and the extraction economies? are you talking about in Eastern Europe or in Central Asia? because from what i understand thats not how resources and trade were allocated. for example, Cuban sugar was bought at or above world market price, and if prices were depressed, then far above market price. this actually is the site of some resentment for chauvinists.
i mean really its hard to talk about this because where do you want me to start? it's not like this is my field of expertise, either, why dont you go read what Stalin actually wrote, or better yet, why dont you visit this Excellent website:
http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/Theory/Marxism/Soviet/Stalin.htm
A good example of the extraction economy I’m thinking of is the cotton monoculture that was established in the amu darya and syr darya watersheds.
I won't read what Stalin wrote for the same reason I wouldn't read a book about WW2 by winston churchill. I'll give that site a read once i get out of the epilepsy clinic.
Lykourgos posted:Uh why wouldn't you read a book on ww2 by winston churchill, you dumb man, can you imagine if we had pausanius's book on sparta or like if theseus wrote about how he kidnapped helen, you privileged modern monster
Because he was a cokehead and I don't read books by drug addicts, i can't think of anything more classless.
seems to be kind of not in line with policy, but oh well
Crow posted:oh really, is that how the Ukrainian peasants were treated, i see, interesting
seems to be kind of not in line with policy, but oh well
What does this mean
xxCraigxx posted:If anyone wants to learn more about this I recommend reading those quotes between respawn in Call of Duty.
Crow posted:oh really, is that how the Ukrainian peasants were treated, i see, interesting
seems to be kind of not in line with policy, but oh well
if he s referencing Law of Spikelets or w/e then it's technically offic. but who can declare what this Man regardeth?
Crow posted:heres a lil list of recommendations:
Albert Szymanski who was a sociologist, has one book in particular thats an interesting analysis of the structure of the Soviet Union:
Is the Red Flag Flying?: The Political Economy of the Soviet Union. outlines the rights of citizens in the political economy of the Soviet Union in the 70s. Szymanski basically was a Maoist in the 70s, but after studying the Soviet Union became more forgiving of the structure of the USSR. it also analyzes the economic relations of the Soviet Union with other socialist and Third World countries, and its contributions to national liberation movements. Apparently, his Human Rights in the Soviet Union is also pretty good, and has extensive sourcing. You can probably find these online (at least Is the Red Flag Flying)
Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny is perhaps a rather contentious, but interesting look at the Soviet collapse, primarily in trying to understand what caused its economic unraveling. There is a ugly version available on scribd
Farm to Factory by Robert C. Allen is a much more academic look (from the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series). reappraises the era of collectivization and grand industrial projects, very well-researched and cited, and demonstrates the stunning success of industrialization and the meteoric rise of living standards. Kinda hard to find online, still havent found it. Probably worth it to find at your local giant library.
some of McCaine's recommendations:
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) John Archibald Getty. Note this is the same J. Arch. Getty that published the findings of the 9,000 page report of the opened archives in American Historical Review
Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (European History in Perspective) Kevin McDermott
I also hear this is good:
Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 by Robert W. Thurston
Phew! That's quite a thing I wrote out that is really easy to ignore! I'm sure yall got quite the reading list! *low whistle*
but let me know if ya want some suggestions on China, i got those too!
little late, but wanted to say thanks... also that econ site from BU is hilarious...
Keven posted:Its so fucking funny to see you nerds posting about Stalin every time I come home from the epilepsy clinic.
not that that's useful for any kind of rigorous anything, just sayin. i could call her up for a quiz if you want iwc
Crow posted:lmao jesus christ http://econc10.bu.edu/Old_students/oldstud_job_frame.htm
haha, those portraits are awesome
herb kessel, m.a., ph.d, boston university, president of frogtech
that whole site lol
sometimes i think that people bracket the existence of planning by simply looking at statistics for the soviet union and saying, well, it was trying to plan for this period, therefore planning must have worked tolerably okay, because the economy existed and persisted, and for a time it even grew rapidly. and they say, well, okay, things persisted up to a point, but then they reformed things towards capitalism and things fell apart quickly because of that.
the explanation that makes more sense to me goes like this:
- during early stalinist industrialization the state used massive repression and a forced decline in real wages (they fell by half) to raise investment levels sharply. this caused a large increase in output in a short period of time. this growth was almost entirely due to the redeployment of existing resources and forced savings.
