In this 3-part series, conservative historian documents the transfer of Western technology into the Soviet economy as sourced in US government records, Soviet government records, and in the records of the private companies involved. I think you'd agree that this is a pretty strong standard for the reliability of data one is citing. The author comes to the conclusion that without this material aid from the West (this is completely excluding the wartime Lend-Lease program) that the Soviet economy's development path would have been untenable.
Do you have any thoughts on this? Does this invalidate the – considering the circumstances, quite impressive – economic legacy of Soviet Socialism? Understandable if you respond 'porky propaganda' but thoughtful responses on either the veracity of the information or the conclusions made by the author would be appreciated.
Yes. The work in question is much larger in scope.
Read it. It's nothing more than middlebrow, whig-history handwaving. In other words, this 'Reddit Historian' finds the works of Antony Sutton not to be creditable because of 'unsupportable conclusions' ("I can't believe that what he's saying is true, therefore it isn't") and 'conspiratorial thinking' ("Networks of self-interested and powerful people working toward mutual benefit as a historical heuristic is only valid when not labelled by establishment intelligentsia 'Conspiracy' ").
Not a single argument in sight. Did you just find a link somewhere or is this what you believe?
Cameron Foster
If anything, it proved that the Soviet state effectively managed and allocated resources which bolstered its economic legacy.
Luke Nelson
What is the argument supposed to be? That Marxists should ignore the outside world and rely only on their own inventions? Any serious Marxist would find that laughable. It's irrefutable that the Soviets had great technological innovation of their own, but they were a smaller country/economy and of course had to incorporate outside technological developments.
Cooper Sanchez
His argument is that the major technological advances in the Soviet economy were imported.
Hunter Stewart
GUYS GUYS STOP USING GUNS! Feudalists invented them!
Asher Ward
That's his supporting evidence, what's the argument? Nobody in their right mind thinks the Soviets didn't use foreign inventions. So what's the conclusion this porky book wants us to draw?
Kayden Campbell
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Charles Perry
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Gavin Ortiz
Convince me why I should take it seriously?
Nolan Cooper
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Julian Flores
Sutton is a neocon who believes communism is when the state does things, that monopoly capital and bolshevism were "allies" and that foreign intervention would've brought freedom to Russia. His Wall street bolsheviks book is written on a bunch of nonsensical neocon premises. I'm not falling for this again.
Julian Fisher
He gives reasons as to why various conclusions reached by Sutton are unsupportable: And so on. It isn't hand-waving, and it's disingenuous to say that there were no arguments in the post.
Michael Young
And? This is supposed to be some huge embarrassment? Practically every country in the 19th century modelled their industrial development off of british innovations in mining, machine building and refinements of the steam engine, locomotive and railway construction. Americans among others engaged in industrial espionage to acquire British trade secrets or others like the Italians paid for machinery imports in exchange for exporting agriculture. The Soviets were no different and Stalin made no secret that collectivization was a means to increase grain surpluses to sell to the west in exchange for technology transfers. FFS, China based its entire modern development on knowledge and technology transfers yet nobody criticizes them for it?
Dominic White
The argument would be that a Socialist Economy is not as capable as its Capitalist adversaries of the technological advancement required for an economy to 'succeed' in a general sense.
I'm not asking you to like him and his Bolshevik Revolution book doesn't make any economic propositions qua economics, it's a documentation of Wall Street networking and financial support to Russian Revolutionaries. Honestly we're probably in the same boat, I don't like him either and I think he's controlled opposition due to his massive goldbuggery. But, on other topics such as this one, it's hard to argue with the enormous body of evidence presented.
But it is hand-waving… Sutton's biggest problem is his 'denial of agency among [non-Wall Street] types'? I've read many of his books and have yet to experience that. He does misunderstand a lot about the Revolution (such as referring to the Civil War as a war between Reds, Whites and Greens - which is what he calls the Tambov rebellion). Documenting how wealthy groups will marshal their own resources and energies in order to accomplish a goal is NOT a proposition that those wealthy groups control everything, merely that they control their own resources, which are many. NOR does it deny the organic nature of Russian discontent and genuine revolutionary fervor among many ethnic Russians – it's a strawman, he's putting words in Sutton's mouth. What he DOES say is that these machinations were one of many "sine qua nons" for the Revolution's success. This Reddit historian is just classic anti-conspiracy bias, terrified that giving a review one step less of contemptuous would incriminate him in that very same low-brow crime of noticing facts of Wall Street coordination with int'l political movements.
