Marx and Engels are working their way to the top of my reading list. Not because I'm getting through a bunch of books, because I'm fucking in government housing and dealing with a bunch of bureaucracy set up by rich white people who think government can't work so they try to break it. I've always been very liberal but navigating poverty while the GOP does everything it can to fuck poor people in an effort to fuck brown people and remain the ruling class is making me reconsider communism. I like my stuff and my right not to be disappeared for disagreeing with the party, I'm American, but Russia and China went from backwards shitholes to world powers pretty quickly so there's an argument to be made that Marx had some good ideas that could be implemented into existing governments without the deaths of millions if you know what you're doing going into the thing.
This is simply inaccurate. Russia under Tsar Nicholas was a failing power but it certainly wasn't a "backwards shithole" at least not when compared with any other European power. In fact, it was the victory of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war that caused European forces to re-evaluate the whole of the Pacific Rim- after all, it was just presumed that Western powers would always dominate Eastern powers. Shifting power from the monarchy to the Bolsheviks had the principle effect of changing who were serfs and who were aristocracy. It did not cause any great advancement of Russian culture or thought. China, for its part, was an ancient dynastic culture that valued stability over change. When it interacted with world powers that valued innovation over stability it lost. China has always been a cosmopolitan coastline with a rustic interior and China under Chiang Kai-shek was every bit as modern as any other Asian nation (with the possible exception of Japan, which pushed into modernity with determined zeal). Mao Zedong's "modernization" of China plunged the nation into famine; order could only be maintained through totalitarianism. What we consider "modern" China only began with the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping from 1979-on. Tricky thing about communism (and I'll bet bfv can totally school me on this) is that it has never really been applied to any group of any real size. Soviet "communism" had a lot more in common with fascism than actual communism. Chinese "communism", for its part, was more of an antiintellectualism than an actual communism (see also: the Khmer Rouge). In each of these cases, shit has gone decidedly south. It's one of the things that keeps the hopes of communism alive - everyone who has ever tried it has ended up fucking it up past the point of recognition. PIketty, after cranking through 900 pages of powerpoints and algebra, basically argues that the best government for the people by the people is a bunch of socialists reining in a free-market capitalist economy. Because really, that's the happy medium: provide enough freedom and challenge that strivers can get ahead, but nerf the field enough that laggers don't inherit a dystopian hellscape. Really, if you rule you should be better off than if you suck but if you suck, your suckitude should not be visited on every proceeding generation of your offspring. And that right there is the tricky balance of all of human society: balancing the needs of the strivers against the needs of the laggers. I'll be the first to observe that things are way to far into the striver camp at the moment.Russia and China went from backwards shitholes to world powers
I struggled briefly with how to phrase that line you quoted and decided to I'd be coarse. I think there's truth to the claim that the Soviets went literally from like two generations or so from serfdom to the moon. I'd actually like some book recommendations about how the Soviets modernized so quickly And I'm not full on Maoist or anything. Again I like consumer goods. I just went from maybe ambivalent or moderate economically to further left.
Coarse or fine, though, it's still wrong. The parts of Russia that were backwaters were backwaters under the Soviet Union. The cosmopolitan centers were cosmopolitan. Meanwhile the principle effect of communism under Mao was the dispersion of urban specialization into rural generalization. As far as "progress", wheat production under Soviet communism went from one of the worlds top exporters to one of the worlds top importers but somewhere between 18 and 55 million people died in China from the Great Leap Forward (the fact that we don't know the number closer than that says a lot about the sophistication of the culture). The United States went from serfdom to the moon in two generations, too, and did so without inhibiting the social and economic progress of the nation. Not that "to the moon" is the best standard by which to judge a culture. I mean, Bhutan consistently ranks as one of the happiest nations in the world and only like 40% of Bhutanese even have access to the Internet. In any event, "socialism" and "communism" are often placed on a spectrum but there are reasons to dicker about that. I don't know of any books that talk about Soviet modernization because really, the Soviets effectively continued the confiscation begun under the Tsars. b_b recommended Richard Pipes to me and despite the guy being an old-school Reaganite hawk the book is balanced and compelling. If you want to see how the Soviet Union came apart, I recommend Hoffman's The Dead Hand.
The mythology is that Operation Paperclip gave us a leg up because we got Von Braun. The reality is the Nazis were ahead because they'd poured money into V-weapons and we hadn't. Freeman Dyson pointed out that the war might have had a very different ending if Hitler hadn't wasted more resources on Von Braun than the US spent on the Manhattan Project. But then, we spent twice as much on the B-29 as we did on the Manhattan Project so nothing is straightforward (as per usual). Fact of the matter is, we did spend $3B on developing a long-range strategic bomber fleet. This prompted Khrushchev to throw money at Korolev because Korolev promised Khruschchev ICBMs. Throwing money at Korolev gave the Soviets a leg up temporarily because the United States was too busy developing two parallel rocket programs (Von Braun at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama vs NACA), one running kerosene and the other running LOX. As soon as the Soviets embarrassed the United States, we merged it all into NASA and the Soviets proceeded to lose as big as a struggling command economy could be expected to while facing down the never-invaded winner of the world's largest geopolitical conflict. Matt Brzinski's Red Moon Rising is about exactly this.