- the attempt at planning things from the centre was never really fulfilled. at its most advanced (the early 1980s), plans would consist of hundreds of index goods, which would be broken down by each ministry, and again by region, enterprise and factory. there were millions of goods in the soviet union. so plans were large abstractions from real economic activity.
- likewise, the attempt to plan by materials balances and physical terms largely failed. enterprises had large incentives to try to hoard resources to fulfill their targets but had no real incentives to find efficiencies. this spiralled because each firm's tendency to hold on to resources caused others to act defensively. this contributed to the tendency towards slack plans. that is, enterprises always told their superiors that more resources were needed than actually were, as a strategy of negotiating towards something achievable.
- slack planning and related issues meant that the centre had to try to impose thousands of indicators on enterprises, micromanaging their behaviour. there was also a constant process of raiding enterprises for resources or trying to defeat hoarding by transfering assets. this made hoarding worse by making managers fear potential raids. micromanaging backed only by administrative methods meant that product quality was very difficult to maintain. since enterprises did not fund themselves through sales, but simply met state targets for output, and because prices did not float, there was little connection between the customer and the enterprise.
- one attempt to fix poor product quality was to put independent inspectors in factories. this worked fairly well in the defence industry and was considered an obvious crossover program. this program was discontinued because it was very easy to bribe these inspectors. this is an example of how many common-sensical solutions failed because they were not based on solid evidence.
- information sharing was abysmal, even at higher levels, due to political concerns. for example, most economic policy planners had little idea about the scale of fiscal and military burdens in the economy. issues such as price-cost imbalances were not allowed to be discussed. publicly-available information was unreliable and it was common to cook the books.
- because of these tendencies in the economy, labour productivity stagnated and then declined, there was underinvestment in certain areas like machine-building and imbalances in the economy were pushed off onto an expanding fiscal crisis. this led economists to suspect there would be a long recession and falling living standards even if there were positive reforms, and those positive reforms were largely constrained (no price rises due to fear of riots).
- it is important then to see this as a basic deadlock within the soviet economy by the early 1980s which was entirely the system's making and was not resolvable within this framework. the system could have perpetuated itself but it would have done so with lower living standards and no obvious way to fix imbalances in the economy. that is, even if the problems were frankly discussed, which they were not until the system slowed to a halt.
- conversion to enterprise autonomy was handled poorly due to hopes of a quick fix. essentially it was an attempt to graft market features on to the planning system but without the institutional structures to do so (price signals, strong property rights, etc.). this period of radical reform led to an immense fiscal crisis, which top policy planners were completely unprepared for, as the economy shifted onto a financial basis without adequate preparation.
- "shock therapy" was a chaotic attempt to impose order on this system by quickly assigning property rights (through a firesale) and reining in budget deficits. this contributed to a catastrophic drop in output, but much of this was already built into the fact that the radical reform period was unsustainable. that is, if the soviet union had not collapsed as an institution, there still would have been severe austerity.
- more importantly, none of the general points were unique to the soviet union. each warsaw pact country had much of the same problems. countries that fared better in some respects tended to be ones that had experience with being relatively high income countries (czechoslovakia and hungary) and experimented early on with minor but important market-style reforms.
See also this article: http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Ball.pdf
catpee posted:Socialist planning p much ended after 1955 though, in favour of a disastrous kind of hybrid economy that was forced to become more and more capitalist. During Stalin's time it was clearly effective at achieving great advances in the prioritized industries. Obv. without an entire empire to exploit it was extremely difficult to keep up with the living standards of the Western proletariat and reach economic parity with the West at the same time. China is now catching up with the West by keeping living standards low as well.
See also this article: http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Ball.pdf
the existence of subsidized producer goods does not effect the basic logic of hoarding. the selective subsidy of particular industries and technologies is a common tool and isn't really a solution to the basic problems. the reason why there were reforms in the stalinist system were because of basic dysfunctions that planners saw within the system. for example, ball admits that prices were inefficiently set, it is the foundation of his argument. if prices were close to costs then there would be no tendency against new products, he says this, but he blames the problem on the absence of producer good subsidies rather than the obvious price mismatch. if he thinks that planners systematically mistake prices then why will they be good at determining materials balances.