Apparently it is impossible within this person's mind to reconcile these two notions: mass political movements and support from int'l financiers. I don't see the difficulty; all that's necessary is to drop your assumptions.
Kind of, yeah. One of the major advantages that can be said about Socialism is that technological research becomes liberated from the principle of profit, meaning that much less resources and energy are tied up in production of planned obsolescence, pointless consumer goods, market research, technologies with only consumer applications and so on, and more resources and energy in the types of technology that obviate the need for markets in the first place by making the scarce suddenly non-scarce. If the reality of Soviet Economic Development was that all of its key technologies were imported then I think that kind of discredits that notion of the ability of a Socialist State to continuously and significantly improve its technology. And before you start, yes I realize it's not an even comparison between the USSR and the developed capitalist States.
Kevin Robinson
This doesn't follow at all. The USSR's rate of innovation and technological advancement was actually far ahead of what it should have been for the population and economy size.
Xavier Cooper
Then it's almost meaningless: every group can be said to "control their own resources." The question is "what goal does Sutton think they want to accomplish" and, fortunately, Sutton is less coy: This is, to put it lightly, utterly absurd. What a socialist means when he declares himself to be an "internationalist" is not the same as what a financier would mean. Yet Sutton takes Trotsky (and the Bolsheviks generally) to mean by "internationalism" that they desire international finance capital to be in power. It's similar to when some liberals and reactionaries take (philosophical) materialism to mean "an obsession with material goods and wealth."
Other than an accusation of bias against conspiratorial thinking, you haven't presented anything showing him to be incorrect.
Comparing the need for a backwards semi-feudal state to import its basic technology is different from simply any country needing to import technology. Japan's development during the Meiji period also required massive imports of expertise and technology in order to bring it up to rough parity with Western powers; that doesn't mean Japan made no modifications or improvements later to those technologies (and other technologies imported afterwards due to trade). The USSR's later innovations also demonstrate that it is possible for a socialist state to improve its technological capabilities continuously and significantly.
Yet you persist in comparing the two all the same.
Kayden Cox
Russia was dependent on importing shit from the west for hundreds of years before the Bolshevik revolution anyways, so it's not like it would have been any better. The entire reason Peter the Great, for instance, is called "great" is because he imported customs and technology from the West. He hardly did anything innovative himself. And yet, it was still a post-feudal, peasant shithole compared with European countries, badly losing World War I and the Russo-Japanese war later on despite manpower advantages because the Russian Army wasn't modernized enough.
Then, after the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's intense economic reforms to industrialize the country, the USSR managed not only to catch up to the West in many aspects (and of course they had to import Western tech as a starting point like any other country), but also to become a global scientific and technological superpower that performed technological feats that far surpassed the West, like getting the first person into space.
Does anyone seriously think that an aging, spoiled and hemophilic Tsar Alexei II could have gotten a man into space in an alternate universe where the Russian Revolution never happened?
Yes when you're starting with a poor industrial base leftover from the Tsarist era (which had been financed and built with french and british capitalists and technical experts BTW) and an almost nonexistent scientific research apparatus the natural thing to do is import knowledge and tech from the West. This is what every developing country does, socialist or no. You're assuming that socialist science should have appear out of thin air when the material conditions didn't exist. It's simply an unrealistic view that doesn't account for the material conditions in the USSR at the time.
Grayson Lewis
Maybe so. But what are we to make then of the other facts presented on Trotsky? That he was apprehended at Canadian customs as a revolutionary, but then waved through from an anonymous green-light from higher up, that he lived on a subsidized allowance in New York City in an expensive part of town for a period months? Who was looking out for him, who had such access to the levers of power? It's only logical to ask. Anyways that's not the point of the thread…
Because there's no content to the argument; the core of accusing someone of 'conspiracism' just browbeating and hoping the person feels too humiliated to continue. There's no qualitative distinction between History and 'Revisionist History'. One can say that the former is wrong and the latter is right and vice versa, but they're categorically the same, only the content differs. The latter is created only in a zone of social pressures, threats of ostracism and so on, but one still properly addresses it as one does with 'Normal' History - by presenting contrary facts and insights, not by naked dismissal. So when someone says that one of the problems of X or Y research is that it suffers from 'conspiratorial thinking' they lose my regard, as they've apparently failed to understand this basic point.
Fair enough. I'm not here to argue Sutton's point for him, just curious what yours is.
I find it hilarious that 'condition of upper class women improved' is listed as one of Peter's great legacies.
Jayden Lopez
fyi op is a fascuck
I really doubt they're here to argue in good faith
