What Was The Soviet Union? ft. Richard Wolff (TMBS 114)

can you tell us about just big so taken in any direction you want we talked about the People's Republic of China last time and now I'd like to talk about the Soviet Union how do we understand that story and literally I know that that's a massive amount of human history and a need so please really any direction well you know it's hard for me since I'm I ask these kinds of questions all the time but better by me yes it's hard to know where to start let me start we start with Lenin maybe start where you want here's the thing that there has to be remembered socialists socialism doesn't really start until the early part of the 19th century there is nothing really like that before you have the chart ISM in England the movements like that and then you develop this language social ISM just kind of awkward communism out of the word social and community and all that so it doesn't really get going until the 19th century and it goes very fast after that it's amazing how fast it went and it goes global very quickly it's one of the most incredible stories of the speed with a you you can see that it must have been speaking to something in the human experience that's extraordinary to go from an isolated case of England and Germany and a few other places early in the 19th century and then just go global everywhere on earth yeah like capitalism you know because socialism is capitalism shadow you can no more get rid of socialism then you can get rid of your shadow it soon as the light shines and you got it and you when when you turn the light off you you may imagine that it disappeared it's right there just waiting for you turtle I know is that the Hegel of it the antithesis is always there anyway to point the point I'm trying to make is the only time socialists got beyond developing a critique of capitalism which they did from the beginning the only time before Russia was a few weeks in 1870 in the city of Paris there was an uprising Marx's own writings were part of it his friends and associates were active in it and for a few weeks that's all it was a few weeks the working class of Paris kind of made a little revolution just in this city and took over and they created something called the Paris Commune which lasted a few weeks and then was ruthlessly crushed by the French army but that was it before that there was no taking over that lasted at all you had a little spark here or there you had a little revolution really shouldn't have been called that in 1905 in Russia but 1917 is absolutely revolutionary in the history of the world it's the first experiment in which socialists largely as a matter of luck were able in the confused chaos of a society falling apart feudal Russia early capitalist Russia having just lost World War one Azhar humiliated beyond recoop in the chaos of a collapsed war effort in the chaos of a very poor country to begin with with a decapitated government this small Socialist Party which what it was called well they didn't have that name communism then takes power and it now has to do something with absolutely no precedent I mean no other country had done this no other country had any history you could see well they tried this it didn't work and they tried that they had none of that they had different the Paris Commune and if you know much about Lenin he wrote a number of very important pamphlets in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution about the Paris Commune and what lessons should be done they were very they were acute is the one thing they could think about that gave them some clues the reason I say it is this is the first experiment to imagine that they would have somehow had the roadmap the way to do it right to succeed to build to grow without making one screw-up after another that's absurd it takes a long time to learn how to rebuild a society this was the first effort and arguably the only other place that's big and complex to try it is China because the others work with this little country is very different situation Russia is the biggest country by geography on this planet and China is the biggest country by population these are real big experiments and they're the Chinese only a second second point capitalism did not jump out of feudalism all done one experiment got it right there were hundreds of efforts to set up capital in cities and towns across Europe they often didn't last more than a week or a month sometimes a year and then they fell apart and people studied that to try with the next falling apart of feudalism or the next uprising of serfs who wanted to get rid of it could they put things together so that they would work so my first is it when I read literature on the Soviet Union I very rarely come across sensitivity to one in the world you know did you expect this ragtag bunch of smart guys I get that smoker's smart very smart guys they did it Stalin Trotsky Lenin all of them and one of the reasons Russia had such terrible problems they wiped all those people out all those early Bolsheviks who had spent a lifetime trying to figure this out so that's the first thing give him some slack that this is an experiment it lasted 70 years pretty good pretty good for an early experiment I would have expected them to last well let me give you an example people don't know this but in nineteen seventeen eighteen nineteen there were other revolutions in Europe not just in there was a revolution give an example in Hungary and they set up the Hungarian Soviet Socialist Republic they formed that and they had a leader a Lenin type leader named Balak une que un in Munich can you imagine southern Catholic Germany they did it as well court Isner in southern Catholic Germany a Jew becomes the the leader of the Bavarians what they call because that's part of Germany's Bavaria Bavarian Soviet Socialist they took the names they lasted weeks and months because they could not manage it they were also experiments they fell by the weather wayside the Russian one for a lot of peculiar reasons lasted 70 years and what did it accomplish and then we'll talk about the horrors of it because they had those too but first the accomplishment I don't know how to say this with enough intensity to get it across I'm sure you I'm gonna talk often I'm the best of all you always bring the heat in 1917 time of the revolution Russia is the most backward country in Europe the vast majority of its people are illiterate they live in the countryside with an agriculture that's a hundred or fifty 150 years behind the rest of Europe you could not have a more extreme example of under development ok in 1917 they have just gone through a world war which they lost immediately following the revolution they have a civil war between a white and red army the Civil War is intervened or interfered with by the West which tries to crush the new government four countries send troops Britain France Japan and the United States 10,000 troops of American troops are landed in Russia to help the white army defeat the new government just a footnote and I'm by the way the white army engages in some of the most vicious pogroms and mass killings imaginable right but just just for the record yes did the Soviet Union ever send troops that enter the United States answer no oh really so I think I saw Red Dawn so I'm a little confused by this did the United States ever land its troops on Soviet territory yes who's got a right to be afraid of whom in this complicated relationship