohort were only raised apart for a few years and so forth.
On occasion I watch television, and see wealthy heirs like the Hilton heiresses or Kardashian heiresses, or watch documentaries like Born Rich with various heirs and heiresses, and it's quite obvious why such a class spends its money on endeavors that says nature rules over nurture. Like the heir Wickliffe Draper did with the Pioneer Fund. That they are born superior without having to work or do anything. For the past ten millennia they said the gods favored them, like Socrates noble lie ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic ). The popes crowned them king. In our post-enlightened age this does not work so now they say their superiority comes from chains of amino acids. Of course, history tends to depose of them any how, the God-ordained superior genetics of the Romanovs were not as well adapted as the Bolshevik soldiers who rid the earth of them (tangential note - their inbreeding caused hemophilia which brought in Rasputin and hastened their downfall). It's an argument for laziness and parasitism - to not look at people by their work, but by the genetic superiority which they were supposedly born with. It's pathetic and parasitic.
It is an old argument, and I think a correct one. Money at the top is mostly spent on capital investment. Capital investment makes commodities which are sold to consumers/workers. Who is going to buy all these things if people are tapped out? You can kick the can down the road for a bit with debt, but if the income split stays the same, that just ultimately makes the problem worse when you reach maximum indebtedness.
In terms of smaller returns, you can see this with cell phone manufacturing. So much capital is on the sidelines that when it sees a chance to turn a profit, capital floods in, a massive infrastructure for building cell phones springs up, and returns shrink. The only exception is Apple, for a variety of reasons including that the initial iPhone was a product of high quality and convenience compared to its competitors at the time.
Starting in 1945, Russia had a very strong desire to pull out of Berlin and east Germany, it never wanted to be there. England and the US had agreed that Germany would be demilitarized, but then reneged on that promise, and formed a military alliance against Russia which west Germany joined in 1955. That was two years after Radio Free Europe in west Berlin was advocating riots to east Berliners and east Germans - which took place. And only six years after this was a wall built. Imagine if Iran occupied half of San Francisco or New York City and Iranians became indignant a wall was put up around their section? Of course much of the Nazis and SS high command was put to work in west Germany after the war in intelligence and business (union-busting etc.) other than their cleaner hands leaders like Reinhard Gehlen, or less clean hands such as Nazi and SS leader Hanns Martin Schleyer who was head of the post-war German Employers' Association (but whose past was not discussed much, most references to him are
in regards to "far-left Red Army Faction terrorism"). Also, the Rhineland was the heart of German industrial might, the Russians got the duds in Germany other than a divided Berlin which caused them and the DDR's leaders headaches.
Whereas Austria, which Russia had occupied but which did not go remilitarize and join NATO, was withdrawn from by Russia, just like Russia pulled out of Iran and a number of other places as agreed. The allies had agreed Germany not be remilitarized and made a military threat to a twice invaded Russia within a 30 year span, but then England and the US broke that deal.
So Russia, who wanted to leave and have Germany reunite, was stuck by US/UK policy. Actually, as has been revealed, Margaret Thatcher was forcibly against east Germany reuniting with west Germany at a time when the Russians wanted it. So this thread stretched all the way from 1945 to 1990.
When the Russian Revolution took place, many of the areas you discuss were part of the Russian empire. So "Russian occupation", if that is what it was, did not start with the Bolsheviks.
Hungary is a different story, but then of course, the Hungarians established themselves as a communist republic in 1919 with no Russians in sight. This was actually put down by foreign intervention - Romanian invasion and guns, with strong support from England in the background. So you could say the Red Army was just restoring what had been taken away by foreign invasion in 1919.
Most of these areas were only “a part of the Russian empire” because Russia had previously invaded them. You seem to have completely forgotten the Partitions of Poland, the numerous uprisings in the 19th Century, and the defeat of the Soviet Army by Poland following WWI, which thus curtailed Soviet expansion. Clearly the Poles did not want to be a part of the Russian empire. The same story is essentially true to a varying degree for most other cultures in the area.
