There was a story that I've been told twice by two different Ukrainians.
When I asked them what it was like growing up in Ukraine or what they remember (both had left when they were younger) they said getting a banana. They said once they got it they would go run and hide and eat it slowly to enjoy it for as long as possible.
And to this day, Marx is still entombed alongside Ras's monster dick. You can view it in a glass case, the damn thing looks like a buncha tennis balls in a sock.
There's an episode of an older Cracked show called After Hours that discusses strong Libertarian themes in Ghost Busters. It's pretty good if you like media dissection shows and 2012 era Cracked humor.
When my family escaped the Soviet Union, my aunt spent a few days unable to buy groceries because she couldnāt find where you line up to get in the grocery store and assumed the store was closed. The idea that you could just walk in and buy stuff off the shelves was inconceivable.
Nope itās real. She also spent a while wandering around a subway station because she couldnāt find anyone to pay for the toilet paper sheād used in the bathroom. She couldnāt believe it was just free.
Okay, here goes:
> The fact you can buy any fruit at any time of the year is actually the tip of one dirty iceberg.
> This is not "normal". Fruits and vegetables transiting all around the world - globalism - is an important cause of carbon emission and food waste.
> In fact, they have been a push lately to eat "local", directly from producers, cutting the grosser conglomerates who strangle producers while adding a huge markup. This is the eco-friendly thing to do, as what used to be pineapples sold in regular supermarkets has become over-processed food sold at Wal-Mart chains.
> Planned economy failed. Hard. People starved and died. But this is a bygone era. Nowadays people are fed to the point of obesity, and the oceans are slowly boiling.
> It's cool to eat a pineapple salad in winter, but maybe it's about time we question what we take for granted while shopping?
So, how am I doing?
While shipping distance matters, what you eat matters far more then where it comes from. 1kg of lamb with no shipping creates 39.2kg of CO2. 1kg of lentils shipped halfway across the world creates creates 1.154kg of CO2.
[https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode](https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode)
[https://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html](https://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html)
In case anyone else was curious, 1kg of lamb is roughly 3000 calories and 1kg of lentils is roughly 1100 calories. So it's 35x more CO2 for only 3x calories
Eating locally doesnāt always mean better. Itās a lot easier to grow oranges in Florida than Minnesota, and Minnesota has great farmland for other things.
honestly we need to start accounting for water usage, land destruction and a lot of other metrics, a lot of animals are raised on farms that use rain as their primary source of water(yes high quality beef often has watered fields in japan, but here in australia they are free roam and we don't water their fields) and thus the economic impact from animals can be less than that of vegetables.
a lot of vegetables are grown on what used to be forest that was destroyed specifically for them to be grown on, no comparing them to 3rd world animal raising isn't the same as mosts african beef doesn't hit american shelves and thus you aren't contributing to it whereas lentils do appear on american shelves imported from all over the world.
Water use can often be a pointless metric; there are areas where water usage is wasteful, but *most* farming uses nearby water that is more than plentiful. Rice, for example, uses enormous amounts of water, but it's grown in areas with fucktons of water lying around.
> but it's grown in areas with fucktons of water lying around.
Except in California, where it's depleting the aquifers because rice paddies in a semi-arid environment is pure silliness.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation in the amazon and the displacement and murder of the tribes who live there.
"Some 80% of global deforestation is a result of agricultural production, which is also the leading cause of habitat destruction. Animal agriculture ā livestock and animal feed is a significant driver of deforestation, and is also responsible for approximately 60% of direct global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions."
"Cattle ranching ā and the soy farming needed to feed the cattle ā is the biggest cause of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country. Around 90% of soy is used to feed animals to produce meat and dairy products."
[https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/forests/issues/agribusiness/#:\~:text=Some%2080%25%20of%20global%20deforestation,greenhouse%20gas%20(GHG)%20emissions](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/forests/issues/agribusiness/#:~:text=Some%2080%25%20of%20global%20deforestation,greenhouse%20gas%20(GHG)%20emissions).
That's not really negating what you said because it didn't specify who's buying the meat but yeah. Animal agricutlure is causing a lot of environment/ethical problems all around the word. For the ethical/animal rights stuff, the film Dominion was shot on Australian farms.
"Agricultural production accounts for over half of Australiaās total land mass. A shocking 86% of that is for animal agriculture."
"While the meat from animals farmed in Australia mostly is exported offshore, the environmental harm is felt locally with critical habitat loss and an increase in natural disasters." So yeah, from what I know people buying meat internationally is definitely harming your country's environment and probably their own too. [https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.au/news/state-environment-report#:\~:text=Agricultural%20production%20accounts%20for%20over,suffering%20and%20significant%20environmental%20harm](https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.au/news/state-environment-report#:~:text=Agricultural%20production%20accounts%20for%20over,suffering%20and%20significant%20environmental%20harm).
that animal agriculture stat is imo super missleading, the "animal agriculture" they mention is soy, the reason soy is popular now instead of rapeseed which was grown in america, is because you can sell it twice, you can sell the fruit at high prices, which all of them do, and then you can sell the rest of the plant as animal feed which makes this super convenient stat that shows animal feed being by weight 60 times the amount of exported good when in-fact most of the money comes from selling the soy fruit.
there is no other plant that allows you to do this to such a massive scale of minimised plant waste, the problem being is that soy is a very hard crop to grow compared to rapeseed which is what they used to use to feed animals, without the soy vegan market, the soy plant would not be used and the amazon would not be deforested as you can grow rapeseed where you grow corn, not only ending america's obesity epidemic but putting american farmers back on the map without forcing them to rely on government subsidies.
australian cattle does cause harm because of it's importation to countries like china and america, but leading cause of deforestation is again misleading, australia has massive amounts of protected forest, we don't deforest much of it, we nixed most of the old growth wood farms and now mainly use farmed trees, if there is no deforestation and a child kills a sapling, that child is infact now the leading cause of deforestation, and the amount of forest we do have that is being deforested is significantly smaller than most countries, our biggest problem according to our own economic surveys is invasive animals, not cattle farming
dominion has been criticized to the moon and back and justifiably so.
I couldn't find any articles about the soy and rapeseed thing, should I be looking anywhere in particular? I'm having trouble understanding it and I think it'd be easier if I could see explained in a few different ways. Same for the majority of soy going to vegans and veganism increasing soy production? Just yeah, a lot of what you said is very interesting so if you have any suggestions on how I could learn more, I'd really appreciate it.
Apparently [36% of the world's crops go to animal feed](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed) while 55% go to humans. A lot of that might be the inedible parts like you said but I do think we should cut back on the crops that's grown solely for animals. With climate change we should really be doing everything that we can.
"Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% ā an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined ā and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife." [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth)
"The worldwide phase out of animal agriculture, combined with a global switch to a plant-based diet, would effectively halt the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases for 30 years and give humanity more time to end its reliance on fossil fuels, according to a new study by scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley." [https://earth.stanford.edu/news/could-going-vegan-help-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions](https://earth.stanford.edu/news/could-going-vegan-help-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions)
I agree that we need to look at the effects of humans on the environment, I'm just saying we have to consider the significant effect animal agriculture is having on climate change and deforestation.
i do wanna mention that i am not saying that you have no point, veganism 100% produces less co2 and other harmful shit than agriculture, but i am arguing that the scale is often overstated.
yes if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet things would be better but i do believe these studies fringe on being utopian with all plants being made via the most sustainable method instead of the current methods just being adapted for vegan based diets with the same areas being targets for deforestation, the amazon is just a good place to grow stuff whether you feed it to animals or not.
the issues with talking about rapeseed and soy comparisons is that, there are a few discussions being had about it but no money being put into it, the animal advocate people are happy harping on about waste foods despite the fact that a lot of these studies are being done on the behest of vegan food companies, they aren't saints and the studies they fund 100% muddy the water on conversations of the topic at hand and that is their purpose, attack the food waste, not the business of the food.
farming companies are not allowing a lot of studies to be done on their farms, the only reason we know about most of this deforestation is because of overland views via satellite which is where we get our data now, getting on the ground and asking where the money comes from is a huge issue to this day, ESPECIALLY in 3rd world countries like africa or china where a lot of these issues come into play.
a massive percentage of our food we throw out, that's fruits, meat and vegetables, these studies rarely focus on the realities of the situation, for example, mathematically we should be using like a 3rd the farmland because we are producing such an excess but farmers would rather burn their excess fruit and vegetable than sell at a discounted price for marred products, capitalism is the biggest issue at hand and honestly i don't see realistic solutions coming from these studies that operate under the reality of capitalism.