also they didn't efficiently invest in industrial machinery during the stalin era (and onwards). they built huge projects which required enormous upkeep costs and were a burden on the economy when they quickly became inefficient relative to new technologies.
getfiscal posted:during early stalinist industrialization the state used massive repression and a forced decline in real wages (they fell by half) to raise investment levels sharply. this caused a large increase in output in a short period of time. this growth was almost entirely due to the redeployment of existing resources and forced savings.
no the entire economic theory was that the peasant countryside was extremely inefficient, and that excess labor could be utilized to create growth. this naturally happened as the economy industrialized, and Robert C. Allen shows that the "repression" of collectivization was in fact unnecessary for economic growth (ignoring the political reasons, Allen is a pure economist). you are sort of saying this, but using specific words to cast it in a negative light, as if redeployment of labor to be more efficient without having to use massive exploitation and imperialist primitive accumulation to industrialize is a bad thing. this grows tiresome because people who don't know better could be convinced of your lies.
getfiscal posted:- the attempt at planning things from the centre was never really fulfilled. at its most advanced (the early 1980s), plans would consist of hundreds of index goods, which would be broken down by each ministry, and again by region, enterprise and factory. there were millions of goods in the soviet union. so plans were large abstractions from real economic activity.
more word twisting. that quotas were never reached was an asset to the planning system, the impossible quotas were incentives and were known to be impossible (rather than the made up propaganda stories of factories making up figures or melting down their steel pipes to meet oppressive quotas). unless you mean that the 5 year plans did not work and failed to accurately predict quotas for efficient growth, that is just plain wrong. The soviet union 5 year plans up until the death of Stalin were extremely efficient, Soviet growth during the period is only surpassed by post WWII Japan which benefited from massive help and imperialist accumulation.
getfiscal posted:- likewise, the attempt to plan by materials balances and physical terms largely failed. enterprises had large incentives to try to hoard resources to fulfill their targets but had no real incentives to find efficiencies. this spiralled because each firm's tendency to hold on to resources caused others to act defensively. this contributed to the tendency towards slack plans. that is, enterprises always told their superiors that more resources were needed than actually were, as a strategy of negotiating towards something achievable.
- slack planning and related issues meant that the centre had to try to impose thousands of indicators on enterprises, micromanaging their behaviour. there was also a constant process of raiding enterprises for resources or trying to defeat hoarding by transfering assets. this made hoarding worse by making managers fear potential raids. micromanaging backed only by administrative methods meant that product quality was very difficult to maintain. since enterprises did not fund themselves through sales, but simply met state targets for output, and because prices did not float, there was little connection between the customer and the enterprise.
- one attempt to fix poor product quality was to put independent inspectors in factories. this worked fairly well in the defence industry and was considered an obvious crossover program. this program was discontinued because it was very easy to bribe these inspectors. this is an example of how many common-sensical solutions failed because they were not based on solid evidence.
- information sharing was abysmal, even at higher levels, due to political concerns. for example, most economic policy planners had little idea about the scale of fiscal and military burdens in the economy. issues such as price-cost imbalances were not allowed to be discussed. publicly-available information was unreliable and it was common to cook the books.
- because of these tendencies in the economy, labour productivity stagnated and then declined, there was underinvestment in certain areas like machine-building and imbalances in the economy were pushed off onto an expanding fiscal crisis. this led economists to suspect there would be a long recession and falling living standards even if there were positive reforms, and those positive reforms were largely constrained (no price rises due to fear of riots).
- it is important then to see this as a basic deadlock within the soviet economy by the early 1980s which was entirely the system's making and was not resolvable within this framework. the system could have perpetuated itself but it would have done so with lower living standards and no obvious way to fix imbalances in the economy. that is, even if the problems were frankly discussed, which they were not until the system slowed to a halt.
half of this is straight up untrue, and the other half is confusing the Stalin period with the post-Stalin period (which share very little in common). the worst part about all of this is like crow said, I am not an expert and am not fully qualified to dispute every single little piece of bullshit. I can say to anyone who cares, read actual documents and sources, read the excellent books that Crow recommends, especially read Farm To Factory (its less than 200 pages I think), none of these "problems" are at all supported by the data of remarkable economic growth, rise in living standards, and industrialization that the USSR achieved.
getfiscal posted:- conversion to enterprise autonomy was handled poorly due to hopes of a quick fix. essentially it was an attempt to graft market features on to the planning system but without the institutional structures to do so (price signals, strong property rights, etc.). this period of radical reform led to an immense fiscal crisis, which top policy planners were completely unprepared for, as the economy shifted onto a financial basis without adequate preparation.