Actually, as has been revealed, Margaret Thatcher was forcibly against east Germany reuniting with west Germany at a time when the Russians wanted it
At that point in history Gorbachev was in a precarious position and Thatcher worried that giving up East Germany might see him forced from office and hardliners taking over. Mitterand also opposed reunification for much the same reason.
There was, in fact, a coup against Gorbechev shortly afterwards, bearing out the fears of Thatcher and Mitterand.
Of course, the coup petered out, Boris Yeltsin climbed atop one of the tanks and addressed the crowd of anti-Communist protesters who had assembled outside of the Russian Parliament building, and the Soviet Union promptly collapsed, which is not a series of events that anyone in the West had predicted.
> Whereas Austria, which Russia had occupied but which did not go remilitarize and join NATO, was withdrawn from by Russia, just like Russia pulled out of Iran and a number of other places as agreed.
Russia "overstayed" their occupation in Austria (although they left without issues).
But they've definitely overstayed their forces in Persia and tried to create a separatist republic there.
It took a complaint to UN (and as rumours say, nuclear threat from US) for Persia to get rid of Russian forces.
So no, they definitely didn't "pull out of Iran and a number of other places as agreed"
They also didn't pull out of Korea until after they set up the Kim regime--in fact, the Korean War saw Soviet fighter pilots, still serving with the North Korean military, go into battle against the UN forces flying Soviet-provided MiGs.
> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year.
Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces".
How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in Saigon, the "North Vietnamese forces"? It was a local NLF C-10 Sapper batallion. The North Vietnamese attack had its main thrust toward the Vietnamese border, the ARVN's I Corps Tactical Zone. Further south it mostly aided the NLF (and local populace) uprising.
The Tet Offensive was costly to the NLF - after years of fighting the French, the Americans, and their Vietnamese collaborators, the NLF was somewhat worn down, and the Tet Offensive was kind of its last hurrah. From 1968 on, the resistance in southern Vietnam became more dependent on North Vietnamese aid.
Insofar as "North" and "South" Vietnam, these themselves are created entities. In 1940, Vietnam was under the control of the Vichy French, who were somewhat hostile to the US. Then it fell to Japanese control. In March 1945, the Vichy French were completely ousted. The OSS was arming and supporting Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, people like Archimedes Patti.
At the end of 1945, the French wanted to take colonial control of Vietnam again (Ho Chi Minh had declared independence with a very pro-US speech and policy, seemingly approved by local American government officials). The French did not have the manpower to take over Vietnam though and asked the English for help, as French/English interests were not 100% US-aligned (see Suez crisis). The English did not have the manpower either so they sent Nepali Gurkhas to take back Vietnam. Many events took place in the next weeks and months, I can't go into it all here, including the British rearming the Japanese to fight against the Vietnamese.
So years of guerilla warfare ensue between the Vietnamese and French colonialists, ending in the 1954 Geneva conference. There, a promise for elections is made. Also pledged is reunification. The US is not a party to the conference.
Eisenhower says in his memoirs he could not allow elections as Ho Chi Minh would have won. So the US starts a policy against the promised elections and reunification. Like the Japanese, French and English, the US at some point invades southern Vietnam. It begins a war against the mostly southern NLF resistance, which includes not just communists but Buddhist monks, Vietnamese nationalists etc., all of these comprise the NLF. Of course, on the long war from 1954 to 1975, including things like the Phoenix Program where the CIA went around south Vietnam murdering school teachers, newspaper columnists and anyone seen as being against US forces being in Vietnam. By 1972 the US began pulling out, and was ousted in 1975. By then the southern resistance forces had been decimated (along with millions killed in the south) and the "northern" forces had become more prominent.
The strangest thing to me was how pro-US Ho Chi Minh was and how strongly we ignored that, largely for a policy of colonialism that everyone already knew was dead. France doesn't catch near enough crap for that.
