#1
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READ FARM TO FACTORY AS RECOMMENDED IN EX-FORUMS MODERATOR AND GAY TWINK MCCAIN'S AMAZON READING LIST

The rapid growth of Soviet industry from the Russian Civil War to World War II relative to the European colonies in Africa and Asia is often held up as an example of a situation where socialism wasn't a total disaster. Yet this comparison ignores that northern hemisphere countries were on a different growth path. Russia was already industrializing under the Tsar and its subsequent performance was no more impressive.



From 1860-13 Russian steel production grew 16% a year, industrial production 5% a year, and GDP over 3% a year. Under the Tsar Russia was following a competent state-led industrialization policy, even under the stultifying paralysis and obstructions of feudal institutions, without the stupidity and excesses of communism.

During the same period, the annual production growth rates were over 5% a year for pig iron, coal 30%, phosphoric fertilizers 10%, rail 10%, and crude oil 13%.

Because some of these products were growing from a low initial baseline, growth slowed initially. However it remained impressive on average.

Physical output, annualized growth rates, 1890-1900:

Coal: 10%
Copper: 3.7%
Crude oil: 12%
Flour: 4%
Iron: 1.2%
Pig iron: 13%
Phosphoric fertilizers: 42%
Rail: 11%
Salt: 3.4%
Industrial soda: 15%
Steel: 19%
Sulfuric acid: 9%
Raw sugar: 7%
Sugar: 4.5%
Zinc: 5%
Zinc oxide: 2.7%
Beer: 4%

Annualized growth rates, 1900-13:

Coal: 6.4%
Copper: 11%
Crude oil: -0.9%
Flour: 4%
Iron: -16% (crowded out by US production)
Pig iron: 3.6%
Phosphoric fertilizers: 7%
Rail: -2%
Salt: Nil
Industrial soda: 4.9%
Steel: 6%
Sulfuric acid: 7.5%
Raw sugar: 3.3%
Sugar: 5%
Zinc: 9%
Zinc oxide: No data
Beer: 5%

If anything, industrial growth in Russia, as in most developing countries then, was accelerating over time as trade and transportation technology allowed more rapid convergence. Growth only slowed temporarily during the 1908-1914 recession. After recovering from the recession and WWI the market economy could have resumed even more rapid growth.

By 1914, Russian steel production equaled that of France and Austria-Hungary, and its economic growth rate was one of the highest in the world. Although Russia had significant external debt, it was declining as a share of gross national product, and it ran a trade surplus.

The 1917 revolution disrupted industrialization in Russia and resulted in a drawn out civil war that slowed recovery from World War I. From 1922 to 1941, Soviet GDP grew 2% a year. Even this figure overstates the actual performance because it's based on purchasing power parity figures, which are well known to overstate production in socialist countries by assuming the quality of goods in capitalist reference countries and socialist economies are comparable. In reality the market value of goods in socialist economies is about half its PPP value, and this still doesn't take into account lack of product variety, shortages, hidden inflation due to forced savings, hoarding, waste, and environmental degradation prevalent in these systems to a much greater degree than in capitalist economies.

But even if we attribute all that damage to the Whites and begin counting in 1925 when the Soviet economy was more or less recovered or 1928 when the five year plans commenced, the Soviet performance is still historically average at best.

The official Soviet GDP growth estimates record a growth of 8% annually during the first two Five Year Plans. However, the official figures make no attempt to adjust for inflation and consider all price increases a quality improvement. Khanin's corrected figures based on physical output data record a GDP growth of 3% a year from 1928 to 1940.

The physical output indices were still decent in some areas. Steel production increased 450%, coal production 500%, and oil production doubled. But this was mainly a reallocation between sectors. Agricultural production stagnated. Food availability fell as agricultural output went toward exports. The Tsar didn't need to employ these crude strategies to fund industrialization because Russia actually had an export industry under capitalism.

And what are we comparing this to? Had the Russian Empire survived World War I and continued paying down debt, the country could have begun increasing its borrowing aboard as it had during Witte's industrialization program from 1890 to 1900. During this period, steel production increased sixfold, coal by 2.7 times, and oil threefold. Oh, and nobody starved.

A similar but expanded program enacted in 1928, taking advantage of foreign exchange gained from expanding export industries, would have surpassed the Soviet growth rates in major industrial items while delivering better quality final products. Even Trotsky noticed this, he wrote about how dissapointed he was that the quality of Russia's fine tobacco deteriorated so greatly under communism. Perhaps Stalin gets credit for focusing on strategic areas like tractor production which hardly existed in the 1900s, but the overall communist industrialization program was not exceptional, even given that it cheated by starving the peasants to increase the investment rate. And after all he did do some stupid things that weakened Russia like Lysenkoism and purging the officer corps.

