[ElevenLathe]

Generally I agree that liberal-ish do-goodery interventions are basically hokum, but in the good old days when there was a real socialist project in the form of the Soviet Union, left economics also pulled huge numbers of people out of poverty. The Bolshevik program of "socialism in one country" turned the leftovers of the Tsarist empire, mainly a mass of peasants who had in living memory been serfs, into an industrialized powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.

I'm not a tankie or Stalin apologist but it shows what is possible within a planned economy.

[atdrummond]

Not sure I agree when we now know the majority of their economic statistics were hokum and the average second world worker earned basically 10%-25% of what a Western European or American worker did. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/soviet-economy-1917-1991-its-...

[ElevenLathe]

Sure, (most) Russians made less than (most) Americans but they also importantly made more than workers in other parts of the world (the "third world") and even more importantly much much more than Russians were making in 1917. There is also probably a stability dividend at play here -- Soviet jobs were much more stable and so much more desirable even at the same level of pay.

[ztrww]

> much much more than Russians were making in 1917

Which is true almost anywhere in the world. Obviously Russia was several decades behind western Europe in 1917. But I’d be very surprised in if the gap between Western Europe and Russia in this regard was considerably higher in 1915 than it was in 1985.

> Soviet jobs were much more stable and so much more desirable even at the same level of pay.

What is this even supposed to mean? It was illegal to not have a job and most people couldn’t freely choose their workplace. Obviously certain positions which provided access to state resources were highly coveted despite only a moderate increase in pay (I don’t think I need to explain why). How is that in anyway something positive, though?

[ztrww]

Right, slave labor can be incredibly efficient in certain circumstances. Plantation owners in the southern states and the Caribbean had already proven that a hundred or more years before Stalin.

It’s not particularly surprising that if you literally work a few million to death and distribute the surplus they created amongst the rest of the population (the one innovation I’ll grant USSR) you can have some impressive growth figures. In fact the more people starve to death or die in the gulags the more per capita productivity increases.

> who had in living memory been serfs, into an industrialized powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.

Right. You can probably say the same about many states in Germany. Russia was just 40 or so years late. It not unreasonable to believe that it’s industrial output would had reached similar levels without the revolution in comparable timeframe (probably with considerably higher inequality but with a magnitude or two less murder, however higher inequality would probably meant that more people would have died from preventable diseases which would potentially offset a million or two who were executed).

[dsq]

Look up "holodomor", "dekulakization", "law of spikelets", and other lovely things. It's possible to get a lot done in a worker's paradise when you can put a bullet in a head.