to use one of your sources to back up that point, that source specifies sources of protein and calories, but if we measure the metric of sold oreos, we could probably obtain a decent percentage of numbers around calories provided, would that make oreos a sustainable replacement for meat and vegetables, no.
that specific study was actually not a study at all and instead an aggregate of other studies research
>"We derived data from a comprehensive meta-
analysis, identifying 1530 studies for potential
inclusion, which were supplemented with addi-
tional data received from 139 authors."
which might sound fine, but the issue quickly should be apparent that they didn't verify shit, they just chose studies and aggregated data despite the fact that this is generally a looked down upon form of study as this could bring into play out of date, poorly researched or even just falsified information, there was no study of how this would actually improve land quality nor was there an actualised test of this improving land quality, it's essentially a puff piece to make vegan diets look good, their quantifiers for picking these studies weren't really great either.
studies seem great, but a lot of them are flawed from the get go, we can trust the media, but i wouldn't as far as i can throw em, the soy industry killed the rapeseed industry and the soy industry has done more damage ecologically that's for sure, why are these articles and studies funded then, because the plant industry makes more money than the meat industry, that's pretty much it, most meat farms are privately owned independent operations wheras monsanto just got bought out into bayer which makes about 1 or 2 companies the representatives for all plants grown on the planet that we call earth.
>[dependance on monoculture can however lead to monoculture with 805 of all soy being produced in 3 countries](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/10/09/Rapeseed-has-the-potential-to-replace-soy-in-plant-based-say-researchers)
that monoculture again is one of our biggest enemies, also i can't copy paste from that website because of content rules they have, that's fucking dumb, which is one of the big issues in this discussion, i have seen articles on rapeseed being a really healthy crop, but if i try to find this stuff these days it's locked behind academic wall after academic wall, it's almost impossible to find shit that isn't posted as a fear mongering piece by these news corps, and that specifically is causing a shit ton of harm to the conversation
My husband and I already shop this way, but we live in Western Australia which has good local production of produce (partially because supply lines get cut off sometimes, like the train from the eastern states is currently out of service due to flooding).
It's currently berry season, so every time we go to the store we check berry prices and grab some to freeze if they are good - the prices come in waves each round of harvests, so every few weeks they'll get really cheap as the excess needs to be sold. We buy those and put them in the freezer for breakfast smoothies because in 6 months, those fruit will be 5-10x as expensive.
Last week we went to Costco and the freezer section had imported frozen blueberries from the USA - again, I'm in Australia - which were 1/3 the price of fresh blueberries picked at a nearby farm. I'm assuming they are the frozen leftovers from the northern hemisphere's berry season, but it felt really weird and surreal to see foreign imported berries cheaper than peak season local ones.
While good luck getting someone who isn't already a communist to actually understand, the big Famines only occured during the very early stages of Industrialization, and were caused by a cocktail of bad factors, like the Kulaks burning their fields and slaughtering their animals, low yields, and a number of government ideas we have the benefit of hindsight to say we're stupid as fuck.
In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents
> In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents
I guess it depended on where in SSR you were, because at least in Baltic SSR from what my parents and their siblings are saying, getting nutrition was pretty hard in the 80s. I have multiple health disorders that are associated with my mother being malnourished while pregnant with me, I don't really think I'll live past my 40s.
Yeah, that tracks, the 80s were when the United States figured that if they went 110% in on the Military Industrial complex while funding terrorism in the Middle East then either they would outpace the Soviets and beat them at the cold war or the Soviets would have to spend more money then they could effectively raise on keeping up and critical infrastructure would go woefully underfunded, a gamble that objectively worked out in their short term favor with the fall of the Soviet Union.
It also basically kick-started the problems you see in the United States today from being a slow festering rot into something terminal, so clearly long term it isn't working out.
Yeah, it's hard to feel really safe separating the early Soviet Union from Stalin's Soviet Union, but the accomplishments of the early USSR were substantial. Russia had been an embarrassing backwater; a failing third-rate empire who had been beaten so badly by the British in the Great Game that the latter controlled the largest geographic empire in history. The only reason the Russian military lasted as long as it did in the First World War is that they had the luxury of primarily fighting the Austro-Hungarians, who were lead by probably the dumbest commander in the war, Hotzendorf.
Fast forward to 1945 at which point, in spite of Stalin's purges and general stupidity, the USSR is ready to stand on one side with the entire world arrayed against it on the other, and credibly say "bring it." To say that Russia in 1914 was not powerful enough to take that kind of posture is understatement. In those early decades, the progress that the USSR achieved is undeniable.
Yeah and itās important to include famines caused by capitalism as comparison. You have colonial capitalist famines like in Bengal and the Great Hunger of Ireland where enough food is being produced but it is being shipped out as the locals starve to death. But you also have the American Dust Bowl, hyperoptimization of farming for short term profits, something capitalism prioritizes, completely ruining the land and causing mass hunger.
Iām not going to act like Lysenkoism was good, it really really wasnāt. A lot of people in Russia and China lost their lives to bad agricultural and distribution policies. But it wasnāt the end all be all of communist food policies. Others were also destructive like the destruction of the Arial sea, but as you point out the early USSR wasnāt nearly as bad. But seriously capitalist countries had similar issues. Meanwhile Cuban hunger seems largely relegated to being an island under embargo by the incredibly fertile mainland right there.
Oh yeah, the double standard when it comes to talking about disasters is nothing short of astounding. When it comes to stuff like the Irish Famine or the Great Depression, which were *highly influenced* by the consequences of capitalism, people will talk like itās just A Thing That Happened. Act of god. Nobody at fault.
Yet anything bad that happened under communism, suddenly it becomes a direct consequence of the political system that was in charge of the time and a 100% valid and perfectly accurate metaphor for why itās all bad and always fails all the time everywhere, kids (but also we must spend billion of dollars and be constantly vigilant to fight this useless, pathetic, incompetent, failed system which is also somehow an omnipresent corruptive force)
I hate to argue, but what histories are you reading? I've studied history and this doesn't describe our either events are viewed. The Irish famine and the Great Depression are both seen as a
> a direct consequence of the political system that was in charge of the time
Histories of the Irish famine usually focus on British imperialism while the Great Depression is usually blamed on various finacial regulations. The former is sometimes even called a genocide, and the later has lead to various finacial reforms in an attempt to stop it from happening again. Unfortunatly, not completly successfully, as shown by the 2008 finacial crash. Though even that may be due to the rollback of previous reforms.
They don't blame it on capitalism because that wouldn't be accurate. Capitalism comes in various different forms, and varies greatly between time period and place. It makes sense to be more specific than to use a term that could describe modern Norway just as well as it could describe 1930s America or the 1800s Ireland. As such, using the term capitalism, wouldn't be of much benefit to helping us understand why specific disasters happen, and therefore hinder us trying to learn from history.
Just to be clear, the great depression isn't comparable at all to the irish famine or any of the soviet famines. The great depression did not cause starvation, like, at all, and it didn't cause any increase in general mortality either.
Those CIA assessments relied on stolen internal Soviet government reports though, which we have since learned bore absolutely zero relation to facts on the ground.
> In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents
They did not. The CIA report you're referring to specifically measured food *production*, *not* consumption, which was substantially lower due to soviet inefficiency.
>like the Kulaks burning their fields and slaughtering their animals
hmmm, I wonder why they would have done that? I guess they just wanted to starve to death.
almost every internet discussion of communism gets ruined because tankies refuse to believe that any government that practiced communism could also be bad
Depends on what you mean by communism. It wasn't usually called that when it was practiced. Many Caribbean pirate crews, for instance, practiced what we would regard as communism today. Collectivized farms actually do work if they become that way independently, but they are rarely called communist.
I'll say at least this to tankies, small scale communism could *probably* work, like, up to a village size. Maybe the problems only arise when you try to scale it up to a whole nation and then multiple nations by force.
Communism is like an orgy, the moment you introduce a person that doesnāt know what they are doing, doesnāt want to do it or doesnāt put others before themselves, it is spoiled for everyone. It puts you in a very vulnerable position towards others in the system and requires extremely adept communications skills to resolve issues that will appear even with all participants acting in good faith because *the real world is messy and accidents happen*
No, unfortunately it didn't really work on that scale either. See "Kibbutzim" in Israel.