And even though communism normally does less-terrible in extractive sectors and heavy industry, it's inefficient at turning these capital inputs into finished products. I'm not aware of any more direct comparisons between Tsarist and Soviet input-output matrices, but more recent data shows how the Soviet economy remained inefficient even in the 1980s when the extensive growth phase was over and decades had been spent on efficiency improvements. Extra thingy #1 is an example.

Western Europe experienced slow growth in the 1930s because of the Great Depression, but the fall in imports actually accelerated industrialization in many developing countries like Argentina and Chile during the 1930s. Finland broke off from Russia and 1917, and by the 30s was well ahead of the immediately neighboring parts of Russia and the Baltics. Turkey, Mexico, and Japan are examples of capitalist countries comparable to Russia which experienced rapid growth in the 20s if not the 30s, and Russia started off with even higher education levels than them. When peripheral Europe began industrializing after WW2, agrarian countries like Greece and Protugal grew much faster than the USSR did from the same baseline. The overall Soviet industrialization experience only looks acceptable compared to non-European countries that started with terrible institutions.

By the 1940s, the ratio of income between the top 10% and bottom 10% of the nonfarm workforce was actually higher in the USSR than the same ratio for the entire population in France, the UK, or Germany. Factoring in collective farms would increase the computed inequality dramatically as the kolkhoz were paid extremely low wages. Rural living standards in Russia were the same or worse in the 1940s than they were under the Tsar despite 20 years of economic growth.

In practice, Nazi Germany was far more egalitarian than the USSR. Through a combination of increased progressive taxes, job guarantees and killing Jews, the income share of the top 10% of the German population fell from 1933 to 1939, placing it below the UK and France. During the same period inequality increased in the USSR as rural areas were exploited to supply inefficient socialist industrialization. Starvation was widespread in Ukraine until the 1950s. Collectivization also killed millions of people of course in addition to the massive famine in 1947 but that's another story.

Without communism, and even more so after discarding feudal priviledges, there is little question Russia would have been much more of a threat to Germany in 1941. As it was, Stalin admitted at Yalta that he could not have won the war without Lend Lease, which supplied $11 billion, which was greater than the value of the entire Soviet T-34 production during the war (less than 5 billion roubles; given a black market exchange rate of 5 roubles:dollar, worse during WWII, this is less than $1 billion). I would even wager that, adjusting for quality differences, the majority of Soviet military manufacturing output came from lend lease. Russia went from a country that was at least able to defend itself better than France in WWI and arrive at a negotiated peace, to being saved at the last minute thanks to US imperialism.

Additional reading:

http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/communistnationssince1917/ch3.html << 1917-39 period

http://akarlin.com/2012/06/24/ayn-stalin/ << inequality, also info on kolkhoz living standards in comments

www.nber.org/chapters/c6021.pdf? << USSR per capita growth rates, with Khanin's research.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/new_economic_policy1.htm << collectivization

http://www.gammathetaupsilon.org/the-geographical-bulletin/1970s/volume10/article4.pdf << Soviet steel production figures

http://www.eco.nihon-u.ac.jp/center/economic/publication/pdf/05-03suhara.pdf << Tsarist period

www.nber.org/papers/w15408? << Nazi Germany more equal than the USSR and most of Western Europe

http://wdi.umich.edu/files/publications/workingpapers/wp681.pdf << an example of a correct product quality adjustment for socialist output

http://scholar.princeton.edu/golosov/files/Cheremukhin_Golosov_Guriev_Tsyvinski.pdf << "Was Stalin necessary?"- a relevant recent paper. Uses PPP figures and overstates Soviet growth for the reasons mentioned above, also doesn't take into account the increase in inequality under communism detailed earlier. Still finds Stalin's policies caused a net output loss 1928-40 and the Soviet economy did much worse than comparable northern hemipshere economies such as Japan.

http://www.applet-magic.com/sovietinefficiency.htm << self explanatory

http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/07/wwii-myths-t-34-best-tank-of-war.html << T-34 prices and production

http://books.google.com/books?id=jWeovB-QzjsC&pg=PA176&lpg=PA176&dq=russia+steel+consumption+1900&source=bl&ots=K-hnc8Y9u2&sig=ctc68-zmpbPOkNEIyO5CVrUE8OA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lPi-UeiqAoP_4AO7oYHwDw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=russia%20steel%20consumption%201900&f=false << Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism. Details Tsarist industrialization before WWI.


Extra thingy #1:

By 1980 the Soviet Union mined eight times as much iron ore as did the United States. That ore yielded only three times as much pig iron, and the pig iron only twice as much steel. Finally, from that steel it was able to produce machines worth roughly the same as those produced in the United States.

