I will agree that "socialist" is being misused here. Change "socialism" to "government controlled economy" and it's on target, though. Most of the famines are because the government fucked up badly.
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Socialism and hunger: a quick reminder
- Thread starter Axulus
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I will agree that "socialist" is being misused here. Change "socialism" to "government controlled economy" and it's on target, though. Most of the famines are because the government fucked up badly.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
As Zycher notes, six out of the 10 worst famines happened in socialist countries. Other famines, including those in Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh, were partly a result of war and partly a result of a government’s economic mismanagement.
The American students growing interested in “socialism” today are too young to remember what the world actually looked like the last time socialism held sway. In their lifetimes, famine has all but disappeared. Today, there is not a single ongoing case of famine in the world – not even in war-torn places like Syria.
Why did famines disappear? First, because agricultural production is at an all-time high and food has been getting cheaper, not dearer. Between 1960 and 2015, the world’s population increased by 143 percent. Over the same time period, the price of food has gone down by 22 percent. Second, humanity has grown richer and can afford to buy more food. Over the last 55 years, the real average annual per capita income in the world rose by 163 percent. Third, communications and transport have massively improved and it is now possible to deliver food aid anywhere in the world in a relatively short time. Fourth, globalization and trade ensure that food can be purchased by anyone, anywhere.
Africa has been the main beneficiary of that salutary development. In 1961, Africans consumed 1,993 calories per person per day. In 2011, which is the last year for which the World Bank provides data, they consumed 2,618 calories. Globally, food consumption increased from 2,196 calories to 2,870 calories. Even in Ethiopia, food consumption has increased. In 1993, two years after the overthrow of the Derg, Ethiopians consumed 1,508 calories per person per day. In 2013, they consumed 2,131 calories.
Zimbabwe, which still suffers from Marxist rule, has not been so lucky. In 1961, Zimbabweans consumed 2,115 calories per person per day. By 2013, that number fell to 2,110.
Wherever it has been tried, from the Soviet Union in 1917 to Venezuela in 2015, socialism has failed. Socialists have promised a utopia marked by equality and abundance. Instead, they have delivered tyranny and starvation. Young Americans should keep that in mind.
http://capx.co/socialism-and-hunger-a-quick-reminder/
This is especially stark when you consider that if socialism has any validity at all it would be in developing countries. In theory socialism would allow faster development of a country because it would avoid the inefficiencies of capitalism, the duplication of effort that competition entails, for example. But it seldom works out.
Has anyone explained the difference between socialism and democratic socialism?
Also: I moved to the US 7 years ago from Finland — here's what Americans don't understand about Nordic countries
lpetrich
Contributor
When Right-Wing Blather Killed | Alternet by Joan Walsh, reviewing John Kelly's book "The Graves are Walking: the Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People".
Did that also apply to living off of stocks and bonds and inherited wealth?
Another source: The HIstory Place - Irish Potato Famine: The Great Hunger
and
The sort of gross inegalitarism that capitalism apologists are so eager to defend.
So the Irish potato famine was a punishment for Irish people's sins. How convenient.
So potatoes were bad because they were too easy to grow? Did potatoes make self-reliance too easy? That strikes me as a rather sick sentiment.
Did that also apply to living off of stocks and bonds and inherited wealth?
Just like many contemporary right-wingers. I'd like to deprive them of military and police protection so that they will become self-reliant about protection.
Sort of like American black people.
Another source: The HIstory Place - Irish Potato Famine: The Great Hunger
But just about every potato in Ireland was then destroyed by potato blight, leaving only a month's worth of potatoes.
Nice Squirrel
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Word. In India in the Great Famine, if you wanted relief you had to work, but the work consumed more calories than the workers were allotted killing people faster. But, you don't want them to become dependent!
Most of the famines on this list could have been prevented. The common theme running through them is that the political system denied helping the victims be it capitalist paternalism or communist mismanagement.
Most of the famines on this list could have been prevented. The common theme running through them is that the political system denied helping the victims be it capitalist paternalism or communist mismanagement.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
After the end of colonialism in Africa starting in the 60's, a fair number of newly free African states adopted "socialism", often the new leaders were trained in the USSR. They were uniformly failures. Mainly because these leaders did not have the skills to run a nation's economy, whether capitalist or socialist. Many quickly dissolved into kleptocracies, or slid into internecine civil wars. Many of these states ended up as basically dictatorial kleptocracies, neither really socialist or capitalist. Savage wars soon caused starvation for millions as depriving whole populations of food became weapons of war or policy. Biafra, Somalia, Ukraine, Cambodia et al.