think about it for a minute anyway they went from the poorest of what civil war foreign invasion lost World War one ten years later they engaged in collectivization of Agriculture another trial more for the society that's in the early 30s and then in the early 40s they have a war with Hitler that that kills forty to fifty million Russians because it's fought on the Russian territory because the Germans invaded and went all the way to Moscow is you know ok unbelievable destruction unbelievable chaos unbelievable poverty by 1970 there's a second most important political and economic power in the world it's an unbelievable human achievement it's just in the annals of economic development there's nothing like it until the 21st century and this is gonna be difficult for some people to hear when the only other example of economic growth like that is the People's Republic of China this is not an endorsement of China or an endorsement of the Soviet Union but to pretend that what I just said didn't happen is an act of dishonest denial that I find mind-bending they set out to stop being a poor country and become a wealthy country they did it the Chinese have done exactly this a not the same way but the same goals and they did it and the rest of the world pays a lot of attention since most of the rest of the world wants to do that too and hasn't been able to buy now that the third part did they kill people in the collectivization of Agriculture sure they did did the Chinese kill people in the struggles after the Great Leap Forward yeah they did I'm not particularly taken by history written according to how many dead bodies there were don't find that a terribly useful metric but apparently people who don't like the Soviet Union in China they really love it so they like to repeat that Stalin was a murderer and Mao also there's truth to that there were terrible struggles and a lot of people died either by military activity or in the byproduct as usual the civilians that thought okay let's face that was that good no was that it's at a flaw of the system yeah did they manage their affairs in a way that caused all these deaths they shouldn't have yeah probably but if we're gonna use that metric okay then let's let's do it stupid in my mind but let's do it well explain though I think I understand but a lot of people hearing won't understand why why is it that stupid why is that a stupid metric because if you're gonna identify deaths during the period of Stalin's government or bowels and you want to make a critique of the Soviet Union or a critique of socialism which is Julie what's being done see socialism sort of like recently socialism Venezuela so this right as if as if you've captured it well then you would have to have as the as the balancer what deaths could you attribute in the same way to capitalism if we couldn't do history by body count let's go and I'm gonna do that now just so you see how stupid this way of thinking is in the twentieth century there were two world wars World War One World War two they're the worst wars in the history of the human race reasonably estimating hundred at least a hundred million people were killed in those two wars even by the usual historical metric so if you're gonna measure a systems worth Wireless but death during its period of dominance and power socialism is a [ __ ] by comparison to capitalism just in those two wars but I'm not done capitalism also is responsible for modern colonial imperialism I mean why were millions of Africans ripped out of their society sending back that continent I don't know a hundred two hundred three hundred years we're still looking at the results was for slavery and slaves were picked up in order to make profit off of sugar and profit off a cotton and that's what they were brought they were wrapped up in a capitalist system making a lot of money but needing laborers and Africans were unfortunately targeted to do the damage done is beyond words the first book I ever published my doctoral dissertation was an analysis of British colonialism in Africa in the country of Kenya when those days it was called the East Africa Protectorate the British arrived in 1895 and they did a census they often did that there were four million but that's what they're four million Africans living in what we now call Kenya in 1930 they did another census and by the way this is my own research in the British Museum and the colonial library in London which the Rockefeller Brothers paid for obsolete so many novels okay so the census in 1930 they ready two and a half million people okay after 30 years of British colonialism in this one little corner they had decimated the population driving it from 4 million their count to two and a half million their town right now you multiply that by all the different countries wrapped up in the thank you wrapped up in the colonial experience the British colonialism and in Asia in India and what we now call Pakistan in Africa if he the numbers they're astronomical they go into the many many million if you go to count bodies what are you doing now what's the smarter metric than just counting bodies what happens to the society what happens to its institutions to the to the communities that are set up to their culture to their political ways of functioning you know if you want to count people that are sick or dead okay I'm not against it but making this story I mean I was in a debate three nights ago was it Tuesday of last week a bit born can I say the name of the debate is that okay oh it depends so I'm just debating of course of course say the name is Maci kidding me or a libertarian group you went in well will will will Stalin will erase it sound later I'm a I'm a roughly this argument critical of it because he had said yep Stalin killed people and socialism kills people and I did this metric and he you could see he was a little bit discomforted my my debating opponent he said yes but the Russians killed their own I thought this was a marvelous moment in other words killing your own is bad to other people extraordinary morality that put it aside so I reminded him of the civil war what did we do the worst war in American history is a civil war we killed more of each other in the Civil War than we did in world wars one and two what are you gonna do with with this history we were in a struggle in the Civil War we say we had capitalism and we had slavery and it was a war to extinguish one economic system slavery because it was held to be in cat incompatible with the morality and the values of the other system that's exactly what Stalin said we are in a war with capitalism we have to protect ourselves against socialism and we're gonna go to war we're not gonna we're not gonna roll over for these people are not gonna read reestablish capitalism here and they put aside with whether it's right or wrong these are the arguments that are made and there's a peculiar almost amnesia involved in imagining that the Socialists have some monopoly or some extra extraordinary responsibility for killing that cap didn't or doesn't have I find that bizarre that kind of thinking right so the question is is how do we actually synthesize those things and and tell the whole story not minimize any the crimes are all around yes we'll have to account for all of them you just watched a Michael Brooks show video subscribe to get them all why wouldn't you don't be foolish click subscribe below and become a patron as well patreon.com slash TMDs thanks everybody

