You’re right, it’s so fucked up that Stalin stole all those poor Kulaks’ grain and put it in a big swimming pool so that he and his cabinet could swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.
After millions of people had already starved to death. A minor but necessary bump in the road toward industrialization, I’m sure.
It wasn’t necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn’t push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
I’ve read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can’t just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn’t happen, so…
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You’re right, it’s so fucked up that Stalin stole all those poor Kulaks’ grain and put it in a big swimming pool so that he and his cabinet could swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.
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People should steal food from hoarders to redistribute it to starving peasants actually.
If youre talking about grain quotas they stopped taking grain out of the region and started importing food when they realized there was a famine.
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It wasn’t necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn’t push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
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Okay but how was the soviet union to create a global proletarian revolution? They had to work with what they had.
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I’ve read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can’t just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn’t happen, so…