Hi all, the TH-cam police have been real class enemies on this video as well as a fair few other more controversial economies. I do now almost exclusively rely on the income I receive from making these video's so I want to put my hat out for the channels patreon page. Any donation helps and it means I will not have to shy away from talking about more controversial topics like this into the future for fears of being hit with the youtube hammer of advertiser friendly content. www.patreon.com/EconomicsExplained Please only give what you can, and as always you are welcome to enjoy otherwise :)
@@SuperMunQ it can vary from the footage shown Vs certain words that he's saying that may be flagged by advertiser's as not suitable to show their ads on. Once TH-cam sees it can't make money on the video it will be demonitised
@@EconomicsExplained Both Invicta and Kings & Generals already did something on that. Maybe you wanna cooperate with them. That would be super awesome.
I thought that bit was funny. If anything was annoying/offensive, it was the statement that 'most workers' in the west get 'a salary and maybe a bonus'. Yeah - thirty years ago. Most today get minimum wage, or don't have a job to begin with. What's left of the middle-class talk like they're still typical. They have no clue. End of rant. Otherwise, the video was quite good...
@@Microtherion I know a lot of salary workers. I know a lot of hourlys too. Don't know a lot of minimum wage outside unskilled labor. Also, national unemployment as of May was 5.8%.
Soviet economy of each decade is absolutely different, it cannot be generalized. Even certain institutions, such as GosPlan, worked very differently in different years. And, the level of efficiency was also very different.
This needs a part 2. The economy under kruschev, brezhnev, and gorbachev was very different. The post stalin portion of it is a lot more interesting than Stalinism which, while important and well-explained, is commonly known.
The only one you mentioned that was really significantly different was Gorbachev. But by the time he came in the economy was already crumbling and the only thing he could do really is try to reform it which he did to some degree but got blamed for the whole thing falling apart.
Ilya Levin The destalinisation and Khrushchev’s reforms were significant. Strict socialist central planning was transitioned to a profit-focused central planning. Then came, Kosygin and Brezhnev’s stagnation. And then of course, Gorbachev’s uskoreniye and perestroika.
@@juanjoniebles452 BS, total centralisation is Khrushchev's invention. During Stalin's rule, private enterprises, called 'artels', worked fine. They were banned by Khrushchev, who did not have any idea what he was doing with his country other than do-what-Stalin-did-not and undo-what-Stalin-did.
can we see the economics of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy? It would be interesting to understand how the countries were run in such a weird economic system.
Nazi germanies economy was pretty similar to the Weimar economy, but the Nazi party heavily subsidized war industries, to the point where they were almost broke. Due to the runaway spending and borrowing, the Nazi economy was unsustainable, and basically required conquest to keep it going ( one of the reasons for the war). Fascist Italy was a bit different. Lots of stuff was directly owned by the state, and by extension, the fascist party.
@@hellboy6507 you are absolutly right, but hitler wanted to become socialist. and thats why barbarossa happened in the first place. he knew that a socialist economy couldnt compete with a capitalist one. so germany needed to be resource independent that trade wouldnt be required anymore. if u read about hitler, u will notice that his decission making and plans made sense, despite that he was megalomaniac racist. and not that moron as many descripe/displayed him... for example hitler knew better than his generals that the modern war is won in factories(which require resources etc.)
You stepped on a landmine when you said Soviet tanks were vastly inferior to German ones. Just a heads up, the tank nerds are going to hold you accountable.
T-34 had almost no chances to survive 1v1 against Tiger. But if we compare cost and not units, its at least 5v1, with very different result. Also Germany had huge fuel problems and lack of metals like vanadium for steel alloys, which made them stuck at impractically heavy tanks.
@@randombystander991 You shouldn't compare Tiger to T-34 because Tiger tank was an answer for T-34 when appeared that Pz4 is not good tank compared to T-34. So actually at the beginning German tanks were much worse than T-34 however better equipped , with experienced crews and good tactics.
@@piecia66 When people say that german WW2 tanks were superior to soviet, they compare most iconic ones. My point was that quantity over quality can be more efficient strategy than just building better weapons; not just mindlessly throwing more, like soviets usually depicted, but finding optimal effort/effect balance.
Here in Mexico folks bitch: "Oh, mexicans work 2500 hours-a-year" but, in reality, they're watching football, at facebook / instagram / tinder, and don't know how to turn on a PC, nor want to learn to avoid "more responsibility", yet, they want a six figures income.
Everything that this video says is true, but the main reason that the USSR dissolved is because President Reagan's crusade against the "Evil Empire" just drove it into bankruptcy. Reagan wildly increased the national debt of America to fight an enemy that was greatly a product of his own imagination. The Soviet leaders saw that Reagan's madness would either destroy the world or at least put the Soviet economy into the toilet. They chose to dissolve the USSR to remove it as the the primary target of American military madness at the time. The USSR actually won The Cold War because they were the first to realize that winning the Cold War wasn't worth destroying the whole planet in process, and not even worth the resulting hardship that it would put on the Soviet people. Compare that to America since 2000, where massive annual defense budgets are putting the nation further in debt, while many 1000's of Americans are homeless and on the street because they can't even afford a place to live. The Soviets at least cared enough about their people to give up its geopolitical ambitions, while America cares less and less about the welfare of its people in its desperate attempts to maintain its hegemony over the world. ... jkulik919@gmail.com
My dad's company does a lot of what the factory managers did. If a team got a budget, they used every cent of it because if they didn't, they wouldn't be given that funding again. There were a lot of business trips that really didn't need to happen before he retired.
Exactly it's the same process. The only difference being is that if that goes unchecked for too long the business starts to struggle financially and faces potential bankruptcy, prompting an investigation and changes. In our socialist systems the factory managers didn't fear bankruptcy as the government managing all wages and its had a larger reserve of money to fund it. The issue was that initially most factories did fall for idea of productivity, but over the decades more and more figured out how to play the system to make more on the side. Now a company might go bust if it functions like this (and a lot of them do go bankrupt) in a couple of years, a country though, the larger in size than a dwarf planet, almost a century to run out of juice
Same goes to education, westerners schools pretty much dump perfectly good school equipment bacause the budget will be reduced if they see them use a year old equipment. Thats why my buddy who's dad was the school janitor had like 5 microscopes in his room. The education budget here in my country does the complete opposite though. Theu gives school almost nothing and many rely on private donations, my high-school had 10 microscopes for 4,000 students and all of it were 5-10 years old.
@@boflator the reason goods and Services are so cheap is because the companies have limited money. When something is state run it don't has to worry as much as a business that only profits through sales.
Deliberately under performing so that when we achieve something it will look like a win.... Its what retail managers do all the time 😅 shhhh don't tell head office.
It's funny how this was the only critique of communist inefficiencies that he could bring up, when literally the entire premise of a command economy introduced a major set of flaws that directly contributed to the black markets of the country, as well as shortages.
My grandfather was personally affected by the horrors of Communism. One time he was eating ice cream and Stalin came up to him and asked for some, he said yes and then Stalin proceeded to pull out a comically large spoon.
"Comrade, that is not fair! Everyone is issued standard Soviet size spoon. Why is yours bigger than the standard size?" ...... This person was never heard from again.
@@markaleman4419 More like a boomers parent/grandparent? Boomers are called boomers because they where born during the baby-boom after world war 2. Lenin was released into the world as a millitary weapon during world war 1 by desperate Germans who needed their soldier in the east who where fighting the Russian Empire to go to the west to fight the French and English. And the most crazy part of all, IT WORKED!
@@adobo777 wasn't Lenin being allowed to go to Russia more a calculated risk from the German higher ups, in hope that the commies would get the Russians off their backs?
@@mashamylaramu you really had to comment about the Polish Cosmonaut to a guy with a Polandball profile pic didn't you? We all know that Poland cannot into Space, never did and never will... I'm just joking 🤣, Don't take this seriously...
@@michaelnewbold214 sorry man, i cannot into comics culture, never did and never will... :)))) Seriously, however, a former space nation has become a joke of everyone by denying it's own achievements, it's sad.
Exactly! Before the new labour laws introduced in Portugal by the Socialist Party, if you were "too" productive, they'd just hand you extra work and pay you the same!
My dad has a buddy who works as a local government accountant and he gets flack from coworkers for just meeting or somewhat exceeding expectations. In an unamused way they told him that he was making them look bad.
Okay, the Mythbusters experiment he referenced is one of my favourite. For those who don't know what it was, the myth was that dynamite could be used to clear hardened cement from a cement truck. What ended up happening was that not only was the cement little more than a vague memory, but all that was left of the truck was a single axle.
Someone could have gone inside the mixing chamber with a pneumatic drill and used that to break up the concrete. I'm going to be on sick leave that day.
5:55 "This had led to a phenomenon where a lot of workers are idle for a vast majority of their working hours. Like maybe you are right now watching this video." I had to pause the video and laugh. My coworkers looked at me in surprise. You got me there.
I remember that my Grandpa told me about a young coworker at a factory they worked at. The young lad didn't know about that lie everyone knew about so the same month he joined the factory, it produced like 150% of the quota. The managers burned the additional 50% in a huge fire behind the factory and told off the new worker.
By the later years of the war, the soviet tanks weren’t vastly inferior to the German ones. Some were, but most at the time could almost measure up the the German tanks in 1-1 combat. The difference was more that the German ones were vastly over-engineered which inhibited the ability to conduct field repairs if they were damaged or broke down, whereas the soviet ones had more basic and universal parts. Basically, the Germans went so far i to the ‘quality’ side of things that they saw huge diminishing returns in the effectiveness of their tanks compared to the Russians. Not only that, the soviet production process was quicker because of the more standardised templates that russian tanks adhered to, and they still had a lot of factories in the lands the Germans hadn’t reached whereas the Britons had been bombing the shit out of German manufacturing centres for a long time after the battle of britain.
Yeah, the "Soviet soldiers and weapons were rubbish but they just _overran_ us" thing is basically a narrative embarrassed German generals came up with after the war to explain why they lost. And since German generals were for decades the primary source of Western information about the war in the East (what with the Cold War and all), it stuck around. It's only true of the earliest stages of the war.
It is also worth to take in consideration the fact that germany was heavily short of fuel by the later years of the war (if not the whole war period). Specially in the eastern front there was a huge shortage of oil, forcing panzer squads to just leave the tanks abandoned.
I'm kinda surprised about how you talked about the industrial growth in the early Soviet Union. That wasn't the gov being obsessed with building more factories just because, it was literally the Russian industrial revolution. Like, that's why the soviets built so many factories: they didn't have enough to produce enough goods for their population, which wasn't really solved until after the war.
@@hackysmack The Holodomor is so new, academically, that Millennials graduated high school before it was taken seriously and only 13 countries in the world recognized it last I checked. You will have to forgive most of the world for being unable to discuss something they don't know about.
@@Robert-qq9em i mean, Robert Conquest was talking about the holodomor in the 60s, and I would hazard a guess that the reasons certain people in academia didn't take him seriously were politically motivated, although it must be said that Conquest's death toll figures for the holodomor and the subsequent purges were way higher than what was eventually confirmed. That being said, a regime doesn't suddenly become fine and acceptable just because it turned out they only killed 4 million people at once instead of 15 million people at once
@@Currrby Robert Conquest was working for the British Intelligence as a professional propagandist. "That being said, a regime doesn't suddenly become fine and acceptable just because it turned out they only killed 4 million people at once instead of 15 million people at once" And who 'killed' these people? There are more than 4 million missing there... i.imgur.com/Rm4AYex.png
The objective: "Don't get sent to the Gulag" applies at every level, from school child, to retirement, from factory worker to minister in the government (only exception is the supreme leader, who gets poisoned instead).
I'll give this video credit on trying to be ambivalent about the USSR, but I'll throw in my 2cents. The Russian Empire was feudalism, which was completely backwards in the 20th century and led to Russia's defeat and overthrow. The majority of people were peasants and Russian economics at the time lacked the mercantile and capitalist engines that powered the other nations. This point is crucial in understanding where Russian communists started with and why they did what they did. This video seemed to try painting a picture of the Russian Empire that was contemporary to socialist revolution in capitalism. Proletariat are wage-earners who had to earn money to buy things that they needed. Peasants are not wage-earners on this level. Peasants toiled their lord's land to produce crops, which a portion was provided to the lords. Peasants then had to provide everything else by themselves like it was the middle ages. No way can this economic system compete with the industrial revolution. Marx and Lenin were paired together in the video often, which could be done if considering the lineage of Marxism (as Marxism-Leninism), but the people themselves had differing views due to their differing historical contexts from which they theorized. Marx did not foresee socialism building up in such backwards conditions and thought that socialism would come from the developed world first and then spread out from there. (The reverse of this prediction occurred. In fact, orthodox Marxists disagreed with Marxist-Leninist developments of theory after Marx and failed in adapting Marxism to their conditions.) (Marx also did not envisage how socialism and communism would exactly develop in detail. He was more into explaining contradictions of capitalism and how they would theoretically be somewhat resolved in a socialist and fully resolved in communism.) Lenin instead adapted Marx's theories to Russian conditions at the time. He developed political organization theories such as the vanguard that would be intellectuals and leaders that would lead on behalf of his comrades. (This was important because Marx did not develop such theories himself.) Lenin also developed the broad plan for the USSR's first half of history to transition from backwards feudalism into a capitalistic stopgap phase and into socialism and then eventually communism, the classless society that would remove contradictions from the production process under capitalism. The period between Russian feudalism and Lenin's time and Stalin's time was reduced to a throwaway statement. Feudalism was absolutely backwards and could not support socialism, a system where workers owned the means of industrial production, because such industrial production barely existed up to the capacity capitalism had. I will gloss over the early War Communism years of economics because it was essentially a war economy taking forceful control of resources and the economy to win against the liberal, capitalistic Whites during the civil war. Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy in order to capitalistically build up the economics (using private property as opposed to public) until it could support socialism. So a mixed economy between the private and public sectors existed, something akin to China now. Peasants were given private property (which they wanted because they did not own land under feudalism) but were not forced to collectivize and industrialize. The private sector was free to exist outside central planning. Stalin ended the NEP in favor for collectivization and industrialization under central planning. This was the start of Soviet socialism where the state owned everything, but the state was in control of the Party, which was voted in by workers. Peasants were to become industrialized farmers using public industrial resources. Of course, there were always peasant resistance to things like this or war communism, which led to anarchist uprisings and the eventual ouster of anarchists from participation in USSR politics. The necessity of such policies were trying to have feudalism catch up to capitalism in a couple decades as opposed to hundreds of years. While the system could be defined as socialism under Stalin, but industrially, it required much more development while lead to the rapid paced five-year plans. This video then goes into the typical argument that not being threatened with being fired leads to lazy workers. But it also happens under capitalism??? I will give this video much credit for realizing capitalism also has that issue. The REAL argument is shown later that the central planners misallocated resources in an attempt to help what they thought were underperformers. This has a basis in anti-capitalist critique because capitalism will not be very kind to economic underperformers, no matter how important their output is. However, how they went about addressing this issue in this scenario led to those mentioned issues. The video attempts to say that its politics and not economics, but there's hardly a distinction here because it's really political economy and the distribution of economic power throughout a legal system. Capitalism also has issues of political economy where resources are mismanaged to appease a very narrow ruling section that's sealed off from the masses without consideration for actual economic results. Soviet socialism had the intelligensia section of workers stratified from the common workers through their political system. Soviet misallocation is a very real problem, which led to its own demise, but similar "political" misallocaiton is also causing similar issues under capitalism, but instead of a worker's state, it is a state to appease capitalists first. However, Soviet misallocation is a matter of not understanding how their socialist economics worked and the actual conditions of workers. (Mao would go on in his contributions to Marxism-Leninism to try forcing the intelligensia in actually coming into the actual workplaces they preside over and work with the actual workers themselves to see what's going on). (Lysenkoism is another example of Soviet misallocation. It attempted to propose an alternate science to the science that justified racist politics under capitalism and fascism. It attempted to create justification for their mode of political economy.) Like what Marx said, economics form the superstructure of society (and culture). (As a side note, peasants were FAR more lazier than workers under capitalism. Capitalism was where the concept of time is money was developed because the industrial revolution changed production from a matter of scaling human laborers through sheer numbers on a 1:1 ratio to scaling machine output and efficiency through technology where 1 person could product more and more and more in the same time span and that number of production can increase significantly other than simply more people and more resources. Peasants also spent a lot of time goofing around as long as the crops were tended to.) The video then moves on about how the Soviet Union focused on industrialization and development as opposed to life comforts. This is a true statement, but lacks the context that the USSR literally came from feudalism and needed to catch up to the West. Hundreds of years of development had to be made in a few decades. There was also that specific industries such as defense and agriculture were favored more than modern comforts such as fashion. This latter point is what later Soviet leaders after Stalin attempted to do through liberalization policies. However, such policies would root the seeds of the USSR's demise with it ending with Gorbachev using liberal policies to create a private sector that intentionally undermined the Soviet public sector. He also caused economic instability with policies like alcoholic prohibition. Yeltsin then went against the people's wishes to continue socialism and its safety nets for workers for some of the worst ten years of Russian history, where economic shock therapy looted the public sector to create oligarchs and people lost public services to make little under the private sector, leading to mass death and a massive reduction in production that Russia still has not fully recovered from. This led to Putin taking power.
The Soviets won over the Germans because they actually had resources. Germany constantly suffered from oil issues and so they fielded horses to help along their machines and supplies. This would be a nightmare in the logistics involved in invading Russia. The Soviets also had BETTER TANKS THAN THE GERMANS. The T-34 caught the Germans by surprise because they were expecting Russian tanks to be crappy like the interwar ones that lost to FInland. So the Germans didn't have good enough anti-tank weapons to penetrate the T-34 armor. So the only way the Germans could fight back was COPY THE T-34. However they couldn't fully due to the aforementioned oil issues and their lack of quality steel. How's that for lazy socialist public sector workers? Meanwhile, Nazi Germany under fascism forced workers to labor for the private sector or else they actually were killed. At least the USSR would at worst label uncooperative workers as parasites to be sorted out in gulags (political labor camps). Other achievements of lazy socialist workers were the AK-47 and satellites and space exploration, the latter which was useless and forced the US into beating out the Soviets to not be ashamed by them. Another problem with Soviet consumer-oriented production was that they maximized for utility rather than comfort in allocating resources. Housing were depressing boarding houses but functional (which was the main urban unit of housing during the early 20th century before post-War boomers got the stereotypical suburban homes). Cars tiny, but functional. The lack of consumer comforts would be another factor in the demise of the USSR. Innovation was not lacking however. There were design plans for things like a radio-based system to transmit text onto screens akin to the Internet, but usually the resource allocation issue won out. The USSR certainly did have an impact on the world. The rise of the USSR put fear into capitalists that workers would rise up and so made concessions. Krushchev condemning Stalin's failures lead to the downfall of the radical left in America. China would try to learn from the USSR's failures (the USSR's advisors to China did not understand Chinese conditions and failed, and so China and the USSR would inevitably have their schism) and go their own way. North Korea would use Stalin's example of socialism in one country (rejecting orthodox Marxist ideals of revolution spreading for Stalin's recognition of the conditions) for Juche to survive past the USSR collapse of Eastern bloc trade networks. Venezeula under Chavez and Maduro would develop socialism of the 21st century and attempt to have socialism under Western-style democracy with open elections for all sorts of parties. (Interestingly, the collapse of the Eastern bloc led to the integration of the former countries into global trade that was blocked and sanction by the Western capitalist countries. Such blocking of the exchange of ideas and resources led to the constriction of resources those countries faced under the Eastern bloc. Poland used to have to share resources, but now it can take resources from Africa to develop for itself. Global trade is also the secret to China's success. However, Russia didn't fare so well still suffering sanctions for being a strongman against NATO encroaching more and more on former Russian allies surrounding Russia and rejecting the wishes of former Russian leaders for NATO to not do that. The flip side to global trade is the proletarization of the third world and their exploitation to benefit the first world at the third world's behalf. China managed to enforce discipline and cheap deals to attract this kind of investment but also take just enough for it to be able to build itself up through deals the West could not refuse. The future will certainly be a clash of the first world vs the third world vs the "second" world of China) .
@@natehiggins2487 Russia in 1913 was on the same level as 1860 Germany, check the economic data. Marx thought a revolution was possible in Germany. Also "industrial proletariat" was always a very small percentage of the population in industrialized nations. In 1930 during the New Economic Policy the Soviet Union was as advanced as Germany in 1890, or as UK in 1860.
@@natehiggins2487 wow that's a lot of information, can you give some sources for further readings? I'd love to know more about socialist economies.. It would seem their biggest mistake was not being able to translate economic growth into public welfare?
@@presuntomr their biggest issue was having to fight hot and cold wars with every major capitalist/imperialist nation on the planet since its inception and until its demise. Hard to achieve anything socially or economically when all the most powerful nations in the world make it their lifes work to see you fail.
My granddad was tractor driver in Lithuanian SR (part of USSR). He said management would measure your work on fuel used, so tractor drivers would go down the field pour diesel from fuel tank to some ditch, have a bottle of vodka and drive back. A lot of diesel used means they worked really hard, even field is still not plowed yet...
My grandfather was a bus driver in socialist Poland and he would suck the Diesel out of the bus. He would then trade It for bricks to build His own House after Work. Legend. My grandmother still lives in that house
Alex Mainz my great grandfather was riding bicycle from work to home every day and would pass some construction yard where they keep construction materials, he would take three bricks every day. By the time he retired, he built house, garage, farm building and there was still pile of bricks left lol.
@@qwertyuiopzxcvbnm9890 don't talk about something you don't know. Nobody was getting paid much and only way to survive was to barter state property. In a communist system everything is state property
@@SA2004YG That is obvious. Still people should have gotten their act together. It cannot be that dumping fuel is easier than carefully making officials understand that there is a way to get the work more productive.