- "shock therapy" was a chaotic attempt to impose order on this system by quickly assigning property rights (through a firesale) and reining in budget deficits. this contributed to a catastrophic drop in output, but much of this was already built into the fact that the radical reform period was unsustainable. that is, if the soviet union had not collapsed as an institution, there still would have been severe austerity.
- more importantly, none of the general points were unique to the soviet union. each warsaw pact country had much of the same problems. countries that fared better in some respects tended to be ones that had experience with being relatively high income countries (czechoslovakia and hungary) and experimented early on with minor but important market-style reforms.
lol
think of all of this like the right wing kock brothers flunkies who keep complex blogs trying to disprove climate change. do you know the specificity of this or that complex climate model? do you know this equation they dispute, or this chemical reaction they say doesn't happen? sure some actual scientist who is trained shows up eventually and shows why every single claim they made is wrong, but the damage is already done, and half the time the scientific explanations make no more sense to the common person than the bullshit he's arguing with.
we may be marxists, but how many of us could effectively argue that the okashinko problem is incorrect to an economist? how many of us could show mathematically that the rate of profit has been falling? there's a reason scholars exist, and just living in the heart of capitalism we're at a massive disadvantage in trusting scholarship to not be propaganda. believing in things without evidence is religion and pointless, but automatically being swayed by the latest pile of words in front of you can be just as bad. have a little bit of trust in your instincts, and let all information age with time before you absorb it fully. I think this is where crow was getting at with trust your experience, and distrust snake oil salesman who are willing to throw Marxist concepts out the window but try and sell you a new leftist cure for the world (this especially goes for the post-marxists getfiscal loves so much)
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
getfiscal posted:catpee posted:Socialist planning p much ended after 1955 though, in favour of a disastrous kind of hybrid economy that was forced to become more and more capitalist. During Stalin's time it was clearly effective at achieving great advances in the prioritized industries. Obv. without an entire empire to exploit it was extremely difficult to keep up with the living standards of the Western proletariat and reach economic parity with the West at the same time. China is now catching up with the West by keeping living standards low as well.
See also this article: http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Ball.pdfthe existence of subsidized producer goods does not effect the basic logic of hoarding. the selective subsidy of particular industries and technologies is a common tool and isn't really a solution to the basic problems. the reason why there were reforms in the stalinist system were because of basic dysfunctions that planners saw within the system. for example, ball admits that prices were inefficiently set, it is the foundation of his argument. if prices were close to costs then there would be no tendency against new products, he says this, but he blames the problem on the absence of producer good subsidies rather than the obvious price mismatch. if he thinks that planners systematically mistake prices then why will they be good at determining materials balances.
also they didn't efficiently invest in industrial machinery during the stalin era (and onwards). they built huge projects which required enormous upkeep costs and were a burden on the economy when they quickly became inefficient relative to new technologies.
like I know the second part is straight up untrue since Allen specifically disproves it in Farm to Factory. I no longer have my copy but he specifically differentiates between building new, technologically advanced machinery and maintaining the upkeep on old and inefficient machinery for political reasons (social stability; new bourgeoisie had different goals) as the fundamental difference between Stalin's success in achieving growth and the stagnation that begun to build during Kruschev and peaked during Brezhnev.
Crow posted:heres a lil list of recommendations:
- Albert Szymanski who was a sociologist, has one book in particular thats an interesting analysis of the structure of the Soviet Union:
Is the Red Flag Flying?: The Political Economy of the Soviet Union. outlines the rights of citizens in the political economy of the Soviet Union in the 70s. Szymanski basically was a Maoist in the 70s, but after studying the Soviet Union became more forgiving of the structure of the USSR. it also analyzes the economic relations of the Soviet Union with other socialist and Third World countries, and its contributions to national liberation movements. Apparently, his Human Rights in the Soviet Union is also pretty good, and has extensive sourcing. You can probably find these online (at least Is the Red Flag Flying)
- Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny is perhaps a rather contentious, but interesting look at the Soviet collapse, primarily in trying to understand what caused its economic unraveling. There is a ugly version available on scribd
- Farm to Factory by Robert C. Allen is a much more academic look (from the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series). reappraises the era of collectivization and grand industrial projects, very well-researched and cited, and demonstrates the stunning success of industrialization and the meteoric rise of living standards. Kinda hard to find online, still havent found it. Probably worth it to find at your local giant library.
