this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Can you list the good parts of capitalism? If you say the free market, capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on that concept. Socialism and communism have free market aspects too, but they centralize control of resources so that 5 people can’t drain everything and ascend to the top.
Both having a form of free market doesn't make it suddenly good for one side and bad for the other.
Some sort of free market is good, so new idea can brew, some of them being one day attempted, other won't because it ends up either not getting traction, or would very obviously fail after some research.
Problem is with too much planning is that it doesn't give as much place for innovation, as well as put too much weight on a single point of failure. That played a good part in the USSR famines, like the holodomor, which was then further aggravated by their unwillingness to admit they fucked up, blaming it on other factors. But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not).
And I'll pass on the other similar failures (Chernobyl, among other), that follow the very same pattern.
Of course, the USSR had some very clear wins, like the first part of the race to space, and others.
The USSR could have been a success if their leader weren't selfish idiots, which os a shame since I'd rather live in a good cummunism regime than a good capitalism regime.
I always worked toward such ideals, I contributed to some open-source project (Gnome, KDE, mostly translation, bug report, but also some packaging for OpenSUSE and Fedora.
I'm a bit tired of those who blindly follow ideologies without having the intellectual honesty to recognize where said ideology fucked up and where it was great. Do I have to be called a social-traitor for every reflection on communism or socialism? I doubt Marx would be happy to see those he tried to enlighten sheepishly follow whoever yell the loudest... Even if they yell parta of what he tried to teach them.
You're contradicting yourself a bit. You reference capitalism as being good for innovation, but then reference the technological advances the soviets made, beating the US into space. You say the Soviets didn't learn from the 1930s famine, but it was the last famine outside of wartime in the Soviet Union.
It's also a blunder to blame all problems on leadership. The USSR was run collectively, and the leadership was not uniquely "stupid," they were in general very competent. They were also not especially selfish. Some leaders were better or worse than others, but the Soviet Union was run by the mass proletariat, with the CPSU as the organized element.
What other famine after holodomor? I can only think of one but was during siege from the nazis.
And that's only those who were big enough to be impossible to hide completely.
All of them have something in common: the central government minimised them, and tried to hide them. Some weren't even acknowledged until after the USSR fall. All of them are a combination of bad luck (war, drought) combined with hasty decisions which made what could have been a hard year a generational disaster.
You're referring to a famine at the outset of the USSR coming from civil war, referring to the 1930s famine as 3 separate famines, and blaming the famine caused by Nazi invasion on the Soviets. There's good reason that's all you have to bring up.
Question: "what famines occurred because the Soviets didn't learn from the 1933 famine?"
Answer: A famine from -before- that famine, the famine you're being asked to name one after, TWO OTHER FAMINES THAT HAPPENED THE SAME YEAR, and the one that happened because the fucking nazis invaded
What a mixture of bad faith and just plain stupid
It's also exceptionally bad faith to treat it as three famines while it was a single one occuring on huge areas. But once we learn it, the entire "holodomor" narration shatter immediately.
So, to summarize, there was exactly one famine after the 32-33 one, and it came immediately after the USSR was devastated by ww2
All have something in common: The capitalist core ignored people, caused wars or restricted economic at their periphery and let millions them die.
The death toll by the capitalist empires are way higher and going way more recent in history.
Which comes back to my main argument: both have failed, so either both are bad, or we have a people problem instead of a system problem.
Except all your examples from communism are from 80 years ago at least and capitalism is currently failing. The main reason communism failed is because it was under siege for it's entire existence and yet, after 1947 they stopped the famines, reindustrialized and won the space race. The same isn't true for the capitalist world, they are doing the siege.