Tbh I think USSR would benefit from a division between Lenin Stalin, Kruschev and Gorbachev during economic analysis. To me these are significantly different enough to warrant seperate videos
Yeah especially because of the shit economy Kruschev drummed up with his "reforms". You can look at the growth data in all former Soviet countries and it goes as follows: Increasing quickly through to roughly the mid-sixties then a quick about face, an uptick in the mid-late seventies, followed by collapse under the weight of Gorbachev's "reforms"
Exactly! Thank you! Every time under different leader economy worked differently. Bringing up only Stalin dictatorship let alone forgetting the fact that Russians were attacked by Nazis is quite biased. Life under Brezhnev was completely different.
@@vkrgfan not necessarily, war can be a massive promoter of industry. It just depends on what parts of your nation are invaded and what resources/routes are seized. If you are not invaded your economy will likely blossom.
Having spent about six years in old communist countries, I think you are severely underestimating lack of worker motivation that was happening there. It was nothing comparable to even our worst bureaucracies. Imagine a job you don't like and being assigned to it for the rest of your life, with no consequences for anything but telling the truth. The ideology talks of land, labor and capital, but carefully omits people. The greatest misallocated resource by far was people (and not just the murdered, starved and imprisoned ones). A good economic system is the one that is best at getting the right people doing the things that the most add value to others. Hard to pull off if people are classified as glorified machine parts.
yep. This is what you get when you let a few people who just happen to be good at communist theory run entire complicated industries. Everything just becomes another statistic. This isn't even a question of socialism at this point--it's a question of irresponsibility.
As a logistician in the government, we were heavily encouraged to spend every dollar of our budget, even requesting fund transfers to increase the next years slice of fiscal pie. We’d spend thousands on extra furniture, equipment we wanted,
Don't believe the myth that this is unique to the public sector. This is present in every organisation with budget cycles and people that are motivated by building their own fiefdom (pretty much every large organisation that exists). From travel budgets to events/entertainment to project budgets; the private sector is rife with this wastage. I've seen purchases of products of $1M+ to "preserve next years budget" that was totally unnecessary and actually made things worse (and now you are forced to use it to justify the previous years purchase).
which is still the same problem. If you work in some supermarket then you paid a flat rate for the hours you work so why should you give 100% performance when 50% nets you the same pay?
@R S there was also the opportunity for you to get huge benefits in the Soviet Union if you were an exemplary worker. You could get a nice Dacha or better working conditions and a car. But for the majority of people then and now you just work a normal boring rate and don’t (or barely) get rewarded
I am a military historian, I can explain some of the things mentioned by E.E. when it comes to the Red Army and the Soviet war effort around Kursk. 1st- He said that German tanks were superior at Kursk and thats a contested matter. While it is true the Panther tank and Tiger tank manned by German crews were capable to knocking out many tanks, the function of a tank is NOT solely to destroy other tanks. To say German tanks were better because of this is naive. The Panther was rushed to the field and had major teething issues so many of them broke down before even arriving to the battlefield. The Panther's high explosive rounds were also not very effective as it was equipped with a high velocity 75mm gun (Germans used CENTImeters so that would be 7,5cm) and it was intended to destroy tanks over great distances. Tactically speaking it was good at what it did, but strategically the T-34 was superior due to low costs, ease of production, and good performance when driving on the battlefield and in armament. While it needed the 85mm gun upgrade to kill late-war German tanks, and the 85mm HE rounds were more effective against infantry and fortifications, the 76.2mm F-34 gun was still effective. That said, the Soviets generally had superior tanks, the T-34 was better in the early phases of the Eastern front, its upgrade post-Kursk was effective but the Red Army recognized it was an aged designed so they worked on making the T-44 precursor to the T-54 tank, and the Soviet heavy tanks were the best except for 1942-1943 when the Tiger was better than the KV tanks in nearly every way, which led to the IS/JS series of tanks that had thicked frontal and hull armor that was sloped, and the more common variant was the IS-2 with a 122mm gun that outperformed the 88mm gun on the tiger in every way except reload time and ammo capacity. 2nd- The Soviet industry DID give the Red Army a marked advantage over the Wehrmacht, but this has led to many misconceptions, among them being that tanks were war winning weapons that were made in the thousands each month vs. hundreds made by the Axis which meant by sheer numbers alone the Soviets won. The majority of casualties caused in both world wars was artillery, 60% of those killed in ww2 were killed by artillery, so mortars and field guns were actually more critical than tanks, which served as mobile bunkers with Machineguns (2nd main cause of death at 20-30%) and big guns with HE rounds for infantry and AP rounds for vehicles. Tanks were primarily an offensive weapon in Soviet hands, while artillery was used effectively on the defensive and on the offensive. That is why every battle in the Eastern front had more field guns than tanks, as the guns themselves were cheaper, easier to produce, less complicated, and served their intended function very well compared to tanks, which were effectively mobile artillery and MG crews. But another misconception is that the Soviets ONLY won because of their industry and throwing men at the German line. This is false. The Soviet Deep Battle/Operation doctrine was very effective and as the war went on, more men were armed with submachineguns than rifles, due to the effectiveness of the weapon in close quarters, which is why we see the Red Army having mass infantry charges, to get men in range with their SMGs, but we often ignore that these offensives would open with artillery strikes and men would often be accompanied by tanks. These offensives were organized, but the Germans continued using the Kar98 and built squads around the MG and supporting it as the main weapon of a squad. Rifles were typically favored for this as engagement distances were about 3-400 meters and the SMG with smaller pistol rounds was effective up to 150 meters while rifles and machineguns that used full sized rifle rounds. They also relied on the Kar98 over semiauto rifles because the Kar98 was more precise and very reliable, compared to the G41 and the G43 rifles, and used the less precise MGs to cover entire areas with a hail of bullets (the inaccuracy of this weapon was actually an advantage as it was more effective as suppressing enemies, German fanboys calm down) and the Red Army's efforts to compensate for their machineguns not dropping lead like the MG34 or MG42, had their infantry armed with SVT38/40 and SKS semiauto rifles and PPSh-41s and PPS-43s to increase the amount of bullets fired at the Axis forces. The PPSh-41s and PPS-43s were very easy to produce and with a large Soviet industrial base, and Soviet weapon engineers making planes, tanks, small arms, artillery and trucks in great numbers with their quality improving over the war, the Soviets actually began making planes like the Yak-3, La-5 and La-7 that began outperforming the Bf.109, Fw.190. The Soviet industry's advantage was not limited to simply "making more of everything", but it also allowed the Soviets to build newer designs with tanks, planes, and guns without compromising the output of necessary weapons. Germany typically made variants of existing weapons to improve performance, while the Soviets and Americans only did it as a stopgap measure or to have the M4 and T-34 fill a specialized role, such as the Sherman Jumbo acting as a sort of heavy tank, or the T-34/57 acting as a tank hunter. The Soviets also made sure the weapons they made were simple to make and use, while Germany's early attempts at modernizing their primary service rifle by having a semiauto rifle be capable of having a manual bolt action feature that complicated the design for manufacturers and soldiers looking to clean their weapon. The simplicity of these weapons also made them more reliable as there were less parts that could be compromised and less time to clean/repair them. Replacing a wheel on an M4, T-34 or Panzer IV was far easier than doing so for the Panther and Tiger tanks, the SVT-40 and M1 Garand were easier to maintain than the G41. The Soviets didn't just win by being industrialized, they won by being smart with how they used that industry. They won by having a firm understanding of logistics and maintained their supply lines effectively, and used misinformation to have Germans attack strong points along the front by obtaining false reports from Soviet headquarters they seized, they attacked railroads disguised to seem busy while keeping the railways they relied upon secret by giving them a bogus target, and any disadvantage they had tactically or strategically they worked to correct while the Germans would sooner blame failures on a lack of commitment.
Well on paper German industry wasn’t certainly inferior against Soviet one,as in every source German gross national product and heavy industry was largest in Europe since 1900s,they were just failed to mobilize their economy until 1943-44 and they used inefficent production methods.Soviet industry was certainly was more efficient than German one but if Germans were fully mobilized from early 1940s they wouldn’t been outproduced by USSR considering they already produced more value of munitions in 1944 with 17 billion dollars against 16 of Soviets.Germany had 5 times of Soviet coal(all types)production,3 times of their steel-aluminium and 2 times of their electricity production between 1942-44 since Soviets lose half of their heavy industry to Germans.Still before WW2 Germany had a larger economy than Soviet Union as well as little bit more industrial power,just second only to US on paper according to American historian Paul Kennedy.
@@AFT_05G Well those are good points. I should prefix the industrial point with "war industry" or say the amount of industry committed to military hardware vs. consumer goods. As for the coal, while thats a fair point, the Soviets had oil and while the Germans might have managed keeping up if they were more efficient, the existing hardware they had didn't have the fuel to maintain their constant use like Soviet hardware enjoyed, and Germans liked complex hardware because it seemed superior. Germans had a bit of an ego, while Soviets were definitely a lot more pragmatic. To offset the disadvantage in steel and aluminum, they used wood frames for planes and worked to make them more maneuverable to avoid getting hit, as far as fighters went, with ground attack aircraft having mixed construction in the case with the IL-2. But those are excellent points, thank you for pointing that out. Hopefully people who read our comments will get a proper idea on the industrial situation and how both sides handled it and why.
@@idiocracyisnowadocumentary8834 Thats curious that you say that, because the historians I have talked to and read from state Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Youre not wrong about Russia, though. Its definitely seen the Mongol, Swedish, and German empires destroyed.
@@ajohnymous5699 Agreed about Afghanistan , Russia has mortally wounded some as well , Napoleons Grand old Army wasn't so grand after the Russian Campaign
My dad once got arrested for selling 40kh of cabbage outside his home town in Soviet Moldova 😅😅. Also it was incredibly difficult to do anything… to build a house (getting materials was hard because even if someone had something buying and selling cement, for example, was prohibited)
Will you do another one on Yugoslavia's economy? They had a very different view of socialism that was much more centred on local autonomy and market socialism than the USSR
@smb Serbia was the only country that would loose from Yugoslav breakup, all other countries especially Slovenia and Croatia profited. It was natural for Serbia to try to maintain Yugoslavia no matter how misguided it was. As for economy, Yugoslavia starting from the early 90s was not really socialist by that point.
@smbYugoslavia had its own industry,factories and production,good international reputation and a strong army as well as better working conditions and security for its citizens. And now you have a bunch of debt ridden small and insignificant corrupt countries in which politicians are billionaires and people have nothing. All as a result of people like yourself.
Can you cover Yugoslavia as well? Their economy was run significantly differently from that of the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations, and I'd love to see you cover it
That's what I found when I was at school: If you can solve a math problem then they keep giving you harder and harder problems until you can't solve them anymore.
Yeah, I caught that too. The T34/85 actually out performed most German tanks and there was way more of them. Most people forget that most German tanks were Panzer III or IV variants that were inferior to the T34 and much more complex to build it repair. The Germans still had better communications and tactics though
Sean C. Very right but I would replace “tactics” with “crew training”. Comparing Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine with German Bavegunskrieg in their entirety I think it would be difficult to say one is “better” than the other, but one thing you certainly can say is that German tank crew training was superior, at least in the early war, and that by extension their tactical cohesion and ability to execute tactics likely would have been superior. A pedantic difference, I know, but one I think is important to note
At ghalkin Gol in 1940 the USSR invaded Japanese held territory and wiped out the 7th Army........the USSR had the best equipped,led and supported blitkrieg army in the world. It already had 4,000 heavy tanks, and the rest of the world combined had zero. The "incompetence" of the Red Army claim is absurd.
"soviet tanks were massively inferior..." Um, no they weren't. They were superior in some areas & inferior in others. But they were definitely more numerous.
Andrew Caleb Gorospe You’re not aloud to say anything positive about the Soviet Union. Every time you insult the Soviet Union, a capitalist earns a dollar
Their tanks were certainly far more numerous, which of course made a difference at Kursk and in WW2 in general. Even Hitler can be heard in a TH-cam video complaining to Finland's Mannheim how he heard many reports of Soviet factories pumping out vast quantities of tanks. That fact cannot be underestimated, and neither can the massive military-industrial output of the US in WW2.
Thank you, Andrew. We need some perspective and logic here. The T-34 at the BEGINNING of WW2 was an overall excellent tank, and had the biggest gun of any tank in the field. Obviously, Germany had to counter this, and did so in some ways, but never in numbers. As Hitler himself said, if he had known about the T-34, he would have never invaded Russia....
My family told me about when the family farm was turned into a state farm. I was told that the authorities came and took all the good honey from their beehives, and left them the trash nobody wanted to eat. The next time the authorities came there were no beehives since it was decided to not be worth the effort. I can imagine situations like this playing out across the system would break it, without incentives why put in the effort?
@@nateisawesome766 When the first comment was literally just saying a story that happened to his family under a Communist government then yes, it is a valid criticism.
1:29 There's a reason why the Tsar lost power. The important thing, is that people should not be cut-off from Basic Necessities. That was the Motivation for the Soviet Union. To quote an Imperial Russian soldier: "Our Wives, Mothers, and Children are protesting in those streets." "They have no bread." "Are you telling us to turn against them too?"
"That was the Motivation for the Soviet Union." That is completely and utterly incorrect. The Tsar was deposed and the people voted for a new government. The Bolsheviks then violently deposed that government against the wishes of the Russian people. Communism was forced on them at gunpoint.
@@dat581 ok, and? Most of the peasants and workers supported the bolsheviks. There were a number of uprisings before the October Revolution including the 1905 Revolution attempt.
_"In 1956, approximately_ *75 percent of Soviet workers were paid under a piece-rate system,* _so the majority of Soviet workers could significantly boost their earnings by increasing their output."_ This is a quote from the Wiki article "Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956-1962". It shows a key change that occured during the Khrushchev era: Abandoning this piece rate system and make the earnings more equal. The famous meme _"In socialism everybody gets paid equally, regardless of performance"_ was never true, but Khrushchev's reforms definitely set course into that direction... During Stalin's time, however, it was absolutely untrue! So much so, that socialists in the West were disappointed because of the huge income disparities in Soviet society. Here an excerpt from Feuchtwanger's travelogue "Moscow 1937": "Andre Gide _(one of those disappointed socialists in the West)_ is also surprised, and this time many others share his surprise, at the inequality of incomes in the Soviet Union. I myself am surprised at their surprise. To me it seems utterly reasonable that the Union should adhere to *the socialist principle of "each according to his achievement,"* so long as it is unable to put into practice the ideal of complete communism - "each according to his needs." It appears to me that socialism is concerned not with the distribution of poverty, but with the distribution of wealth. But I cannot see how a distribution of wealth could be arrived at if those from whom much is expected are forced to lead a life of such meanness that it must prove injurious to their achievement." So, as you can see, there was quite an incentive for workers to do a good job: Increase their earnings. Khrushchev's reforms changed that. The wage reform was not the only change, but it is vey simptomatic for the general direction the Soviet Union took from the late 1950's: From being a real (though not perfect, of course!) *workers' state,* the USSR turned into an *ideological state,* an instrument for the "competition between the systems". The Soviet economy had different realities throughout its history. Here another example for the Soviet economy you would not have suspected, I bet: *Up until the late 1950's the private sector was huge!* About 40% of all furniture and 70% of all household items made of metal were produced by craftsmen cooperatives. This too was changed by the Khrushchev reforms, as the huge incomes generated in this private sector were considered as some sort of "theft" from the whole of society. Too specific a discussion to go further into depth here, sorry. But in general you could say that Khrushchev basically tried to replace economics with "scientific central planning"... Thank you for your video, but unfortunately you are just reinforcing certain myths and prejudices...
Just expanding on the "from each according to the ability, to each according to need" This quote was explained by Marx in "Critique of the Gotha program" Gotha program was a set of principles for United Workers Party of Germany. An organization that was early in its development, and early in development of worker's movement. It was neither communist, nor social democratic, it was in workers interest but far too early to be truly developed. Marx in turn wrote his critique. In part 3, he considers equal distribution. Immediately, he notes that people have different capabilities, therefore if people are paid equally, they are paid unequally for their contribution, which is more unfair than paying by their contribution. However, even if you pay perfectly according to the work done, some have more children (children are important to socialists as children are the productive force of the future and a vital contribution to society.), so even then people are paid unfairly based on their contribution to society. Thus socialist principle is to pay according to contribution and taking into account the needs of the person. (How to do it? there are multiple ways, it is left to future socialist society to find what works for them) Yet this is still different from "from each according to the ability, to each according to need", as this statement refers to future communist society, in which productive forces are so advanced, it no longer makes sense to pay anyone, as anyone can take whatever they need. Thus anyone who claims it is communism when you are paid the same regardless of the contribution does not know what they are talking about. Still, in practice, new difficulties arise. For example, in factory it is often difficult to say how much one person contributes. Workers are needed to move, switch places, help specific stations, prepare supplies, make repairs. It is often impossible, which, as I sometimes joke, results in capitalist principle "from each according to the ability, to each minimum wage". In socialist states, workers should be able to define their own wages and work hours, through discussion in the soviet. They should be able to distribute funds democratically and fairly. (and obviously this statement is not very accurate for soviet union, as historical circumstances would not let them. More often than not, need for tanks was greater than need for fair society) Some comments praise theft in soviet union, foolish considering capitalist countries would not do well either if people stole consistently. Only reason why people dont, is because factories operate like prisons, with entry checkpoints, metal detectors, security. It would be fair to assume that you wont need that in socialism, as people own the factory already, and stealing from it would mean stealing from yourself. But soviet population in later years had an increasingly poor understanding of socialist principles, higher tendency to steal and poor participation in democratic institutions. As for the video, in part it amazed me. It does understand that soviet union needed massive reforms in agriculture, together with industrialization. Which is better than regular right winger statement "Collectivization bad". Yet it still misunderstands the soviet union. This video is quite bad, it is the best video regarding soviet union that is not made by focused communist historian, but it is still quite bad.
This is pretty well said. > craftsmen cooperatives, AKA artel (pl. arteli) were autonomous pretty darn commercial organizations built by workers who were capable of working extra hard to earn extra rubles. They were not private enterrises and so they didn't contradict with the line of Communists' party. The destruction of arteli and then putting extra tax on fruiting trees, cattle, poutry in peasants' households (well, next day they just cut the trees heh) have planted huge landmine in the course of USSR which soon resulted in rise of ДЕФИЦИТ meaning, total defficit of everything regarding consumer goods, which resulted in more and more people hating the Communists and then USSR broke. And here, in Russia, older generations equally loathe Khruschev just because he, being village dumb fuck made everyones' lives more miserable. They equally like Brezhmev, but he could not undo the damage done by Khruschev.
Oh, well, and Khruschev is also known as КУКУРУЗНИК or ТРЕПЛО КУКУРУЗНОЕ (кукуруза means maize and трепло stands for, IDK exact english idiom, it means man who speaks a lot, never delivers). Why: Khruscheve visited USA and saw, that maize harvests are AMAZING there. Everybody gets damn fat on corn. Steaks are very tender and burboun is so much better than plain vodka. So he forced everyone in USSR plant fucking maize while the whole climate situation in USSR is such, that it grow ears in just tiny part of arable land near Black Sea and nobody had a clue how to process corn (e.g. Nixtamalization). If wheat is fail crop in Russia, maize is DISASTER crop, lol.
Me being unfortunately from Romania I can collaborate that this sort of mentality displayed here is still in many segments of life still present, unfortunately. Like lying about results or top down command chain, demanding results regardless of realistic they are ...etc. The country is a mess.
The same things happen here in the US all the time too. It's not a unique issue to communist countries, as the video points out. Everything is mismanaged here and all the power is at the top while the little people are always at risk of losing everything.
@@tomk6292 Communism is actually a world without states, money, or power hierarchies, where all resources are fairly shares and distributed by people, and where work is distributed and done rationally and fairly, as needed, by society. A place where none of that needs to be coerced because people willingly do it because that is how society functions. That is the accepted social contract, just as "normal" and "expected, without requiring force" as you visiting or doing something nice for your mom or grandma. It is the opposite of what you're saying. Though, some Communists (Marxist-Leninists) posited that the only way to get to that point is through state centralization via a single Vanguard parth which guides the societal transition toward the new world. That is not agreed upon by all or even most Communists these days, but instead there are many other discussions around how to get to that point. Classical Marxism itself preferred a more Democratic approach that did not include any type of centralized Vanguard party, but instead was led by the workers (/worker-owners of the new society) themselves, who would choose their leaders democratically through worker councils ("Soviets" in Russian, though Lenin and Stalin moved away from giving them any real independent power if they weren't part of the Vanguard party elite). Then, those worker councils and their elected body would represent the will of the people and work based on that will in a far more accountable way than "bourgois democracies" since they would be instantly recallable, and could not indepedently make important decisions without first getting the approval of the worker councils they represent. So, it wasn't supposed to be a purely top-down model. Outside of Marxists the other most common approaches to bring about Communism are through participation in the Democratic process of modern Democratic countries, and/or through beginning with the reduction or elimination of the state and top-down authority as a complex, as a whole, and building a communist society from the bottom-up and/or municupally first, this is the approach of libertarian-communists, Anarchists/Anarcho-Communists, and Communalists/Libertarian-Municipalists, among others. In terms of being able to organize a larger society that worked toward larger goals most of them tended toward an idea called Democratic Confederalism, which would be for all of these different areas or groups (such as Syndicates) to agree to work together, but with full autonomy and without force or coercion, and thus they could achieve what states can currently achieve without needing any type of top-down heavy handedness, so they could guarantee both freedom and a communist society where the fruits of the labor of society are distributed more fairly and no one is exploited. Before you say this is impossible either because it would require force because people would never comply without coercion, ask yourself, how did human beings live for the hundreds of thousands of years before certain pastoralists started hoarding land and animals and forcing people to work for them? And especially before capitalism? (Since even in pastoral times and during serfdom there was a considerable amount of "communism" among most people, even if the elites exempted themselves from it.) Ask yourself, how did our current world order arise? Is this really how human society and human "nature" have always been? Is most of the work and hierarchy today natural and really necessary? What will the world necessarily look like soon when AI and automation can do all of our jobs (and they can already do many of them)? If you realize the answers to these problems, you realize that pure (non-statist,"transitionary") communism (aka Anarcho-Communism) is actually the "natural order" of this world, and that humans wouldmt be able to survive and thrive otherwise in a stateless or very small state world, which I think we both agree would be ideal. Without the people agreeing to work together and share their resources fairly, that would otherwise just lead to another age of feudalism, since those with the most resources would continue to have the most power and people would be forced to work for them to get a few scraps of bread to survive-which isnt too far from today, except the government has that power, instead of some corporation, though in today's world corporarations basically own the government. So yeah, we're living in neo/techno-feudalism right now and the only way to ensure real freedom for all is to agree to share all of our resources fairly.
