Why was ''western'' capitalism superior to Soviet Socialism..

Miscellaneous Newbies
1

in raising the standard of living for the masses?

Soviet apologists usually make 3 claims for why this was the case.

A) Capitalist countries had the advantage of many years of industrialization, while the Soviet Union had to begin from feudal-esque systems present in Russia and Eastern Europe.

B) Capitalists had access to markets in their colonies and neo-colonies.

C) Capitalist countries received investment from their capitalist buddies e.g. Marshal Plan

What Communists et al, are usually trying to say when they make these contentions is that, 1) capitalist nations, like the U.S., were only superior to the USSR because they ‘‘exploited’’ the underdeveloped areas of the world, by implementing loyal dictatorships to gain cheap resources, etc. and 2) the only reason the ‘’bourgeoisie’’, and their lackeys in government, focused on investments for raising the standards of living of the masses was to buy the loyalty of the ‘’proletariat’’ in the western capitalist countries.

I’m wondering how people here would respond. Thanks for your time.

2

Superior in what way? In general economic progress? In that case, I don’t think it was, USSR was a country that had massive industrialization and increases in all branches of productivity, that’s why it was taken as an example to be looked upon among third world countries.

USSR state capitalism was worse then the western mix between state and laissez faire capitalism in the sense of less authoritarianism, less oppression of the toiling class and less extreme cases of poverty for the poor (e.g. famines that happen even though there is enough agricultural products), yes, but if those are effects of market capitalism or of a different way of government has organized it’s laws regarding the workers is a matter of opinion.

3

South Korea and Japan disproves A quite easily, since their indrustializantion happened much after the one of Soviet Union.

Cuba and North Korea received investements and priveleges from their socialistis buddies, didn’t work out that well.

4

One term: “Economic Calculation”, simply the Western Democracies gave their subjects more freedom to perform Economic Calculation than the Soviets did. The results even from the somewhat/mostly socialist democracies advanced humanity. But don’t worry, the Russians and Chinese are now allowing their subjects more freedom to perform economic calculation and will both eventually pass most Western Democracies in economic development. Socialism is a restriction on private property by a mob at the point of a gun. It is the antithesis of freedom. Unfortunately even the Democratic version is directly opposed to individual freedom.

And who provided their subjects the greatest freedom: Why England in the 18th and 19th centuries followed by the USA in the second half of the 19th and periodically throughout the 20th.

5

The Soviet Communists really screwed things up in the Soviet Union.

First there was “war communism”, which involved confiscating all agricultural surplus from the peasants. The peasants didn’t like that, because they had barely enough to survive on afterwards. So they started producing less and hiding or consuming more of what they already produced. In spite of all that, the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War.

Next there was the “New Economic Policy” (NEP). Now only part of the peasants’ surplus was demanded from them. The idea was that the taxed produce would be sold by the state to the workers. In turn, the workers would manufacture goods that would be sold by the state to the peasants (along with other workers). This policy was referred to as the smychka or “link” between the proletariat and the peasantry.

The thing about the peasants was that, while the Russian peasant commune typically collectively owned the land it farmed and resided on, each family within it owned what they farmed. They would thus be free to sell any surplus they had. Marxists called this the “petit-bourgeois” tendency of the peasants.

Under the NEP, there was a free market for the peasants to sell their surplus (minus taxes to the Soviet state). Being a free market, prices of commodities sold within it were free to fluctuate. However, this was not the case for the non-agricultural portion of the economy (IIRC). There the prices of commodities were heavily regulated by the Soviet state.

It’s no surprise, then, that as agricultural productivity increased, food prices in the free market went down - but prices of industrial commodities remained constant (or even rose) in the face of increasing industrial productivity. This threatened the whole point of the smychka policy. The Communists took some measures to reduce industrial prices, but the so-called “scissors crisis” remained an issue.

By the late 1920s, the Communists were becoming increasingly fearful of an invasion by the Western capitalist powers and subsequent “capitalist restoration” in the Soviet Union. They figured the way to prevent this would be to build up Soviet defense capability to a much higher level. This required a build-up of heavy industry, which in turn required more people to be employed as workers instead of peasants. To make up for the lower number of peasants, agricultural productivity was to be boosted by forced collectivization. This whole effort was to be coordinated by a central plan.

There was another reason for forced collectivization - the Communists were growing increasingly wary of peasants who had become well-to-do from the free peasant market - the so-called kulaks. These peasants tended to keep produce (mainly grain) in reserve so it could be sold at higher prices during lean years. Instead of being thankful to the kulaks because more grain was available during bad harvests, the Communists ultimately classified them as “enemies of the people”. Hence the forced collectivization killed two birds with one stone.

The peasants didn’t like collectivization, however. Under collectivization, most of their surplus was to be sold to the state at much lower prices than they were getting on the free market. Furthermore, they didn’t like how the collectivization was forced. The Soviet state was only barely able to overcome peasant resistance to it, and only then through extremely repressive measures. None of this helped productivity or standard of living in general.