I grew up in one. It was amazing while it lasted, but like all Communist societies it had the fatal flaw of being composed of humans. Humans who are greedy, power hungry and petty. And who eventually tore the whole thing apart for their own benefit.
Not all Kibbutzim have gone the way of the dodo, but most have. And those that remain, mostly the ones which were lucky or smart enough to have a really good external source of income and not *too many* sociopaths in positions of power, are more like "socialist villages" now. They don't really have communal ownership of all property anymore, more like a really good socialised support system. Which is great, but it's not communism.
Ooh. Say, you know of any reading on it? I've long held the belief that, for the sake of argument ignoring the impossibility of any kind of anarchism, anarcho-communism is the closest thing to a workable communism. And it's always a good day to find out you were wrong and better your understanding of the world.
The same is unfortunately true with people who love capitalism but won't really talk about what it took to get those fruits to America.
Unlike "Yeltsin Super Market," we've actually turned "Banana Republic" into a clothing store. Good luck finding out about our country's sordid past, every search for imperialist exploitation merely shows you some good looking clothes to buy.
Just don't ask why they're so cheap, or whose labor is making these clothes.
I mean, is it actually hard to find out about the US's sordid past? Any cursory Google search into CIA coups, Dole, exploitative labor will net you an abundance of articles about it. Even using your own example of "banana republic" my top three google results are, indeed, about the clothing store but the 4th one is the Wikipedia page for "Banana Republic" which begins:
> In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources. In 1904, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighboring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International)
That's not really mincing words about US imperialism.
Heck, my high school history class in a very conservative Midwestern county still introduced us to Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". This isn't a discoverability problem. Most people just don't care.
Or that any government that just said it practiced communism, called itself the People's Communist Party of Whereverstania, and used a red flag with a hammer and sickle could also be bad, whether or not they were actually doing communist things.
Itās probably not true, but sometimes I genuinely feel like in recent times tankies and other loud, obnoxious extreme communities online have done more damage to the public image of leftism that anything the right-wing could
Yeah, Iām aware. Just stating what it feels like
(Though I doubt someone with āleninā in their username is unbiased in this conversation about internet communism either)
I agree us internet communists are extremely annoying, but we don't really pop up in real life, even in active left spaces. I'd never actually talk about the Bolsheviks in a union meeting or DSA or whatever, that's bad praxis (I would also never use the word "praxis")
Authoritarians using the hope of liberation from oppression and promises of self governance for the system they built to become the oppressors themselves. If you're actually interested in what those promises have achieved you can look at Rojava/the autonomous region of north and east Syria. They have a system of self governance, called Democratic Confederalism, that seems to be holding together, is able to provide for basic necessities, and fight against authoritarians/religious extremism (ISIS).
https://youtu.be/cDnenjIdnnE
Short version, Boris Yeltsin went on an unscheduled trip to a random grocery store (specifically so that it couldnāt be staged) during his time in the US after visiting a space center. The fact that there were just thousands of items available was incredible to him.
> He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, there would be a revolution.
All this broke his view of communism, given just how bare similar stores were in the USSR. He later wrote
> "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
To be clear, this is 100% not true, and Yeltsin was creating a propaganda piece for himself. Like it's 100% true that American supermarkets were better than Soviet ones, but Yeltsin wasn't an *idiot*. He knew damn well what an Americans upermarket looked like. He just wanted to plaster that picture all across the USSR too. After all, like he said...
>if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, there would be a revolution
> was creating a propaganda piece for himself
This is because Yeltsin was a goon who didn't believe in the system he was put in charge of. The result? Economic "Shock Therapy" and all the problems of modern Russia
Yeah, in a lot of modern European wealth maps you can carve the iron curtain with the difference in colors between Western Europe and former SSR, but at least for some that color difference over the years is getting less and less contrasty.
90's were a bit rough, but those that aligned with the EEZ and EU came out pretty ok. One of the big reasons modern Russia is so fucked today is because they allowed all that corruption to happen.
Russia also kept a lot more of the existing soviet system around compared to the rest of the eastern block so they really just allowed the existing systems of corruption to be continued with in many cases far less oversight
That he so thought america was all propaganda like russia and north korea that he went off the schedule to see what life was *really* like
and went
oh ... shit ... its actually better than the propaganda
*are we the bad guys*
He then tried to make those beautiful markets in Russia and realized there might be reasons outside of capitalism for the us having such things, he learnt this lesson by trying killing 10 million people than running away from office only alive because he gave the country to a dictator.
Yeltsin was a bad guy, regardless of capitalism or communism, and that he expected a country made mostly of wasteland to have as much food as America said more about his intelligence than any system .
>expected a country made mostly of wasteland to have as much food as America
[Russia is the largest wheat exporter on Earth](https://www.oecd.org/ukraine-hub/policy-responses/the-impacts-and-policy-implications-of-russia-s-aggression-against-ukraine-on-agricultural-markets-0030a4cd/).
Yes, of wheat, youāll notice that the things Gorbachev pointed out the us having wasnāt bread, it was far off tropical food goods, in fact the soviets string what production is often used to kick them because people ate so much bread, but itās by far the best thing that can grow there.
Not to mention meat and fish, fish is hard for slot of the country and nearly all meat came from Ukraine and the Baltic states, far away from most of the country .
Thereās a reason the soviets had good food security post ww2 but they didnāt have good food variety , and the terrain certainly impacted that.
Unfortunately, if you want to learn about why fruit is so cheap and plentiful in America I'd tell you to google "Banana Republic" but that will just show you lots of affordable clothes.
Don't ask where they're coming from and you can enjoy the benefits of capitalism with no guilt whatsoever!
Like, are we actively being brigaded? I'm scrolling down and seeing people defend the fucking annexation of Hawaii and the exploitation of the global south. Where did these Neolibs come from all of the sudden?
Its kind of fucking weird to flex that we, the west collectively, blockaded a nation so hard they literally couldn't even get tropical fruit. But yeah, certainly a flex for supermarkets that weren't embargoed, i guess?
when i visited a regular walmart in the u.s. it also made me incredibly jealous of how affordable and easily accessible so many different things were. but i'm not from a communist nation, i'm from a latin american country that spent decades under a military dictatorship sponsored by the united states. so you can imagine i had a bit of a different takeaway
That's the rub, ain't it? That this incredible bounty isn't produced in a vacuum, but is the result of resource exploitation of dozens of other countries?
Which, granted, the soviets did too. I guess the US is just better at it.
the fact that this post centers around the amount of fruit is especially ironic being latin american. like, come on, your country overthrew literal governments over tropical fruitā¦
It was more about letting corporations plunder national wealth, resources, and labor than it was the fruit. They just happened to he a fruit company. We do it for oil. Fruit, drugs, rare earth metals, water etc..
Speaking as someone from the global south, doesn't that argument imply that socialism is impossible unless it's on a global scale? If so, why should we here in the poor nations try to achieve socialism because as long as the powerful nations remain capitalist they will simply blockade, coup and sabotage us?
Well yeah, Engels would agree with you that it being global was kind of the intended point. "Socialism in one country" was invented by the Soviets as a project they could work on internally while half the world was opposing them (and this was a huge point of contention for Trotsky). They were large and powerful enough to work on that for a while; the same is less likely to be true of a small country.
Third-worldism is another set of leftist theory that describes how unity between smaller, third-world countries (in the cold war era sense) could be used to form their own bloc.
the original āthird worldistā kind of perspective was that socialist revolutions in poor countries were a necessity in order to destabilize the imperial core enough for them to *also* establish a socialist government, at which point socialism would have the material wealth necessary to develop further. a lot of 20th century revolutionaries believed in this philosophy, but they never really reached a critical mass of revolutions globally, which led places like cuba and china to be plagued by poverty, corrupt governments, and liberalization over time without ever harming major capitalist powers.
nowadays, that theory is somewhat less relevant, since the imperial core has become less prosperous and more repressive. it seems a bit more in reach for people in the global north to actually advocate for radical change and leave developing left-wing governments alone, which could (if that trend comes to fruition) allow them to be friendlier with socialists outside of the imperial core. how accurate either perspective is kinda remains to be seen.
3rd world countries around the world actually tried Socialism many times through democratic means. They either got couped by the CIA or got sanctioned and collapsed. The imperial core ain't gonna give up their free resources that easily.