@@ammanite Did you know that the Communist revolution wouldn't have happened in the Russia without financing from the wall street bankers? Communism is just a scam, designed by the very richest to use useful idiots in order to give the elite even more power than they have now under capitalism. In fact Karl Marx was a relative to the mighty Rockefeller family, the richest banker family in that time. That should raise alarms in every >60iq human being.
Me too. Every April my department is scrambling to spend every bit of money. I have so many iPads I've never used because they're an easy way to spend thousands It's plain wrong in my opinion.
A guy in the USSR goes to buy a car. "You can pick up your car in 10 years" *"Morning or afternoon?"* "Why does it matter? It's gonna be in 10 years!" *"Well the plumber is coming in the morning"*
Rewarding underperforming industry’s and claiming they are “too big to fail” is exactly what failed the Soviet Union. Yet we still do it in a capitalist society, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Actually none of the "too big to fail" were privately owned. They were corporations and thus by definition public and also by definition not capitalist.
@@gothenmosph5151 That is an oxymoron. Corporations are not capitalist by definition. If it is a publicly traded company it is socialist, end of story.
9:40 i've seen this in corporations also. I worked at a grocery store and some weeks there wasn't enough work and i'd ask to go home early cause I was just twiddling my thumbs anyways. However, my boss would ask me to stay and "look busy" cause if we didn't use all our work hours that week, the next year they would get cut. So a similar phenomenon as the one you're referring to even at the lower echelons of companies
Nicholas Brassard that’s one of the issues with work being paid by the hour instead of the work you do. Hard-working and smart people who get stuff done faster are forced to work on the same level as what a normal person would deem hard, holding those people back from their reward of free time, more money for the work, or whatever. However if we did make it based on work, everyone would be monitored and those unable to keep up would left out. It’s a tough situation to deal with
Winston Smith i did not know that, as ive also heard stories like the one above, and others about how once they get work done, they are given more and more work from other slower employees, and yet they get paid the same. My point of view mainly comes from office work, so its somewhat skewed, and this could just be employer’s preference. Either way, capitalism has its advantages, so im not arguing against it
I recall hearing about Soviet managers having to do things to meet their quotas such as slaughtering beef cattle early to meet the numbers. Then they had no breeding stock when the next period started.
Maybe they were better designs compared to the early war ones, but the crews were still just as undertrained as they were early in the war. Hence, the reason why German tanks continued to enjoy a lopsided k/d ratio right up till the end of the war.
Bedford Grime Media They do lol. They knew too well by 1943 that losing trained soldiers is not the way to go. Plus it was about cost efficient, mass production, easy to fix and stuff
@@penitentes0011 lol...A true marxist/ leninist/ Socialist would know, logic and 'argument' are just temporary tools used to water down opposition until absolute and complete control can be achieved ,thus rendering "argument" extinct. (+as well as the opposition 🤗)
I remember a friend saying that communism works only in small communities, where your incentive is your success. The more the scale grows, the less it works as organization shatters and responsibility is diluted. Now, imagine your scale is the biggest country in the world.
Be careful you don't fall into the "german tank good, soviet tank bad" wehraboo camp. The German tanks were quite inferior in many a regard to the Soviet's, it wasn't just that these amazing machines were overwhelmed by shittier ones, it's that the Germans were too worked up creating 101 different varients of the same tank to fix its fundamental flaws. Check out Potential History for better info on Tanks in history (especially in the first and second world wars).
If the soviet Russia and the Nazi Germany had a war against each other then the superiority of Russian tanks would be irrelevant. The Russian commies would crush themselves under the weight of failures that have and will always follow socialist doctrine. The war would be about whether a German nationalized economy can out perform the already failing Russian socialist economy.
@@littlejohnny41 They lost most of the tanks to infantry rather than German tanks. It was mostly the lack of proper training and field tactics that led to such numbers. Still, until the IS-2 and the t-34-85, the Soviet tanks were quite flawed. In particular, they were overcrowded and they lacked a proper way to observe what was happening outside (AKA a cupola).
Look, based on just design the Germans and Soviet tanks were on par with each other each having their own class of strengths and weaknesses. But in production Soviet doctrine was not to make tanks last for a long time but just enough to do well in the war. With their limitations I still think Soviet tanks were still phenomenal. That’s goes for Germany, American, and even Japanese tanks with all their limitation and applications to their doctrines. Quantity is a quality all on its a own.
As a teenage intern in the 1990's, I had the opportunity to ask a retired KGB colonel his opinion about why the Soviet Union disintegrated. To my astonishment, he attributed it to Andropov's crackdowns on corruption. The whole Soviet system was insanely corrupt except the KGB because ideologues went into the KGB. When former KGB head Andropov was put on the throne, he launched a huge anti-corruption effort. But what he didn't understand was that the corruption and black markets were the only things keeping the Soviet economy functioning at all. In order to make money on black markets, you have to actually make some shoes, coats, car parts, rebar, etc that people will voluntarily buy. So they were the best products around. Black markets were free-ish markets. And when the rules of a system are completely backward and contrary to facts and reason, the system becomes absolutely dependent on rule-breakers for its survival.
Pretty sad, considering that it was kept afloat on such a small sliver of free market activity. Imagine if they just embraced hardline free market activities with strong party oversight like China. Unfortunately, it seems like the Chinese were way more pragmatic in their approach, and the Soviet Union collapsed due to their commitment to a doomed ideology.
@Kathy Sharp well, I *could* try to educate you a little on how legitimate industrial facilities can be used to produce illicit goods off the books, particularly in an environment of rampant bribery... but I suspect that you are proudly impervious to information. And your assertion that there was no significant black-market is just laughably naive.
@@Pheer777 Well Communism is not really inherently doomed, since every system has its strengths and flaws. The core problem of "hardcore" communism as we've seen it in the Soviet Union (and for a part of it's history also in China) is, that the system is not flexible, since it's a planned economy, so it can't react well to sudden shifts in demand, when a new fad comes around. "Dresses with flower patterns are in now? Sorry Mrs. Comrade, these are out in the current 5-year-plan, but we got some dresses with animals on them!" And, as explained in the video, since the system incentivized being lazy and it did this in every sector, this started to show in the performance of the nation. Basically, when the Union was young, people were excited to try this new approach, it was still way better than what they had experienced under the Tsars, so this new approach, even when it failed sometimes, had a bit of leeway in public trust. And this approach even helped them enormously to beat Nazi Germany, so another generation was ideologically bolstered to support the state, hence we see the high strides of the USSR in the 50's and early 60's, with them being, for a time, ahead in the space race. But over time, the capitalist societies have repaired all the damage, that WWII caused to them, too and started to race up and then overtake the Soviets, they were the "golden West" and people inevitably started to wonder, why simple citizens in the capitalist west could get a car, whenever they wanted and why they could enjoy a certain degree of luxury compared to soviet citizens, when allegedly the capitalist system is inferior and the masses there are yearning for socialism. So the Soviets were behind economically and then in round about the 70's and especially in the 80's they started to fall behind technologically too, the Cold War became unsustainable for them, hence why Gorbachev, the last Soviet Head of State and Government, defused it, made arms reductions treaties and refocused the military doctrine, away from spreading the revolution towards the English Channel towards Home Defense and peaceful coexistence, just to save ressources there and spend them somewhere else, to improve the way of living for the Soviet Citizens and to allow them honest criticism and such. But it was too late. The Red Chinese learned from the Soviet Downfall, hence why they take this "Seize the means of production" approach less strict and basically transformed their economy in a party controlled but more or less free market. Right now I'm not even sure if they still got 5 year plans over there or not, I only know, that the party is owner of many parts of the economy and freely operating companies, e.g. Huawei, are expected to cooperate with the CCP, otherwise they'd get trouble. But as long as they do it and bolster China, they're free to do whatever they want. After all, a socialist state must only ensure, that on average the different classes of society are not that far apart from each other, hence why the CCP invested heavily into raising living standards for the common chinese from simple farmers up to lower urban class or even lower middle class that you can see today in China. But let one heavy economical crisis hit Red China, let the masses loose their relative wealth and Communism in China could fall too. They're only willing to endure the overboarding control of the party, as long as they can enjoy relative luxury, most people are not motivated by ideology alone (that would be the ideal case for communist states, but it just isn't reality, it wasn't in the USSR after decades of existence and generations born and raised in that country). The core problem of Communism is the comparison to Capitalism. Basically, if Communism would've wanted to "win", they would've had to win the "early game" in the 1920's, exporting the revolution to atleast the major capitalist countries, convincing workers there to join the communist cause and overthrow the government. So basically, Trotzky was right all along, at least with his approach to export the revolution instead of just bolstering it in the USSR with the "Socialism in one state" approach, because the USSR tried to become a shining beacon of socialism to convince other countries' workers to look on to it and joining the communist cause on their own, without direct indoctrination from the Soviets. But since the Soviets didn't do this, they lost it in the long run.
@@EconomicsExplained As someone who lived for some time in a commie country and whose parents and grandparents lived under it all of their lives: The video SUUUUUCKS! Like major balls suck! First and foremost-the Soviet Union was NOT SOCIALIST AT ALL! They might have called it Socialism,but I also might call myself the UFC Champion,but calling myself that does Not make me the UFC Champion,does it?And so It was Communist-which is a 100% opposite of Socialism.
@@dobriltanev9722 yep, totally opposite, you just need to switch the socialism and communism to get it ... less wrong ;) and as long as you find enough people to accept your definition of the UFC champion, then yes, it makes you that in their eyes. there are plenty of examples of misused words like that.
@Revolutionary Communist "the Soviet Union choosing to export foodstuff for money for rapid industry development" this is an inaccurate statement. The Soviet Union paid the US in gold to buy industrial technologies for quite some time until the US decided to undermine the USSR economy by claiming they would only accept grain as payment. This led to the famine. In fact, the US never needed grain, and what was supplied by the USSR was simply thrown into the ocean by the US. Of course, under any other circumstances I would say, Stalin made a mistake and shouldn't have made his people starve for some machines, but would he not have done it, the USSR wouldn't be able to build up military for the second world war. Taking into consideration how unwelcome the new socialist system was in the West, it wasn't too hard to imagine the war is coming sooner or later.
I know a different version: What are the enemies of glorious Soviet agriculture? The imperialist (because they are always), Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
@VICTOR MOLINA even worse Lysenko was actually put in charge of the department of genetics. Alex Jones just goes on peote fueled rampages screaming into a microphone.
Don't forget the Greedy Ukrainians keeping all the food to themselves too. The Glorious Soviets had to force them to share all of they're food they were keeping for themselves.
Their cars and Space ships too, The Soyuz Space craft is 60 Years old and is still in use. Actually, statistically it is even safer than the NASA shuttle. The Kharkovchanka, the land crawler in antarctica, is also a 65 year old soviet vehicle. No one has been capable or replacing it. Tells you much on how right you are....
@@rosesprog1722 oh i know ! It is no wonder the environment is suffering so much. Mountains of garbage... just so a GDP is never lower than the year before. Stupid. Just plain stupid. Even xerox copy machines had a fuse that would break after a certain amount of copies produced... rendering the machine useless... and the fuse was almost impossible to just change out. We shouldnt let companies do that on purpose, its almost criminal.
@@mr.coffee6242 I know but that's what happens when profits are your first priority, capitalism is fundamentally flawed, it is savage, inhumane and a constant and increasing risk for us all. It might be saved I suppose but it will need a serious revision if we are to survive beyond a few hundred years... or maybe less.
@@rosesprog1722 indeed. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources. Doesnt take a genius to figure out it cant function forever. It will take a genius to get us out of that though.. in my opinion.
Soviet tanks were not “vastly inferior” to German tanks, in many regards they surpassed or equalled German designs. (Namely armor thickness and the application of that armor)
On a serious note amazing how quickly sloped armor became a staple in armored vehicles, considering tanks had just been invented one generation before.
By the time of Kursk, the German heavy tanks were superior to the T-34, but as the narrator explained, there weren't just more T-34s, there was also a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them constantly rolling off the assembly lines. The Nazis thus lost despite their rabidly capitalist economy.
James Smith, The Quiet Hiker The Germans at Kursk had killed many more Soviets and actually won the battle. Hitler halted his advance to reinforce Italy leading to a “strategic victory” for the Russians. The Germans lost 500 tanks and the soviets 1,500. The Germans also didn’t have the gas required to power anything by the end of the war so even if they could produce another 500 tanks it was no use.
This Comment isnt a critique about tank Information, more about how you said it. First off, The soviets had a different mentality when it comes to tank production, but it wasn't just "Let's throw stuff at the enemy", because thats untrue (for the battle of Kursk, in the early war maybe) And completly ignores Soviet tactics and commanding skills. Your Version of the Story comes from German Memoirs ( they say they were overwealmed by Hordes of russians wich is did not happen) and because of the cold war . Btw the battle of Kursk wasn't the biggest tank battle in History that title belongs to the battle of Dubno/Brodi in 1941
"the Soviet tanks where massively inferior to the German tanks" I'm sorry but this is just wrong. At Kursk the most prevalent Soviet tank would've been the T-34. Probably the 85mm variant. The most common German tanks were the panzer III & IV. Despite the T-34 being relatively unreliable, it's armour and weaponry were superior to most German tanks, and it's speed was on par. Of course when you compare a T-34-85 to a Panther or Tiger they don't look that good. But at Kursk only a few of those were available to the Germans, and they were at this point about as unreliable as the T-34, and also harder to repair owing to the complexity of their design.
The T34/85 was not issued to Red Army units until the summer of 1944, the main Soviet tanks at Kursk were the T34 /43 and the light T70, with smaller additional numbers of the last of the KV tanks, the SU-152 and the SU-122 assault guns. Overall technical balance in armor at Kursk was fairly even, since many of the powerful new German tanks and assault guns (Panther, Tiger, Ferdinand) were present only in small numbers, were horribly unreliable and sometimes had severe design flaws. The Soviets did not even have that great a superiority in tank numbers, some 3000 to 2000. German handling of their armor however continued to be much superior, with Red Army armored forces failing badly in mobile armored warfare engagements, such as their disastrous defeat at Prokhorovkha. The Red Army was victorious at Kursk mainly thanks to the more humble weapons of the infantry, minefields, field fortifications and above all the artillery.
The 34 has the reputation as one of the greatest weapons of all time but it is for its use and design not its combat strength. It was designed to only drive some 30 miles or so before it would just break down. It had slopped sides to hide the lack of armor and thinner metal but this turned into a strength. The tank was made to be replaced not like the American or german one with parts but wholesale discarded and replaced. It was truly a Soviet tank.
When it comes to production methods the Soviets where also ahead of the Germans. The Soviets had adopted the mass producing methods of the Ford model, while the Germans when they produced their tanks produced their tanks the same way they produced their aircraft. Not on conveyor belts but with each artisan worker being assigned his Tank, which was horribly inefficient. The T-34 was also produced with planned obsolescence. Each component then had the same expiration date, instead of wasting more resources than necessary on building some components which where of higher quality then they needed to be, it was all standardized.
This is sadly true in every aspect of our lives. In a world where work hours mean more than anything, people are actually compelled to work slowly and waste time. I like to say I am pretty good at my job, better than my coworkers. I tend to finish the day’s work in the afternoon instead of the evening like they do. So often when I turn it in, my boss “punishes” me by giving me more work to last me until the end of the day. Now I just take my sweet time to do because I know it’s better to put in less effort as I get paid the same to do more, and faster. Punishing greatness is so deeply engrained in any economic society that there’s no simple way of phasing such a concept out.
When I was a welder, I would push my table to finish. For 2 years we were allowed to leave when done, then they got a new manager who told us we had to do 1/3 of another tables work for no extra money. I said FU and quit on the spot
@@Mormielo History and practice show this quite clearly - they was superior their german counterparts and FAR FAR superior than american vehicles garbage. And most important - not only 34. T-60, T-70, bt-7, kv-1 and 2, all IS, (which later gives a life to main battle tank of new generations), planes with their aces and ships with brave sailors - all those reliable machines and their heroic crews had a decisive role in the liberation of the world from faschism's monster.
@@ПетрВрангель-т8п I think all in all soviet tanks were, specially the T 34, a more practical overall weapon compared to the german tanks. You may argue that tigers were infact better tanks, maybe not the panthers due to reliability, but logistics, was problematic to say the least. And yet Germans arrived almost literally inches to taking Moscow. Had they done that (maybe had they anticipated the attack avoiding the worst of the winter) things would have been different.
"The term 'Soviet' is actually a Russian term for Workers Council. Or, basically a Worker's Union." So that means the Soviet Union means Workers Council Union, or Worker's Union Union.
tried to see the comments but I accidentally pressed the subscribe button instead I don't mind because it seems like a great channel (even though that's the first video I watched) keep up the good work
A father and son are listening to the radio when the announcer says that, once again, there will be a 70-kopek increase in the price of a bottle of vodka. “Daddy,” the child says, with hope in his heart, “will this mean you will drink less?” “No. It means, you will eat less.”
@@jackrutledgegoembel5896 I don't even know how someone can say that when the largest man-made famines in the 20th century were in socialist nations. Take into account the US as a country has never had a famine, even at its lowest economic point. Can you say the same for China? Soviet Union? Cambodia? North Korea? Ethiopia?
MyDogFulton It's Apolitical,Friendly,Intriguing What's the issue!?..NONE! (If you think I'm insulting you I am not I'm just expanding on why oh why does youtube see this as Controversial)
This upsets too many Stalinist flakes, who, ironically, somehow make perfect members of the consumer society. Basically because they have no idea of how economics work on any level.
It is minor "edgy" and most companies when looking to get their name known avoid "edgy" at all costs. They want to be associated with warm and fuzzy feelings, not anything at all, in any way, negative. TH-cam is a prostitute of advertisers, not creators, and as such goes way out of its way to please them.
I'm not a Stalinist, and I'm definitely not upset, but hot take: It's a bit ignorant to suggest that Lenin (let alone Marx) ever supported the kind of dictatorship Stalin represented. So although some of the policies implemented were more communal, it's hard to call it socialism since society at large didn't have any say in political matters by the time the country stabilised. In fact, by some Marxist definitions - such as the systematic extraction of surplus - Stalinist Russia can be considered State Capitalism.
I would like to see something about modern day Cuba or Rojava. Cuba has currently a 25% workers co-op market and they awful democratic start is still a democratic start that could hopefully get better. Rojava is being quite "original" on their approach and could actually be the best anarchist test since a long time. Curious about your thoughts
Cuba's democractic process is pretty democratic I'd say, perhaps even more democratic than how the current US legislative branch is, with local governance being given top priority, with the congress having no party partisanship, as, although there is the communist party, you are able to run without a party, with 45-48% of the party representatives being female, whilst the US still lags behind with 24%, aswell as corporate lobbying being prevelant in the US congress, whilst it's been barred from Cuban politics, so to say that they have just been becoming "democratic" is a fallacy
@@philthefinadelphian4830 Are you crazy?! Cuba is nowhere near being more democratic in the US, stop lying. The Cuban government is awful and treats it's people terribly. There is a reason so many Cubans have fled on rafts to escape the tyrannical government.
12:20 this is true in terms of beauty of design. But in terms of combat effectiveness it really wasn't. The T34 was famous for its survivability, although they hadn't been upgraded with the 85mm gun at the time of Kurst so they really struggled to kill Tigers, Panthers, and uparmored Panzer IV's (from the front at least). They had a handful of SU-122's and SU-152's that could do the job though. The KV-1's that the Soviets had could also kill the German tanks. Let's also not forget the fact that the overly complex components the Nazis loved to implement led to reliability issues. And the Tigers in particular were prone to drivetrain failure.
This video, while interesting seems to draw from sources that seem primarily to be of origin from before opening of the archives which always makes me a bit hesitant about their validity. It also fails to properly split up the various time periods, it's mentioned off handed but it isn't really being pushed on exactly how much the economy grew in the initial phases (Lenin and Stalin era) versus how much that growth fell off over the years. Nor does it exactly examine what policy shifts were present to change such figures. The video also does a lot to paint command economies as "Less efficient" without really explaining what that means. It might be less efficient to make more food because the best farming fields are already occupied, but that does not mean that making less food is good. A command economy can drive prices of goods down, such as food or housing by supplying as much as needed whilst a market will always prefer to under perform to keep a demand thus increasing prices. Even companies in markets do not use a market system to allocate their resources internally. To finish off, it's a fine video but I wish it'd gone into much more depth and maybe put in a little more effort.
I don't wholly agree with your conclusions. In a free market, efficiency can be eradicated because where a worker sees inefficiency, they can either work towards promotion or even start their own business and out-perform the other company. What you described is true in a monopoly, you can keep the prices high enough by keeping supply low enough. But that doesn't work if I am permitted to also make that widget for a cheaper cost, everyone is going to buy it from me and we engage in a price war. If everything is controlled by the government, the rich (those in power) can keep the prices high enough and the costs low enough to benefit themselves which is what the Soviets regularly did. They would starve out populations that were unwanted for whatever reason (see Tatarstan famine and Holodomor). Some companies do indeed not use a market system internally, and that is where you see massive systems of managers (MBA drones) shuffling around paperwork. You can see the effect of that in government-related industries, eg. Boeing has that problem, Lockheed Martin and some big oil companies, because the government has guaranteed them to keep market pressures away artificially. Even then, in the case of big oil, you have small oil companies that have been capable of outperforming and revolutionized American oil in the last 3-4 years (shale oil is dominated by mom-and-pop companies). But there again, you have perhaps GM with such systems for years, but then along comes Tesla and Honda that does use market forces internally between teams and simply outperform them to the point of driving these behemoths to bankruptcy.