Should have? Yes. Could have? Probably not. No one in the US gave two shits about French Indochina, it was all about Western Europe and containing the USSR/Communists during the scramble to pick up the pieces after the war. France had a large Communist party that was a key part of the resistance during the war and maintained a good reputation after, and large proletariat revolutions had a historical precedent in France that probably scared US government officials to death. No matter how much he was hated, you backed de Gaulle over the alternative so that you only had to worry about Eastern Europe and not have a grenade explode in the middle of the continent. Not a good choice, but even in hindsight it seems like there were not a lot of good options available to the US.
>Should have? Yes. Could have? Probably not. No one in the US gave two shits about French Indochina, it was all about Western Europe and containing the USSR/Communists during the scramble to pick up the pieces after the war.
And what exactly business was of them to contain anything in foreign countries?
It was no more the business of the US to contain the USSR in Western Europe than it was the business of the USSR to violently repress any possibility of democracy in Eastern Europe and install puppet governments in same. Realpolitik is a bitch, but better to understand the real world than pretend that some fantasy of how things "should" work is a useful guide.
Very well put. I would say that containment went too far (even Keenan thought so later in life) but violent class struggle and Communist takeover was exactly what was being pursued by the Soviet Union. Although initially the hope seems to be an international coalition of workers under Communism (i.e. there would be no need for an invasion, workers from all nations would unite under its banner) the Bolsheviks quickly crushed that idea by turning the first truly communist state into a virtual dictatorship, and crushing any opposition using violence.
Whether it was their business or not, I'm thankful Americans did it, because it meant that I have been able to live my first 50 years in freedom and peace.
Without American support after World War II, also Western Europe would have been ruled by stalinist USSR.
The US? Because if Europe gets overrun by Soviets, like they got overrun by Germany, guess who's next? Could you imagine Soviet Europe for the last 60 years?
My uncle was drafted in Vietnam, except he didn't go to Vietnam, he went to West Germany. He spent his time waiting for the Soviets to roll their tanks over the border.
>Besides half of Europe wanted to be socialist -- and I'm speaking of the support for such parties in Western Europe.
There's a big, big difference between wanting to be socialist and living under a Soviet regime.
It is US business because if Europe was overrun by Soviets, the US would have to get involved, if not for their own interests, certainly the interests of the now subjugated Europe. It's also a hell of a lot harder fighting with your back to the ocean. I mean we are talking the exact same scenario that happened in 1914 and 1939, except instead of Germany, it would have been the USSR. The Eastern Bloc countries revolted for a reason.
Not only that, the victors of WWII wanted the US military there for that very reason.
>Again, not the business of a foreign power to meddle.
>It is US business because if Europe was overrun by Soviets, the US would have to get involved, if not for their own interests, certainly the interests of the now subjugated Europe.
So, it would have been equally OK for other nations to invade the US in the interests of the black slaves, the native Americans, the other peoples all over the world it harmed, etc?
>It sure was welcomed in 1917 and 1941.
You'd be surprised. That's how Americans tell it themselves, and also how, via Hollywood, they taught modern historically illiterate people to see it.
In surveys and polls the decades just after WWII, when the thing was still fresh in memory, most Europeans placed the biggest role in defeating Nazi Germany with USSR, not the US.
In 1945, most French people thought that the Soviet Union
deserved the most credit for Nazi Germany's defeat in World
War II — even though the Soviets didn't play much of a role
in France's liberation, relative to the US and Britain. By
1995 and 2004, however, the French had changed their minds,
and were crediting the US as the biggest contributor to
victory in Europe (...)
Scholar addresses question, ‘Who won World War II in
Europe?’
There’s no easy answer, said Norman Davies, an Oxford-
educated British historian and Poland specialist who has
written widely on the 1939-1945 conflict.
(...)
Among the Davies so-called myths:
That D-Day was big and decisive. (About 80 percent of
German forces were lost on the Eastern Front, he said,
where the biggest battles raged.)
That the West triumphed over the Third Reich. (Germany was
all but defeated by the Soviets well before the Allies
landed troops on the continent, he contended.)
In fact, asserted Davies, it was the Red Army that played
the decisive role in defeating Germany, “and they were in
the service of an evil tyranny.”