Channel: The Michael Brooks Show

Views: 77,993

Rating: 4.8523388 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Wolff, Soviet Union, USSR, Stalinism, Mao, Communism, Richard Wolff History, Richard Wolff Economic Update

Id: 5E8wtXnhhj8

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/FibreglassFlags]

This is why I am at most half-hearted towards Richard Wolff.

Wolff's entire career and discipline is hinged on the assumption that the position of a professional statesman - a full-time wrangler of state-related metrics - is a given. This means Wolff himself is fundamentally irrelevant unless a population and associated resources are managed from the top down by a class of professional statesmen. So, here's a million-dollar question: if war is to be had and blood is to be spilt, then why not do it at a turning point when we all realise we don't really need a bunch of bastards treating some vast stretch of land as their philosophical trolley and its inhabitants faceless railroad workers to be run over and sacrificed in the name of so-called "progress"? I am sorry, but Lenin is a worthless hack, and democracy isn't a resource of some sort to be built up by some "professional revolutionary" wastes-of-space at the top. Democracy, instead, is about us going about, learning about all the things about the environment we live in and sharing what we know with everyone else. If the wisdom of the masses is not to be trusted, then we might as well just stick to the bosses we work for - the captains of industries - and admit that most of us can never be any more than know-nothing born-to-be slaves.