"A command economy can drive prices of goods down, such as food or housing by supplying as much as needed whilst a market will always prefer to under perform to keep a demand thus increasing prices." *Well, that's a pretty tall claim...* Anyway, I just started a new business that does whatever you do, only cheaper and more efficiently. Peeps are buying from _me_ now, and you're going bankrupt if you don't lower your prices. I can do that, because there's a free market. And I _want_ to do that, because there's something in it for me. Under _your_ system, I wouldn't be allowed to do that, however. And so people would be left wanting. Or rather, they wouldn't even know they wanted anything in the first place, except perhaps food. Your systemt tends to produce sudden and quite fatal famines. Also there wouldn't really be anything in it for me to compete with you anyway, under such a system, so why would I bother doing anything but the bare minimum? That should give you a hint about how the famine started. No _-ism_ has killed more people than Socialism. Except a certain religion.
@@kebman My friend, I think you're misinformed. Command economies aren't some kind of boogeyman. "My system" doesn't exist. You can create an economy, both capitalist and socialist, both market and command or even central planning that allows for full freedom or none at all. Also, capitalism kills 20~ million every year, by the way. Starvation and lack of medical treatment around the world. If you wanna talk death counts, fine. But from an economist point of view then the way you describe the rigidity of systems is just wrong.
Shoga H. Frost “capitalism’s kills 20 million” citation please, plus we have socialist and communist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and part nationalized countries like China and Vietnam who most likely have very large death tolls. Soviet Russia and communist China most likely killed far more than 20 million yearly.
@@joshuacampbell1625 comparing with Tiger tanks, sure. but the average run of the mill T-34 could mostly make short work of Panzer IIIs/IVs if I'm not mistaken. and tigers were quite expensive, so
@@stanspb763 The red army invaded Finland. So the Finns did whatever they had to do to retain their independence including fighting the Germans towards the end of the war to remove them from Finland. So your attempt to slander the Finns and justify Soviet atrocities failed. The problem is a lot of Russians who grew up in the USSR have this glorified image in their heads of soviet history the brainwashed ones. Germans were forced to come to terms with their WW2 history but Russians have not and unlike Germany, Russia has not paid any compensation to the countries it destroyed or attempted to destroy like Finland.
That's inaccurate, the Soviets defeated the Finns twice and with each defeat they annexed more finnish land (But did not strip Finland of its independence nor did they impose Communism even though they totally could have) Yes, they had high casualties but they also had high casualties defeating Germany and Romania, and nobody would dare say the Germans/Romanians won the war.
My dad and uncle were born in the USSR. They both worked abd still work in the machine tool industry. My dad was so good at machine tool he got invented to Canada to work but then the company failed. And now he owns a business making machine tools.
In this video, the socialist economy is just a series of generalized half-truth stories with no concept. Where is the social sphere? This is socialism, but no words about social benefits. Strange, isn't it?
nice video! Perhaps it would also have been worth mentioning that even in the 1980s the USSR was spending 30% of its GDP on the military industrial complex. They made neat tanks and bad cars. If they had spent more on improving the population's quality of life, the system would have held together for longer.
@OVOD.net ya this was the problem with the soviet union.They could not reform the system.The ppl on top had a lot of power.But mordern socialists are learning from this
Well when you have a nation on your eastern shore that is arming itself to the teeth, and makes its intentions to destroy you completely clear, what would you do?
just because it was the best overall doesn't mean it was the most effective. its low cost and ease of manufacturing is a major reason why its considered better than the Panzer 4, but in a 1v1 battle the Panzer was more likely to win, although not by a large margin. Panzer had more crew, radio in ever tank, much more accurate sights and gun, and better vision
@@yosefyonin6824let me rephrase that. Panzer 3 is utter trash, it's a lot more expensive, terrible armour, a box coffin, terrible firepower, decent mobility but trash mobility since we're comparing it to a t-34. More crew members means you lose more when you lose it. A lot of panzer 3 were lost in 1941 even though that was when red army was weakest. Tigers can be penned at 1 kilometer by t-34-85 but it's opponent was is-2 not t-34. Is-2 can pen tiger at 1.5 kilometers to 2 and is more versatile/mobile.
Hi, thanks for the quality content! I am always enjoying your videos... just thought could be quite interesting to see a video about the economy of cambodia during the khmer rouge.
"Rewarding under-performing industries with more resources is a sure-fire was to create more under-performing undustries." Hmm....can anyone say WALL ST?
I don't think the two are really comparable on the same scale although i don't agree with what's going on with Wall St. and big tech either. But maybe i misunderstood what you meant.
Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" book mentions two soviet union economists documenting the main problem: the lack of a pricing system. With high or low prices, soviet bureacrats had no idea how much supplies, etc. was really needed. A famous example was the nails---too many big ones were produced at the cost of not enough small ones.
It wasn't just out of not knowing, but the incentives created. The case of the nails was due to the production quota being measured in tonnes of nails per year. But producing a smaller amount of larger nails is more efficient, hence they did exactly that. While in theory, the bureaucrat could have specified in greater detail the correct amount of nails, given that these bureaucrats had 100s of 1000s of individual items to quantify, selecting the appropriate measurement of each quota was in itself a nightmare. Another flaw in the centralised system was how sluggish the 'market' was to changes. One example was the price of furs from a wild animal (I can't remember which one). The bureaucrats in charge had set the price too high, and hence created the an oversupply of these pelts that had a limited demand, and ended up rotting in storage. While in a free market economy, the oversupply would be fixed by buyers reducing how much they are willing to pay, this was not possible in the USSR. Instead, 'buyers' had to inform the relevant bureaucracy involved, which unsurprisingly was never quick to respond, as such requests were coming from every corner of industry, for countless items, all of which were 'equilibrium' with eachother on monstrous mass balances. Hence it could take months before prices could be corrected to a more reaosnable value.
Thomas Sowell is a moron. The economic calculation problem is a meme because a pricing system isn't really needed in a centrally planned economy and, if it is needed, the socialist society could replicate it.
“The Soviet tanks were massively inferior to the German tanks” Yep, that is all I had to hear to know you are not an expert in WW2 history, cheaper doesnt mean inferior, and the heavy Tanks that were considered superior had their own problems, that werent as common in the soviet late war heavy tanks Besides that this is quite a good video, a socialist state could take some ideas from here to put te economy to work better, and people who say socialism cant work should also watch this to understand why it didnt work (Because no idiots, the reason it didnt work isnt "Because socialsm cant work")
Thank you, the idea so prevalent in the West of the superiority of German tanks is ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I heard people jerk off the Tiger I only for them to not realize that they had severe problems that oftentimes made them more of a liability than a utility. Not much good in having an 88mm gun and thick armor when it uses too much fuel for the poor German logistics and couldn't stand up to the mud, snow, and cold of the Soviet Union. Don't get me wrong, the Soviet tanks also had problems too but at least they worked reasonably well in the expected conditions and were much easier to manufacture.
I agree with 5:48 and it's true in a lot of workplaces, but where I work, we get bonuses based on the profit made from our particular clients (so if we manage the Northeast division, profit is split between all people working on that division based on the profit, and for salespeople it's based on whichever clients they manage). It's a small company and that is probably why it works, but it does motivate us to work, and a few people who have put in a ton of work have been rewarded.
Their tanks weren't "massively inferior" why would preface that statement with "I'm not a military historian" and then make such a bold claim like that.
They weren't that inferior, in fact the German panzer had trouble penetrating the front glacis of Soviet tanks. Even though they had the tactical advantage, e.g radio communication and the soviet tanks doesn't have a hatch for the tank commander. Which it means that he will have to open the hatch and pop his head out to observe the surroundings.
@@veyolaski4324 Indeed, german tanks while good on paper were over engineered, underpowered ( mainly the larger behemoths they made later on ) and were extremely resource-intensive.
@@agiftfromdracosfather3490 I might be wrong here, the design and development of panzers were influenced by the Wehrmacht. The designers was supervised by Wehrmacht officers. Plus most of the budgets and investments on the military went to the luffwaffe and Kriegsmarines
@@napoleonbonaparteempereurd4676 Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC Didn't get to bed last night On the way the paper bag was on my knee Man I had a dreadful flight th-cam.com/video/nS5_EQgbuLc/w-d-xo.html&feature=share Êtes-vous français? Je parle seulement un peu le français. th-cam.com/video/ADEc3L31tj8/w-d-xo.html&feature=share
@@corporategreed No, it never was. East Berlin was part of the Soviet occupation zone from 1945 until 1949, and then part of the GDR until 1990, but it was never a part of the USSR itself.
@@akosjun_9087 for all it's practical purpose GDR was part of USSR. The regime that ran GDR was instantiated and loyal to USSR. Travel was closed to the west but open to USSR. And the USSR military was positioned in GDR until end of cold war.
In the 1980s most people have forgotten that the Soviets defeated the Nazis at Kursk, now most people forgot that the Soviets played the most important role in the anti-Nazi warfare, and in 40 years most people will forget about the Soviet Union.
@Economics Explained So you're just going to leave out the whole topic of economics under Lenin? No War communism, no NEP, no nothing? I mean, Lenin's "communism is sovjet government plus electrification of the country" is propably the most famous quote about sovjet economics, period.
Yeah I was disappointed by that as well. He said that soviet socialism began in 1928, but the NEP was a fundamentally socialist idea. Marxism is about the whole process of transforming a nation’s economy from feudalism to communism, not just skipping to the end
This channel is very much based on mainstream economics. He didn't even mention the problem of economic calculation under socialism, only logistical difficulties on applying the economical planning.
@@etiennebouyoux3577 It did happen, but how well it worked and was applied varied from industry to industry and from time to time. There was originally a system of payment per piece produced, then it was hours worked. Both had upsides and downsides.
As someone who spent most of his career in public service budgeting I can tell you that March Madness, when public servants use up their budgets as much as they can, certainly exists, but the justification for it, that they will get a budget cut if they don't, certainly does not. Why? It is a simple matter of timing. Since the budget has to be prepared before the end of the fiscal year, no actuals for the year are available. Most numbers are finalized 3 months before the end of the year in the 3 large (10s or 100s of billions) entities I worked in. And this, sadly, is characteristic of the civil service. It is very hard to measure output effectively, and the motivation provided to managers is almost universally counter productive. Fortunately there are, in my experience, a large number of people who are genuinely trying to serve the body politic, even though they get no thanks. Also, a small historic note. The Russian T34 was much better designed for its operating environment than a panzer. More to the point, when the Germans first encountered them they were embarrassed to discover that their shells would merely bounce off them. The Russians don't seem to be very good at government, but they are not stupid.
Tanks were still a relatively new invention and there was some uncertainty about the relative merits of defensive armor, range, and fire power, and they cannot all be maximized in the same vehicle.
@@michaels4255 The T-34 was faster, better protected and better armed than contemporary German medium tanks (Not to mention most German tanks at the time were light tanks armed only with machine guns or light autocannon), but it lacked a third crewmember in the turret (reducing situational awareness and operational efficiency) and not all tanks had a radio (not good for tactical communication!). These design flaws were in many cases more crippling than the Germans' lack of armour thickness and firepower.
I used to work for a company that regularly took advantage of the governments end of the fiscal year crunch and from what I understood it wasn't that next year's budget would get cut, but that whatever they didn't spend of their allocated budget that year would then be taken back so they couldn't spend it. So it created an incentive for a mad dash rush to spend as much as possible.
@@ShamanMcLamie You are right that the money goes "poof" on the last day of the fiscal year. So you are careful to make sure the year runs out before the money and that often leaves you with some left over. It is within reason to spend some of it on things you need. But the mad rush to spend every nickel is not. It is rationalized most often by fears for next year's budget.
@@СергейСергей-э6э2н The Soviet Union means a union of soviet republics. That is what the comment was about. Now, what you are talking is a presumable legislative body at various levels, yes, allegedly councils of workers and peasants. Their real power was short lived - only a few months in 1918. Thereafter, it became a mock legislative institute with no real power, but rather just bunches of puppets, used by the the Communist party, who actually ruled the country.
One issue I have is that this video focuses on theoretical draw backs of motivating workers in socialist economies, and how economic planning can lead to the inefficient production and allocation of resources. The state terror policies and forced labor of Stalin are behind the overly optimistic goals and lying about actual output figures (people were afraid of making constructive criticisms of the system, and were afraid of failing to hit targets. The consequences could be horrendous either way for them personally). But this is a failure of political policy, not a proof or sign that the USSR's economic configuration was fatally flawed. Even with the inefficiencies of the overly-powerful and oppressive political apparatus, the USSR experienced massive leaps in growth for Industrial and agricultural power throughout the 1930s, a time where most of the world experienced the collapse of capitalism. The USSR then lost about half its productive capacity because of world war II (the nazis had seen to that), and despite this, by the 1960s, the USSR was the second fastest growing economy in the world. These are critical things to consider when making an objective assessment of whether or not the Soviet economic system worked. The inefficiencies, I think, were due to flaws in the USSR's government system. We see in capitalist countries how this same contradiction between state policies and economic function can lead to massively different outcomes for those economies (look at the 2008 financial crisis, or the sovereign debt crisis). Also, on the battle of Kursk bit: The Soviet T-34 is considered by many military historians to be the one of best all-around tanks of World War II; it wasn't as strong as some of the more massively armored and big-gunned German tanks, but it provided sufficient fire-power and protection, all at an efficient cost, to easily win the war; it was at least as good as the Germany Panzer Mk IV or the American m4 Sherman. The fact that the Soviet economy not only designed this but mass produced it more than Germany ever could is, again, telling. The Soviet military then massively produced one of the most iconic, well designed (because of its un-rivalled reliability and good power), and most wide-spread firearms of all-time: the AK-47. This also isn't to mention that the USSR then leads the space-race initially, and is well able to design powerful and long range ICBMS and nuclear submarines....and it does this all with a smaller and less developed economy than the combined might of the U.S and half of Europe. We have to remember: the USA and Briton began their industrialization basically a full century sooner than the USSR does, and the USSR has the smaller population.
One should keep in mind that the "great terror" happened in 1930s. Large portion of people involved have seen WW1, then fought in the civil war and against Antanta intervention. It should not come as a surprise that they had substantially different view on life. I'd suggest that many people viewed terror as an opportunity to legally get rid of ones they hated: people who were known to come from merchant and noble families, people who got rich during "new economic policy". So it's like a civil war echo.
My grandparents lived through Socialism. As long as you didn't talk trash about the system, you had a pretty comfortable, down to earth life. No false dreams of becoming a billionaire out of nothing like the US.
Considering it went from an agrarian feudal state to launching first satellites (earth, moon, venus) and astronauts, being an industrial and military superpower in just 30 years, and all of that after a devastating war and under heavy embargo from the 'civilised world', it's safe to say it did great. By far better than ''free market'' could have done.
This had the potential to be a good video with actual valid appraisal of the USSR's attempts to build an almost wholly planned economic system, but you neglected to talk at all about the system of piece rate worker compensation in the Stalin years and the bureaucratic problems with such an institution in the pre-digital age, as well as the structural problems that came with replacing this system with the post Stalin set up introduced under Khrushchev. It was great for motivating workers, but at the same time awful for red tape and literally cost more in paper and clerk labour to process than the worker's payment itself. You also completely neglected to talk about Gosplan and it's actual requisition system. Without discussing Gosplan you cannot have any serious discourse about the economic system of the Soviet Union.
@@edwardiris58 Gospan was the state agency that mapped out and administered the 5 year plans that drove the Soviet economy; all targets, objectives, adjustments and industrial strategy originate from that bureaucratic apparatus. A good, up to date introductory text on Gosplan and the Soviet economic model in it's entirety is "Socialist Planning" by Michael Ellman. Good luck with your studying, it's a fascinating subject.
"Quantitive accumulation leads to qualitative changes" Just need to add, that the soviet tanks were not inferior to the germans in terms of firepower or armor. And though the assembly of the soviet cars was really bad, there were some really genius design decisions to make the cars work despite the means of production.
they were vastly inferior in firepower, the kwk l76 8.8cm had a vastly higher rate of fire. less dispersion after 100m and lower gun depression....not to mention the penetration difference
Hi all, the TH-cam police have been real class enemies on this video as well as a fair few other more controversial economies.
I do now almost exclusively rely on the income I receive from making these video's so I want to put my hat out for the channels patreon page. Any donation helps and it means I will not have to shy away from talking about more controversial topics like this into the future for fears of being hit with the youtube hammer of advertiser friendly content.
www.patreon.com/EconomicsExplained
Please only give what you can, and as always you are welcome to enjoy otherwise :)
Economics Explained do you accept BAT ?
Do you know what specifically is causing this demonetization?
Pin it friend
Damn YT lack the balance comunism and capitalism.
@@SuperMunQ it can vary from the footage shown Vs certain words that he's saying that may be flagged by advertiser's as not suitable to show their ads on. Once TH-cam sees it can't make money on the video it will be demonitised
i’d like to see a series on the economies of ancient civilizations (roman, egyptian, etc)
Roman Egypt would be great, pretty much raised the standard of living across the empire just with that one territorial expansion.
It is in the works my good man :)
Economics Explained please do Economy of Czech Republic explained
@@EconomicsExplained Both Invicta and Kings & Generals already did something on that. Maybe you wanna cooperate with them. That would be super awesome.
Persian Achemenid Empire as well !
Calling Mythbusters "that old TV show" just threw me through a loop.
Yes we are old:(
It is old tho
I felt older than I should when he said that...
The phantom menace is old☹️
I feel ancient
"A lot of workers are idle most of the workday, maybe like you are right now"
I feel personally attacked.
Turns back to work pc
*chuckles in lunch break
*angry communism noises* I still get paid the same no matter if I work or if I watch them videos *angry lazy worker noises*
I thought that bit was funny. If anything was annoying/offensive, it was the statement that 'most workers' in the west get 'a salary and maybe a bonus'. Yeah - thirty years ago. Most today get minimum wage, or don't have a job to begin with. What's left of the middle-class talk like they're still typical. They have no clue. End of rant. Otherwise, the video was quite good...
@@Microtherion I know a lot of salary workers. I know a lot of hourlys too. Don't know a lot of minimum wage outside unskilled labor. Also, national unemployment as of May was 5.8%.
Soviet economy of each decade is absolutely different, it cannot be generalized. Even certain institutions, such as GosPlan, worked very differently in different years.
And, the level of efficiency was also very different.
Yeah without having to worry about lobbying or beuracracy , caused the Soviets to be very flexible with experimentation.
Yes, that's very true. Somebody has to say it.
@@sethgaston8347 beurocracy? It was litterally the embodiment of beurocracy.
Each decade was different, but the lies never change: over-report (inflate) good numbers while downplaying the bad. China uses the same playbook.
@@weirjf lol China is killing it fam don't use them as an example
This needs a part 2. The economy under kruschev, brezhnev, and gorbachev was very different. The post stalin portion of it is a lot more interesting than Stalinism which, while important and well-explained, is commonly known.
Especially gorbachev
The only one you mentioned that was really significantly different was Gorbachev. But by the time he came in the economy was already crumbling and the only thing he could do really is try to reform it which he did to some degree but got blamed for the whole thing falling apart.
A part 2 of definitely needed
Ilya Levin The destalinisation and Khrushchev’s reforms were significant. Strict socialist central planning was transitioned to a profit-focused central planning. Then came, Kosygin and Brezhnev’s stagnation. And then of course, Gorbachev’s uskoreniye and perestroika.
@@juanjoniebles452 BS, total centralisation is Khrushchev's invention. During Stalin's rule, private enterprises, called 'artels', worked fine. They were banned by Khrushchev, who did not have any idea what he was doing with his country other than do-what-Stalin-did-not and undo-what-Stalin-did.
I remember the old Soviet joke: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
I lived in the socialist country, and I have to tell you people work hard,
@@jk5042 And they still aren't compinsated
We`re pretending to work BECAUSE they`re pretending to pay us. Not otherwise dummy
It could also be. America pretends to be the greatest, and others tune for the show.
@@pavellima5755 Christ mate he's making a joke calm down.
can we see the economics of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy? It would be interesting to understand how the countries were run in such a weird economic system.
Nazi germanies economy was pretty similar to the Weimar economy, but the Nazi party heavily subsidized war industries, to the point where they were almost broke.
Due to the runaway spending and borrowing, the Nazi economy was unsustainable, and basically required conquest to keep it going ( one of the reasons for the war).
Fascist Italy was a bit different. Lots of stuff was directly owned by the state, and by extension, the fascist party.
@@hellboy6507 you are absolutly right, but hitler wanted to become socialist. and thats why barbarossa happened in the first place. he knew that a socialist economy couldnt compete with a capitalist one. so germany needed to be resource independent that trade wouldnt be required anymore.
if u read about hitler, u will notice that his decission making and plans made sense, despite that he was megalomaniac racist. and not that moron as many descripe/displayed him... for example hitler knew better than his generals that the modern war is won in factories(which require resources etc.)
Don’t listen to either of these comments
I don't think the differences would be that big
Corporatism. Autarky
I have a 25 video playlist on my channel. Neither capitalist nor socialist
You stepped on a landmine when you said Soviet tanks were vastly inferior to German ones. Just a heads up, the tank nerds are going to hold you accountable.
T-34 had almost no chances to survive 1v1 against Tiger. But if we compare cost and not units, its at least 5v1, with very different result. Also Germany had huge fuel problems and lack of metals like vanadium for steel alloys, which made them stuck at impractically heavy tanks.
@@randombystander991 and likely most of the time they were fighting panzers medium tanks or light tanks.
@@randombystander991 You shouldn't compare Tiger to T-34 because Tiger tank was an answer for T-34 when appeared that Pz4 is not good tank compared to T-34. So actually at the beginning German tanks were much worse than T-34 however better equipped , with experienced crews and good tactics.
@@piecia66 When people say that german WW2 tanks were superior to soviet, they compare most iconic ones. My point was that quantity over quality can be more efficient strategy than just building better weapons; not just mindlessly throwing more, like soviets usually depicted, but finding optimal effort/effect balance.
@@randombystander991 oh, ok. Now I get it.