This whole anti-socialism ranting utterly misses a lot of history, and a lot of harsh realities about how the third world has been operating for many years now.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/the-economist-behind-the-khmer-rouge/In his analysis of Cambodia’s economic structure, Khieu Samphan wrote:
these branches of activity add no value to the society from the perspective of the economy as a whole. They simply profit from a transfer of value issuing from other productive activities within society (agriculture, crafts, small industry). And the transfer of produce within society does not enlarge the total value of production obtained by society in any way. The distinction made by the Scottish economist Adam Smith between productive and unproductive work deserves to be carefully considered here.
This idea adapted by Smith stems from the early French economists, the physiocrats.
Bad theories can lead to insane policies.
This whole anti-socialism ranting utterly misses a lot of history, and a lot of harsh realities about how the third world has been operating for many years now.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/the-economist-behind-the-khmer-rouge/In his analysis of Cambodia’s economic structure, Khieu Samphan wrote:
these branches of activity add no value to the society from the perspective of the economy as a whole. They simply profit from a transfer of value issuing from other productive activities within society (agriculture, crafts, small industry). And the transfer of produce within society does not enlarge the total value of production obtained by society in any way. The distinction made by the Scottish economist Adam Smith between productive and unproductive work deserves to be carefully considered here.
This idea adapted by Smith stems from the early French economists, the physiocrats.
Bad theories can lead to insane policies.
lpetrich
Contributor
Any documentation of that? I was careful to look for additional sources for the "it's wrong to help them" attitude in Ireland. But since British officials had such an attitude in Ireland, they likely also had that attitude in India.
Nice Squirrel
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Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
[h=1]Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World Paperback – June 17, 2002[/h]By Mike Davis
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history.
Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Socialism and hunger a quick reminder
Once again, most here are taking a small grain of truth and spinning into support for the pretty extremist views that they hold.
Remember my call to arms with the rallying call, Give me moderation or give me death! Or a severe reprimand.
Correct, everyone seems to using the word incorrectly. Communism is a socialist economic doctrine imposed by a so called collective dictatorship, an authoritarian government.
Yes, the author of the OP and most of the posters here have failed to differentiate between the form the government and the form of the economy.
It is almost as if he or she believes or wants us to believe that all of the countries with socialistic economies have to have an authoritarian government. While it is true that the majority of socialistic countries have authoritarian governments there have been countries with socialistic economies and democratic governments. After World War II some countries turned to socialism to recover from the war, the UK, Germany and Japan for example.
The EU members aren't democratic socialist states. They are social democratic states. "Social Democracy" is a political movement that promotes improving social justice using the capitalistic system by using various means such as collective bargaining and progressive taxation to redistribute income and tight regulation of the economy to achieve an egalitarian society.
The US and Mexico are oligarchical democratic states who operate their economies for the benefit of the wealthy to increase their wealth. Canada is somewhere in between the European and the North American model.
You are confusing the form of the government and the form of the economy.
Communistic societies have largely or completely socialistic economies. Industry is owned and operated by the government.
Communistic governments are largely authoritarian, not democratic.
Most communistic societies operate their socialistic economy to benefit just a small number of people in the society. But this is more a result of having an authoritarian government rather than the form of the economy. Most authoritarian governments with capitalistic economies also operate their economies for the benefit of the ruling elite.
The US is an example of a democratic government with a capitalistic economy that operates its economy for the benefit of the few, already rich rather than society as a whole.
The obsession in the US to increase the income and the wealth of the already wealthy means that we must constantly find new sources of revenue to direct to the already rich. The safety net has to go to satisfy the obsession.
Not really. What you have to do is to investigate how the economy is operated rather than generalize about the form of the economy. No matter the form of the economy it can be operated to benefit either the few or the many.
While you can generalize about any economic system I don't think that a response to a natural disaster is a function of the economic system. Remember the reaction of our crony capitalists to Katrina?
Socialism doesn't meddle with the market it replaces the market with government planning.
Once again, the solution is moderation. There are things that are best left to the market and the for profit enterprise system and things that are best left to the government and professionalism.
You are taking a small and obvious truth, that socialism is a poor economic system and conflating it to your fondly held belief that we should remove the government from the economy, an extreme and unworkable idea.
Government has been involved in the economy and has been responsible for regulating the economy since the first tribal chief decided how the food should be divided between the tribe's members. The need for the economy to be defined and to be regulated is largely why government was created. It is impossible to separate the economy and the government.