From that point on, the defining feature of the Soviet economic structure was its massive military-industrial complex - proportionally speaking, much more massive than that of the United States. This massive military-industrial complex was a huge hindrance on the rest of the Soviet economy. It seems that both Soviet and Western leaders were aware of this by the early 1960s, if not earlier. It may have helped inspire Eisenhower with his now-famous Farewell Address. Also Khrushchev’s effort at reaching détente with the West was spurred by a desire to dismantle the Soviet military-industrial complex and thus reallocate resources toward improving Soviet living standards.

Unfortunately, the most powerful elements of the Western leadership turned out to be those who didn’t want détente with the Soviets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because they had reason to believe that 1) the massive military-industrial complex would be continued by the Soviet leadership as long as they felt threatened by the West (led by the US) and 2) this massive military-industrial complex was unsustainable and would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Soviet state. As it turns out, they were right on both counts.

6

The point was that industrialization on the scale concieved by the Communists required gigantic investment of capital which the Soviets did not have. Traditionaly capital necessary for industrialization of such a country would flow in from abroad, but that was obviously a non-option for the Soviets. Collectivization is first and foremost how the state, via the aplication of ruthless, colonialist methods of exploitation against the peasantry, went about securing profits for itself on the scale sufficient to build up the industry, while remaining true to the ideal of resisting ‘capitalist exploitation’.

7

Yes that’s correct. Thanks for adding that, Marko - it makes explicit what was only implicit in my post. I’ll add that the capital in this case was mainly agricultural (surplus food to feed additional workers), at least to begin with.

8

Just to add a couple things to your excellent write-up Autolykos.

Ike knew very well about the situation in the USSR. His Open Skies initiative was his way of telling the Soviet leadership “We know what’s going on in your country… want to know how we are doing?”. The U2 (and to a lesser extent RAF) overflights simply confirmed what Ike already knew: the huge military industrial complex in the USSR was not backed by a flourishing economy like the one in the US, but by a really messed up economy.

The US leadership had many ways to keep the Soviets on the edge and pushing them to churn out enormous quantities of armaments. One way was to allow their own citizens to think the USSR was nigh on invincible. If you were alive in the '70s and the '80s you may remember the frequent fabricated “Red Scares”, based around statistical figures which, when everybody got to see what was on the other side of the Iron Curtain, sounded like a colossal joke. Two things I remember the most are the figures on cement production and the usual rant and raves about how damn good the Soviet medical system was. At the time I often wondered what in the world were the Soviets doing with such huge quantities of cement. Then I discovered what “planned economy” really means and remembered how damn easy cement is to manufacture. And many of you may not remember this but at the time the press was full of the most enthusiastic comments about the Soviet medical system. Then I learned a curious fact: the two men responsible for both sending Gagarin into space and building the nuclear tipped ICBM’s which could wipe out civilization in a matter of minutes, Sergei Korolev and Vladimir Chelomei, both died under incredible circumstances in Soviet hospitals. Kroloev died on the surgical table during a minor operation and Chelomei died of “complications” (infection?) after being hospitalized with a broken leg. Both men had been loaded with titles and medals and both had been taken to the best hospitals in the USSR. If the best doctors in the USSR working with the best equipment available there weren’t able to save them, what could the ordinary man in the street expect?

9

Well, I would respond by pointing out the the communist system isn’t really an economic system at all. In fact, it was merely an ill-informed (I would elaborate on this point) critique of capitalism that never introduced any normative proposals and/or reforms. In other words, Marx never explained how a communist society would function; he merely asserted that it would emerge, organically, from the remains of capitalism (the same way that capitalism replaced feudalism). Communism therefore, was just an inefficient form of capitalism in many respects, defined by weaker institutions, perverse incentive structures, and arbitrarily manipulated (in many cases, eliminated) information signals.

But I would probably highlight that (a), (b) and (c) don’t explain the development of northeast Asian nation’s such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, et al.

10

That’s giving them an awful lot of credit, assuming such cleverness on their part. Would these be the same people who were taken totally by surprise by the dissolution of the USSR?

So the military-industrial complex in the US wasn’t there for its own sake, but to give a reason to its Soviet counterpart to exist and to expand on the bet it will ultimately lead to the downfall of the Soviet state. The US arms build up wasn’t meant to arrive at US superiority in arms, but to make certain the Soviets would build lots of weapons themselves. Actually the state of the military-industrial complex in the US since the dissolution of the Soviet Union would imply its existence and activity was not for the sake of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

11

For some reason I completely forgot about this when I wrote that post. While some people probably thought the Soviet military-industrial complex was or might be unsustainable, given the nature of their economy and government, most of them apparently didn’t care that much about it. Either way, a lot of people wanted to take advantage of the Soviet efforts to keep up with the West to boost the military-industrial complex over here. When the Soviet Union finally did collapse, they scrambled for new raisons d’etre for that, instead of shifting resources to other endeavors. Those who may have wanted to push the Soviet Union to collapse by keeping up the arms race may have done so only so the US would acquire an even greater amount of hegemony.

Thanks for challenging me on what I wrote.