Having large numbers of people starve to death seems like a pretty damning indictment of a system. But I dunno, maybe I’m overly attached to food?
First, the USSR and China under Mao were not communist and did not even claim to be communist. So you have to understand that many people who are advocating for communism do not even want to emulate the Soviet Union. They are talking about a fairly different system. In fact, communism is theoretically meant to be stateless, so it shouldn’t really have a government in the sense that we would understand, though there is some debate over exactly what this means.
But most people who have studied history recognize that the Soviet system of government did not work well and oversaw numerous crimes against humanity. Of course, the same can be said for many western governments. And it’s worth noting that it’s not very clear that capitalist governments have been particularly better at avoiding famines. Several examples have already been given in this thread.
In fact, since the discovery of modern agricultural techniques, the majority of famines have been caused not by environmental factors but by the deliberate and usually violent deprivation of people from land and food resources. Recognizing this fact, which is common to all types imperialist powers, whether western or eastern, allows us to see that the root cause is not the economic system but the political system. Specifically, the oppression and exploitation of one group of people by another which happened in the USSR and China and happens today and historically under US hegemony.
People starved many many times in those places before the communist revolutions. People starved all over the world under many economic systems. Most of the time due to climate events.
That is basically what happened in the two famines you are thinking of. There was extreme drought in Europe and Central Asia for decades, which did kill a lot of people. In Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and yes Ukraine. They also died in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, parts of the Middle East. Just like many died in the US from massive droughts in the decade before.
What you probably purposefully leave out is how there was never famine again in the USSR. People experienced better caloric intake than the US up until the collapse of the union and neoliberal shock-therapy brought hunger back.
In any case, was there mismanagement during the famine of the 30s? Yea, of course.
Was there sabotage by counterrevolutionaries? Yes, of course.
Who is to blame? Not a single person, and likely not even people in general tbh.
Almost all of this also applies to the famine in China.
So idk, I know the OP doesn’t care and isn’t trying to look for an alternative to his narrative. But others who come in here might take something positive from the comments we leave.
Looks like you already have your mind made up
I’d suggest you read about the Irish and the Bengali. What economic system did those famines happen under?
The Irish potato famine was more an exogenous factor (a blight) not the direct result of mismanagement, which is generally a feature of communism. So that’s a pretty poor comparison.
Bengal was a mostly agrarian state so not really an advanced capitalist society. Again, not a particularly good comparison.
you are emphatically wrong about the irish famine ohhhmygawd.
Ireland was brought into the UK and were almost immediately subjected to renting (capitalist) landlords who mostly lived in England. they were kept in poverty and forced to be reliant on the potato as primary nourishment because the potato was the only fully-nutritious crop that was worth growing on their tiny parcels of alloted land, while the rest of the food they produced was sold out of country (by capitalists).
the British forced the Irish to be reliant on one staple crop, and when the blight happened it kicked the final leg out of the stool. to narrow this down to “an exegenous factor” is incredibly misinformed and ignorant in the face of disgusting colonialist practice.
OP’s comments seem to indicate that they are asking in bad faith, but seeing no evidence given in other comments than “whatabout famine under capitalism?”:
destabilization efforts and economic sanctions. western capitalist countries, like the us, did a shit ton with the direct intent that communism would be utterly untenable. this was not 100% of the story, but in combination with policy failures and natural disasters, there is a lot more to blame than “the revolution.”