Capitalism is great at doing those things where the simplistic goal of making a profit aligns with the needs of society. Providing food and consumer products where capitalism is constantly innovating and improving the products and the ways of producing them, for example.
Capitalism is not so good at providing those things where profit doesn't provide a clear alignment with the needs of society; jurisprudence, health care, foreign and domestic security, education, for example. These are best left to government and to a mechanism that no one here talks about or seems to understand, professionalism, having trained professionals who have a duty to society beyond making a profit; doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers, teachers, the military, government service, etc.
Just as socialism is an extreme that is largely unworkable so too is the idea of leaving everything to the market and the idea of taking the government out of the economy.
Socialism is bad at resource allocation, and at meeting consumer demand. It tries to replace the market with planning. It doesn't generate wealth for the individual, only for the collective, an abstraction. It relies on individuals being dedicated to the collective rather than to themselves and their families. It kills individual incentive and tries to replace it with the incentive to better the collective. In short, greed is a better incentive than patriotism.
Capitalism is a better economic system but it is far from perfect. It has the marked tendency to concentrate the rewards of the system with capitalists, such a surprise I know, and with the operators of the various mechanisms that capitalism requires, bankers, stock brokers, agents, etc., in short, Adam Smith's rentiers. This means in a capitalistic system there must be a way to intentionally redistribute the wealth from the rentiers to everyone else. To deny this is to deny the basic nature of capitalism, to deny what makes it tick.
Capitalism comes with a large overhead, the resources that capitalism requires to operate. Its banks, stock markets, insurance companies require a large number of people and money to operate. Arguably it probably requires more government to regulate the capitalistic economy than it does to completely run a socialistic one.
And there are other less obvious inefficiencies in capitalism. The main one is the duplication of effort that competition involves. We have thousands of people trying to best someone else in making a better toilet paper for example.
Capitalism requires stability. This means that it is often not suitable to recover from major disasters like hurricanes, Katrina, earthquakes and tidal waves, Fujiyama, wars, etc. Recovery requires investment and investors require profits to invest. These aren't provided in recovery situations.
These factors should make socialism a better system for developing countries because they don't have the resources to dedicate to the requirements of capitalism. But maybe this is just saying that there is no good system for developing countries, just some less poor ones, say a mixed mode economy with more government than would be needed by a developed country.
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Once again, most here are taking a small grain of truth and spinning into support for the pretty extremist views that they hold.
Remember my call to arms with the rallying call, Give me moderation or give me death! Or a severe reprimand.
Correct, everyone seems to using the word incorrectly. Communism is a socialist economic doctrine imposed by a so called collective dictatorship, an authoritarian government.
Yes, the author of the OP and most of the posters here have failed to differentiate between the form the government and the form of the economy.
It is almost as if he or she believes or wants us to believe that all of the countries with socialistic economies have to have an authoritarian government. While it is true that the majority of socialistic countries have authoritarian governments there have been countries with socialistic economies and democratic governments. After World War II some countries turned to socialism to recover from the war, the UK, Germany and Japan for example.
The EU members aren't democratic socialist states. They are social democratic states. "Social Democracy" is a political movement that promotes improving social justice using the capitalistic system by using various means such as collective bargaining and progressive taxation to redistribute income and tight regulation of the economy to achieve an egalitarian society.
The US and Mexico are oligarchical democratic states who operate their economies for the benefit of the wealthy to increase their wealth. Canada is somewhere in between the European and the North American model.
You are confusing the form of the government and the form of the economy.
Communistic societies have largely or completely socialistic economies. Industry is owned and operated by the government.
Communistic governments are largely authoritarian, not democratic.
Most communistic societies operate their socialistic economy to benefit just a small number of people in the society. But this is more a result of having an authoritarian government rather than the form of the economy. Most authoritarian governments with capitalistic economies also operate their economies for the benefit of the ruling elite.
The US is an example of a democratic government with a capitalistic economy that operates its economy for the benefit of the few, already rich rather than society as a whole.
The obsession in the US to increase the income and the wealth of the already wealthy means that we must constantly find new sources of revenue to direct to the already rich. The safety net has to go to satisfy the obsession.
Not really. What you have to do is to investigate how the economy is operated rather than generalize about the form of the economy. No matter the form of the economy it can be operated to benefit either the few or the many.
While you can generalize about any economic system I don't think that a response to a natural disaster is a function of the economic system. Remember the reaction of our crony capitalists to Katrina?