I'm not unmotivated, I'm multitasking. Slowly.
At my job, we may not do good work, but we're slow.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_scheduling --> Just call it that during the meetings. Also try to use the word "Synergy".
*deliberately.
Here in Mexico folks bitch: "Oh, mexicans work 2500 hours-a-year" but, in reality, they're watching football, at facebook / instagram / tinder, and don't know how to turn on a PC, nor want to learn to avoid "more responsibility", yet, they want a six figures income.
Everything that this video says is true, but the main reason that the USSR dissolved is because President Reagan's crusade against the "Evil Empire" just drove it into bankruptcy. Reagan wildly increased the national debt of America to fight an enemy that was greatly a product of his own imagination. The Soviet leaders saw that Reagan's madness would either destroy the world or at least put the Soviet economy into the toilet. They chose to dissolve the USSR to remove it as the the primary target of American military madness at the time. The USSR actually won The Cold War because they were the first to realize that winning the Cold War wasn't worth destroying the whole planet in process, and not even worth the resulting hardship that it would put on the Soviet people. Compare that to America since 2000, where massive annual defense budgets are putting the nation further in debt, while many 1000's of Americans are homeless and on the street because they can't even afford a place to live. The Soviets at least cared enough about their people to give up its geopolitical ambitions, while America cares less and less about the welfare of its people in its desperate attempts to maintain its hegemony over the world. ... jkulik919@gmail.com
My dad's company does a lot of what the factory managers did. If a team got a budget, they used every cent of it because if they didn't, they wouldn't be given that funding again. There were a lot of business trips that really didn't need to happen before he retired.
Exactly it's the same process. The only difference being is that if that goes unchecked for too long the business starts to struggle financially and faces potential bankruptcy, prompting an investigation and changes.
In our socialist systems the factory managers didn't fear bankruptcy as the government managing all wages and its had a larger reserve of money to fund it. The issue was that initially most factories did fall for idea of productivity, but over the decades more and more figured out how to play the system to make more on the side.
Now a company might go bust if it functions like this (and a lot of them do go bankrupt) in a couple of years, a country though, the larger in size than a dwarf planet, almost a century to run out of juice
Same goes to education, westerners schools pretty much dump perfectly good school equipment bacause the budget will be reduced if they see them use a year old equipment. Thats why my buddy who's dad was the school janitor had like 5 microscopes in his room. The education budget here in my country does the complete opposite though. Theu gives school almost nothing and many rely on private donations, my high-school had 10 microscopes for 4,000 students and all of it were 5-10 years old.
That’s what the military does
But that spending also helps other businesses from the money he spent on those trips. Probably expensive dinners and drinks etc.
@@boflator the reason goods and Services are so cheap is because the companies have limited money. When something is state run it don't has to worry as much as a business that only profits through sales.
Deliberately under performing so that when we achieve something it will look like a win.... Its what retail managers do all the time 😅 shhhh don't tell head office.
Don't worry I'll keep this oath bound secret
XD
Juche Gang Gang OF8 Revolution 🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️
That was our strategy in PE class
It's funny how this was the only critique of communist inefficiencies that he could bring up, when literally the entire premise of a command economy introduced a major set of flaws that directly contributed to the black markets of the country, as well as shortages.
My grandfather was personally affected by the horrors of Communism. One time he was eating ice cream and Stalin came up to him and asked for some, he said yes and then Stalin proceeded to pull out a comically large spoon.
Band kids are not funny.
Was your grandfather Reagan?
@@mzadro7 All communist states were ruled by tyranny and terror, they do not go along with freedom
This made me laugh out loud. Here’s a gold star for you ⭐️
"Comrade, that is not fair! Everyone is issued standard Soviet size spoon. Why is yours bigger than the standard size?"
......
This person was never heard from again.
Last time I was this early, Lenin was still in Switzerland
With his German handlers (Yes Lenin was a German plant and agent)
Okay boomer
@@markaleman4419 420 FUNNY LMAO!
@@markaleman4419 More like a boomers parent/grandparent? Boomers are called boomers because they where born during the baby-boom after world war 2. Lenin was released into the world as a millitary weapon during world war 1 by desperate Germans who needed their soldier in the east who where fighting the Russian Empire to go to the west to fight the French and English.
And the most crazy part of all, IT WORKED!
@@adobo777 wasn't Lenin being allowed to go to Russia more a calculated risk from the German higher ups, in hope that the commies would get the Russians off their backs?
In communist Poland there was a joke about trading with them :
,,We gave them sugar and they take coal from us."
they gave us coal
we gave them best helicopter production and massive shipbuilding orders
and sent first Polish man to space (added name: Mirosław Hermaszewski)
@@mashamylaramu you really had to comment about the Polish Cosmonaut to a guy with a Polandball profile pic didn't you? We all know that Poland cannot into Space, never did and never will...
I'm just joking 🤣, Don't take this seriously...
@@michaelnewbold214 sorry man, i cannot into comics culture, never did and never will...
:))))
Seriously, however, a former space nation has become a joke of everyone by denying it's own achievements, it's sad.
@@mashamylaramu it of ok. Just a dumb joke...
At my last job, if I was too productive and finished early, I was pressured to leave early and miss out on paid hours.
Exactly! Before the new labour laws introduced in Portugal by the Socialist Party, if you were "too" productive, they'd just hand you extra work and pay you the same!
My dad has a buddy who works as a local government accountant and he gets flack from coworkers for just meeting or somewhat exceeding expectations. In an unamused way they told him that he was making them look bad.
@@Fred_the_1996 it does happen in countries without socialist politics as well.
If I finished early, they would give me more work even though I was being payed the same.
That sucks!
Okay, the Mythbusters experiment he referenced is one of my favourite. For those who don't know what it was, the myth was that dynamite could be used to clear hardened cement from a cement truck. What ended up happening was that not only was the cement little more than a vague memory, but all that was left of the truck was a single axle.
Maybe they should have tested with smaller amounts of dynamite to begin the experiment lol
Someone could have gone inside the mixing chamber with a pneumatic drill and used that to break up the concrete.
I'm going to be on sick leave that day.
I thought it was just Capitalist propaganda but now i see your theory
04:55 (...) and to not get gulag-ed. Cut to Amazon ad.
This was a work of art from the algorithm
😂, I got download local government vivid tracking App!😅🤣🤣
Mine was a recruitment video from the Canadian Armed Forces. The machine is learning!
> not using YT vanced
Mine was about microeconomics
You guys get ads?
5:55
"This had led to a phenomenon where a lot of workers are idle for a vast majority of their working hours. Like maybe you are right now watching this video."
I had to pause the video and laugh. My coworkers looked at me in surprise. You got me there.
I feel attacked.
It's amazing how much capitalist America works like soviet Russia. It seems the flaw lies in the human component and not the ideological system.
So really, that’s hardly something unique to socialist nations.
Matthew Stinar Exactly, which is why the Soviet Union exists to this day.
We called that running out for a few things with a string bag.
"that old tv show myth busters" dont do this to me
Bruh...
Go watch tested on TH-cam it’s a great show hosted by Adam
I remember that my Grandpa told me about a young coworker at a factory they worked at.
The young lad didn't know about that lie everyone knew about so the same month he joined the factory, it produced like 150% of the quota.
The managers burned the additional 50% in a huge fire behind the factory and told off the new worker.
By the later years of the war, the soviet tanks weren’t vastly inferior to the German ones. Some were, but most at the time could almost measure up the the German tanks in 1-1 combat. The difference was more that the German ones were vastly over-engineered which inhibited the ability to conduct field repairs if they were damaged or broke down, whereas the soviet ones had more basic and universal parts. Basically, the Germans went so far i to the ‘quality’ side of things that they saw huge diminishing returns in the effectiveness of their tanks compared to the Russians.
Not only that, the soviet production process was quicker because of the more standardised templates that russian tanks adhered to, and they still had a lot of factories in the lands the Germans hadn’t reached whereas the Britons had been bombing the shit out of German manufacturing centres for a long time after the battle of britain.
This is still typical for german cars - they over engineried and hard to repair.
@Bunta Fujiwara it actually makes :-)
Yeah, the "Soviet soldiers and weapons were rubbish but they just _overran_ us" thing is basically a narrative embarrassed German generals came up with after the war to explain why they lost. And since German generals were for decades the primary source of Western information about the war in the East (what with the Cold War and all), it stuck around. It's only true of the earliest stages of the war.
It is also worth to take in consideration the fact that germany was heavily short of fuel by the later years of the war (if not the whole war period). Specially in the eastern front there was a huge shortage of oil, forcing panzer squads to just leave the tanks abandoned.
@@matiashofmann6010 this is poor german logistics and mistakes made by german General Staff.
I'm kinda surprised about how you talked about the industrial growth in the early Soviet Union. That wasn't the gov being obsessed with building more factories just because, it was literally the Russian industrial revolution. Like, that's why the soviets built so many factories: they didn't have enough to produce enough goods for their population, which wasn't really solved until after the war.
The failure to talk about the Holodomor (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) was an even greater indictment of the incompleteness of this video.
@@hackysmack The Holodomor is so new, academically, that Millennials graduated high school before it was taken seriously and only 13 countries in the world recognized it last I checked. You will have to forgive most of the world for being unable to discuss something they don't know about.
@@Robert-qq9em i mean, Robert Conquest was talking about the holodomor in the 60s, and I would hazard a guess that the reasons certain people in academia didn't take him seriously were politically motivated, although it must be said that Conquest's death toll figures for the holodomor and the subsequent purges were way higher than what was eventually confirmed. That being said, a regime doesn't suddenly become fine and acceptable just because it turned out they only killed 4 million people at once instead of 15 million people at once
Yes people seem to forget that Russia was behind the west.
@@Currrby Robert Conquest was working for the British Intelligence as a professional propagandist.
"That being said, a regime doesn't suddenly become fine and acceptable just because it turned out they only killed 4 million people at once instead of 15 million people at once"
And who 'killed' these people? There are more than 4 million missing there...
i.imgur.com/Rm4AYex.png
What do you call a Soviet sharpshooter? A Marxman
Ok, that’s a good one.
We need more jokes
Ugh..
I understand that you hate marxists I too, But this is really cringy "joke"(?).
I see what you did there
Marx was german
You've achieved Factory Manager Level
Objective: Don't get sent to the Gulag.
The objective: "Don't get sent to the Gulag" applies at every level, from school child, to retirement, from factory worker to minister in the government (only exception is the supreme leader, who gets poisoned instead).
I'll give this video credit on trying to be ambivalent about the USSR, but I'll throw in my 2cents.
The Russian Empire was feudalism, which was completely backwards in the 20th century and led to Russia's defeat and overthrow. The majority of people were peasants and Russian economics at the time lacked the mercantile and capitalist engines that powered the other nations. This point is crucial in understanding where Russian communists started with and why they did what they did.
This video seemed to try painting a picture of the Russian Empire that was contemporary to socialist revolution in capitalism. Proletariat are wage-earners who had to earn money to buy things that they needed. Peasants are not wage-earners on this level. Peasants toiled their lord's land to produce crops, which a portion was provided to the lords. Peasants then had to provide everything else by themselves like it was the middle ages. No way can this economic system compete with the industrial revolution.
Marx and Lenin were paired together in the video often, which could be done if considering the lineage of Marxism (as Marxism-Leninism), but the people themselves had differing views due to their differing historical contexts from which they theorized. Marx did not foresee socialism building up in such backwards conditions and thought that socialism would come from the developed world first and then spread out from there. (The reverse of this prediction occurred. In fact, orthodox Marxists disagreed with Marxist-Leninist developments of theory after Marx and failed in adapting Marxism to their conditions.)
(Marx also did not envisage how socialism and communism would exactly develop in detail. He was more into explaining contradictions of capitalism and how they would theoretically be somewhat resolved in a socialist and fully resolved in communism.)
Lenin instead adapted Marx's theories to Russian conditions at the time. He developed political organization theories such as the vanguard that would be intellectuals and leaders that would lead on behalf of his comrades. (This was important because Marx did not develop such theories himself.) Lenin also developed the broad plan for the USSR's first half of history to transition from backwards feudalism into a capitalistic stopgap phase and into socialism and then eventually communism, the classless society that would remove contradictions from the production process under capitalism.
The period between Russian feudalism and Lenin's time and Stalin's time was reduced to a throwaway statement. Feudalism was absolutely backwards and could not support socialism, a system where workers owned the means of industrial production, because such industrial production barely existed up to the capacity capitalism had.
I will gloss over the early War Communism years of economics because it was essentially a war economy taking forceful control of resources and the economy to win against the liberal, capitalistic Whites during the civil war.
Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy in order to capitalistically build up the economics (using private property as opposed to public) until it could support socialism. So a mixed economy between the private and public sectors existed, something akin to China now. Peasants were given private property (which they wanted because they did not own land under feudalism) but were not forced to collectivize and industrialize. The private sector was free to exist outside central planning.
Stalin ended the NEP in favor for collectivization and industrialization under central planning. This was the start of Soviet socialism where the state owned everything, but the state was in control of the Party, which was voted in by workers. Peasants were to become industrialized farmers using public industrial resources. Of course, there were always peasant resistance to things like this or war communism, which led to anarchist uprisings and the eventual ouster of anarchists from participation in USSR politics. The necessity of such policies were trying to have feudalism catch up to capitalism in a couple decades as opposed to hundreds of years. While the system could be defined as socialism under Stalin, but industrially, it required much more development while lead to the rapid paced five-year plans.
This video then goes into the typical argument that not being threatened with being fired leads to lazy workers. But it also happens under capitalism??? I will give this video much credit for realizing capitalism also has that issue.
The REAL argument is shown later that the central planners misallocated resources in an attempt to help what they thought were underperformers. This has a basis in anti-capitalist critique because capitalism will not be very kind to economic underperformers, no matter how important their output is. However, how they went about addressing this issue in this scenario led to those mentioned issues.
The video attempts to say that its politics and not economics, but there's hardly a distinction here because it's really political economy and the distribution of economic power throughout a legal system. Capitalism also has issues of political economy where resources are mismanaged to appease a very narrow ruling section that's sealed off from the masses without consideration for actual economic results. Soviet socialism had the intelligensia section of workers stratified from the common workers through their political system. Soviet misallocation is a very real problem, which led to its own demise, but similar "political" misallocaiton is also causing similar issues under capitalism, but instead of a worker's state, it is a state to appease capitalists first. However, Soviet misallocation is a matter of not understanding how their socialist economics worked and the actual conditions of workers. (Mao would go on in his contributions to Marxism-Leninism to try forcing the intelligensia in actually coming into the actual workplaces they preside over and work with the actual workers themselves to see what's going on). (Lysenkoism is another example of Soviet misallocation. It attempted to propose an alternate science to the science that justified racist politics under capitalism and fascism. It attempted to create justification for their mode of political economy.) Like what Marx said, economics form the superstructure of society (and culture).
(As a side note, peasants were FAR more lazier than workers under capitalism. Capitalism was where the concept of time is money was developed because the industrial revolution changed production from a matter of scaling human laborers through sheer numbers on a 1:1 ratio to scaling machine output and efficiency through technology where 1 person could product more and more and more in the same time span and that number of production can increase significantly other than simply more people and more resources. Peasants also spent a lot of time goofing around as long as the crops were tended to.)
The video then moves on about how the Soviet Union focused on industrialization and development as opposed to life comforts. This is a true statement, but lacks the context that the USSR literally came from feudalism and needed to catch up to the West. Hundreds of years of development had to be made in a few decades. There was also that specific industries such as defense and agriculture were favored more than modern comforts such as fashion.
This latter point is what later Soviet leaders after Stalin attempted to do through liberalization policies. However, such policies would root the seeds of the USSR's demise with it ending with Gorbachev using liberal policies to create a private sector that intentionally undermined the Soviet public sector. He also caused economic instability with policies like alcoholic prohibition. Yeltsin then went against the people's wishes to continue socialism and its safety nets for workers for some of the worst ten years of Russian history, where economic shock therapy looted the public sector to create oligarchs and people lost public services to make little under the private sector, leading to mass death and a massive reduction in production that Russia still has not fully recovered from. This led to Putin taking power.
The Soviets won over the Germans because they actually had resources. Germany constantly suffered from oil issues and so they fielded horses to help along their machines and supplies. This would be a nightmare in the logistics involved in invading Russia.
The Soviets also had BETTER TANKS THAN THE GERMANS. The T-34 caught the Germans by surprise because they were expecting Russian tanks to be crappy like the interwar ones that lost to FInland. So the Germans didn't have good enough anti-tank weapons to penetrate the T-34 armor. So the only way the Germans could fight back was COPY THE T-34. However they couldn't fully due to the aforementioned oil issues and their lack of quality steel. How's that for lazy socialist public sector workers? Meanwhile, Nazi Germany under fascism forced workers to labor for the private sector or else they actually were killed. At least the USSR would at worst label uncooperative workers as parasites to be sorted out in gulags (political labor camps).
Other achievements of lazy socialist workers were the AK-47 and satellites and space exploration, the latter which was useless and forced the US into beating out the Soviets to not be ashamed by them.
Another problem with Soviet consumer-oriented production was that they maximized for utility rather than comfort in allocating resources. Housing were depressing boarding houses but functional (which was the main urban unit of housing during the early 20th century before post-War boomers got the stereotypical suburban homes). Cars tiny, but functional. The lack of consumer comforts would be another factor in the demise of the USSR. Innovation was not lacking however. There were design plans for things like a radio-based system to transmit text onto screens akin to the Internet, but usually the resource allocation issue won out.
The USSR certainly did have an impact on the world. The rise of the USSR put fear into capitalists that workers would rise up and so made concessions. Krushchev condemning Stalin's failures lead to the downfall of the radical left in America. China would try to learn from the USSR's failures (the USSR's advisors to China did not understand Chinese conditions and failed, and so China and the USSR would inevitably have their schism) and go their own way. North Korea would use Stalin's example of socialism in one country (rejecting orthodox Marxist ideals of revolution spreading for Stalin's recognition of the conditions) for Juche to survive past the USSR collapse of Eastern bloc trade networks. Venezeula under Chavez and Maduro would develop socialism of the 21st century and attempt to have socialism under Western-style democracy with open elections for all sorts of parties.
(Interestingly, the collapse of the Eastern bloc led to the integration of the former countries into global trade that was blocked and sanction by the Western capitalist countries. Such blocking of the exchange of ideas and resources led to the constriction of resources those countries faced under the Eastern bloc. Poland used to have to share resources, but now it can take resources from Africa to develop for itself. Global trade is also the secret to China's success. However, Russia didn't fare so well still suffering sanctions for being a strongman against NATO encroaching more and more on former Russian allies surrounding Russia and rejecting the wishes of former Russian leaders for NATO to not do that. The flip side to global trade is the proletarization of the third world and their exploitation to benefit the first world at the third world's behalf. China managed to enforce discipline and cheap deals to attract this kind of investment but also take just enough for it to be able to build itself up through deals the West could not refuse. The future will certainly be a clash of the first world vs the third world vs the "second" world of China)
.
@@natehiggins2487 Russia in 1913 was on the same level as 1860 Germany, check the economic data. Marx thought a revolution was possible in Germany. Also "industrial proletariat" was always a very small percentage of the population in industrialized nations. In 1930 during the New Economic Policy the Soviet Union was as advanced as Germany in 1890, or as UK in 1860.
@@natehiggins2487 wow that's a lot of information, can you give some sources for further readings? I'd love to know more about socialist economies.. It would seem their biggest mistake was not being able to translate economic growth into public welfare?
@@presuntomr their biggest issue was having to fight hot and cold wars with every major capitalist/imperialist nation on the planet since its inception and until its demise. Hard to achieve anything socially or economically when all the most powerful nations in the world make it their lifes work to see you fail.
Wow, what an insightful analysis! Respect!
My granddad was tractor driver in Lithuanian SR (part of USSR). He said management would measure your work on fuel used, so tractor drivers would go down the field pour diesel from fuel tank to some ditch, have a bottle of vodka and drive back. A lot of diesel used means they worked really hard, even field is still not plowed yet...
My grandfather was a bus driver in socialist Poland and he would suck the Diesel out of the bus. He would then trade It for bricks to build His own House after Work. Legend. My grandmother still lives in that house
@@alexgratzaTV no wonder that so many people were purged or starved to death if everyone was so selfish
Alex Mainz my great grandfather was riding bicycle from work to home every day and would pass some construction yard where they keep construction materials, he would take three bricks every day. By the time he retired, he built house, garage, farm building and there was still pile of bricks left lol.
@@qwertyuiopzxcvbnm9890 don't talk about something you don't know. Nobody was getting paid much and only way to survive was to barter state property. In a communist system everything is state property
@@SA2004YG That is obvious. Still people should have gotten their act together. It cannot be that dumping fuel is easier than carefully making officials understand that there is a way to get the work more productive.
Tbh I think USSR would benefit from a division between Lenin Stalin, Kruschev and Gorbachev during economic analysis. To me these are significantly different enough to warrant seperate videos
Yeah especially because of the shit economy Kruschev drummed up with his "reforms". You can look at the growth data in all former Soviet countries and it goes as follows: Increasing quickly through to roughly the mid-sixties then a quick about face, an uptick in the mid-late seventies, followed by collapse under the weight of Gorbachev's "reforms"
Exactly! Thank you! Every time under different leader economy worked differently. Bringing up only Stalin dictatorship let alone forgetting the fact that Russians were attacked by Nazis is quite biased. Life under Brezhnev was completely different.
@@vkrgfan Economy DID NOT work differently. Only political repressions eased up from Lenin to Gorbachev over time.
@@тамбовский_волк Regardless of the economy, if your country is in the middle of war, any economy will collapse, especially Capitalistic system.
@@vkrgfan not necessarily, war can be a massive promoter of industry. It just depends on what parts of your nation are invaded and what resources/routes are seized. If you are not invaded your economy will likely blossom.
