[lbo-talk] Russia's economy (now question of consent)

[tfast]

You missed the point, wife beater; not that I am saying that there is any
relationship between you and a wife beater; cough, wife beater; but a
battered wife may have been better off under her brutalizer than she was
without him, so as to your point about your wife, you must take into account
the happy slave problem; not that I think slaves and wives have anything in
common mind you; ahem, or anything in common with your wife, I am just
saying it is a real question because of, like you know Hitler, Stalin and X.
Not that they have anything in common I just like to put them all in the
same sentence together you know so I can make sure my point is well
understood and not confuse the issue.

The question is what are real socialists going to do about it.  It is a real
problem you know.


> Andie:
>
> "The average life of the ordinary citizen ... in Hitler's
> Germany, was an improvement over the past."
>
James replies:
> I don't believe that is true for the wage earners. There were longer
hours,
> less wages, resoures were redirected from the production of consumer goods
> to armaments. Tens of thousands were prosecuted for breaching labour
> discipline, and thousands executed - all of which added to a climate of
> terror in the workplace. Also, notwithstanding the ideological commitment
to
> the peasants, they were pretty much abolished as a class. There was
> obviously some glamour to the military victories of 1939-40, but in
material
> terms they presaged a return of the austerity policies of 1933-35. An
> improvement over the past? Not over the boom years of '23-'25, and
> frustrating as the inflation was, it was those with a lot of savings that
> really suffered more than wage earners.
>
> As to the material advantages of Stalin's Russia, I think they would be
> pretty hard to justify, as opposed maybe to the post-Stalin era. Stalin's
> rule involved some brutal industrialisation, wartime austerity, a famine
and
> the liquidation of the kulaks, which were all pretty grim.
>
>
>
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