The meme of communism being the root cause of the starvation in the USSR and China is infuriating to me because it stops people from seeing the valuable lesson that’s actually there: the destruction caused by ideology taking precedence over evidence and a system that cannot see or adapt to evidence that it’s made the wrong decision.
A well run communist nation would have run optional trial programs to test lysenkoism. It would have slowly ramped it up, seeing if it actually produced results, all while promising those trying it that if it failed they’d be given food, and if it succeeded they’d be allowed to keep some of the surplus.
No way to safely test the 5 pests campaign though. Gotta have people who understand agriculture and ecology make agricultural decisions to stop that.
Regardless though, these problems aren’t innate to communism. Reaganism/Thatcherism are of the same nature. And fascists did it far more egregiously than anyone else, partly because their ideology is built on explicitly rejecting non ideological thought and all old ways of doing things. If communists call watering crops communism, fascists will build tents to keep their plants dry.
The USSR and China were and are not Communist countries. Just because they call themselves Communist, doesn’t mean they have anything to do with Marxism.
The meme of communism being the root cause of the starvation in the USSR and China is infuriating to me because it stops people from seeing the valuable lesson that’s actually there: the destruction caused by ideology taking precedence over evidence and a system that cannot see or adapt to evidence that it’s made the wrong decision.
A well run communist nation would have run optional trial programs to test lysenkoism. It would have slowly ramped it up, seeing if it actually produced results, all while promising those trying it that if it failed they’d be given food, and if it succeeded they’d be allowed to keep some of the surplus.
No way to safely test the 5 pests campaign though. Gotta have people who understand agriculture and ecology make agricultural decisions to stop that.
Regardless though, these problems aren’t innate to communism. Reaganism/Thatcherism are of the same nature. And fascists did it far more egregiously than anyone else, partly because their ideology is built on explicitly rejecting non ideological thought and all old ways of doing things. If communists call watering crops communism, fascists will build tents to keep their plants dry.
The USSR and China were and are not Communist countries. Just because they call themselves Communist, doesn’t mean they have anything to do with Marxism.