this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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[–] Dremor@lemmy.world -4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Both having a form of free market doesn't make it suddenly good for one side and bad for the other.

Some sort of free market is good, so new idea can brew, some of them being one day attempted, other won't because it ends up either not getting traction, or would very obviously fail after some research.

Problem is with too much planning is that it doesn't give as much place for innovation, as well as put too much weight on a single point of failure. That played a good part in the USSR famines, like the holodomor, which was then further aggravated by their unwillingness to admit they fucked up, blaming it on other factors. But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not).

And I'll pass on the other similar failures (Chernobyl, among other), that follow the very same pattern.

Of course, the USSR had some very clear wins, like the first part of the race to space, and others.

The USSR could have been a success if their leader weren't selfish idiots, which os a shame since I'd rather live in a good cummunism regime than a good capitalism regime.

I always worked toward such ideals, I contributed to some open-source project (Gnome, KDE, mostly translation, bug report, but also some packaging for OpenSUSE and Fedora.

I'm a bit tired of those who blindly follow ideologies without having the intellectual honesty to recognize where said ideology fucked up and where it was great. Do I have to be called a social-traitor for every reflection on communism or socialism? I doubt Marx would be happy to see those he tried to enlighten sheepishly follow whoever yell the loudest... Even if they yell parta of what he tried to teach them.

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not.

What other famine after holodomor? I can only think of one but was during siege from the nazis.

[–] Dremor@lemmy.world -2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)
  • 1921-1922 (Povolzhye, or Volga famine), 5-10 millions dreath
  • 1932-1933 (Holodomor), 3.5 to 7 millions death in Ukraine alone
  • 1930-1933 (Asharshylyk), 1.5 million deaths (seem small, but that was 40% of then Kazakhstan population)
  • 1932-1933 (at the same time than the Holodomor, but in Russia) : 1 to 2 millions deaths
  • 1946-1947: 1 to 1.5 millions deaths

And that's only those who were big enough to be impossible to hide completely.

All of them have something in common: the central government minimised them, and tried to hide them. Some weren't even acknowledged until after the USSR fall. All of them are a combination of bad luck (war, drought) combined with hasty decisions which made what could have been a hard year a generational disaster.

[–] hamid@crazypeople.online 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)
  • 4 million dead in the Bangal Famine caused by the British in 1943
  • 1 million people died in a drought in the Sahel region
  • 1.5 Million died in Bangladesh from floods in 1974
  • 1 million died in Ethiopia famine between 1983- 84
  • 70,000 people died in 1998 in Sudan from Famine
  • 2.7 million people died in the Second Congo War between 1998 - 2004 mostly from starvation and disease

All have something in common: The capitalist core ignored people, caused wars or restricted economic at their periphery and let millions them die.

The death toll by the capitalist empires are way higher and going way more recent in history.

[–] Dremor@lemmy.world -1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Which comes back to my main argument: both have failed, so either both are bad, or we have a people problem instead of a system problem.

[–] hamid@crazypeople.online 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Except all your examples from communism are from 80 years ago at least and capitalism is currently failing. The main reason communism failed is because it was under siege for it's entire existence and yet, after 1947 they stopped the famines, reindustrialized and won the space race. The same isn't true for the capitalist world, they are doing the siege.