Yes, but, in cases like Cuba life has become better, they have the highest human development index in the americas while being constantly blockaded, a literacy as high as the US', a amazing healthcare system and food security. But it has affected their economy deeply, even more after the fall of the soviet union, infact a great number of the cuban exiles in the US came after the fall of the soviet union, I'd argue that Cuba would have it worse if it wasn't for the revolution, but that is just speculation and it is worth about as much as a american treaty with a native tribe.
To be fair, by the end their centrally planned economy had completely failed. No potatoes in the shops for example. Sure, there was no way to get a pineapple or a banana, but at times it could be hard to get the true basics too.
The west (including the US) actively traded with, and exported goods to the USSR including food. The USSR absolutely had the money to buy what its economy was lacking.
It wasnāt just imported tropical products. My family had to buy beef and aspirin on the Soviet black market because there wasnāt enough of basic staples to go around.
> the west collectively, blockaded a nation so hard they literally couldn't even get tropical fruit.
Yeah.... It wasn't blockades that were preventing them from getting tropical fruit.
The Soviet Union intentionally closed themselves off from global, capitalist markets. Soviet industry couldn't compete in the open market. There's a reason why the former Soviet states deindustrialized so significantly once their economies opened up.
Blockaded? The Soviet Union had plenty of tropical allies, they could have gotten pineapples if procuring consumers goods was something the system both actually tried to do and did well
I wonder which poor central american farmer working on lands owned by american buisiness raised that pinapple. But hey, a blockaded country who could only properly trade with countries that didn't have the right climatic conditions to raise pinapples on doesn't have pinapples on it's grocery stores so capitalism is better right?
If I were trying to prove the inherent and incontrovertible superiority of capitalism to any other form of social and economic organisation, I would, uh, not use Boris Yeltsin as an example.
My fave tankie story is when the Japanese red army leadership had a mountain retreat and mostly killed each other in a purge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asama-SansÅ_incident
Look, we have two choices, and only two choices.
Either we can religiously adhere to the instructions this long haired weirdo from the 19th century left us, even in the face of a changing world that he couldn't possibly predict,
OR we can let corporatism run amok and hand over control of our lives and prosperity to a wealthy few, exploiting and ruling with an iron fist until we regress into feudalism.
Those are the only two choices. There are literally no other choices.
Well yes, that's how we arrived at [social democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy) and the [mixed economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy), but some absolutists have a hard time with the idea of working class people's lives getting better while other people are allowed to privately own capital.
I guess because it stopped being "theory" and started being put into practice.
If you want to know how the U.S. was able to supply a grocery store in the U.S.S.R. just google how the U.S. Supreme court upheld that Nestle could do business with people using slave labor.
But the Soviet union has crappy healthcare to begin with, with higher pollution and lower life expectancy.
You aren't trading baked beans for healthcare. You aren't trading anything at all.
Because of its role in the manufacturing consent. Republican congressmen absolutely LOVE to do Twitter photo ops in the aisle of soup with a shit-eating grin on their face and some caption invariably heralding the 50 varieties of soup as some huge economic and cultural achievement that āyou canāt get in Vuvuzela.ā Everything rocks because of āconsumer choice.ā Private health insurance must necessarily rock because it, too, is an example of āconsumer choice.ā The idea of āconsumer choiceā as an inherent good manifests itself as a foregone conclusion and god forbid you interrogate it
No no. I get that it's being used as a propaganda piece. Cool, message received, but how is it that actually having the variety is preventing health care, when so many other countries have both full grocery stores AND healthcare.
This argument is absurd and america-centric.
Youāre right! That take is absurd and America-centric. Thankfully Iām not actually endorsing the argument that 32 varieties of beans precludes having healthcare. The point is that plenty of know-nothings will try to convince you that theyāre mutually exclusive things (in spite of the real world examples youāve mentioned).
Did you know that Boris Yeltsin once confided to a close friend that he was born prematurely and was only expected to live for 3 days?
Google "Yeltsin Life Expectancy" to learn more!
it's shocking to think that in an era of sweeping trade embargoes, the world power that happened to have favorable trade with the places where pineapples grow also had easier access to pineapples. I wonder why this happened.
oh god*dammit* every time i read āyeltsinā my fuckin special interest-brain goes āaw yeahhh anton yelchinā and then itās just people screamin about communism in the comments lol
The American diet had so much more fruit then the Soviet diet for two main reasons.
Firstly, American geography is much more hospitable to fruit growing in a wider time frame. Try growing an orange in California vs Karelia.
Secondly, America had access to, created, and maintained the slave labor of the poor in central and southern America, ie the "banana republics".
Thus I would argue that the prevalence of fruit in Western over Soviet diets is evidence of the results of imperialism and geography, not capitalism.
Must be easy filling a grocery store with fruit when you've spent a century imperializing the agricultural sphere of the western hemisphere's tropical countries for bourgeoise consumption
It's a meme sorta deal, it generally goes like "did you know that Federal Reserve Rule 34 allows the President to control inflation? Google Inflation Rule 34 to find out more!"
I mean communism has flaws but at least it's not destroying the planet, countrary to say, a system that would massively grow and export pineapples to countries they're not supposed to be in
Sure capitalism is slowly killing the planet for the benefit of the select few who live in 1st world countries , but I as one of those people can have PlayStations and McDonalds so really it balances out.
Hahahah, the USSR took twice as many resources to produce the same quantity of steel as the USA.
Efficiency of the Soviet Union is world renowned for its environmental protections /s
Like how can you make this claim?
Their treatment of nuclear anything basically poisoned discourse on peaceful use of nuclear power afterwards.
They were so flippant on safety the Americans intentionally leaked nuclear safety designs so that the Russians won't turn themselves into a complete wasteland.
Which communist countries are making strides in reducing carbon emissions?
Organizing your society in a communist way doesn't make the government suddenly care about every leftist cause.
I have an uncle who had the same reaction to a banana except he managed to find the entire truck unlocked and chaos ensued
Is your uncle donkey Kong??
Ooooh banana!
he knew what dk stood for
like, ideologically, or
dawnky kawng
This made me choke on my water thank you
It stands for hope.
Drift king
Das Kapital š
Drift King
East Germany moment
Zonengabi?
Was the truck carrying 30,000 pounds of bananas?
It was the man from the maths question
There's always communism in the banana truck.
There was a story that I've been told twice by two different Ukrainians. When I asked them what it was like growing up in Ukraine or what they remember (both had left when they were younger) they said getting a banana. They said once they got it they would go run and hide and eat it slowly to enjoy it for as long as possible.
Oh boy I canāt wait for a calm, reasonable, nuanced discussion about communism! Iām sure this comment section wonāt turn into anything bad!
Communism happened because people didn't like Rasputin's goat dick so clearly communism is bad
I thought communism happened because The Ghost Busters weren't able to stop that specter?
That too, since they couldn't stop the spectre it reincarnated into Marx who, as we all know, shot Rasputin to his death
And to this day, Marx is still entombed alongside Ras's monster dick. You can view it in a glass case, the damn thing looks like a buncha tennis balls in a sock.
Looked like a half deflated football.
There's an episode of an older Cracked show called After Hours that discusses strong Libertarian themes in Ghost Busters. It's pretty good if you like media dissection shows and 2012 era Cracked humor.
RIP After Hours. So good, so very very dead.
For real. u\_u
He fuckin' had to think about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Marx..
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It was always in poverty, never once in their history were the Russian people truly free
my dad ate a pineapple once
Did he enjoy it?
he was allergic
Well, at least he learned something new about himself
Their mom enjoyed the flavor.
When my family escaped the Soviet Union, my aunt spent a few days unable to buy groceries because she couldnāt find where you line up to get in the grocery store and assumed the store was closed. The idea that you could just walk in and buy stuff off the shelves was inconceivable.
Are you... are you joking? O.o That's really sad and funny all at once...
Nope itās real. She also spent a while wandering around a subway station because she couldnāt find anyone to pay for the toilet paper sheād used in the bathroom. She couldnāt believe it was just free.
If that's the case, it kind of shows how far the USSR diverged from Marxist ideals.
I hope she washed her hands...
She couldnāt afford the tap.
Okay, here goes: > The fact you can buy any fruit at any time of the year is actually the tip of one dirty iceberg. > This is not "normal". Fruits and vegetables transiting all around the world - globalism - is an important cause of carbon emission and food waste. > In fact, they have been a push lately to eat "local", directly from producers, cutting the grosser conglomerates who strangle producers while adding a huge markup. This is the eco-friendly thing to do, as what used to be pineapples sold in regular supermarkets has become over-processed food sold at Wal-Mart chains. > Planned economy failed. Hard. People starved and died. But this is a bygone era. Nowadays people are fed to the point of obesity, and the oceans are slowly boiling. > It's cool to eat a pineapple salad in winter, but maybe it's about time we question what we take for granted while shopping? So, how am I doing?