some of McCaine's recommendations:
- Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) John Archibald Getty. Note this is the same J. Arch. Getty that published the findings of the 9,000 page report of the opened archives in American Historical Review
- Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (European History in Perspective) Kevin McDermott
I also hear this is good:
- Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 by Robert W. Thurston
Phew! That's quite a thing I wrote out that is really easy to ignore! I'm sure yall got quite the reading list! *low whistle*
but let me know if ya want some suggestions on China, i got those too!
I'm very interested if there's an equivalent economic study like Farm to Factory for China under Mao. thanks and sorry you wasted so much effort on sick and psychotic people
for example:
The causes of the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union are the
subject of chapter 8. Allen reaches the conventional conclusion that this
resulted from the mobilization of capital and labor, but the analysis of
capital accumulation he favors gives too much attention to Feldman at the
expense of Stanislaw Gomulka.19 There is no mention of import-led
growth. Allen states that the development of the producer goods sector
was autarchic and that "exporting wheat and importing machinery... was
not necessary for rapid growth."20 Actually, grain was exported in every
year from 1928 to 1941: 13.2 million tons in the four years from 1930 to
1933, 3.3 million tons in 1937-38, and about 2 million tons in 1940 and
the first half of 1941. Similarly, the first Five-Year Plan largely involved importing
machinery and equipment from Germany and the United States.
Much of the growth in the second Five-Year Plan that so impresses Allen
came from the foreign equipment imported a few years earlier. The import
of technology remained important throughout the Soviet period.
Allen's picture of autarchic growth without export of primary products
(first grain and timber, then, in a later period, oil) and import of technology
is misleading.
...
With the exception of the last chapter, this work concentrates on issues
that were topical decades ago and pays little attention to the social indicators
movement (with the exception of fertility) or to the results of the
archival revolution. For example, Allen sees Soviet growth as "remarkable,"
based on the rapid growth from 1934 to 1937 and in the 1950s.23 For
observers in the 1950s, such as Peter Wiles and Maurice Dobb, this growth
was indeed positive and "remarkable," but from the standpoint of the
middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Soviet growth as a
whole was not very "remarkable." Whereas the USSR only achieved
middle-income status in 1989, several previously poor countries have now
joined the First World (Japan, South Korea, Finland). Furthermore, the
most populous developing country (China) has experienced more than
two decades of fast growth. The Soviet growth spurts certainly compare
well with average experience in Africa, Latin America, and India from
1928 to 1989 but the Soviet growth record as a whole is no longer very "remarkable" by world standards.2
it comes across as a non-expert to the field trying to weigh in in a radical way but unfortunately using incorrect and distorted data.
babyhueypnewton posted:have a little bit of trust in your instincts, and let all information age with time before you absorb it fully. I think this is where crow was getting at with trust your experience, and distrust snake oil salesman who are willing to throw Marxist concepts out the window but try and sell you a new leftist cure for the world (this especially goes for the post-marxists getfiscal loves so much)
my intuition is that most socialists have no idea what socialist economics entails. they exist entirely in reaction to their negative experience of capitalism. they bracket socialism as a minimum belief that planning works, maybe sometimes it even works well if the right people are in charge or new technology is involved or it is more participatory/mass influenced, and leave it at that. accordingly, instead of working through the scholarly consensus and historical record, they simply choose works that reinforce their worldview. usually this involves coming up with elaborate reasons why whole periods of history are irrelevant despite having very similar basic structures.
anyway, the story that marx and hegel tell is instructive: once upon a time there was a man who constantly told a story about how he once jumped really far when he was on rhodes. finally one day someone said to him: "rhodes is here, jump here!" if planning works fine then go ahead do it now, go find some dumb country and terrorize it into comprehensive physical planning and get awesome growth rates and have fun with it and prove everyone wrong. everyone will clap and it'll be great. until then who cares, i'll just keep reading about shit.