Having spent about six years in old communist countries, I think you are severely underestimating lack of worker motivation that was happening there. It was nothing comparable to even our worst bureaucracies. Imagine a job you don't like and being assigned to it for the rest of your life, with no consequences for anything but telling the truth. The ideology talks of land, labor and capital, but carefully omits people. The greatest misallocated resource by far was people (and not just the murdered, starved and imprisoned ones). A good economic system is the one that is best at getting the right people doing the things that the most add value to others. Hard to pull off if people are classified as glorified machine parts.
exactly. there was no incentive to do great or innovative things
yep. This is what you get when you let a few people who just happen to be good at communist theory run entire complicated industries. Everything just becomes another statistic. This isn't even a question of socialism at this point--it's a question of irresponsibility.
@@007kingifrit Yet this exact same thing goes for capitalism too.
@@_________________142 are you slow? capitalism's incentive to innovate is called "getting rich"
@@007kingifrit "getting rich" by earning shitty wages working long hours in shitty conditions. Yeah, great incentive.
As a logistician in the government, we were heavily encouraged to spend every dollar of our budget, even requesting fund transfers to increase the next years slice of fiscal pie.
We’d spend thousands on extra furniture, equipment we wanted,
And, the US military. It's a showcase of inefficient allocation and over-spending.
Don't believe the myth that this is unique to the public sector. This is present in every organisation with budget cycles and people that are motivated by building their own fiefdom (pretty much every large organisation that exists).
From travel budgets to events/entertainment to project budgets; the private sector is rife with this wastage. I've seen purchases of products of $1M+ to "preserve next years budget" that was totally unnecessary and actually made things worse (and now you are forced to use it to justify the previous years purchase).
@@tomtech1537 The term you're looking for is "Use it or lose it", and is indeed a common budget allocation failing.
In the US the vast majority of people aren't salaried / exempt employees. MOST people are paid by the hour.
which is still the same problem. If you work in some supermarket then you paid a flat rate for the hours you work so why should you give 100% performance when 50% nets you the same pay?
Your source?
@@paprikaa117 ummm....the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 59% of Americans are hourly, not salary.
@@AT-AT26 Because there is the opportunity for pay raises and promotions...
@R S there was also the opportunity for you to get huge benefits in the Soviet Union if you were an exemplary worker. You could get a nice Dacha or better working conditions and a car.
But for the majority of people then and now you just work a normal boring rate and don’t (or barely) get rewarded
I am a military historian, I can explain some of the things mentioned by E.E. when it comes to the Red Army and the Soviet war effort around Kursk.
1st- He said that German tanks were superior at Kursk and thats a contested matter. While it is true the Panther tank and Tiger tank manned by German crews were capable to knocking out many tanks, the function of a tank is NOT solely to destroy other tanks. To say German tanks were better because of this is naive. The Panther was rushed to the field and had major teething issues so many of them broke down before even arriving to the battlefield. The Panther's high explosive rounds were also not very effective as it was equipped with a high velocity 75mm gun (Germans used CENTImeters so that would be 7,5cm) and it was intended to destroy tanks over great distances. Tactically speaking it was good at what it did, but strategically the T-34 was superior due to low costs, ease of production, and good performance when driving on the battlefield and in armament. While it needed the 85mm gun upgrade to kill late-war German tanks, and the 85mm HE rounds were more effective against infantry and fortifications, the 76.2mm F-34 gun was still effective. That said, the Soviets generally had superior tanks, the T-34 was better in the early phases of the Eastern front, its upgrade post-Kursk was effective but the Red Army recognized it was an aged designed so they worked on making the T-44 precursor to the T-54 tank, and the Soviet heavy tanks were the best except for 1942-1943 when the Tiger was better than the KV tanks in nearly every way, which led to the IS/JS series of tanks that had thicked frontal and hull armor that was sloped, and the more common variant was the IS-2 with a 122mm gun that outperformed the 88mm gun on the tiger in every way except reload time and ammo capacity.
2nd- The Soviet industry DID give the Red Army a marked advantage over the Wehrmacht, but this has led to many misconceptions, among them being that tanks were war winning weapons that were made in the thousands each month vs. hundreds made by the Axis which meant by sheer numbers alone the Soviets won. The majority of casualties caused in both world wars was artillery, 60% of those killed in ww2 were killed by artillery, so mortars and field guns were actually more critical than tanks, which served as mobile bunkers with Machineguns (2nd main cause of death at 20-30%) and big guns with HE rounds for infantry and AP rounds for vehicles. Tanks were primarily an offensive weapon in Soviet hands, while artillery was used effectively on the defensive and on the offensive. That is why every battle in the Eastern front had more field guns than tanks, as the guns themselves were cheaper, easier to produce, less complicated, and served their intended function very well compared to tanks, which were effectively mobile artillery and MG crews. But another misconception is that the Soviets ONLY won because of their industry and throwing men at the German line. This is false. The Soviet Deep Battle/Operation doctrine was very effective and as the war went on, more men were armed with submachineguns than rifles, due to the effectiveness of the weapon in close quarters, which is why we see the Red Army having mass infantry charges, to get men in range with their SMGs, but we often ignore that these offensives would open with artillery strikes and men would often be accompanied by tanks. These offensives were organized, but the Germans continued using the Kar98 and built squads around the MG and supporting it as the main weapon of a squad. Rifles were typically favored for this as engagement distances were about 3-400 meters and the SMG with smaller pistol rounds was effective up to 150 meters while rifles and machineguns that used full sized rifle rounds. They also relied on the Kar98 over semiauto rifles because the Kar98 was more precise and very reliable, compared to the G41 and the G43 rifles, and used the less precise MGs to cover entire areas with a hail of bullets (the inaccuracy of this weapon was actually an advantage as it was more effective as suppressing enemies, German fanboys calm down) and the Red Army's efforts to compensate for their machineguns not dropping lead like the MG34 or MG42, had their infantry armed with SVT38/40 and SKS semiauto rifles and PPSh-41s and PPS-43s to increase the amount of bullets fired at the Axis forces. The PPSh-41s and PPS-43s were very easy to produce and with a large Soviet industrial base, and Soviet weapon engineers making planes, tanks, small arms, artillery and trucks in great numbers with their quality improving over the war, the Soviets actually began making planes like the Yak-3, La-5 and La-7 that began outperforming the Bf.109, Fw.190. The Soviet industry's advantage was not limited to simply "making more of everything", but it also allowed the Soviets to build newer designs with tanks, planes, and guns without compromising the output of necessary weapons. Germany typically made variants of existing weapons to improve performance, while the Soviets and Americans only did it as a stopgap measure or to have the M4 and T-34 fill a specialized role, such as the Sherman Jumbo acting as a sort of heavy tank, or the T-34/57 acting as a tank hunter. The Soviets also made sure the weapons they made were simple to make and use, while Germany's early attempts at modernizing their primary service rifle by having a semiauto rifle be capable of having a manual bolt action feature that complicated the design for manufacturers and soldiers looking to clean their weapon. The simplicity of these weapons also made them more reliable as there were less parts that could be compromised and less time to clean/repair them. Replacing a wheel on an M4, T-34 or Panzer IV was far easier than doing so for the Panther and Tiger tanks, the SVT-40 and M1 Garand were easier to maintain than the G41. The Soviets didn't just win by being industrialized, they won by being smart with how they used that industry. They won by having a firm understanding of logistics and maintained their supply lines effectively, and used misinformation to have Germans attack strong points along the front by obtaining false reports from Soviet headquarters they seized, they attacked railroads disguised to seem busy while keeping the railways they relied upon secret by giving them a bogus target, and any disadvantage they had tactically or strategically they worked to correct while the Germans would sooner blame failures on a lack of commitment.
Well on paper German industry wasn’t certainly inferior against Soviet one,as in every source German gross national product and heavy industry was largest in Europe since 1900s,they were just failed to mobilize their economy until 1943-44 and they used inefficent production methods.Soviet industry was certainly was more efficient than German one but if Germans were fully mobilized from early 1940s they wouldn’t been outproduced by USSR considering they already produced more value of munitions in 1944 with 17 billion dollars against 16 of Soviets.Germany had 5 times of Soviet coal(all types)production,3 times of their steel-aluminium and 2 times of their electricity production between 1942-44 since Soviets lose half of their heavy industry to Germans.Still before WW2 Germany had a larger economy than Soviet Union as well as little bit more industrial power,just second only to US on paper according to American historian Paul Kennedy.
@@AFT_05G Well those are good points. I should prefix the industrial point with "war industry" or say the amount of industry committed to military hardware vs. consumer goods. As for the coal, while thats a fair point, the Soviets had oil and while the Germans might have managed keeping up if they were more efficient, the existing hardware they had didn't have the fuel to maintain their constant use like Soviet hardware enjoyed, and Germans liked complex hardware because it seemed superior. Germans had a bit of an ego, while Soviets were definitely a lot more pragmatic. To offset the disadvantage in steel and aluminum, they used wood frames for planes and worked to make them more maneuverable to avoid getting hit, as far as fighters went, with ground attack aircraft having mixed construction in the case with the IL-2.
But those are excellent points, thank you for pointing that out. Hopefully people who read our comments will get a proper idea on the industrial situation and how both sides handled it and why.
It's always a mistake to attack Russia, it's where Empires go to die
@@idiocracyisnowadocumentary8834 Thats curious that you say that, because the historians I have talked to and read from state Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Youre not wrong about Russia, though. Its definitely seen the Mongol, Swedish, and German empires destroyed.
@@ajohnymous5699 Agreed about Afghanistan , Russia has mortally wounded some as well , Napoleons Grand old Army wasn't so grand after the Russian Campaign
My dad once got arrested for selling 40kh of cabbage outside his home town in Soviet Moldova 😅😅. Also it was incredibly difficult to do anything… to build a house (getting materials was hard because even if someone had something buying and selling cement, for example, was prohibited)
i've never heard of this kh unit before, would you like to explain to me what it is?
@@professorcube5104 I think he meant kg
KH probably means kilo-hectare. A unit of land area.
@@tom23421 Kilo-Gram = Its a unit of weight measurement.
Oh my cabbages!!
Thanks. With this knowledge I can now create a true communist utopia. You are also invited.
I'm not too crazy about the communism, but if you throw in a nice Russian bride I can be persuaded!
Lol, okay. Just be careful of Georgians who know people with ice axes.
China? 🤠
Make lennin proud
⛏
Will you do another one on Yugoslavia's economy?
They had a very different view of socialism that was much more centred on local autonomy and market socialism than the USSR
@smb Serbia was the only country that would loose from Yugoslav breakup, all other countries especially Slovenia and Croatia profited.
It was natural for Serbia to try to maintain Yugoslavia no matter how misguided it was.
As for economy, Yugoslavia starting from the early 90s was not really socialist by that point.
@@kostam.1113 Yugoslavia was a mess after Tito died
@@cosmophobia1917 Yugoslavia was a mess since 1918
@smbYugoslavia had its own industry,factories and production,good international reputation and a strong army as well as better working conditions and security for its citizens.
And now you have a bunch of debt ridden small and insignificant corrupt countries in which politicians are billionaires and people have nothing.
All as a result of people like yourself.
@@aaaaaa-ii4hg They had hyperinflation in the 80s
Can you cover Yugoslavia as well? Their economy was run significantly differently from that of the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations, and I'd love to see you cover it
step one: imf loan
th-cam.com/video/nGm0u3UHDZM/w-d-xo.html
Yugoslavia💀
Yeah would be interesting
My Dad told me there's a saying in the navy: "the reward for working hard is more work"
That's what I found when I was at school: If you can solve a math problem then they keep giving you harder and harder problems until you can't solve them anymore.
Romanian saying :"Ottomans took our eggs from time to time . Soviets took our chickens and asked for more eggs."
😂😂
lol. true though.
@Ruffus Vampir laughs at capitalist Germany
@@inigobantok1579 Cant beat that Wirtschaftsmotor and Export Weltmeister!
@Ruffus Vampir cope
“The Soviet tanks were massively inferior to the German tanks”
Germans: “Hans ze transmission broke again”
Yeah, I caught that too. The T34/85 actually out performed most German tanks and there was way more of them. Most people forget that most German tanks were Panzer III or IV variants that were inferior to the T34 and much more complex to build it repair. The Germans still had better communications and tactics though
@@seanc.5310 yes i think in early t34 only a small portion of tanks had radios.
Sean C. Very right but I would replace “tactics” with “crew training”. Comparing Soviet Deep Battle Doctrine with German Bavegunskrieg in their entirety I think it would be difficult to say one is “better” than the other, but one thing you certainly can say is that German tank crew training was superior, at least in the early war, and that by extension their tactical cohesion and ability to execute tactics likely would have been superior. A pedantic difference, I know, but one I think is important to note
At ghalkin Gol in 1940 the USSR invaded Japanese held territory and wiped out the 7th Army........the USSR had the best equipped,led and supported blitkrieg army in the world. It already had 4,000 heavy tanks, and the rest of the world combined had zero. The "incompetence" of the Red Army claim is absurd.
I mean that was a big problem with T34s and soviet tanks too. The difference is that the Russian tanks were easier to repair.
"soviet tanks were massively inferior..." Um, no they weren't. They were superior in some areas & inferior in others. But they were definitely more numerous.
Andrew Caleb Gorospe You’re not aloud to say anything positive about the Soviet Union. Every time you insult the Soviet Union, a capitalist earns a dollar
Their tanks were certainly far more numerous, which of course made a difference at Kursk and in WW2 in general. Even Hitler can be heard in a TH-cam video complaining to Finland's Mannheim how he heard many reports of Soviet factories pumping out vast quantities of tanks. That fact cannot be underestimated, and neither can the massive military-industrial output of the US in WW2.
Thank you, Andrew. We need some perspective and logic here. The T-34 at the BEGINNING of WW2 was an overall excellent tank, and had the biggest gun of any tank in the field. Obviously, Germany had to counter this, and did so in some ways, but never in numbers. As Hitler himself said, if he had known about the T-34, he would have never invaded Russia....
Not to mention the IS-2.
Germans created tanks to last for years and years to come. Russia made them to laat for just about long enough
My family told me about when the family farm was turned into a state farm. I was told that the authorities came and took all the good honey from their beehives, and left them the trash nobody wanted to eat. The next time the authorities came there were no beehives since it was decided to not be worth the effort. I can imagine situations like this playing out across the system would break it, without incentives why put in the effort?
"Show me the incentive and I'll show your the result"
Lol the "Communism is when the government steals stuff" meme 🤣
@@nateisawesome766 Lol the "I'll blindly defend Communism whenever someone gives a valid criticism of it" meme.
@@visassess8607 "valid criticism" yeah okay buddy 🤣
@@nateisawesome766 When the first comment was literally just saying a story that happened to his family under a Communist government then yes, it is a valid criticism.
1:29
There's a reason why the Tsar lost power.
The important thing, is that people should not be cut-off from Basic Necessities.
That was the Motivation for the Soviet Union.
To quote an Imperial Russian soldier:
"Our Wives, Mothers, and Children are protesting in those streets."
"They have no bread."
"Are you telling us to turn against them too?"
"That was the Motivation for the Soviet Union."
That is completely and utterly incorrect. The
Tsar was deposed and the people voted for a new government. The Bolsheviks then violently deposed that government against the wishes of the Russian people. Communism was forced on them at gunpoint.
@@dat581 ok, and? Most of the peasants and workers supported the bolsheviks. There were a number of uprisings before the October Revolution including the 1905 Revolution attempt.
_"In 1956, approximately_ *75 percent of Soviet workers were paid under a piece-rate system,* _so the majority of Soviet workers could significantly boost their earnings by increasing their output."_
This is a quote from the Wiki article "Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956-1962". It shows a key change that occured during the Khrushchev era: Abandoning this piece rate system and make the earnings more equal. The famous meme _"In socialism everybody gets paid equally, regardless of performance"_ was never true, but Khrushchev's reforms definitely set course into that direction...
During Stalin's time, however, it was absolutely untrue! So much so, that socialists in the West were disappointed because of the huge income disparities in Soviet society. Here an excerpt from Feuchtwanger's travelogue "Moscow 1937":
"Andre Gide _(one of those disappointed socialists in the West)_ is also surprised, and this time many others share his surprise, at the inequality of incomes in the Soviet Union. I myself am surprised at their surprise. To me it seems utterly reasonable that the Union should adhere to *the socialist principle of "each according to his achievement,"* so long as it is unable to put into practice the ideal of complete communism - "each according to his needs." It appears to me that socialism is concerned not with the distribution of poverty, but with the distribution of wealth. But I cannot see how a distribution of wealth could be arrived at if those from whom much is expected are forced to lead a life of such meanness that it must prove injurious to their achievement."
So, as you can see, there was quite an incentive for workers to do a good job: Increase their earnings.
Khrushchev's reforms changed that. The wage reform was not the only change, but it is vey simptomatic for the general direction the Soviet Union took from the late 1950's: From being a real (though not perfect, of course!) *workers' state,* the USSR turned into an *ideological state,* an instrument for the "competition between the systems".
The Soviet economy had different realities throughout its history. Here another example for the Soviet economy you would not have suspected, I bet: *Up until the late 1950's the private sector was huge!* About 40% of all furniture and 70% of all household items made of metal were produced by craftsmen cooperatives.
This too was changed by the Khrushchev reforms, as the huge incomes generated in this private sector were considered as some sort of "theft" from the whole of society. Too specific a discussion to go further into depth here, sorry. But in general you could say that Khrushchev basically tried to replace economics with "scientific central planning"...
Thank you for your video, but unfortunately you are just reinforcing certain myths and prejudices...
Misinformation about the Soviet Union? My god I'm surprised :) Thanks for your detailed comment!
Just expanding on the "from each according to the ability, to each according to need"
This quote was explained by Marx in "Critique of the Gotha program"
Gotha program was a set of principles for United Workers Party of Germany. An organization that was early in its development, and early in development of worker's movement. It was neither communist, nor social democratic, it was in workers interest but far too early to be truly developed.
Marx in turn wrote his critique. In part 3, he considers equal distribution. Immediately, he notes that people have different capabilities, therefore if people are paid equally, they are paid unequally for their contribution, which is more unfair than paying by their contribution. However, even if you pay perfectly according to the work done, some have more children (children are important to socialists as children are the productive force of the future and a vital contribution to society.), so even then people are paid unfairly based on their contribution to society.
Thus socialist principle is to pay according to contribution and taking into account the needs of the person. (How to do it? there are multiple ways, it is left to future socialist society to find what works for them)
Yet this is still different from "from each according to the ability, to each according to need", as this statement refers to future communist society, in which productive forces are so advanced, it no longer makes sense to pay anyone, as anyone can take whatever they need.
Thus anyone who claims it is communism when you are paid the same regardless of the contribution does not know what they are talking about.
Still, in practice, new difficulties arise. For example, in factory it is often difficult to say how much one person contributes. Workers are needed to move, switch places, help specific stations, prepare supplies, make repairs. It is often impossible, which, as I sometimes joke, results in capitalist principle "from each according to the ability, to each minimum wage".
In socialist states, workers should be able to define their own wages and work hours, through discussion in the soviet. They should be able to distribute funds democratically and fairly. (and obviously this statement is not very accurate for soviet union, as historical circumstances would not let them. More often than not, need for tanks was greater than need for fair society)
Some comments praise theft in soviet union, foolish considering capitalist countries would not do well either if people stole consistently. Only reason why people dont, is because factories operate like prisons, with entry checkpoints, metal detectors, security. It would be fair to assume that you wont need that in socialism, as people own the factory already, and stealing from it would mean stealing from yourself. But soviet population in later years had an increasingly poor understanding of socialist principles, higher tendency to steal and poor participation in democratic institutions.
As for the video, in part it amazed me. It does understand that soviet union needed massive reforms in agriculture, together with industrialization. Which is better than regular right winger statement "Collectivization bad". Yet it still misunderstands the soviet union. This video is quite bad, it is the best video regarding soviet union that is not made by focused communist historian, but it is still quite bad.
This is pretty well said. > craftsmen cooperatives, AKA artel (pl. arteli) were autonomous pretty darn commercial organizations built by workers who were capable of working extra hard to earn extra rubles. They were not private enterrises and so they didn't contradict with the line of Communists' party. The destruction of arteli and then putting extra tax on fruiting trees, cattle, poutry in peasants' households (well, next day they just cut the trees heh) have planted huge landmine in the course of USSR which soon resulted in rise of ДЕФИЦИТ meaning, total defficit of everything regarding consumer goods, which resulted in more and more people hating the Communists and then USSR broke. And here, in Russia, older generations equally loathe Khruschev just because he, being village dumb fuck made everyones' lives more miserable. They equally like Brezhmev, but he could not undo the damage done by Khruschev.
Kruschev is one of history's most deceptive and evil leaders
Oh, well, and Khruschev is also known as КУКУРУЗНИК or ТРЕПЛО КУКУРУЗНОЕ (кукуруза means maize and трепло stands for, IDK exact english idiom, it means man who speaks a lot, never delivers). Why: Khruscheve visited USA and saw, that maize harvests are AMAZING there. Everybody gets damn fat on corn. Steaks are very tender and burboun is so much better than plain vodka. So he forced everyone in USSR plant fucking maize while the whole climate situation in USSR is such, that it grow ears in just tiny part of arable land near Black Sea and nobody had a clue how to process corn (e.g. Nixtamalization). If wheat is fail crop in Russia, maize is DISASTER crop, lol.
Me being unfortunately from Romania I can collaborate that this sort of mentality displayed here is still in many segments of life still present, unfortunately. Like lying about results or top down command chain, demanding results regardless of realistic they are ...etc. The country is a mess.
The same things happen here in the US all the time too. It's not a unique issue to communist countries, as the video points out. Everything is mismanaged here and all the power is at the top while the little people are always at risk of losing everything.
The very nature of communism means giving as much power as possible to the government hence creating an even more extreme hierarchy.
@@tomk6292
Communism is actually a world without states, money, or power hierarchies, where all resources are fairly shares and distributed by people, and where work is distributed and done rationally and fairly, as needed, by society. A place where none of that needs to be coerced because people willingly do it because that is how society functions. That is the accepted social contract, just as "normal" and "expected, without requiring force" as you visiting or doing something nice for your mom or grandma.