Sheer numbers alone help dispel myths about the war, he
said. In 1939, the United States had half as many trained
soldiers as Poland — and it took until 1944 to muster 100
American divisions. The Germans fielded 230 divisions, and
the Soviets as many as 400.
>So, it would have been equally OK for other nations to invade the US in the interests of the black slaves, the native Americans, the other peoples all over the world it harmed, etc?
Depends on how you look at it, the North certainly invaded an independent CSA (the South) over slavery as most of the war was fought in the South. Obviously the North thought it was ok and the South didn't. Also, the UK nearly join the war on the side of the South. "OK" is such a simple term, I think we are having completely different levels of discussion.
>You'd be surprised. That's how Americans tell it themselves, and also how, via Hollywood, they taught modern historically illiterate people to see it. In surveys and polls the decades just after WWII, when the thing was still fresh in memory, most Europeans placed the biggest role in defeating Nazi Germany with USSR, not the US.
So my statement was Europe wanted the US to enter the war (which they most certainly did.) You are arguing that the USSR was the most responsible for defeating Nazi Germany. Do you see how those are two different things? I know you want to win the argument, but at least counter argue what I'm arguing.
FWIW, I agree that the USSR was the single most important factor in defeating Nazi Germany. Russia was also was one of the factors of the rise since they signed the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, then both Germany and Russia invaded Eastern Europe. Oops.
I don't think many people in Western Europe wished for a Soviet Europe, but quite a lot of people wanted something far more democratic-socialist than the US was willing to allow. It's definitely a factor in the creation of the EU.
The dichotomy of "everything must be US-style dystopia capitalism or full communism" has poisoned politics for over half a century.
Sweden is seen as a democratic-socialist country, but the guns were definitely aimed east. This was probably the case for most countries in Europe. Why would anyone want to be part of the Soviet union? Not even the Soviet members did.
I think the "foreign power meddling in our business" needs to be nuanced -- I'm personally happy the US decided to spend taxpayer's money to keep us safe.
> Besides half of Europe wanted to be socialist -- and I'm speaking of the support for such parties in Western Europe. [...] Many wished exactly [Soviet Europe] at the time
While there was support for socialism in Western Europe, after 1956 it was not necessarily support for Soviet-style socialism, since the invasion of Hungary appalled many Communists and led them to denounce the USSR. Then, the uproar of 1968, the USSR was mocked by many as a spent force politically and no friend or guide to future actions, so the Situationists or Maoists proposed instead their respective takes on Communism. So, plenty of Western European socialists appreciated the USSR staying far, far away.
The US didn't meddle, NATO was co founded by European governments. My own country literally begged the US to house nuclear weapons in order to keep the Soviets out.
Depending on which country you speak of, it was usually just the pro-establishment, pro-rich part of the political elites, as opposed to the whole country "begging the US".
Well, his pro-US sentiments are somewhat exaqggerated. Ho Chi Minh was yet another alias for Nguyễn Ái Quốc/Nguyễn Sinh Cung who lived for a time in the Soviet Union and founded one of the several competing Vietnamese Communist Parties in the 1920s. He always was pro-Soviet, but he was willing to work with the US because he believed that the US wanted to break up the French Empire after the war.
That doesn't change at all. In the same pace it was ignored how pro-US Russia in 90s was, largely for intertia from Cold War times which was irrelevant but also the only mode that was remembered.
This lead to Russia only getting humiliation for its forward steps, and fast forward 20 years, new "cool war" with Putin.
The problem here is also short memory. It's Orwelesque "Oceania always had war with Eurasia", ignoring that "always" is just 40 years, but also it's all two generations can remember. In XX century, suddently human memory became too short for politics.
> it was ignored how pro-US Russia in 90s was, largely for intertia from Cold War times
Russia wasn't “pro-US” in the 1990s; after the fall of the USSR, Russia, after a brief moment of inward-focussed stabilization, returned to active geopolitical competition based (in Europe, at least) largely on fanning the flames of pan-Slavism.
At best, under Yeltsin, Russia could be “pro integration into the neoliberal regime of international trade”, but that's a far cry from being pro-US.