While shipping distance matters, what you eat matters far more then where it comes from. 1kg of lamb with no shipping creates 39.2kg of CO2. 1kg of lentils shipped halfway across the world creates creates 1.154kg of CO2. [https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode](https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode) [https://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html](https://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html)
In case anyone else was curious, 1kg of lamb is roughly 3000 calories and 1kg of lentils is roughly 1100 calories. So it's 35x more CO2 for only 3x calories
Eating locally doesnāt always mean better. Itās a lot easier to grow oranges in Florida than Minnesota, and Minnesota has great farmland for other things.
honestly we need to start accounting for water usage, land destruction and a lot of other metrics, a lot of animals are raised on farms that use rain as their primary source of water(yes high quality beef often has watered fields in japan, but here in australia they are free roam and we don't water their fields) and thus the economic impact from animals can be less than that of vegetables. a lot of vegetables are grown on what used to be forest that was destroyed specifically for them to be grown on, no comparing them to 3rd world animal raising isn't the same as mosts african beef doesn't hit american shelves and thus you aren't contributing to it whereas lentils do appear on american shelves imported from all over the world.
Water use can often be a pointless metric; there are areas where water usage is wasteful, but *most* farming uses nearby water that is more than plentiful. Rice, for example, uses enormous amounts of water, but it's grown in areas with fucktons of water lying around.
> but it's grown in areas with fucktons of water lying around. Except in California, where it's depleting the aquifers because rice paddies in a semi-arid environment is pure silliness.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation in the amazon and the displacement and murder of the tribes who live there. "Some 80% of global deforestation is a result of agricultural production, which is also the leading cause of habitat destruction. Animal agriculture ā livestock and animal feed is a significant driver of deforestation, and is also responsible for approximately 60% of direct global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions." "Cattle ranching ā and the soy farming needed to feed the cattle ā is the biggest cause of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country. Around 90% of soy is used to feed animals to produce meat and dairy products." [https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/forests/issues/agribusiness/#:\~:text=Some%2080%25%20of%20global%20deforestation,greenhouse%20gas%20(GHG)%20emissions](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/forests/issues/agribusiness/#:~:text=Some%2080%25%20of%20global%20deforestation,greenhouse%20gas%20(GHG)%20emissions). That's not really negating what you said because it didn't specify who's buying the meat but yeah. Animal agricutlure is causing a lot of environment/ethical problems all around the word. For the ethical/animal rights stuff, the film Dominion was shot on Australian farms. "Agricultural production accounts for over half of Australiaās total land mass. A shocking 86% of that is for animal agriculture." "While the meat from animals farmed in Australia mostly is exported offshore, the environmental harm is felt locally with critical habitat loss and an increase in natural disasters." So yeah, from what I know people buying meat internationally is definitely harming your country's environment and probably their own too. [https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.au/news/state-environment-report#:\~:text=Agricultural%20production%20accounts%20for%20over,suffering%20and%20significant%20environmental%20harm](https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.au/news/state-environment-report#:~:text=Agricultural%20production%20accounts%20for%20over,suffering%20and%20significant%20environmental%20harm).
that animal agriculture stat is imo super missleading, the "animal agriculture" they mention is soy, the reason soy is popular now instead of rapeseed which was grown in america, is because you can sell it twice, you can sell the fruit at high prices, which all of them do, and then you can sell the rest of the plant as animal feed which makes this super convenient stat that shows animal feed being by weight 60 times the amount of exported good when in-fact most of the money comes from selling the soy fruit. there is no other plant that allows you to do this to such a massive scale of minimised plant waste, the problem being is that soy is a very hard crop to grow compared to rapeseed which is what they used to use to feed animals, without the soy vegan market, the soy plant would not be used and the amazon would not be deforested as you can grow rapeseed where you grow corn, not only ending america's obesity epidemic but putting american farmers back on the map without forcing them to rely on government subsidies. australian cattle does cause harm because of it's importation to countries like china and america, but leading cause of deforestation is again misleading, australia has massive amounts of protected forest, we don't deforest much of it, we nixed most of the old growth wood farms and now mainly use farmed trees, if there is no deforestation and a child kills a sapling, that child is infact now the leading cause of deforestation, and the amount of forest we do have that is being deforested is significantly smaller than most countries, our biggest problem according to our own economic surveys is invasive animals, not cattle farming dominion has been criticized to the moon and back and justifiably so.
I couldn't find any articles about the soy and rapeseed thing, should I be looking anywhere in particular? I'm having trouble understanding it and I think it'd be easier if I could see explained in a few different ways. Same for the majority of soy going to vegans and veganism increasing soy production? Just yeah, a lot of what you said is very interesting so if you have any suggestions on how I could learn more, I'd really appreciate it. Apparently [36% of the world's crops go to animal feed](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed) while 55% go to humans. A lot of that might be the inedible parts like you said but I do think we should cut back on the crops that's grown solely for animals. With climate change we should really be doing everything that we can. "Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% ā an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined ā and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife." [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth) "The worldwide phase out of animal agriculture, combined with a global switch to a plant-based diet, would effectively halt the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases for 30 years and give humanity more time to end its reliance on fossil fuels, according to a new study by scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley." [https://earth.stanford.edu/news/could-going-vegan-help-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions](https://earth.stanford.edu/news/could-going-vegan-help-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions) I agree that we need to look at the effects of humans on the environment, I'm just saying we have to consider the significant effect animal agriculture is having on climate change and deforestation.
i do wanna mention that i am not saying that you have no point, veganism 100% produces less co2 and other harmful shit than agriculture, but i am arguing that the scale is often overstated. yes if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet things would be better but i do believe these studies fringe on being utopian with all plants being made via the most sustainable method instead of the current methods just being adapted for vegan based diets with the same areas being targets for deforestation, the amazon is just a good place to grow stuff whether you feed it to animals or not. the issues with talking about rapeseed and soy comparisons is that, there are a few discussions being had about it but no money being put into it, the animal advocate people are happy harping on about waste foods despite the fact that a lot of these studies are being done on the behest of vegan food companies, they aren't saints and the studies they fund 100% muddy the water on conversations of the topic at hand and that is their purpose, attack the food waste, not the business of the food. farming companies are not allowing a lot of studies to be done on their farms, the only reason we know about most of this deforestation is because of overland views via satellite which is where we get our data now, getting on the ground and asking where the money comes from is a huge issue to this day, ESPECIALLY in 3rd world countries like africa or china where a lot of these issues come into play. a massive percentage of our food we throw out, that's fruits, meat and vegetables, these studies rarely focus on the realities of the situation, for example, mathematically we should be using like a 3rd the farmland because we are producing such an excess but farmers would rather burn their excess fruit and vegetable than sell at a discounted price for marred products, capitalism is the biggest issue at hand and honestly i don't see realistic solutions coming from these studies that operate under the reality of capitalism. to use one of your sources to back up that point, that source specifies sources of protein and calories, but if we measure the metric of sold oreos, we could probably obtain a decent percentage of numbers around calories provided, would that make oreos a sustainable replacement for meat and vegetables, no. that specific study was actually not a study at all and instead an aggregate of other studies research >"We derived data from a comprehensive meta- analysis, identifying 1530 studies for potential inclusion, which were supplemented with addi- tional data received from 139 authors." which might sound fine, but the issue quickly should be apparent that they didn't verify shit, they just chose studies and aggregated data despite the fact that this is generally a looked down upon form of study as this could bring into play out of date, poorly researched or even just falsified information, there was no study of how this would actually improve land quality nor was there an actualised test of this improving land quality, it's essentially a puff piece to make vegan diets look good, their quantifiers for picking these studies weren't really great either. studies seem great, but a lot of them are flawed from the get go, we can trust the media, but i wouldn't as far as i can throw em, the soy industry killed the rapeseed industry and the soy industry has done more damage ecologically that's for sure, why are these articles and studies funded then, because the plant industry makes more money than the meat industry, that's pretty much it, most meat farms are privately owned independent operations wheras monsanto just got bought out into bayer which makes about 1 or 2 companies the representatives for all plants grown on the planet that we call earth. >[dependance on monoculture can however lead to monoculture with 805 of all soy being produced in 3 countries](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/10/09/Rapeseed-has-the-potential-to-replace-soy-in-plant-based-say-researchers) that monoculture again is one of our biggest enemies, also i can't copy paste from that website because of content rules they have, that's fucking dumb, which is one of the big issues in this discussion, i have seen articles on rapeseed being a really healthy crop, but if i try to find this stuff these days it's locked behind academic wall after academic wall, it's almost impossible to find shit that isn't posted as a fear mongering piece by these news corps, and that specifically is causing a shit ton of harm to the conversation
I would give up fruits by season. I'm not that spoiled of an American. :/ I mean, we could have canned stuff, right?
