Let's discuss it seriously for a moment, why were there bread lines and how did it become so bad during the 80s? I mean seriously, how do you fuck up so badly that you don't have enough of the basic products at department stores? This by the way wasn't a new phenomenon to the 80s, it was during the 60s and 70s as well but to a lesser extent, and it was most felt especially in the less central areas. Don't know about the 50s.
Who/what is to blame? Revisionists? Calculation? Disaster and as a result a timely allocation of resources? Nefarious 5th column?
Did you know the UK had breadlines too? Except they called them "queues"
Jace Turner
Did they UK have empty stores for prolonged periods? Were these breadlines (and not just bread, meat and other goods as well, in rural places) present since the 60s?
And even if they did, even if it was by the same scale and for the same period, it still doesn't answer why the USSR had them.
Liam Rogers
The USSR had them for bureaucratic incompetence displayed by the revisionist party leaders post stalin. Nothing to do with socialism
Grayson Perry
like what?
Kevin Lee
I mean besides the corn
Owen Sullivan
Reintroducing a profit motive, liberalizing the economy, stagnation, multiple people for jobs that only need one, etc
Jordan Murphy
Capitalism.
Anthony Roberts
???
Zachary Thompson
Then how come we didn't see a more severe and prolonged effect in capitalist countries? Or was this the result of liberalizing the economy on top of an existing socialist economic policy and thus taking some unexpected windfalls?
don't be obtuse, that isn't what I'm saying.
Brandon Morris
People hoarding food and not being gulaged for it.
Lincoln Ortiz
…and that caused shortages? How many hoarded?
Wyatt Perez
In the Soviets' case, it was because of their overbearing bureaucracy. Planned economies are not necessarily a bad thing, but command economies usually are.
Elijah Wood
Because the US, Britain, France etc weren't being economically sabotaged like the USSR was. This is why socialism hasn't been successfull permanently. One socialist country can't do fuck all against hundreds of capitalist countries
Daniel Reyes
Prices were set so low on important staple food products that supply could not meet demand. In Marxist terms, the prices (as an expression of labor-time) did not match the total person-hours dedicated to those industries, leading to shortages.
This is… sort of true. But "bureaucratic incompetence" is a vague hand-wave that doesn't actually address any specific issues.
In reality, Soviet legislative powers and the Presidium lowered prices arbitrarily as a sort of populist, probably well-intentioned move to make bread more available to the masses. This is part of the program of many faux-marxist socialist parties more interested in developing a sort of Keynesian gift economy system than in-kind economic calculation and scientific planning. It's especially silly in this particular case, as the Soviet Union was already a planned economy and had the powers necessary to prevent this issue. Soviet planning authorities were simply not given final say in final-product pricing, and politicians cannot be depended on to make reasonable economic decisions if it endangers their standing with their consistuency.
This is a problem that has to do with fundamental deficiencies in Soviet government going all the way back to Lenin.
Charles Smith
In the absence of market mechanism, it is difficult to reach a balance between quantity demanded and quantity supplied. Embrace market socialism, faggots.
Joseph Allen
Wasn't the market socialism just state controlled factories with the politicians as CEOs while making a facade the workers had any say in it?
Julian King
This but unironically.
Cameron Evans
not only wrong but the exact opposite of what actually happened nothing less to be expected from non ML retarded people
it was implementation of market reforms, privatization and decentralization starting with khrushchev that lead up to this, with the same retarded arguments you now use again even though the exact fucking opposite is true
people like you are justification for euthanasia
Adam Butler
Give proof faggot. You guys always talk shit about Khrushchev like everything was perfect in the USSR and then suddenly this bad 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧capitalist🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 guy came out of nowhere and fucked everything up but you never offer any proof. "Oh he introduced market reforms" (where? how?) "Oh he privatized stuff" (LOL no) "Oh he decentralized stuff" (there is literally no argument to be made against decentralization, why the fuck should Moscow be responsible for deciding everything?). All you guys do is circlejerk against this imaginary portrayal of Khrushchev as some sort of undercover capitalist plant when he was literally one of the most dedicated socialists alive. And I don't even like the fat fuck but to deny he was a socialist and to paint him as some sort of Gorbachev is sheer historical revisionism (I know you guys love that word).
this is a supermarket in East Germany, I think those kinds of problems were prevalent only in the late 80's in a few select areas. I don't know more about the topic though
go to any church, go to any salvation army, look at the lines go to any department of social services branch and look at the lines the issue is fucking beaurocracy got enmeshed with every part of human life, and it is so hard to step out of it for a moment
Jackson King
There were all kinds of lines but not bread lines because it was over produced to keep citizens fed.
Gabriel Martin
russia has a shit ton of resources though. i find it hard to believe that capitalist countries could sabotage ussr and eatern bloc except by witholding resources, which they didn't.
Unfortunately seems to be the most common problem of socialist politics, simple and crude price fixing for populist ends.
Camden Barnes
Is that a real tabloid? At this point, I can’t tell anymore
Jason Barnes
Not even a tank but the whole breadlines thing is a fucking myth lmao. As far as I know, there were no significant food shortages except for The pic you posted is from 1990. Why are so many of you seriously engaging a complete myth with bullshit excuses about bureaucracy and revisionism?
Andrew Howard
Even communism isn't immune to powerful morons. Just like how your average liberal won't let the great depression detract from their devotion of capitalism, a few failings doesn't mean that the entire USSR was a wash.
Breadline stuff is mostly bullshit. Half the time its just pics from after the destruction of the eastern bloc when privatisation came in full force, and the other half its from the Gorbachev years of liberal reforms fucking up the economy and causing starvation. Food was more plentiful, cheaper, healthier and locally produced back then and everyone had access to it. The only stuff my family ever complained about was not being able to get oranges out of season and the like because the eastern bloc didn't have a fucking United Fruit company killing campesinos in the third world for them year round.
Eli Ortiz
Who gives a fuck if we don’t have the petit amenities of western civilization? An obsession with comforts makes men spiritually barren and morally bankrupt, this is decadence 101 here.
yeah man more than two sorts of meat rationed once a weak is decadence
Thomas King
Oh shit man I better tell my parents and grandparents there wasn't scarcity during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and that people didn't drive to the central cities to buy food because the rural ones were lacking.
Zachary Evans
Why did you include famines that took place before 1917 if you wanted to make a comparison between communist and capitalist countries? Why are the 1921-1922 famine in Tatarstan and the 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia not designated as communist? Why are famines that took place in countries with pre-industrial economies designated as capitalist?
Benjamin Morris
Superabundance of goods and a post-scarcity society are literally the goals of communism
Jaxson Clark
because many here subscribe to a philosophy of 'anything I don't like = capitalism'
Jacob Roberts
you already disproved yourself by starting the thread with a pic from 1990
Brayden Williams
where was your family from?
Eli Morris
Also what the fuck are you on about calling it "anecdotal"? Yeah, the scarcity was just localized to the specific places my parents and grandparents lived at, at those specific periods of time, sure thing Skinner. And it was just "anecdotal" that people would drive to central areas to get the products or their full variety.