That's as much affection as you can ever see from a country this size.
Russian pan-Slavism faces an obvious obstacle of Poland. It's a no go. If you're talking about Serbia, then let's face it, 90s Europe saw a fire lit in their midst that they couldn't contain for a decade. It's a thorough failure of pan-European security. On yet another attempt to extinguish flame with gasoline, even Yeltsin's Russia had to do something. Which was totally not much.
In hindsight the US should have just supported Ho Chi Minh and his government. The man was more of a nationalist and anti colonialist than a Soviet pawn.
"Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street"
What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that sparks fear on Wall Street ?
"Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness."
Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed?
Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is feared by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired.
As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary.
Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...
The example Ricardo gave for comparative advantage was Portuguese wine for English cloth.
More than two centuries later, Joan Robinson reexamined comparative advantage using Ricardo's original example. How had such trade affected the two economies - Portugal staying a more agricultural society, whereas in England, textiles served as one of the backbones for the country's industrialization. The analysis Robinson came up with should be obvious - both countries did not benefit by the trade of cloth for wine, it had been much more to England's advantage, and Portugal would have been better off staving off free trade and building up its textile and industrial base. The original example given for the benefits of comparative advantage for all parties turned out to itself be a fallacy.
> British worsteds, bays and serges being exported to Portugal – the ‘cloth’ from ‘England’ in Ricardo’s famous example – simply could not be paid for alone by the wine exports travelling in the other direction. Brazil, a Portuguese colony at the time, was responsible for a massive 40 per cent of the world’s new gold reserves in the eighteenth century (DeWitt 2002: 4). It was this that
was used to settle the trade deficit resulting from the inadequacies of the wine trade.[0]
Simply put, the flaw in their argument is they treat Brazilian bullion not as a trade good but as some magical thing. Portugal was able to consume more English goods than their wine industry could supply because they were also able to dig gold out of the ground and use it to "settle the trade deficit".
Portugal chose to consume foreign goods instead of investing in domestic production and this is somehow England's fault?
> Portugal chose to consume foreign goods instead of investing in domestic production and this is somehow England's fault?
Huh? It's Portugal's fault, they could have imposed a tax on imported cloth to change the domestic economic calculus to favor creation of a local textile industry.
> What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power, so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees, soldiers� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war, which is what the Bolsheviks used them for, or encouraged them to do. You could have had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national parliament.
There are a lot of silly ideas contained in the last two sentences.
First off committees like those mentioned have sprung up in every revolution since the French Revolution. Back then they were Les Enrages, the sans-culottes, and they have emerged in revolutions since then up into the 20th century, be they called councils or soviets or whatever. The notion that "those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war" is preposterous, because workers taking control over their own lives and halting the exproporiation of their surplus labor time is the centrality of class warfare. If workers had control over their own labor time, instead of punching a clock at some corporation owned by heirs, which directed their work and expropriated surplus labor time from them, then there would be no classes. The only way to prevent workers managing their own affairs in local committees from not being engaged in class warfare would either be to dissolve the committees, or alternatively neuter them to where they were completely powerless.
In terms of the idea of a national parliament and local soviets being the basis of a government, that is exactly the situation Russia was in in February 2017 - what was called dual power. It's an untenable situation. Up until April 1917 the idea was generally that socialists might be able to take power, but should instead subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, in a society where the capitalists would rule through a modern bourgeois parliament.
Lenin spells out why this was not done at the beginning and end of his April Theses: one of the main things that made him realize the time for socialists to stop subordinating themselves to capitalists and bourgeois parliaments was it was leading to the degradation of the socialist parties, the center-piece of which was German social-democrats supporting entry into World War I. The option Lenin saw being handed to him was - support World War I, pitting Russian workers against German workers (including left-wing pacifistic German socialists), or turn completely against the government. Lenin chose the latter course. Figes neglects to mention this - Lenin's only real alternative to taking the path he took would be to support Russia's continuation of World War I.