The use of raw materials and energy in the production of each final product was, respectively, 1.6 and 2.1 times greater than in the United States. The average construction time for an industrial plant in the U.S.S.R. was more than ten years, in the United States less than two years. In manufacturing per unit, the U.S.S.R. in 1980 used 1.8 times more steel than the United States, 2.3 times more cement, 7.6 times more mineral fertilizer, and 1.5 times more timber. The U.S.S.R. produced 16 times as many grain harvesters, but harvested less grain and became dependent on grain imports.

Extra thingy #2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo was born in the village of Yabluchne in modern Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. He was born soon after the mass famine in Ukraine caused by crop failures and Joseph Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture. Mass starvation ran rampant throughout Ukraine and reports of cannibalism soared. Throughout his childhood, Chikatilo was repeatedly told by his mother, Anna, that prior to his birth, an older brother of his named Stepan had been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbors, although it has never been independently established whether this incident actually occurred.

Chikatilo's parents were both farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut. As a child, Chikatilo slept on a single bed with his parents. He was a chronic bed wetter and was berated and beaten by his mother for each offense. When the Soviet Union entered World War II, his father, Roman, was drafted into the Red Army and subsequently taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. During the war, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of Blitzkrieg, which both frightened and excited him. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their hut burn to the ground. In 1943, while Chikatilo's father was away at the front, his mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. It has been speculated the child was conceived as a result of rape committed by a German soldier. In 1949, Chikatilo's father returned home. Instead of being rewarded for his war service, he was branded a traitor for surrendering to the Germans.

Shy and studious as a child, Chikatilo developed a passion for reading: by his teens he was an avid reader of Communist literature and was appointed chairman of the pupils' Communist committee at his school. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was consistently a target for bullying by his peers.

During adolescence, he discovered that he suffered from chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. Chikatilo was shy in the company of females: his only sexual experience as a teenager was when he, aged 17, jumped on an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grasp.

A few years later...

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: ?????? ????????? ????????, Ukrainian: ?????´? ????´????? ??????´??; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Soviet serial killer, nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper, and The Rostov Ripper, who committed the sexual assault, murder and mutilation of a minimum of 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR. Chikatilo confessed to a total of 56 murders and was tried for 53 of these killings in April 1992. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and subsequently executed in February 1994.

READ FARM TO FACTORY AS RECOMMENDED IN EX-FORUMS MODERATOR AND GAY TWINK MCCAIN'S AMAZON READING LIST

Edited by babyhueypnewton ()

#2
Dont Mess With Sucess
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mustang posted:

By 1980 the Soviet Union mined eight times as much iron ore as did the United States. That ore yielded only three times as much pig iron, and the pig iron only twice as much steel. Finally, from that steel it was able to produce machines worth roughly the same as those produced in the United States.

The use of raw materials and energy in the production of each final product was, respectively, 1.6 and 2.1 times greater than in the United States. The average construction time for an industrial plant in the U.S.S.R. was more than ten years, in the United States less than two years. In manufacturing per unit, the U.S.S.R. in 1980 used 1.8 times more steel than the United States, 2.3 times more cement, 7.6 times more mineral fertilizer, and 1.5 times more timber. The U.S.S.R. produced 16 times as many grain harvesters, but harvested less grain and became dependent on grain imports.

and to achieve these efficiencies, all the united states had to do was supplement raw materials with the blood of the working classes.

#3
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and to achieve these efficiencies, all the united states had to do was supplement raw materials with the blood of the working classes.



Nazi Germany was more egalitarian than the Soviet Union. You can't explain that.

No need for anyone to reply to this thread. I'm just putting it out there for scorekeeping purposes.

#4
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Annualized growth rates:

Industrial soda: 5%
Street soda: 8%
Road soda: 9%
Beer: 4%
Jazz ciggarettes: 6%
0.0%: 0%
#5
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mustang posted:

www.nber.org/papers/w15408? << Nazi Germany more equal than the USSR and most of Western Europe



"Major countries, such as Brazil and Russia, are still missing from the database"

Cool article, but it has nothing to do with Nazi Germany being "more equal", whatever that means.

#6
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isn't it Marxist though to acknowledge that capitalism provides very robust industrialization? The Marxist theory of third world underdevelopment maintains that the 3rd world countries don't develop because they lack the appropriately healthy bourgeois class required for industrialization. So in the ussr, where there is no bourgeois, of course they would fail at industrialization. marx 101.

You seem to be taking these capitalist standards though and saying "huh, the soviets sure failed at capitalism."