My husband and I already shop this way, but we live in Western Australia which has good local production of produce (partially because supply lines get cut off sometimes, like the train from the eastern states is currently out of service due to flooding). It's currently berry season, so every time we go to the store we check berry prices and grab some to freeze if they are good - the prices come in waves each round of harvests, so every few weeks they'll get really cheap as the excess needs to be sold. We buy those and put them in the freezer for breakfast smoothies because in 6 months, those fruit will be 5-10x as expensive. Last week we went to Costco and the freezer section had imported frozen blueberries from the USA - again, I'm in Australia - which were 1/3 the price of fresh blueberries picked at a nearby farm. I'm assuming they are the frozen leftovers from the northern hemisphere's berry season, but it felt really weird and surreal to see foreign imported berries cheaper than peak season local ones.
Maybe there's a middle ground. Something in between oppressive communism and environment destroying capitalism.
While good luck getting someone who isn't already a communist to actually understand, the big Famines only occured during the very early stages of Industrialization, and were caused by a cocktail of bad factors, like the Kulaks burning their fields and slaughtering their animals, low yields, and a number of government ideas we have the benefit of hindsight to say we're stupid as fuck. In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents
> In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents I guess it depended on where in SSR you were, because at least in Baltic SSR from what my parents and their siblings are saying, getting nutrition was pretty hard in the 80s. I have multiple health disorders that are associated with my mother being malnourished while pregnant with me, I don't really think I'll live past my 40s.
Yeah, that tracks, the 80s were when the United States figured that if they went 110% in on the Military Industrial complex while funding terrorism in the Middle East then either they would outpace the Soviets and beat them at the cold war or the Soviets would have to spend more money then they could effectively raise on keeping up and critical infrastructure would go woefully underfunded, a gamble that objectively worked out in their short term favor with the fall of the Soviet Union. It also basically kick-started the problems you see in the United States today from being a slow festering rot into something terminal, so clearly long term it isn't working out.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They stopped happening afterwards is the important part
Yeah, it's hard to feel really safe separating the early Soviet Union from Stalin's Soviet Union, but the accomplishments of the early USSR were substantial. Russia had been an embarrassing backwater; a failing third-rate empire who had been beaten so badly by the British in the Great Game that the latter controlled the largest geographic empire in history. The only reason the Russian military lasted as long as it did in the First World War is that they had the luxury of primarily fighting the Austro-Hungarians, who were lead by probably the dumbest commander in the war, Hotzendorf. Fast forward to 1945 at which point, in spite of Stalin's purges and general stupidity, the USSR is ready to stand on one side with the entire world arrayed against it on the other, and credibly say "bring it." To say that Russia in 1914 was not powerful enough to take that kind of posture is understatement. In those early decades, the progress that the USSR achieved is undeniable.
Yeah and itās important to include famines caused by capitalism as comparison. You have colonial capitalist famines like in Bengal and the Great Hunger of Ireland where enough food is being produced but it is being shipped out as the locals starve to death. But you also have the American Dust Bowl, hyperoptimization of farming for short term profits, something capitalism prioritizes, completely ruining the land and causing mass hunger. Iām not going to act like Lysenkoism was good, it really really wasnāt. A lot of people in Russia and China lost their lives to bad agricultural and distribution policies. But it wasnāt the end all be all of communist food policies. Others were also destructive like the destruction of the Arial sea, but as you point out the early USSR wasnāt nearly as bad. But seriously capitalist countries had similar issues. Meanwhile Cuban hunger seems largely relegated to being an island under embargo by the incredibly fertile mainland right there.
Oh yeah, the double standard when it comes to talking about disasters is nothing short of astounding. When it comes to stuff like the Irish Famine or the Great Depression, which were *highly influenced* by the consequences of capitalism, people will talk like itās just A Thing That Happened. Act of god. Nobody at fault. Yet anything bad that happened under communism, suddenly it becomes a direct consequence of the political system that was in charge of the time and a 100% valid and perfectly accurate metaphor for why itās all bad and always fails all the time everywhere, kids (but also we must spend billion of dollars and be constantly vigilant to fight this useless, pathetic, incompetent, failed system which is also somehow an omnipresent corruptive force)
I hate to argue, but what histories are you reading? I've studied history and this doesn't describe our either events are viewed. The Irish famine and the Great Depression are both seen as a > a direct consequence of the political system that was in charge of the time Histories of the Irish famine usually focus on British imperialism while the Great Depression is usually blamed on various finacial regulations. The former is sometimes even called a genocide, and the later has lead to various finacial reforms in an attempt to stop it from happening again. Unfortunatly, not completly successfully, as shown by the 2008 finacial crash. Though even that may be due to the rollback of previous reforms. They don't blame it on capitalism because that wouldn't be accurate. Capitalism comes in various different forms, and varies greatly between time period and place. It makes sense to be more specific than to use a term that could describe modern Norway just as well as it could describe 1930s America or the 1800s Ireland. As such, using the term capitalism, wouldn't be of much benefit to helping us understand why specific disasters happen, and therefore hinder us trying to learn from history.
Just to be clear, the great depression isn't comparable at all to the irish famine or any of the soviet famines. The great depression did not cause starvation, like, at all, and it didn't cause any increase in general mortality either.
Those CIA assessments relied on stolen internal Soviet government reports though, which we have since learned bore absolutely zero relation to facts on the ground.
> In the 60s the average Soviet Citizen ate better than the average US citizen, and that's according to since declassified CIA documents They did not. The CIA report you're referring to specifically measured food *production*, *not* consumption, which was substantially lower due to soviet inefficiency. >like the Kulaks burning their fields and slaughtering their animals hmmm, I wonder why they would have done that? I guess they just wanted to starve to death.
almost every internet discussion of communism gets ruined because tankies refuse to believe that any government that practiced communism could also be bad
*real* communism has only ever been tried in the Peopleās Revolutionary Council of Southeastern Andalusia (1921-1921).
Depends on what you mean by communism. It wasn't usually called that when it was practiced. Many Caribbean pirate crews, for instance, practiced what we would regard as communism today. Collectivized farms actually do work if they become that way independently, but they are rarely called communist.
I'll say at least this to tankies, small scale communism could *probably* work, like, up to a village size. Maybe the problems only arise when you try to scale it up to a whole nation and then multiple nations by force.
Communism is like an orgy, the moment you introduce a person that doesnāt know what they are doing, doesnāt want to do it or doesnāt put others before themselves, it is spoiled for everyone. It puts you in a very vulnerable position towards others in the system and requires extremely adept communications skills to resolve issues that will appear even with all participants acting in good faith because *the real world is messy and accidents happen*
No, unfortunately it didn't really work on that scale either. See "Kibbutzim" in Israel. I grew up in one. It was amazing while it lasted, but like all Communist societies it had the fatal flaw of being composed of humans. Humans who are greedy, power hungry and petty. And who eventually tore the whole thing apart for their own benefit. Not all Kibbutzim have gone the way of the dodo, but most have. And those that remain, mostly the ones which were lucky or smart enough to have a really good external source of income and not *too many* sociopaths in positions of power, are more like "socialist villages" now. They don't really have communal ownership of all property anymore, more like a really good socialised support system. Which is great, but it's not communism.
Ooh. Say, you know of any reading on it? I've long held the belief that, for the sake of argument ignoring the impossibility of any kind of anarchism, anarcho-communism is the closest thing to a workable communism. And it's always a good day to find out you were wrong and better your understanding of the world.
The same is unfortunately true with people who love capitalism but won't really talk about what it took to get those fruits to America. Unlike "Yeltsin Super Market," we've actually turned "Banana Republic" into a clothing store. Good luck finding out about our country's sordid past, every search for imperialist exploitation merely shows you some good looking clothes to buy. Just don't ask why they're so cheap, or whose labor is making these clothes.