Class warfare doesn't seem inevitable if locally organized committees in a time of revolution prioritize something else in life more than class concerns. Consider Iran where, as the shah’s regime crumbled, there was a lot of organization not in favour of the Communists, but rather to try to bring bring Khomeini back from exile and usher in an Islamic regime. Similarly, some of the other revolutions in and around World War I were driven more by a desire to marginalize ethnic groups other than the workers’ own than to marginalize the bourgeoisie.
I'm not sure it could have worked out perfectly, but I'm sure, minus the Bolshevik influence on such committees pre-October, and their wholesale takeover of them afterwards, those same committees could have acted with a bit more sense and purpose.
I don't think the author is wrong to point out that they had more potential than they lived up to. He's not, I think, saying they add up to a cohesive strategy for a successful state.
This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to Stalin's death, the Soviet economy grew by leaps and bounds. While the US was in a depression, Russia was building massive steel plants in Magnitogorsk. In fact Russia didn't even have enough manpower to do it, so imported American and European labor, and contracted to American and European firms.
The aim was to build up the means of production (capital, in western parlance) to western levels.
However when Stalin died, and the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 died and faded away, the second generation of Khrushchev's and the like slowed down the infrastructure capital spending and started increasing consumer production and freebies like this. A number of other things happened as well around this time, but all in the same direction - capital spending went lower, sops to the populace started, and a long economic, and then political decline set in. This sop was part of that. Ultimately, the money to keep up the park came out of capital spending, leading to the decline of the USSR on some level.
But that was the problem with the USSR, wasn't it? Gorbachev said (quoting from memory from maybe two decades ago) that the USSR could produce a military that could go toe to toe with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for their people. And his reforms started when he said, what's wrong here?
The Soviet command economy wasn't as productive as the US's economy, and it never would have been. And if you think that all that production should have gone to the military forever, and never have gone to making people's lives a little less drab, then I would ask: Why?
They spent their resources on the military because the whole capitalist world wanted to crush them. If they hadn't armed themselves to the teeth the western armies would have rolled right through after the end of WWII and later.
I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east. But by 1945 the western armies were tired of fighting and had no desire for another brutal war of attrition.
The Soviet army seriously outnumbered the west for the vast majority of the cold war. Especially in 1945, when they had something like 550 divisions compared to 100 US divisions.
The real straw that broke the camel's back was their dispute with China.
Sheer numbers don't mean as much in the face of vastly superior weaponry. If the Soviets didn't keep pace with Western advances, they would be at a serious disadvantage.
Of course, but in many cases (BMP, T-64, SA-2, AT-3, R-7) they were ahead of the west. They built a technically advanced and massive army. Quantity was something the U.S. didn't consider necessary after the Vietnam War. At that point, the Soviets could've done the same. Except that a third of their army was deployed along their border with communist China and later they had a small problem in Afghanistan.
This is precisely where the criticism that the USSR was "state capitalist" came from; it operated as a corporation owning its own means of production, not a dictatorship of the proletariat. "All power to the soviets" faded rather quickly even under Lenin.
Like the article says, even in capitalist countries with lively economy, public parks are free to enter. And this doesn't even have the scale to affect the economy in any way, as compared with stuff like free healthcare. The Soviet economy survived on unpaid (slave) labor, when that became largely frowned upon in the civilised world, the decline was inevitable.
The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work - the Kochs, the Waltons, the Johnson family. The Rockefellers fell off the list in the past few years, $2 billion is the individual cutoff and I suppose Forbes doesn't know of any individual in the family worth more that that. But I can assure you if they and their three siblings are worth 1.5 billion each, and their first cousins are all worth 1.5 billion each, they are not out there breaking the bricks.
It's amusing to hear about meritocracy and the rat race for education, skills etc. when these heirs are the people controlling the economy, and causing so many economic and other problems due to its increasing lopsidedness towards them. What are their skills and professionalism that are valued? The money they suck off from those who work is the truest lowest common denominator, rule by parasites. At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.
I am supposed to get into a tizzy about someone with less skills getting the same pay as me, when the money is being sent off to the heirs who do no work? I certainly would prefer that the people actually doing the work alongside me get the money.