What are your non-propaganda sources on the Stalinist economy being good for every day citizens of the USSR?
I don't need them. I'm not asserting that it was good for every day citizens of the USSR. They were exploited like American workers, except they were exploited in a state capitalist society by the state rather than a liberal society by the corporations.
Doubling $1 to $2 is easier than $100,000 to $200,000.
Yeah but turning $1 into $100,000 is a lot harder than turning $100,000 into $200,000.
Consumption can be made sustainable. I absolutely believe consumption should be high if it can be sustainable. I do not believe current levels of consumption are sustainable and believe we need to work on that. That is why I support carbon taxes, veganism and re-using, recycling, repairing etc.
But that's all irrelevant - you made the claim that the Stalinist economy was good. I gave some measures to show that it did not benefit ordinary people well. What measure do you want to go by? Pure GDP growth? Militarisation levels?
Except you didn't give any measures in a proper context. You asserted that their real wage was less than pre-collectivization, which for two reasons isn't a very good measure. 1. The real wage measure is good for western capitalism in which an individual pays for their housing, food, healthcare, and education. The Soviet people post collectivization did not have to pay for that. 2. You're real wage measurements were taken (how? I don't know because apparently the Soviet Union didn't keep these kinds of records, but somehow western economist know them?) at arbitrary times during famines to make the later wage appear lower than the older wage. That's propaganda. The arbitrary misuse of statistics to push an agenda.
Its funny what can be found out after an authoritarian regime opens up its archives, isn't it.
When did they open up? I mean make your mind up. Did the Soviet Union "cook the books," "falsify information." etc. or did they keep intricate records that enable accurate study of it. Because in each of these sources you suggest prove your side there's a disclaimer at the beginning that the records are of "bad quality" and that the economist is basically taking a shot in the dark. Orlando Figgs didn't have a single source in that entire thing you sent me.
But I'm curious, with all this lack of information going around making it impossible to know what really went on, why are you arguing so firmly that the economy was good?
The economy had to have been good for the Soviet Union to be the only other superpower of the world, and for the Soviet Union to pretty much single handidly pose a threat to the rest of Europe including the UK, which although a crumbling empire, still was one of the more powerful countries of the world, and the US. The economy was good, it had to be. You have one country that went from being the backwater of Europe competing for global domination almost single handedly. You can't do that with a weak economy.That's the only assertion I've made aside from the lack of unemployment regarding the soviet union.
Generally well functioning economies don't have mass starvation events.
It wasn't well functioning when they had the starvation. However, let's not pretend that famine is something specific to the USSR or socialism. If you want to go down that road, it's going to be an easy one for me to win.
And I mean, you literally just said that "the most impoverished time for the Soviet Union" was under Stalin, while moments ago you were saying the Stalinist economy was good? You literally said the economic failure only started after Stalin. Is a mass famine killing millions not an economic failure in your mind?
It was a brief famine that lasted two years. A famine that came and went in Russia several times for the centuries preceding it. After the famine, the Soviet Union became the other superpower.
The scale isn't even comparable. Especially if you limit yourself to 1917-1991 versions of each country. I mean jesus, the forced sedentarisation of the Kazakhs killed 42% of them - 1,750,000 people. No, the US did nothing comparable to that in this time period. Not even close.
The Kazakhs died in the famine, first of all. Why would we limit it to this time period? The US got rid of all of the Native Americans the century before, you know, the people who's rights got in the way of modernizing the land that America declared was theirs by Manifest destiny. How is it fair to compare a country that did that more recently to modernize to one that did it the century before and just forget about the crimes done by America. The US neglects its citizens that need healthcare. 40,000 people a year die because they don't have healthcare. People starve to death too. Even today "approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty." That's like a million a year due to the inefficiencies of this system. And it was only worse in the past. Yet you rationalize it, and think it's appropriate to bring up Soviet government's neglect of its citizenry during a single instance of famine as an example of malice, but fail to mention the United States' neglect that has been a permanent feature of the government. Here's the real kicker. America has enough food to feed the world. But citizens of America still starve to death because ideologically capitalists are brainwashed to believe that food isn't be a right. Soviets that starved to death did so when there was not enough food to feed them.
Also, why don't we compare it to another country without full employment - my home country: Australia.
How about we not?