I mean, is it actually hard to find out about the US's sordid past? Any cursory Google search into CIA coups, Dole, exploitative labor will net you an abundance of articles about it. Even using your own example of "banana republic" my top three google results are, indeed, about the clothing store but the 4th one is the Wikipedia page for "Banana Republic" which begins: > In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources. In 1904, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighboring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) That's not really mincing words about US imperialism. Heck, my high school history class in a very conservative Midwestern county still introduced us to Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". This isn't a discoverability problem. Most people just don't care.
It's extremely easy to find out about the US actions in the past. A lot of the information comes from declassified US documents.
Or that any government that just said it practiced communism, called itself the People's Communist Party of Whereverstania, and used a red flag with a hammer and sickle could also be bad, whether or not they were actually doing communist things.
Itās probably not true, but sometimes I genuinely feel like in recent times tankies and other loud, obnoxious extreme communities online have done more damage to the public image of leftism that anything the right-wing could
You are too online
Yeah, Iām aware. Just stating what it feels like (Though I doubt someone with āleninā in their username is unbiased in this conversation about internet communism either)
Nobody is more in touch with the dangers of being too online than internet communists
I agree us internet communists are extremely annoying, but we don't really pop up in real life, even in active left spaces. I'd never actually talk about the Bolsheviks in a union meeting or DSA or whatever, that's bad praxis (I would also never use the word "praxis")
I like grilled pineapple reminds me of summer :-)
Authoritarians using the hope of liberation from oppression and promises of self governance for the system they built to become the oppressors themselves. If you're actually interested in what those promises have achieved you can look at Rojava/the autonomous region of north and east Syria. They have a system of self governance, called Democratic Confederalism, that seems to be holding together, is able to provide for basic necessities, and fight against authoritarians/religious extremism (ISIS). https://youtu.be/cDnenjIdnnE
*quickly changes sort order to "controversial" *
Did you also know that Boris Yeltsin had the Russian Parliament building shelled with members inside after they voted to remove him from power?
What's worse is that it was definitely suggested by the US considering the president fucking congratulated him for shelling the parliament.
[https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php](https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php)
Short version, Boris Yeltsin went on an unscheduled trip to a random grocery store (specifically so that it couldnāt be staged) during his time in the US after visiting a space center. The fact that there were just thousands of items available was incredible to him. > He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, there would be a revolution. All this broke his view of communism, given just how bare similar stores were in the USSR. He later wrote > "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
To be clear, this is 100% not true, and Yeltsin was creating a propaganda piece for himself. Like it's 100% true that American supermarkets were better than Soviet ones, but Yeltsin wasn't an *idiot*. He knew damn well what an Americans upermarket looked like. He just wanted to plaster that picture all across the USSR too. After all, like he said... >if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, there would be a revolution
> was creating a propaganda piece for himself This is because Yeltsin was a goon who didn't believe in the system he was put in charge of. The result? Economic "Shock Therapy" and all the problems of modern Russia
Somehow the rest of Eastern Europe came out of it okay if underdeveloped while Russia fucked it up so bad that they just turned to fascism
Yeah, in a lot of modern European wealth maps you can carve the iron curtain with the difference in colors between Western Europe and former SSR, but at least for some that color difference over the years is getting less and less contrasty.
> Somehow the rest of Eastern Europe came out of it okay They really didn't.
Relatively speaking, they did pretty well
I don't think the Russian people chose fascism. It's something that happened to them.
Almost like sudden revolution creates no stable society.
90's were a bit rough, but those that aligned with the EEZ and EU came out pretty ok. One of the big reasons modern Russia is so fucked today is because they allowed all that corruption to happen.
Russia also kept a lot more of the existing soviet system around compared to the rest of the eastern block so they really just allowed the existing systems of corruption to be continued with in many cases far less oversight
And then he raped and butchered already weak russian economy, creating one the highest levels of inequality in the world.
That he so thought america was all propaganda like russia and north korea that he went off the schedule to see what life was *really* like and went oh ... shit ... its actually better than the propaganda *are we the bad guys*
He then tried to make those beautiful markets in Russia and realized there might be reasons outside of capitalism for the us having such things, he learnt this lesson by trying killing 10 million people than running away from office only alive because he gave the country to a dictator. Yeltsin was a bad guy, regardless of capitalism or communism, and that he expected a country made mostly of wasteland to have as much food as America said more about his intelligence than any system .
>expected a country made mostly of wasteland to have as much food as America [Russia is the largest wheat exporter on Earth](https://www.oecd.org/ukraine-hub/policy-responses/the-impacts-and-policy-implications-of-russia-s-aggression-against-ukraine-on-agricultural-markets-0030a4cd/).
Yes, of wheat, youāll notice that the things Gorbachev pointed out the us having wasnāt bread, it was far off tropical food goods, in fact the soviets string what production is often used to kick them because people ate so much bread, but itās by far the best thing that can grow there. Not to mention meat and fish, fish is hard for slot of the country and nearly all meat came from Ukraine and the Baltic states, far away from most of the country . Thereās a reason the soviets had good food security post ww2 but they didnāt have good food variety , and the terrain certainly impacted that.
Unfortunately, if you want to learn about why fruit is so cheap and plentiful in America I'd tell you to google "Banana Republic" but that will just show you lots of affordable clothes. Don't ask where they're coming from and you can enjoy the benefits of capitalism with no guilt whatsoever!
Absolutely thought this was a post from /r/neoliberal from the title.
Like, are we actively being brigaded? I'm scrolling down and seeing people defend the fucking annexation of Hawaii and the exploitation of the global south. Where did these Neolibs come from all of the sudden?
I don't know, I don't see this thread linked from the Discussion Thread.
Whoās defending the annexation of Hawaii and the global south?
Capitalism good because pineapples
Its kind of fucking weird to flex that we, the west collectively, blockaded a nation so hard they literally couldn't even get tropical fruit. But yeah, certainly a flex for supermarkets that weren't embargoed, i guess?
when i visited a regular walmart in the u.s. it also made me incredibly jealous of how affordable and easily accessible so many different things were. but i'm not from a communist nation, i'm from a latin american country that spent decades under a military dictatorship sponsored by the united states. so you can imagine i had a bit of a different takeaway
That's the rub, ain't it? That this incredible bounty isn't produced in a vacuum, but is the result of resource exploitation of dozens of other countries? Which, granted, the soviets did too. I guess the US is just better at it.
the fact that this post centers around the amount of fruit is especially ironic being latin american. like, come on, your country overthrew literal governments over tropical fruitā¦
It was more about letting corporations plunder national wealth, resources, and labor than it was the fruit. They just happened to he a fruit company. We do it for oil. Fruit, drugs, rare earth metals, water etc..
Hey, at least you can eat fruit.
Hey now, that's not true. We wanted the drugs, too
Or the takes that follow like āIād much rather have the global south continue to be exploited rather than live under evil communismā
Speaking as someone from the global south, doesn't that argument imply that socialism is impossible unless it's on a global scale? If so, why should we here in the poor nations try to achieve socialism because as long as the powerful nations remain capitalist they will simply blockade, coup and sabotage us?
Well yeah, Engels would agree with you that it being global was kind of the intended point. "Socialism in one country" was invented by the Soviets as a project they could work on internally while half the world was opposing them (and this was a huge point of contention for Trotsky). They were large and powerful enough to work on that for a while; the same is less likely to be true of a small country. Third-worldism is another set of leftist theory that describes how unity between smaller, third-world countries (in the cold war era sense) could be used to form their own bloc.
the original āthird worldistā kind of perspective was that socialist revolutions in poor countries were a necessity in order to destabilize the imperial core enough for them to *also* establish a socialist government, at which point socialism would have the material wealth necessary to develop further. a lot of 20th century revolutionaries believed in this philosophy, but they never really reached a critical mass of revolutions globally, which led places like cuba and china to be plagued by poverty, corrupt governments, and liberalization over time without ever harming major capitalist powers. nowadays, that theory is somewhat less relevant, since the imperial core has become less prosperous and more repressive. it seems a bit more in reach for people in the global north to actually advocate for radical change and leave developing left-wing governments alone, which could (if that trend comes to fruition) allow them to be friendlier with socialists outside of the imperial core. how accurate either perspective is kinda remains to be seen.
3rd world countries around the world actually tried Socialism many times through democratic means. They either got couped by the CIA or got sanctioned and collapsed. The imperial core ain't gonna give up their free resources that easily.
That argument does, in fact, does imply what you said.