I love how he dismisses Latin America, Africa,and India as if that is not the majority of the underdeveloped world. This is like people who compare Cuban growth and living standards to American growth and living standards, as if the entirety of dependency theory never happened. Soviet and Chinese scholars are a joke, remember to take lf recommendations because the overwhelming majority of scholarship on the two is worthless. I can say this as a fact with scholarship on north korea, which resembles the drudge report on factuality and hysteria.
And his only example left is China, which he conveniently forgets to mention developed because of a SOCIALIST SYSTEM.
I would recommend Ha Joon Chang for a beginner who wants to understand how the system of the east asian tigers had absolutely nothing to do with free market capitalism. I would also recommend for Getfiscal burning that guy's book, and for everyone else see what the standard of research is among "experts" on the soviet union among the bewildered herd of independent minds (Chomsky).
karphead posted:Crow posted:lmao jesus christ http://econc10.bu.edu/Old_students/oldstud_job_frame.htm
haha, those portraits are awesome
herb kessel, m.a., ph.d, boston university, president of frogtech
KEEP WATCHING, THEYRE ANIMATED http://econc10.bu.edu/Old_students/rodriquez_jorge_xanima.gif
getfiscal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:have a little bit of trust in your instincts, and let all information age with time before you absorb it fully. I think this is where crow was getting at with trust your experience, and distrust snake oil salesman who are willing to throw Marxist concepts out the window but try and sell you a new leftist cure for the world (this especially goes for the post-marxists getfiscal loves so much)
my intuition is that most socialists have no idea what socialist economics entails. they exist entirely in reaction to their negative experience of capitalism. they bracket socialism as a minimum belief that planning works, maybe sometimes it even works well if the right people are in charge or new technology is involved or it is more participatory/mass influenced, and leave it at that. accordingly, instead of working through the scholarly consensus and historical record, they simply choose works that reinforce their worldview. usually this involves coming up with elaborate reasons why whole periods of history are irrelevant despite having very similar basic structures.
anyway, the story that marx and hegel tell is instructive: once upon a time there was a man who constantly told a story about how he once jumped really far when he was on rhodes. finally one day someone said to him: "rhodes is here, jump here!" if planning works fine then go ahead do it now, go find some dumb country and terrorize it into comprehensive physical planning and get awesome growth rates and have fun with it and prove everyone wrong. everyone will clap and it'll be great. until then who cares, i'll just keep reading about shit.
you're showing quite well the different between intellectuals and organic intellectuals and science (as marx and lenin conceived of it) and bourgeois science. a gut reaction against socialism is still preferable to going along with the "consensus" of petit-bourgeois intellectuals, who have created an entire science of falsehood known as economics.
Rather than getting caught up in the bullshit empiricism of scholarship, it is far better to understand the class interests of "science" itself (otherwise it is a religion of faith in truth as Nietzsche points out). Let's remember that "intellectuals" are a class faction of the petit-bourgeoisie themselves, and even marxist intellectuals (which are primarily from a Trotskyist background for this reason) should be taken with a grain of salt. history and science are important, but we need to stress two things as marxists: one marxist science (historical materialism) is separate and superior to bourgeois science; two: science and history themselves are interpretations that serve interests in the class struggle, and the point of philosophy is to change the world and not study it.
"Here was a country that could send men into space but had people queuing up for basic foodstuffs such as bread and sugar. The country had no problem churning out intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines, but could not manufacture a decent TV." - p. 200.
"Despite this, the system still failed to function well because of the inefficiency of the communist central planning system, which was supposed to be a more efficient alternative to the market system." - p. 201
from the intro: "Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism. Despite its problems and limitations, I believe that capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of capitalism that has dominated the world in the last three decades, that is, free-market capitalism. This is not the only way to run capitalism, and certainly not the best, as the record of the last three decades shows. The book shows that there are ways in which capitalism should, and can, be made better." - Ha-Joon Chang
thats why i said he was for beginners. I long ago stopped looking for "truth" in academia, and Zizek is right that post-modern marxism is allowed to exist in a form in identity politics studies (race, feminist, lgbt studies) because it doesn't challenge the system itself. zizek himself is allowed to exist because he's mostly inaccessible and is a professional troll rather than a serious revolutionary.
babyhueypnewton posted:sorry i only read the first half of what you wrote getfiscal because it's all wrong. stop reading shitty bourgeois propaganda that ... Robert C. Allen ... Allen is a pure economist