this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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"Or some other other solution to be determined by the state in question"
Gulags, generally speaking
I literally said "liquidating you as a class" as a possible retaliation. "Gulags" is not a gotcha, if you hoard or destroy food during a famine you are committing murder and you need to be stopped for the good of society.
By the way, the US prison population today is higher than the Gulag population of the entire Soviet Union at its peak. I'd sure as hell rather see gulags full of reactionaries and food-burners than full of drug users and the chronically unemployed. I'm curious, why do you prefer the latter?
Well being worked to death and/or being strait up shot tends to keep those numbers down. And how many of those "hoarders" were quite literally starving but they had a tiny bit on hand? And how many more were in there for "anti-soviet behavior" instead of anything related to hoarding or destroying food.
Gulags, concentration camps and the like are definitely a "gotcha" as much as a "gatcha" can exist.
it blows my mind the lengths that online rightists will go to to defend literally burning food during a famine. Why?
Yes, people who burn food during a famine should be rehabilitated, and prisons were the method (that doesn't work) that people thought was effective to that end at the time.
You're right, it's so fucked up that Stalin stole all those poor Kulaks' grain and put it in a big swimming pool so that he and his cabinet could swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.
People should steal food from hoarders to redistribute it to starving peasants actually.
If youre talking about grain quotas they stopped taking grain out of the region and started importing food when they realized there was a famine.
It wasn't necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn't push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
Okay but how was the soviet union to create a global proletarian revolution? They had to work with what they had.
I've read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can't just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn't happen, so...