It is the opposite of what you're saying. Though, some Communists (Marxist-Leninists) posited that the only way to get to that point is through state centralization via a single Vanguard parth which guides the societal transition toward the new world. That is not agreed upon by all or even most Communists these days, but instead there are many other discussions around how to get to that point.
Classical Marxism itself preferred a more Democratic approach that did not include any type of centralized Vanguard party, but instead was led by the workers (/worker-owners of the new society) themselves, who would choose their leaders democratically through worker councils ("Soviets" in Russian, though Lenin and Stalin moved away from giving them any real independent power if they weren't part of the Vanguard party elite). Then, those worker councils and their elected body would represent the will of the people and work based on that will in a far more accountable way than "bourgois democracies" since they would be instantly recallable, and could not indepedently make important decisions without first getting the approval of the worker councils they represent. So, it wasn't supposed to be a purely top-down model.
Outside of Marxists the other most common approaches to bring about Communism are through participation in the Democratic process of modern Democratic countries, and/or through beginning with the reduction or elimination of the state and top-down authority as a complex, as a whole, and building a communist society from the bottom-up and/or municupally first, this is the approach of libertarian-communists, Anarchists/Anarcho-Communists, and Communalists/Libertarian-Municipalists, among others. In terms of being able to organize a larger society that worked toward larger goals most of them tended toward an idea called Democratic Confederalism, which would be for all of these different areas or groups (such as Syndicates) to agree to work together, but with full autonomy and without force or coercion, and thus they could achieve what states can currently achieve without needing any type of top-down heavy handedness, so they could guarantee both freedom and a communist society where the fruits of the labor of society are distributed more fairly and no one is exploited.
Before you say this is impossible either because it would require force because people would never comply without coercion, ask yourself, how did human beings live for the hundreds of thousands of years before certain pastoralists started hoarding land and animals and forcing people to work for them? And especially before capitalism? (Since even in pastoral times and during serfdom there was a considerable amount of "communism" among most people, even if the elites exempted themselves from it.)
Ask yourself, how did our current world order arise? Is this really how human society and human "nature" have always been? Is most of the work and hierarchy today natural and really necessary? What will the world necessarily look like soon when AI and automation can do all of our jobs (and they can already do many of them)?
If you realize the answers to these problems, you realize that pure (non-statist,"transitionary") communism (aka Anarcho-Communism) is actually the "natural order" of this world, and that humans wouldmt be able to survive and thrive otherwise in a stateless or very small state world, which I think we both agree would be ideal. Without the people agreeing to work together and share their resources fairly, that would otherwise just lead to another age of feudalism, since those with the most resources would continue to have the most power and people would be forced to work for them to get a few scraps of bread to survive-which isnt too far from today, except the government has that power, instead of some corporation, though in today's world corporarations basically own the government. So yeah, we're living in neo/techno-feudalism right now and the only way to ensure real freedom for all is to agree to share all of our resources fairly.
@@ammanite So you, like communism and everything that comes with it? Or am I trippin
@@ammanite Did you know that the Communist revolution wouldn't have happened in the Russia without financing from the wall street bankers? Communism is just a scam, designed by the very richest to use useful idiots in order to give the elite even more power than they have now under capitalism. In fact Karl Marx was a relative to the mighty Rockefeller family, the richest banker family in that time. That should raise alarms in every >60iq human being.
9:45
Not just the public sector. I have a lot of first hand experience with exactly this in big private companies.
Me too. Every April my department is scrambling to spend every bit of money. I have so many iPads I've never used because they're an easy way to spend thousands
It's plain wrong in my opinion.
A guy in the USSR goes to buy a car.
"You can pick up your car in 10 years"
*"Morning or afternoon?"*
"Why does it matter? It's gonna be in 10 years!"
*"Well the plumber is coming in the morning"*
President Reagan.
It's like me buying a bike.
Ronald Reagan
Yea I love that joke
I love these bullshit scenarios republicans make about a country they only know of from rocky films.
Rewarding underperforming industry’s and claiming they are “too big to fail” is exactly what failed the Soviet Union.
Yet we still do it in a capitalist society, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
That's because austrian economics is not fashionable. Keynesianism is just selective socialism for failing industries
Null and the US almost never learns they actually thought invading the middle east with arms was a good idea with no idea of how that regions worked.
Actually none of the "too big to fail" were privately owned. They were corporations and thus by definition public and also by definition not capitalist.
@@dat581 publicly traded companies are still private, they just have many owners.
@@gothenmosph5151 That is an oxymoron. Corporations are not capitalist by definition. If it is a publicly traded company it is socialist, end of story.
9:40 i've seen this in corporations also. I worked at a grocery store and some weeks there wasn't enough work and i'd ask to go home early cause I was just twiddling my thumbs anyways. However, my boss would ask me to stay and "look busy" cause if we didn't use all our work hours that week, the next year they would get cut. So a similar phenomenon as the one you're referring to even at the lower echelons of companies
Nicholas Brassard that’s one of the issues with work being paid by the hour instead of the work you do. Hard-working and smart people who get stuff done faster are forced to work on the same level as what a normal person would deem hard, holding those people back from their reward of free time, more money for the work, or whatever.
However if we did make it based on work, everyone would be monitored and those unable to keep up would left out. It’s a tough situation to deal with
Capitalism pays for not working!
@@sandshark2 Agreed, we need more incompetent doctors, carpenters, scientists and pilots. Why should they be left out?
TeaParty1776 I’m sure you’d struggle trying to learn how to fly a plane, or perform surgery, but that doesn’t make you incompetent.
Winston Smith i did not know that, as ive also heard stories like the one above, and others about how once they get work done, they are given more and more work from other slower employees, and yet they get paid the same. My point of view mainly comes from office work, so its somewhat skewed, and this could just be employer’s preference.
Either way, capitalism has its advantages, so im not arguing against it
I recall hearing about Soviet managers having to do things to meet their quotas such as slaughtering beef cattle early to meet the numbers. Then they had no breeding stock when the next period started.
yes,there was the case after wwii in one district..
Actually, the soviet tanks by the end of the second world War were actually quite good individually yet still could be mass produced at a soviet scale
Ronaldjr Montagne they were good from 1941 t-34s were op
Maybe they were better designs compared to the early war ones, but the crews were still just as undertrained as they were early in the war. Hence, the reason why German tanks continued to enjoy a lopsided k/d ratio right up till the end of the war.
CavalierHorseman91 Yh and the fact that the soviets didn’t really care about safety features on the tanks at all
What's this? Do we have ourselves a soviet tech tree War Thunder player?
Bedford Grime Media They do lol. They knew too well by 1943 that losing trained soldiers is not the way to go. Plus it was about cost efficient, mass production, easy to fix and stuff
EE:Remember that OLD TV show mythbusters
Me realizes its 2020
From Russia: What i miss in this video is numbers and statistics. And fundamental social programs.
and a logic argument also fam. hes literally just touching common missconceptions and making it sounds like facts.
@@penitentes0011 lol...A true marxist/ leninist/ Socialist would know, logic and 'argument' are just temporary tools used to water down opposition until absolute and complete control can be achieved ,thus rendering "argument" extinct. (+as well as the opposition 🤗)
@@penitentes0011 Missconceptions? How does socialism works? (real, not theoretic)
Well it's inevitable. The Soviet "archives" basically turned the Ministry of Truth from 1984 into a reality
@@victorrenevaldiviasoto9728 lol u r funny, it doesnt in reality, only theoretically
I remember a friend saying that communism works only in small communities, where your incentive is your success. The more the scale grows, the less it works as organization shatters and responsibility is diluted.
Now, imagine your scale is the biggest country in the world.
Venezuela and Cuba started worse than bigger coin muni at countries
Be careful you don't fall into the "german tank good, soviet tank bad" wehraboo camp. The German tanks were quite inferior in many a regard to the Soviet's, it wasn't just that these amazing machines were overwhelmed by shittier ones, it's that the Germans were too worked up creating 101 different varients of the same tank to fix its fundamental flaws. Check out Potential History for better info on Tanks in history (especially in the first and second world wars).
Russians still lost 3-4 times as much equipment and men but yeah sure. It surely was their superrior intelligence and engineering.
If the soviet Russia and the Nazi Germany had a war against each other then the superiority of Russian tanks would be irrelevant. The Russian commies would crush themselves under the weight of failures that have and will always follow socialist doctrine. The war would be about whether a German nationalized economy can out perform the already failing Russian socialist economy.
@@littlejohnny41 They lost most of the tanks to infantry rather than German tanks. It was mostly the lack of proper training and field tactics that led to such numbers. Still, until the IS-2 and the t-34-85, the Soviet tanks were quite flawed. In particular, they were overcrowded and they lacked a proper way to observe what was happening outside (AKA a cupola).
Look, based on just design the Germans and Soviet tanks were on par with each other each having their own class of strengths and weaknesses. But in production Soviet doctrine was not to make tanks last for a long time but just enough to do well in the war. With their limitations I still think Soviet tanks were still phenomenal. That’s goes for Germany, American, and even Japanese tanks with all their limitation and applications to their doctrines.
Quantity is a quality all on its a own.
Wehraboo camp? Lmfao 😂
Rather dead than red
As a teenage intern in the 1990's, I had the opportunity to ask a retired KGB colonel his opinion about why the Soviet Union disintegrated. To my astonishment, he attributed it to Andropov's crackdowns on corruption. The whole Soviet system was insanely corrupt except the KGB because ideologues went into the KGB. When former KGB head Andropov was put on the throne, he launched a huge anti-corruption effort. But what he didn't understand was that the corruption and black markets were the only things keeping the Soviet economy functioning at all. In order to make money on black markets, you have to actually make some shoes, coats, car parts, rebar, etc that people will voluntarily buy. So they were the best products around. Black markets were free-ish markets. And when the rules of a system are completely backward and contrary to facts and reason, the system becomes absolutely dependent on rule-breakers for its survival.
Pretty sad, considering that it was kept afloat on such a small sliver of free market activity. Imagine if they just embraced hardline free market activities with strong party oversight like China. Unfortunately, it seems like the Chinese were way more pragmatic in their approach, and the Soviet Union collapsed due to their commitment to a doomed ideology.
Similar free black markets are keeping the North Korea barely afloat today. Without them, the country would collapse instantly.
@Kathy Sharp well, I *could* try to educate you a little on how legitimate industrial facilities can be used to produce illicit goods off the books, particularly in an environment of rampant bribery... but I suspect that you are proudly impervious to information. And your assertion that there was no significant black-market is just laughably naive.
@Kathy Sharp What's your response to that? ^^^^^
@@Pheer777 Well Communism is not really inherently doomed, since every system has its strengths and flaws.
The core problem of "hardcore" communism as we've seen it in the Soviet Union (and for a part of it's history also in China) is, that the system is not flexible, since it's a planned economy, so it can't react well to sudden shifts in demand, when a new fad comes around.
"Dresses with flower patterns are in now? Sorry Mrs. Comrade, these are out in the current 5-year-plan, but we got some dresses with animals on them!"
And, as explained in the video, since the system incentivized being lazy and it did this in every sector, this started to show in the performance of the nation.
Basically, when the Union was young, people were excited to try this new approach, it was still way better than what they had experienced under the Tsars, so this new approach, even when it failed sometimes, had a bit of leeway in public trust.
And this approach even helped them enormously to beat Nazi Germany, so another generation was ideologically bolstered to support the state, hence we see the high strides of the USSR in the 50's and early 60's, with them being, for a time, ahead in the space race.
But over time, the capitalist societies have repaired all the damage, that WWII caused to them, too and started to race up and then overtake the Soviets, they were the "golden West" and people inevitably started to wonder, why simple citizens in the capitalist west could get a car, whenever they wanted and why they could enjoy a certain degree of luxury compared to soviet citizens, when allegedly the capitalist system is inferior and the masses there are yearning for socialism.
So the Soviets were behind economically
and then in round about the 70's and especially in the 80's they started to fall behind technologically too, the Cold War became unsustainable for them, hence why Gorbachev, the last Soviet Head of State and Government, defused it, made arms reductions treaties and refocused the military doctrine, away from spreading the revolution towards the English Channel towards Home Defense and peaceful coexistence, just to save ressources there and spend them somewhere else, to improve the way of living for the Soviet Citizens and to allow them honest criticism and such.
But it was too late.
The Red Chinese learned from the Soviet Downfall, hence why they take this "Seize the means of production" approach less strict and basically transformed their economy in a party controlled but more or less free market. Right now I'm not even sure if they still got 5 year plans over there or not, I only know, that the party is owner of many parts of the economy and freely operating companies, e.g. Huawei, are expected to cooperate with the CCP, otherwise they'd get trouble. But as long as they do it and bolster China, they're free to do whatever they want.
After all, a socialist state must only ensure, that on average the different classes of society are not that far apart from each other, hence why the CCP invested heavily into raising living standards for the common chinese from simple farmers up to lower urban class or even lower middle class that you can see today in China.
But let one heavy economical crisis hit Red China, let the masses loose their relative wealth and Communism in China could fall too.
They're only willing to endure the overboarding control of the party, as long as they can enjoy relative luxury, most people are not motivated by ideology alone (that would be the ideal case for communist states, but it just isn't reality, it wasn't in the USSR after decades of existence and generations born and raised in that country).
The core problem of Communism is the comparison to Capitalism. Basically, if Communism would've wanted to "win", they would've had to win the "early game" in the 1920's, exporting the revolution to atleast the major capitalist countries, convincing workers there to join the communist cause and overthrow the government.
So basically, Trotzky was right all along, at least with his approach to export the revolution instead of just bolstering it in the USSR with the "Socialism in one state" approach, because the USSR tried to become a shining beacon of socialism to convince other countries' workers to look on to it and joining the communist cause on their own, without direct indoctrination from the Soviets.
But since the Soviets didn't do this, they lost it in the long run.
*this WAS the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
twas
Economics Explained #camp
@@EconomicsExplained As someone who lived for some time in a commie country and whose parents and grandparents lived under it all of their lives:
The video SUUUUUCKS! Like major balls suck!
First and foremost-the Soviet Union was NOT SOCIALIST AT ALL!
They might have called it Socialism,but I also might call myself the UFC Champion,but calling myself that does Not make me the UFC Champion,does it?And so It was Communist-which is a 100% opposite of Socialism.
@@dobriltanev9722 thats just the same shit with different sparkles.
No matter how much you want to make it glow, it will still stain, stink and smear.
@@dobriltanev9722 yep, totally opposite, you just need to switch the socialism and communism to get it ... less wrong ;)
and as long as you find enough people to accept your definition of the UFC champion, then yes, it makes you that in their eyes. there are plenty of examples of misused words like that.
"Socialism heroically overcomes difficulties unknown in any other system"
-Stefan Kisielewski
more like socialism creates unnecessary difficulties
Ireland had a 5 year plan too. In the 60s called the first programme for economic expansion. The economy grew by 20%
Many countries in the 50s-60s had five year plans. Argentina had two "planes quinquenales" in both governments of Peron in the 40s/50s.
Aidan Collins how is it unrelated? It’s context and context means everything
Aidan Collins hm reading back you’re right. Apologies
@Revolutionary Communist "the Soviet Union choosing to export foodstuff for money for rapid industry development" this is an inaccurate statement. The Soviet Union paid the US in gold to buy industrial technologies for quite some time until the US decided to undermine the USSR economy by claiming they would only accept grain as payment. This led to the famine. In fact, the US never needed grain, and what was supplied by the USSR was simply thrown into the ocean by the US. Of course, under any other circumstances I would say, Stalin made a mistake and shouldn't have made his people starve for some machines, but would he not have done it, the USSR wouldn't be able to build up military for the second world war. Taking into consideration how unwelcome the new socialist system was in the West, it wasn't too hard to imagine the war is coming sooner or later.
I think five year plans are just a convenient length of time, particularly in countries with 5 year election cycles.
What are the 4 main problems with Soviet agriculture?
Autumn, winter, spring, summer...
And Lysenko. Don't forget him.
@Dovar Gulag time for you comrade
I know a different version: What are the enemies of glorious Soviet agriculture?
The imperialist (because they are always), Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
@VICTOR MOLINA even worse Lysenko was actually put in charge of the department of genetics. Alex Jones just goes on peote fueled rampages screaming into a microphone.
Don't forget the Greedy Ukrainians keeping all the food to themselves too. The Glorious Soviets had to force them to share all of they're food they were keeping for themselves.
On the other hand without the incentive of profit margins and constant growth their fridges lasted 50 years.
Bump
Their cars and Space ships too,
The Soyuz Space craft is 60 Years old and is still in use.
Actually, statistically it is even safer than the NASA shuttle.
The Kharkovchanka, the land crawler in antarctica, is also a 65 year old soviet vehicle. No one has been capable or replacing it.
Tells you much on how right you are....
@@rosesprog1722 oh i know ! It is no wonder the environment is suffering so much. Mountains of garbage... just so a GDP is never lower than the year before. Stupid. Just plain stupid.
Even xerox copy machines had a fuse that would break after a certain amount of copies produced... rendering the machine useless... and the fuse was almost impossible to just change out. We shouldnt let companies do that on purpose, its almost criminal.
@@mr.coffee6242 I know but that's what happens when profits are your first priority, capitalism is fundamentally flawed, it is savage, inhumane and a constant and increasing risk for us all. It might be saved I suppose but it will need a serious revision if we are to survive beyond a few hundred years... or maybe less.
@@rosesprog1722 indeed. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources.
Doesnt take a genius to figure out it cant function forever.
It will take a genius to get us out of that though.. in my opinion.
" people might be idle at work, like you are watching this video" 😂👍
Soviet tanks were not “vastly inferior” to German tanks, in many regards they surpassed or equalled German designs.
(Namely armor thickness and the application of that armor)
Aka: Sloped armor
On a serious note amazing how quickly sloped armor became a staple in armored vehicles, considering tanks had just been invented one generation before.
Yeah the sovies only invented sloped armour /s
By the time of Kursk, the German heavy tanks were superior to the T-34, but as the narrator explained, there weren't just more T-34s, there was also a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them constantly rolling off the assembly lines. The Nazis thus lost despite their rabidly capitalist economy.
James Smith, The Quiet Hiker The Germans at Kursk had killed many more Soviets and actually won the battle. Hitler halted his advance to reinforce Italy leading to a “strategic victory” for the Russians. The Germans lost 500 tanks and the soviets 1,500. The Germans also didn’t have the gas required to power anything by the end of the war so even if they could produce another 500 tanks it was no use.
This Comment isnt a critique about tank Information, more about how you said it.
First off,
The soviets had a different mentality when it comes to tank production, but it wasn't just "Let's throw stuff at the enemy", because thats untrue (for the battle of Kursk, in the early war maybe)
And completly ignores Soviet tactics and commanding skills. Your Version of the Story comes from German Memoirs ( they say they were overwealmed by Hordes of russians wich is did not happen) and because of the cold war .
Btw the battle of Kursk wasn't the biggest tank battle in History that title belongs to the battle of Dubno/Brodi in 1941
thank you.
"the Soviet tanks where massively inferior to the German tanks"
I'm sorry but this is just wrong.
At Kursk the most prevalent Soviet tank would've been the T-34. Probably the 85mm variant.
The most common German tanks were the panzer III & IV. Despite the T-34 being relatively unreliable, it's armour and weaponry were superior to most German tanks, and it's speed was on par. Of course when you compare a T-34-85 to a Panther or Tiger they don't look that good. But at Kursk only a few of those were available to the Germans, and they were at this point about as unreliable as the T-34, and also harder to repair owing to the complexity of their design.
The T34/85 was not issued to Red Army units until the summer of 1944, the main Soviet tanks at Kursk were the T34 /43 and the light T70, with smaller additional numbers of the last of the KV tanks, the SU-152 and the SU-122 assault guns. Overall technical balance in armor at Kursk was fairly even, since many of the powerful new German tanks and assault guns (Panther, Tiger, Ferdinand) were present only in small numbers, were horribly unreliable and sometimes had severe design flaws. The Soviets did not even have that great a superiority in tank numbers, some 3000 to 2000. German handling of their armor however continued to be much superior, with Red Army armored forces failing badly in mobile armored warfare engagements, such as their disastrous defeat at Prokhorovkha. The Red Army was victorious at Kursk mainly thanks to the more humble weapons of the infantry, minefields, field fortifications and above all the artillery.
@@gamebook727 yeah you're right it was the 76mm variant, I was going of the top of my head.
Lol *laughs in KV2*
The 34 has the reputation as one of the greatest weapons of all time but it is for its use and design not its combat strength. It was designed to only drive some 30 miles or so before it would just break down. It had slopped sides to hide the lack of armor and thinner metal but this turned into a strength. The tank was made to be replaced not like the American or german one with parts but wholesale discarded and replaced. It was truly a Soviet tank.
When it comes to production methods the Soviets where also ahead of the Germans. The Soviets had adopted the mass producing methods of the Ford model, while the Germans when they produced their tanks produced their tanks the same way they produced their aircraft. Not on conveyor belts but with each artisan worker being assigned his Tank, which was horribly inefficient.
The T-34 was also produced with planned obsolescence. Each component then had the same expiration date, instead of wasting more resources than necessary on building some components which where of higher quality then they needed to be, it was all standardized.
This is sadly true in every aspect of our lives. In a world where work hours mean more than anything, people are actually compelled to work slowly and waste time. I like to say I am pretty good at my job, better than my coworkers. I tend to finish the day’s work in the afternoon instead of the evening like they do. So often when I turn it in, my boss “punishes” me by giving me more work to last me until the end of the day. Now I just take my sweet time to do because I know it’s better to put in less effort as I get paid the same to do more, and faster. Punishing greatness is so deeply engrained in any economic society that there’s no simple way of phasing such a concept out.
When I was a welder, I would push my table to finish. For 2 years we were allowed to leave when done, then they got a new manager who told us we had to do 1/3 of another tables work for no extra money. I said FU and quit on the spot
"The Soviet tanks were massively inferior to the German tanks."
Oh dear.
Not massively inferior, but inferior yes
I am not sure the T-34 was really that inferior to german tanks.
@@Mormielo History and practice show this quite clearly - they was superior their german counterparts and FAR FAR superior than american vehicles garbage.