"i mean, come on, x8 as much iron but their machines were worth just as much? good thing money is the sole and infallible determinant of worth"

"2% GDP growth? you call that progress? how am i supposed to buy all my shoes with such a stagnant economy?"
#7
Nippon
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mustang posted:

and to achieve these efficiencies, all the united states had to do was supplement raw materials with the blood of the working classes.

Nazi Germany was more egalitarian than the Soviet Union. You can't explain that.

No need for anyone to reply to this thread. I'm just putting it out there for scorekeeping purposes.



#8
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mustgan sucks so bad
#9
political car tune
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not one word
#10
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burritonegro posted:

mustang posted:

www.nber.org/papers/w15408? << Nazi Germany more equal than the USSR and most of Western Europe

"Major countries, such as Brazil and Russia, are still missing from the database"

Cool article, but it has nothing to do with Nazi Germany being "more equal", whatever that means.


if "more equal" means income distribution was more equal, then this article literally syas hte opposite of that

when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the top decile had been
thoroughly equalized . . . The effect of Nazi economic administration changed
radically this outcome . . . In a period of time of only five years, the pre-First
World War shares were nearly recovered


unless of course he means "more equal" as in rich people prospered, in which case, yeah, the rich did well in nazi germany.

#11
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#12
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mustang, read marx already, you pitiful insect



You should read mein kampf, its really, really good and gives you an idea where Hitler was coming from.

We already have. You would have been boring but tolerable 5 years ago, but we've all been there and you're just pathetic to watch now.

Edited by babyhueypnewton ()

#13
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#14
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street soda is a good one I hadn't heard until recently. I knew about road sodas though. I still like road soda because it has the more obvious hillbilly drunk driving connotation. jazz ciggarette is obviously the only way I refer to any sort of weed product, derivative, byproduct or paraphernalia. industrial soda though, that could be good, maybe parking lot soda or something might be better.
#15
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did you hear it from me on facebook? lol
#16
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probably. do you use it a lot?
#17
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I haven't read mein kampf yet, is it worth the trouble? What's it about
#18
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A bitter German coming to terms with his Jewish identity.
#19
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#20
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#21
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mustang, not going to be your dominatrix and satisfy your death drive.
#22
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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stegosaurus posted:

street soda is a good one I hadn't heard until recently. I knew about road sodas though. I still like road soda because it has the more obvious hillbilly drunk driving connotation. jazz ciggarette is obviously the only way I refer to any sort of weed product, derivative, byproduct or paraphernalia. industrial soda though, that could be good, maybe parking lot soda or something might be better.



#23
[account deactivated]
#24
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stegosaurus posted:



i use it every once in a while

#25
sup b*tch
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mustang is starting to creep me out
#26
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BHPN if you'd like to debate the arguments put forth in McCain's book (which I haven't read, but you should be able to present his main points) that would be an interesting discussion.

The Tsarist growth was not simply due to a wheat boom. The period of most rapid growth in the 1890s was during a series a global recessions and falling wheat prices. In fact the entire period 1873-1896 was the "Long Depression", a prolonged commodity price deflation.

For comparison, the Great Depression actually spurred industrialization in major wheat exporters, especially Argentina, by lowering capital costs. During the actual wheat price boom in the 1920s Tsarist growth would have been much faster.
#27
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xXmustang1_galt2Xx
#28
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Galt was a liberal, I'm a fascist.
#29
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actually, your a huge poopy baby. shame on you, you poopy baby.
#30
Mike Nelson here.
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#31
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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mustang19alt2 posted:

BHPN if you'd like to debate the arguments put forth in McCain's book (which I haven't read, but you should be able to present his main points) that would be an interesting discussion.

The Tsarist growth was not simply due to a wheat boom. The period of most rapid growth in the 1890s was during a series a global recessions and falling wheat prices. In fact the entire period 1873-1896 was the "Long Depression", a prolonged commodity price deflation.

For comparison, the Great Depression actually spurred industrialization in major wheat exporters, especially Argentina, by lowering capital costs. During the actual wheat price boom in the 1920s Tsarist growth would have been much faster.



#32
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What's McCaine's email? It can't be "firstname dot lastname at brunel.ac.uk."

What's his first name? He doesn't post it anywhere.
#33
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jesus dude stop fuckin posting already
#34
Mike Nelson here.
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mccaine@clownpenis.fart
#35
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No one's making you read my posts, I just need to pester some of the actual marxists here on the only argument they have.
#36
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Stop bullying Cycloneboy
#37
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his real name is Mark Snow, McCaine is just an internet alias
#38
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I could pester Robert Allen author of Farm to Factory but he's 66 years old and I'd just give him a heart attack.
#39
political car tune
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getfiscal posted:

mccaine@clownpenis.fart

do not taunt happy fun ball.

#40
[account deactivated]