Ask Lemmy

Oh geeze, this seems like it's going to be a productive discussion that's starting out in good faith.

Looks like you already have your mind made up

How do you reconcile capitalism with climate catastrophe and ecological collapse?

These seem like a pretty damning indictment of a system. But i dunno, maybe i just like living things

People starved many many times in those places before the communist revolutions. People starved all over the world under many economic systems. Most of the time due to climate events.

That is basically what happened in the two famines you are thinking of. There was extreme drought in Europe and Central Asia for decades, which did kill a lot of people. In Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and yes Ukraine. They also died in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, parts of the Middle East. Just like many died in the US from massive droughts in the decade before.

What you probably purposefully leave out is how there was never famine again in the USSR. People experienced better caloric intake than the US up until the collapse of the union and neoliberal shock-therapy brought hunger back.

In any case, was there mismanagement during the famine of the 30s? Yea, of course.

Was there sabotage by counterrevolutionaries? Yes, of course.

Who is to blame? Not a single person, and likely not even people in general tbh.

Almost all of this also applies to the famine in China.

So idk, I know the OP doesn’t care and isn’t trying to look for an alternative to his narrative. But others who come in here might take something positive from the comments we leave.

First, the USSR and China under Mao were not communist and did not even claim to be communist. So you have to understand that many people who are advocating for communism do not even want to emulate the Soviet Union. They are talking about a fairly different system. In fact, communism is theoretically meant to be stateless, so it shouldn’t really have a government in the sense that we would understand, though there is some debate over exactly what this means.

But most people who have studied history recognize that the Soviet system of government did not work well and oversaw numerous crimes against humanity. Of course, the same can be said for many western governments. And it’s worth noting that it’s not very clear that capitalist governments have been particularly better at avoiding famines. Several examples have already been given in this thread.

In fact, since the discovery of modern agricultural techniques, the majority of famines have been caused not by environmental factors but by the deliberate and usually violent deprivation of people from land and food resources. Recognizing this fact, which is common to all types imperialist powers, whether western or eastern, allows us to see that the root cause is not the economic system but the political system. Specifically, the oppression and exploitation of one group of people by another which happened in the USSR and China and happens today and historically under US hegemony.