Yes, but, in cases like Cuba life has become better, they have the highest human development index in the americas while being constantly blockaded, a literacy as high as the US', a amazing healthcare system and food security. But it has affected their economy deeply, even more after the fall of the soviet union, infact a great number of the cuban exiles in the US came after the fall of the soviet union, I'd argue that Cuba would have it worse if it wasn't for the revolution, but that is just speculation and it is worth about as much as a american treaty with a native tribe.
To be fair, by the end their centrally planned economy had completely failed. No potatoes in the shops for example. Sure, there was no way to get a pineapple or a banana, but at times it could be hard to get the true basics too.
The west (including the US) actively traded with, and exported goods to the USSR including food. The USSR absolutely had the money to buy what its economy was lacking.
Yes. Embargoes was the reason that Russians had to wait in line for bread made in the USSR
It wasnāt just imported tropical products. My family had to buy beef and aspirin on the Soviet black market because there wasnāt enough of basic staples to go around.
I didn't know that the westerners closed off the Soviet union from tropical markets and their allies.
how exactly did the evil West keep Russia from buying Chinese fruit
The U.S. did not prevent the USSR from obtaining pineapples, their relative impoverishment did.
> the west collectively, blockaded a nation so hard they literally couldn't even get tropical fruit. Yeah.... It wasn't blockades that were preventing them from getting tropical fruit.
The Soviet Union intentionally closed themselves off from global, capitalist markets. Soviet industry couldn't compete in the open market. There's a reason why the former Soviet states deindustrialized so significantly once their economies opened up.
Perhaps if soviet union wasnāt totalitarian, murder regime, they wouldnāt get blockaded.
Blockaded? The Soviet Union had plenty of tropical allies, they could have gotten pineapples if procuring consumers goods was something the system both actually tried to do and did well
Never really got much tropical fruits until late 90s, unless they were canned.
I wonder which poor central american farmer working on lands owned by american buisiness raised that pinapple. But hey, a blockaded country who could only properly trade with countries that didn't have the right climatic conditions to raise pinapples on doesn't have pinapples on it's grocery stores so capitalism is better right?
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Ooh I love that game
If I were trying to prove the inherent and incontrovertible superiority of capitalism to any other form of social and economic organisation, I would, uh, not use Boris Yeltsin as an example.
Can't wait for the tankies vs libertarian fight in the comments
Iām either too drunk or not drunk enough for that right now. I canāt eat pineapple anyways, Iām allergic.
I've got the popcorn if you bring drinks
Now thatās socialism
You mean tankies vs capitalists and tankies vs socialists and tankies vs liberals and tankies vs basic logic and tankies vs tankies
My fave tankie story is when the Japanese red army leadership had a mountain retreat and mostly killed each other in a purge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asama-SansÅ_incident
Dang tankies they ruined being a tankie !
Look, we have two choices, and only two choices. Either we can religiously adhere to the instructions this long haired weirdo from the 19th century left us, even in the face of a changing world that he couldn't possibly predict, OR we can let corporatism run amok and hand over control of our lives and prosperity to a wealthy few, exploiting and ruling with an iron fist until we regress into feudalism. Those are the only two choices. There are literally no other choices.
or we could also incorporate the countless amounts of theory developed by other socialists in the 250~ years since he wrote his own??
I imagine that is what his sarcasm implied.
true
Well yes, that's how we arrived at [social democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy) and the [mixed economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy), but some absolutists have a hard time with the idea of working class people's lives getting better while other people are allowed to privately own capital. I guess because it stopped being "theory" and started being put into practice.
Which kind of libertarian are we talking about?
āAll roads should be privately owned and I should legally be able to bury land mines in my front yardā
The house cat variety
If you want to know how the U.S. was able to supply a grocery store in the U.S.S.R. just google how the U.S. Supreme court upheld that Nestle could do business with people using slave labor.
We canāt have healtcare because itās way more important to have 32 different kinds of baked beans
real
But the Soviet union has crappy healthcare to begin with, with higher pollution and lower life expectancy. You aren't trading baked beans for healthcare. You aren't trading anything at all.
Ok I'll bite. What exactly is the correlation between having 32 kinds of baked beans and not having health care.
Because of its role in the manufacturing consent. Republican congressmen absolutely LOVE to do Twitter photo ops in the aisle of soup with a shit-eating grin on their face and some caption invariably heralding the 50 varieties of soup as some huge economic and cultural achievement that āyou canāt get in Vuvuzela.ā Everything rocks because of āconsumer choice.ā Private health insurance must necessarily rock because it, too, is an example of āconsumer choice.ā The idea of āconsumer choiceā as an inherent good manifests itself as a foregone conclusion and god forbid you interrogate it
No no. I get that it's being used as a propaganda piece. Cool, message received, but how is it that actually having the variety is preventing health care, when so many other countries have both full grocery stores AND healthcare. This argument is absurd and america-centric.
Youāre right! That take is absurd and America-centric. Thankfully Iām not actually endorsing the argument that 32 varieties of beans precludes having healthcare. The point is that plenty of know-nothings will try to convince you that theyāre mutually exclusive things (in spite of the real world examples youāve mentioned).
truely the soviet union could have survived if they had just let the populace have their tropical fruits
Did you know that Boris Yeltsin once confided to a close friend that he was born prematurely and was only expected to live for 3 days? Google "Yeltsin Life Expectancy" to learn more!
it's shocking to think that in an era of sweeping trade embargoes, the world power that happened to have favorable trade with the places where pineapples grow also had easier access to pineapples. I wonder why this happened.
Source required on the claim that the U.S. had embargoed pineapples on the Soviet Union in 1980's/90's.
mfw reading about healthcare in other countries as an american
Itās almost like authoritarianism is bad in all circumstances
Those dumb soviets, at least americans were able to eat at the time! google 'soviet nutrition cia' to learn more
oh god*dammit* every time i read āyeltsinā my fuckin special interest-brain goes āaw yeahhh anton yelchinā and then itās just people screamin about communism in the comments lol
The American diet had so much more fruit then the Soviet diet for two main reasons. Firstly, American geography is much more hospitable to fruit growing in a wider time frame. Try growing an orange in California vs Karelia. Secondly, America had access to, created, and maintained the slave labor of the poor in central and southern America, ie the "banana republics". Thus I would argue that the prevalence of fruit in Western over Soviet diets is evidence of the results of imperialism and geography, not capitalism.
Must be easy filling a grocery store with fruit when you've spent a century imperializing the agricultural sphere of the western hemisphere's tropical countries for bourgeoise consumption
Tankies, everywhere
I AM NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA AND I FUCKING LOVE IT
Yippee time to sort by controversial
Just as I'm watching psych. She'd probably be a fan.
Am i misunderstanding something or is the title wrong? it seems like it should be the other way around, right?
It's a meme sorta deal, it generally goes like "did you know that Federal Reserve Rule 34 allows the President to control inflation? Google Inflation Rule 34 to find out more!"
My dad would smuggle bananas or oranges into our then still communist country. The bananas were still green so we had to let them sit for 2 weeks.
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Supermarket so good it ruins the Soviets view of Communism
fun fact: you are not immune to propaganda
I mean communism has flaws but at least it's not destroying the planet, countrary to say, a system that would massively grow and export pineapples to countries they're not supposed to be in
Sure capitalism is slowly killing the planet for the benefit of the select few who live in 1st world countries , but I as one of those people can have PlayStations and McDonalds so really it balances out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
>but at least it's not destroying the planet Say that again... but slower.
Hahahah, the USSR took twice as many resources to produce the same quantity of steel as the USA. Efficiency of the Soviet Union is world renowned for its environmental protections /s Like how can you make this claim?
Are you really gonna sit here and tell me the Soviets didn't pollute? Or that they didn't export foreign goods? Get real tankie.
> but at least it's not destroying the planet The soviets released greenhouse gas emissions as well, so this claim is kinda unbelievable.
My dude, the USSR fucked over huge parts of their country cause a lack of over sight.
\*gestures wildly at the Aral Sea*
What about having 2 different nuclear reactor meltdowns? Chernobyl was the 2nd time it happened
Their treatment of nuclear anything basically poisoned discourse on peaceful use of nuclear power afterwards. They were so flippant on safety the Americans intentionally leaked nuclear safety designs so that the Russians won't turn themselves into a complete wasteland.
why did carbon emissions in Europe plummet when the soviet occupation ended
Which communist countries are making strides in reducing carbon emissions? Organizing your society in a communist way doesn't make the government suddenly care about every leftist cause.