Socialism doesn't meddle with the market it replaces the market with government planning.
Once again, the solution is moderation. There are things that are best left to the market and the for profit enterprise system and things that are best left to the government and professionalism.
You are taking a small and obvious truth, that socialism is a poor economic system and conflating it to your fondly held belief that we should remove the government from the economy, an extreme and unworkable idea.
Government has been involved in the economy and has been responsible for regulating the economy since the first tribal chief decided how the food should be divided between the tribe's members. The need for the economy to be defined and to be regulated is largely why government was created. It is impossible to separate the economy and the government.
Capitalism is great at doing those things where the simplistic goal of making a profit aligns with the needs of society. Providing food and consumer products where capitalism is constantly innovating and improving the products and the ways of producing them, for example.
Capitalism is not so good at providing those things where profit doesn't provide a clear alignment with the needs of society; jurisprudence, health care, foreign and domestic security, education, for example. These are best left to government and to a mechanism that no one here talks about or seems to understand, professionalism, having trained professionals who have a duty to society beyond making a profit; doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers, teachers, the military, government service, etc.
Just as socialism is an extreme that is largely unworkable so too is the idea of leaving everything to the market and the idea of taking the government out of the economy.
Socialism is bad at resource allocation, and at meeting consumer demand. It tries to replace the market with planning. It doesn't generate wealth for the individual, only for the collective, an abstraction. It relies on individuals being dedicated to the collective rather than to themselves and their families. It kills individual incentive and tries to replace it with the incentive to better the collective. In short, greed is a better incentive than patriotism.
Capitalism is a better economic system but it is far from perfect. It has the marked tendency to concentrate the rewards of the system with capitalists, such a surprise I know, and with the operators of the various mechanisms that capitalism requires, bankers, stock brokers, agents, etc., in short, Adam Smith's rentiers. This means in a capitalistic system there must be a way to intentionally redistribute the wealth from the rentiers to everyone else. To deny this is to deny the basic nature of capitalism, to deny what makes it tick.
Capitalism comes with a large overhead, the resources that capitalism requires to operate. Its banks, stock markets, insurance companies require a large number of people and money to operate. Arguably it probably requires more government to regulate the capitalistic economy than it does to completely run a socialistic one.
And there are other less obvious inefficiencies in capitalism. The main one is the duplication of effort that competition involves. We have thousands of people trying to best someone else in making a better toilet paper for example.
Capitalism requires stability. This means that it is often not suitable to recover from major disasters like hurricanes, Katrina, earthquakes and tidal waves, Fujiyama, wars, etc. Recovery requires investment and investors require profits to invest. These aren't provided in recovery situations.
These factors should make socialism a better system for developing countries because they don't have the resources to dedicate to the requirements of capitalism. But maybe this is just saying that there is no good system for developing countries, just some less poor ones, say a mixed mode economy with more government than would be needed by a developed country.
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Damn, SimpleDon. Thank you for that. 
JonA
Senior Member
Has socialism worked anywhere it's been tried?
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
Scandinavia, Germany, other Democratic socialist European states. And see my thread on the 11 Red states with the most government employees. And we have the phenomenon of those Red states that get more $$$ from the Federal government than they send that government. Parasite states. Socialism right winger style. Run the economy into a ditch. Taxpayers, bail out our investment bankers. Too big to fail. Socialism for the rich.
JonA
Senior Member
Democratic socialism is not socialism.
Harry Bosch
Contributor
Yea, the difference between Germany and the US is that Germany has a bigger safety net. We spend more of our tax dollars on the military in order to keep the world safe and fight evil (tongue in cheek). The US is also a democratic socialist state.
ronburgundy
Contributor
IOW, all the conservative rhetoric about Bernie and his radical "Socialism" are fear-mongering nonsense, and he isn't seeking to make any fundamental changes to the nature of the US economy.
laughing dog
Contributor
Maybe not in your narrow view. But to many people, socialism may have a broader meaning. This site - http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/difference-between-socialism-and-democratic-socialism/ gives a relatively short exposition on the differences and similarities between the two concepts. In particular, " Socialism can also be stated to be a society where all people work as equals cooperating for the common good of all."
In that view, there is no difference between the two.
Harry Bosch
Contributor
No fundamental change? He wants to dramatically reduce military spending, dramatically increase the safety net, and dramatically increase taxes.
ronburgundy
Contributor
IOW, he wants to make changes that all fall well within the current system of Democratic Socialism, which means that by definition, none of those change the fundamental nature of our economy.