News Is Atheism the true enemy in the fight against communism?

[Eh]

Forget about the arms race. We've still got the countless other communist countries where the quality of life is garbage. That is proof enough it doesn't work. It also didn't work in Russia prior to the arms race.

 

[damgo]

FZ, I don't think any of that is supported by the actual data, GDP etc. Stalin did industrialize the USSR, but that's not really communism per se; the same industrialization in China came long after communism had first been implemented. Indeed the recent boom in the Chinese economy can be traced back to the market semi-liberalization that became policy a while back.

Other examples abound, too: the per-capita real GDP of Cuba today is less than it was at the time of Castro's revolution. The situation in Vietnam, North Korea, etc is not much better.

As far as the Depression USA, that's a very different situation -- vigorous government spending and regulation in a market framework is a far cry from communism/socialism. Also, I think it's generally accepted that the New Deal policies were of limited immediate effectiveness, and it was WWII that brought the USA out of the depression...

 

[FZ+]

damgo: I disagree with your evaluation - though I admit the figures can be used both ways, there is hardly any evidence to suggest that communism was inherently entirely a failure as a economic system - ie. no evidence of economic collapse directly attributed to the onset of communism. Other systems, with more moderate policies may be more successful in the modern context, but communism is not inherently disasterous.

1. From the 1929 to 1937 period, wages in the USSR rose 271%. Prices also fell in this period.
2. The lowering of GDP in Cuba occurred only recently, and was greatly affected by US trade sanctions. The overall picture is an improvement in living conditions, until the collapse of it's soviet trading partner. This data is not seen in context. Taking values in the middle of the communist period shows a significant rise over the Batista period, despite US measures.
3. Comparisons in Vietnam and North Korea are irrelevant, since the nations in their divided state did not have a pre-soviet period. Comparisons with the whole of the country pre-communism are plainly misleading.
4. The success of open policies in China are mostly due to inward investment from the west, not directly from non-socialist policy. The fact that industrialisation took time (in fact, they all occurred with the Mao regime) does not show communist policies to be a failure in such reforms, especially given little reform in the pre-socialist years.
5. The US economy did significantly recover from 1930 to the onset of the war. While the war did help things, recovery before can be attributed to a variety of socialist policies. From the height of the depression when GDP fell 31%, recovery began with the entry of FDR to office. When GDP fell 13.4% in 1932, GDP fell only 2% in 1933, and rose 7.7% in 1934. The majority of FDR's policies were socialist in nature. (eg. abolition of Trusts, redistribution of wealth, raising top tax rates) However limited in effectiveness the New Deal was, when it led to a recovery from a GDP of 584.3bn to one of 866.5bn by 1939 (100bn dollars higher than what it was 1929), it was definitely more effective than the non-socialist measures taken before it. Socialist policy in this case was clearly not a FAILURE.

 

[Eh]

You've still got to deal with the fact that the quality of life is still fairly bad in communist countries. Any system that cannot provide a decent life for citizens must be seen as a failure. Unless there is some other critera for determining whether or not an economic system is a sucess or not.

 

[FZ+]

But the quality of life for the majority of the population is bad in most capitalist countries too, bad relative to the US of course. The quality of life in say, USSR was much better than that in most countries, eg. india. By that definition, capitalism is a failure as well. Or perhaps it is better to say that all systems have their failings, and that communism cannot be absolutely judged to be a failure, only incompatiable in some contexts.

 

[Eh]

No doubt, capitalism only succeeds in nations that have pre-existing wealth, ie. natural resources, or those in the immediate influence of such nations. Poor nations might be better off in a communist system, but the fact still remains that the system doesn't work very well. Still, that doesn't make capitalism a worldwide success either, since it typically allows those already rich to become richer.

That's why countries like Russia will be a very different place in the coming decades. The nation has massive resources, and once the economy recovers the east will start looking a lot like the west.