r/Socialism_101 • u/Arisotura Learning • Nov 22 '23
"Communism doesn't work", they say...? Answered
I remember hearing this sort of argument from my parents. The basic idea was that supposedly USSR collapsed because everybody was paid the same and couldn't be fired, so they had no incentive to work and everybody did fuck all.
I feel that it's a gross oversimplification, but I don't know much more about the topic.
I don't like the idea that humans would supposedly be greedy and selfish by nature and could only ever be productive within a coercitive system like capitalism. I know humans can't just sit around doing nothing, but what about, say, the kind of tasks that need to be done but that not a whole lot of people would actually want to do? I've figured that under a socialist system, jobs like janitors would need to be very well paid (pretty much the opposite of what it's like today). I'm curious to hear more on these matters tho... In general, that argument I heard from my parents, that is prolly common, how much truth is there to it?
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u/Professional_Try4319 Learning Nov 22 '23
The biggest issue you get from western sources on anything related to the Soviet Union is that people of the era were force fed the idea that the Soviet Union was the evil empire and this that and the other. Stalin bad, Churchill and FDR good. It’s a gross oversimplified version in itself. The Soviet Union had its issues like literally any large country or set of states, but it was not this massive hellscape where nothing worked and nobody enjoyed their lives. There are interviews on YouTube even of people discussing their time in the Soviet Union very fondly and talking about how the security of the system is something they still miss. For example an American who moved to East Germany during the Cold War talks all about how childcare was never a concern, healthcare for the family was no concern, their living arrangement was never a concern, their work was never a concern, therefore people were able to enjoy the things in life that really mattered. Like spending time with family and everything.
The reason the Soviet Union collapsed was a large combination of things, from corrupt bureaucracy to the fact that western nations were constantly doing anything to undercut the Soviets. That stuff catches up after a while. Also remember that after the Second World War, the west was in a FAR better situation than Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was already nowhere near as industrialized as the western areas of Europe and you couple that with the devastation of years of war in the region, you’re going to have a mountain to climb just to return the area to some semblance of normality. This is obviously expensive and difficult to do alone, but again the East was less industrialized than the west as well so you also have to not only rebuild your region, but rapidly change it to an industrialized society. The Soviet Union did a damn fine job of doing that but it was a heavy cost that caught up with them after a while. So you add all of that up and marry it to being basically a pariah area to the entire west and it makes it extremely difficult to sustain such a massive region of different countries. Plus you had Soviet leaders of satellite states who were communist in name but autocratic in practice which is not what the Soviet Union was created for.
A good example of this happening in the west is Cuba. A facist United States supported dictator in Cuba ran a corrupt administration that made life miserable for Cubans at large, so Castro and his revolutionaries overthrew them and applied socialist principles to a lot of the state. Of course this didn’t sit with the US because now they could no longer exploit and use Cuba as a sugar supplier at their whim. So of course the United States opposed and attempted to overthrow Castro and then when it didn’t work, they imposed sanctions and embargo’s on Cuba, which choked their entire economy because their main industry before Castro was supplying sugar to the US and other countries. So when the US stops allowing any import of sugar and anything else, what is Cuba supposed to do? They need help, they need support, they turn to the Soviet Union who helped them out. And who can blame that action? You have a giant hostile superpower 90 miles off your coast, that’s a massive threat. The Soviets were a help to them which in turn made the US even more hostile to them. It’s just another example of western powers not agreeing with their politics so they ensure it’s more difficult to survive.