And most important - not only 34. T-60, T-70, bt-7, kv-1 and 2, all IS, (which later gives a life to main battle tank of new generations), planes with their aces and ships with brave sailors - all those reliable machines and their heroic crews had a decisive role in the liberation of the world from faschism's monster.
@@ПетрВрангель-т8п I think all in all soviet tanks were, specially the T 34, a more practical overall weapon compared to the german tanks.
You may argue that tigers were infact better tanks, maybe not the panthers due to reliability, but logistics, was problematic to say the least.
And yet Germans arrived almost literally inches to taking Moscow.
Had they done that (maybe had they anticipated the attack avoiding the worst of the winter) things would have been different.
@@ПетрВрангель-т8п from nazism to stalinism.........thanks
"The term 'Soviet' is actually a Russian term for Workers Council. Or, basically a Worker's Union."
So that means the Soviet Union means Workers Council Union, or Worker's Union Union.
The WUU.
Damn those wuuuuu.
@@WolfvineGaming the UWU
Soviet means council
In the beginning of the Soviet Union they had democratic worker Councils. But the Bolsheviky had other visions for socialism.
@@TASCOLP The councils were stripped of power under Kruschev not prior administrations
tried to see the comments but I accidentally pressed the subscribe button instead
I don't mind because it seems like a great channel (even though that's the first video I watched)
keep up the good work
A father and son are listening to the radio when the announcer says that, once again, there will be a 70-kopek increase in the price of a bottle of vodka.
“Daddy,” the child says, with hope in his heart, “will this mean you will drink less?”
“No. It means, you will eat less.”
sucks to be you
One of the few policies that continued from pre revolutionary days in the USSR was a state monopoly in vodka production which kept it cheap.
OK but this scenario can very well still happen under capitalism as well...it has nothing to do with socialism
@@hannijazz3276 this is more likely to happen under capitalism lol
@@jackrutledgegoembel5896 I don't even know how someone can say that when the largest man-made famines in the 20th century were in socialist nations. Take into account the US as a country has never had a famine, even at its lowest economic point. Can you say the same for China? Soviet Union? Cambodia? North Korea? Ethiopia?
Sad that TH-cam actually considers this “controversial” what a joke. I listened and it seems nothing more than educational and fair
MyDogFulton It's Apolitical,Friendly,Intriguing
What's the issue!?..NONE!
(If you think I'm insulting you I am not I'm just expanding on why oh why does youtube see this as Controversial)
This upsets too many Stalinist flakes, who, ironically, somehow make perfect members of the consumer society. Basically because they have no idea of how economics work on any level.
It is minor "edgy" and most companies when looking to get their name known avoid "edgy" at all costs. They want to be associated with warm and fuzzy feelings, not anything at all, in any way, negative. TH-cam is a prostitute of advertisers, not creators, and as such goes way out of its way to please them.
Controversial basically just means, "someone somewhere will find a way to creatively interpret this to get upset"
🤣🤣
I'm not a Stalinist, and I'm definitely not upset, but hot take:
It's a bit ignorant to suggest that Lenin (let alone Marx) ever supported the kind of dictatorship Stalin represented. So although some of the policies implemented were more communal, it's hard to call it socialism since society at large didn't have any say in political matters by the time the country stabilised.
In fact, by some Marxist definitions - such as the systematic extraction of surplus - Stalinist Russia can be considered State Capitalism.
I would like to see something about modern day Cuba or Rojava.
Cuba has currently a 25% workers co-op market and they awful democratic start is still a democratic start that could hopefully get better.
Rojava is being quite "original" on their approach and could actually be the best anarchist test since a long time.
Curious about your thoughts
Cuba's democractic process is pretty democratic I'd say, perhaps even more democratic than how the current US legislative branch is, with local governance being given top priority, with the congress having no party partisanship, as, although there is the communist party, you are able to run without a party, with 45-48% of the party representatives being female, whilst the US still lags behind with 24%, aswell as corporate lobbying being prevelant in the US congress, whilst it's been barred from Cuban politics, so to say that they have just been becoming "democratic" is a fallacy
Revolutionary Catalonia (and/or modern day Catalonia) would be cool, perhaps paired with analysis of the economy of Spain.
@@philthefinadelphian4830 "perhaps even more democratic than how the current US legislative branch is" not a particular high bar u set there.
What and or where is Rojava?
@@philthefinadelphian4830 Are you crazy?! Cuba is nowhere near being more democratic in the US, stop lying. The Cuban government is awful and treats it's people terribly. There is a reason so many Cubans have fled on rafts to escape the tyrannical government.
12:20 this is true in terms of beauty of design. But in terms of combat effectiveness it really wasn't. The T34 was famous for its survivability, although they hadn't been upgraded with the 85mm gun at the time of Kurst so they really struggled to kill Tigers, Panthers, and uparmored Panzer IV's (from the front at least). They had a handful of SU-122's and SU-152's that could do the job though. The KV-1's that the Soviets had could also kill the German tanks.
Let's also not forget the fact that the overly complex components the Nazis loved to implement led to reliability issues. And the Tigers in particular were prone to drivetrain failure.
This video, while interesting seems to draw from sources that seem primarily to be of origin from before opening of the archives which always makes me a bit hesitant about their validity.
It also fails to properly split up the various time periods, it's mentioned off handed but it isn't really being pushed on exactly how much the economy grew in the initial phases (Lenin and Stalin era) versus how much that growth fell off over the years.
Nor does it exactly examine what policy shifts were present to change such figures.
The video also does a lot to paint command economies as "Less efficient" without really explaining what that means. It might be less efficient to make more food because the best farming fields are already occupied, but that does not mean that making less food is good.
A command economy can drive prices of goods down, such as food or housing by supplying as much as needed whilst a market will always prefer to under perform to keep a demand thus increasing prices.
Even companies in markets do not use a market system to allocate their resources internally.
To finish off, it's a fine video but I wish it'd gone into much more depth and maybe put in a little more effort.
I don't wholly agree with your conclusions. In a free market, efficiency can be eradicated because where a worker sees inefficiency, they can either work towards promotion or even start their own business and out-perform the other company.
What you described is true in a monopoly, you can keep the prices high enough by keeping supply low enough. But that doesn't work if I am permitted to also make that widget for a cheaper cost, everyone is going to buy it from me and we engage in a price war.
If everything is controlled by the government, the rich (those in power) can keep the prices high enough and the costs low enough to benefit themselves which is what the Soviets regularly did. They would starve out populations that were unwanted for whatever reason (see Tatarstan famine and Holodomor).
Some companies do indeed not use a market system internally, and that is where you see massive systems of managers (MBA drones) shuffling around paperwork. You can see the effect of that in government-related industries, eg. Boeing has that problem, Lockheed Martin and some big oil companies, because the government has guaranteed them to keep market pressures away artificially.
Even then, in the case of big oil, you have small oil companies that have been capable of outperforming and revolutionized American oil in the last 3-4 years (shale oil is dominated by mom-and-pop companies). But there again, you have perhaps GM with such systems for years, but then along comes Tesla and Honda that does use market forces internally between teams and simply outperform them to the point of driving these behemoths to bankruptcy.
"A command economy can drive prices of goods down, such as food or housing by supplying as much as needed whilst a market will always prefer to under perform to keep a demand thus increasing prices."
*Well, that's a pretty tall claim...*
Anyway, I just started a new business that does whatever you do, only cheaper and more efficiently. Peeps are buying from _me_ now, and you're going bankrupt if you don't lower your prices. I can do that, because there's a free market. And I _want_ to do that, because there's something in it for me.
Under _your_ system, I wouldn't be allowed to do that, however. And so people would be left wanting. Or rather, they wouldn't even know they wanted anything in the first place, except perhaps food. Your systemt tends to produce sudden and quite fatal famines. Also there wouldn't really be anything in it for me to compete with you anyway, under such a system, so why would I bother doing anything but the bare minimum? That should give you a hint about how the famine started. No _-ism_ has killed more people than Socialism. Except a certain religion.
@@kebman My friend, I think you're misinformed.
Command economies aren't some kind of boogeyman.
"My system" doesn't exist.
You can create an economy, both capitalist and socialist, both market and command or even central planning that allows for full freedom or none at all.
Also, capitalism kills 20~ million every year, by the way. Starvation and lack of medical treatment around the world.
If you wanna talk death counts, fine.
But from an economist point of view then the way you describe the rigidity of systems is just wrong.
Shoga H. Frost “capitalism’s kills 20 million” citation please, plus we have socialist and communist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and part nationalized countries like China and Vietnam who most likely have very large death tolls. Soviet Russia and communist China most likely killed far more than 20 million yearly.
The Lenin era was a capitalist one though, until it got good enough
"Battle of Kursk, largest tank battle in history"
bruh
"Soviet tanks were massively inferior to german tanks"
BRUH
Well, tank for tank you could argue that they were. But that was kind of the point.
Joshua Campbell not really actually they could duel with them quite well
@@joshuacampbell1625 comparing with Tiger tanks, sure. but the average run of the mill T-34 could mostly make short work of Panzer IIIs/IVs if I'm not mistaken. and tigers were quite expensive, so
@@victorc8855 tigers are overrated tanks
Ya boi I concur
- Wanna a joke USSR?
- Ok
- Finland
- I don't get it
- Exactly
Ah, yes the Finns who eagerly joined the Nazis in WW2. Not much to be proud of.
@@stanspb763 finland was finland. They never were allies with the axis or the allies.
@@unacuentadeyoutube13 without Finland nazis wouldn't be able to make a siege of Leningrad last so long
@@stanspb763 The red army invaded Finland. So the Finns did whatever they had to do to retain their independence including fighting the Germans towards the end of the war to remove them from Finland. So your attempt to slander the Finns and justify Soviet atrocities failed. The problem is a lot of Russians who grew up in the USSR have this glorified image in their heads of soviet history the brainwashed ones. Germans were forced to come to terms with their WW2 history but Russians have not and unlike Germany, Russia has not paid any compensation to the countries it destroyed or attempted to destroy like Finland.
That's inaccurate, the Soviets defeated the Finns twice and with each defeat they annexed more finnish land (But did not strip Finland of its independence nor did they impose Communism even though they totally could have)
Yes, they had high casualties but they also had high casualties defeating Germany and Romania, and nobody would dare say the Germans/Romanians won the war.
My dad and uncle were born in the USSR. They both worked abd still work in the machine tool industry. My dad was so good at machine tool he got invented to Canada to work but then the company failed. And now he owns a business making machine tools.
This Channel:
They teach us about economics
*The comment section teaches EE about History*
In this video, the socialist economy is just a series of generalized half-truth stories with no concept. Where is the social sphere? This is socialism, but no words about social benefits. Strange, isn't it?
nice video! Perhaps it would also have been worth mentioning that even in the 1980s the USSR was spending 30% of its GDP on the military industrial complex. They made neat tanks and bad cars. If they had spent more on improving the population's quality of life, the system would have held together for longer.
Almost like when you destroy price mechanisms it's impossible to tell what people want, and you end up making what the government wants.
That's the downside to Siege Socialism, when the imperialists are knocking at your door
@OVOD.net ya this was the problem with the soviet union.They could not reform the system.The ppl on top had a lot of power.But mordern socialists are learning from this
Well when you have a nation on your eastern shore that is arming itself to the teeth, and makes its intentions to destroy you completely clear, what would you do?
The people didn't need cars because they had a much better free public transportation
Soviet T-34 was one of the best middle tank of WWII, actually.
medium
Nope
just because it was the best overall doesn't mean it was the most effective.
its low cost and ease of manufacturing is a major reason why its considered better than the Panzer 4, but in a 1v1 battle the Panzer was more likely to win, although not by a large margin.
Panzer had more crew, radio in ever tank, much more accurate sights and gun, and better vision
@adukuttan rocks yeah exactly the rocket part
@@yosefyonin6824let me rephrase that. Panzer 3 is utter trash, it's a lot more expensive, terrible armour, a box coffin, terrible firepower, decent mobility but trash mobility since we're comparing it to a t-34. More crew members means you lose more when you lose it. A lot of panzer 3 were lost in 1941 even though that was when red army was weakest. Tigers can be penned at 1 kilometer by t-34-85 but it's opponent was is-2 not t-34. Is-2 can pen tiger at 1.5 kilometers to 2 and is more versatile/mobile.
Hi, thanks for the quality content! I am always enjoying your videos... just thought could be quite interesting to see a video about the economy of cambodia during the khmer rouge.
"Rewarding under-performing industries with more resources is a sure-fire was to create more under-performing undustries."
Hmm....can anyone say WALL ST?
I don't think the two are really comparable on the same scale although i don't agree with what's going on with Wall St. and big tech either. But maybe i misunderstood what you meant.
@@antoneriksson356 Yeah, I think the GDP of USSR was just a fraction of Wall St. losses.
My bad.
Except that if a private company goes bankrupt it doesn't effect anyone but the people who own that company.
@@thadoc5186 wrong it affects employees and the gov that bails it out due to lobbying ie corruption
Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" book mentions two soviet union economists documenting the main problem: the lack of a pricing system. With high or low prices, soviet bureacrats had no idea how much supplies, etc. was really needed. A famous example was the nails---too many big ones were produced at the cost of not enough small ones.
yeah, i heard that they even tried to copy the U.S prices for the confusion, funny also how they just replaced the nobles for the bureaucrats
It wasn't just out of not knowing, but the incentives created. The case of the nails was due to the production quota being measured in tonnes of nails per year. But producing a smaller amount of larger nails is more efficient, hence they did exactly that.
While in theory, the bureaucrat could have specified in greater detail the correct amount of nails, given that these bureaucrats had 100s of 1000s of individual items to quantify, selecting the appropriate measurement of each quota was in itself a nightmare.
Another flaw in the centralised system was how sluggish the 'market' was to changes. One example was the price of furs from a wild animal (I can't remember which one). The bureaucrats in charge had set the price too high, and hence created the an oversupply of these pelts that had a limited demand, and ended up rotting in storage. While in a free market economy, the oversupply would be fixed by buyers reducing how much they are willing to pay, this was not possible in the USSR. Instead, 'buyers' had to inform the relevant bureaucracy involved, which unsurprisingly was never quick to respond, as such requests were coming from every corner of industry, for countless items, all of which were 'equilibrium' with eachother on monstrous mass balances. Hence it could take months before prices could be corrected to a more reaosnable value.
I love me some Thomas Sowell.
Yes, this idea is originally from Mises, he called it the Calculation Problem.
Thomas Sowell is a moron. The economic calculation problem is a meme because a pricing system isn't really needed in a centrally planned economy and, if it is needed, the socialist society could replicate it.
“The Soviet tanks were massively inferior to the German tanks”
Yep, that is all I had to hear to know you are not an expert in WW2 history, cheaper doesnt mean inferior, and the heavy Tanks that were considered superior had their own problems, that werent as common in the soviet late war heavy tanks
Besides that this is quite a good video, a socialist state could take some ideas from here to put te economy to work better, and people who say socialism cant work should also watch this to understand why it didnt work (Because no idiots, the reason it didnt work isnt "Because socialsm cant work")
Just fyi Stalinium isn't real and War Thunder isn't historically accurate.
uncreativename look at the Ferdinand
Thank you, the idea so prevalent in the West of the superiority of German tanks is ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I heard people jerk off the Tiger I only for them to not realize that they had severe problems that oftentimes made them more of a liability than a utility. Not much good in having an 88mm gun and thick armor when it uses too much fuel for the poor German logistics and couldn't stand up to the mud, snow, and cold of the Soviet Union. Don't get me wrong, the Soviet tanks also had problems too but at least they worked reasonably well in the expected conditions and were much easier to manufacture.
@RadTheLad Don't forget the soviets also made the AK-47.
Juaquín Fuentes Jara can’t blame him, he’s not a military historian
I agree with 5:48 and it's true in a lot of workplaces, but where I work, we get bonuses based on the profit made from our particular clients (so if we manage the Northeast division, profit is split between all people working on that division based on the profit, and for salespeople it's based on whichever clients they manage). It's a small company and that is probably why it works, but it does motivate us to work, and a few people who have put in a ton of work have been rewarded.
Their tanks weren't "massively inferior" why would preface that statement with "I'm not a military historian" and then make such a bold claim like that.
They weren't that inferior, in fact the German panzer had trouble penetrating the front glacis of Soviet tanks. Even though they had the tactical advantage, e.g radio communication and the soviet tanks doesn't have a hatch for the tank commander. Which it means that he will have to open the hatch and pop his head out to observe the surroundings.
@@veyolaski4324 Indeed, german tanks while good on paper were over engineered, underpowered ( mainly the larger behemoths they made later on ) and were extremely resource-intensive.
@@agiftfromdracosfather3490 I might be wrong here, the design and development of panzers were influenced by the Wehrmacht. The designers was supervised by Wehrmacht officers. Plus most of the budgets and investments on the military went to the luffwaffe and Kriegsmarines
@⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ (Two models of tank)
@@agiftfromdracosfather3490 what is he trying to prove?
"I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the U.S.S.R."
Ukraine girls really knock me out,
Leave the weast behind,
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout,
And Georgias always on my mind x5
@@napoleonbonaparteempereurd4676
Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC
Didn't get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man I had a dreadful flight
th-cam.com/video/nS5_EQgbuLc/w-d-xo.html&feature=share
Êtes-vous français?
Je parle seulement un peu le français.
th-cam.com/video/ADEc3L31tj8/w-d-xo.html&feature=share
At least until Kruschev....
*Hungarian music plays* "This is the USSR."
And then footage of Berlin at 0:52
@@andbelov Berlin used to be part of the USSR
bro im hungarian and had no clue thats from us lol
@@corporategreed No, it never was. East Berlin was part of the Soviet occupation zone from 1945 until 1949, and then part of the GDR until 1990, but it was never a part of the USSR itself.
@@akosjun_9087 for all it's practical purpose GDR was part of USSR. The regime that ran GDR was instantiated and loyal to USSR. Travel was closed to the west but open to USSR. And the USSR military was positioned in GDR until end of cold war.
In the 1980s most people have forgotten that the Soviets defeated the Nazis at Kursk, now most people forgot that the Soviets played the most important role in the anti-Nazi warfare, and in 40 years most people will forget about the Soviet Union.
Taking that disclaimer in consideration, the T-34 was one of the best tanks in the war actually, even more if compared to the german tanks
@Economics Explained So you're just going to leave out the whole topic of economics under Lenin? No War communism, no NEP, no nothing? I mean, Lenin's "communism is sovjet government plus electrification of the country" is propably the most famous quote about sovjet economics, period.
Yeah I was disappointed by that as well. He said that soviet socialism began in 1928, but the NEP was a fundamentally socialist idea. Marxism is about the whole process of transforming a nation’s economy from feudalism to communism, not just skipping to the end
"It was bad economics, so people could feel good". Lol. Tells you something about mainstream economics..
Yep
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These guys get it.
true
This channel is very much based on mainstream economics. He didn't even mention the problem of economic calculation under socialism, only logistical difficulties on applying the economical planning.
@@pedrobatista7975 socialism is trash. Yay capitalism!
People in the USSR were rewarded for working harder, at least in theory. There were perks for particularly productive workers.
And in practice? Not criticizing just don't know
@@etiennebouyoux3577 It did happen, but how well it worked and was applied varied from industry to industry and from time to time. There was originally a system of payment per piece produced, then it was hours worked. Both had upsides and downsides.
Can you provide a source? Plz
As someone who spent most of his career in public service budgeting I can tell you that March Madness, when public servants use up their budgets as much as they can, certainly exists, but the justification for it, that they will get a budget cut if they don't, certainly does not. Why? It is a simple matter of timing. Since the budget has to be prepared before the end of the fiscal year, no actuals for the year are available. Most numbers are finalized 3 months before the end of the year in the 3 large (10s or 100s of billions) entities I worked in.
And this, sadly, is characteristic of the civil service. It is very hard to measure output effectively, and the motivation provided to managers is almost universally counter productive. Fortunately there are, in my experience, a large number of people who are genuinely trying to serve the body politic, even though they get no thanks.
Also, a small historic note. The Russian T34 was much better designed for its operating environment than a panzer. More to the point, when the Germans first encountered them they were embarrassed to discover that their shells would merely bounce off them. The Russians don't seem to be very good at government, but they are not stupid.
Tanks were still a relatively new invention and there was some uncertainty about the relative merits of defensive armor, range, and fire power, and they cannot all be maximized in the same vehicle.
@@michaels4255 The T-34 was faster, better protected and better armed than contemporary German medium tanks (Not to mention most German tanks at the time were light tanks armed only with machine guns or light autocannon), but it lacked a third crewmember in the turret (reducing situational awareness and operational efficiency) and not all tanks had a radio (not good for tactical communication!). These design flaws were in many cases more crippling than the Germans' lack of armour thickness and firepower.
I used to work for a company that regularly took advantage of the governments end of the fiscal year crunch and from what I understood it wasn't that next year's budget would get cut, but that whatever they didn't spend of their allocated budget that year would then be taken back so they couldn't spend it. So it created an incentive for a mad dash rush to spend as much as possible.
@@ShamanMcLamie You are right that the money goes "poof" on the last day of the fiscal year. So you are careful to make sure the year runs out before the money and that often leaves you with some left over. It is within reason to spend some of it on things you need. But the mad rush to spend every nickel is not. It is rationalized most often by fears for next year's budget.
So,The Soviet Union basically means Workers union *"U N I O N"* ??
Yes, but more like "council union", "assembly union" or "get-together union". Then we party!
@@derekcollins9739 until we run out of food and starve!
@@toastytoast9800 This is not Tsar. We have mass production! You'll work longer but we'll pay you low wages! This is why more people died.
soviet means a council of workers and peasants
@@СергейСергей-э6э2н The Soviet Union means a union of soviet republics. That is what the comment was about. Now, what you are talking is a presumable legislative body at various levels, yes, allegedly councils of workers and peasants. Their real power was short lived - only a few months in 1918. Thereafter, it became a mock legislative institute with no real power, but rather just bunches of puppets, used by the the Communist party, who actually ruled the country.
One issue I have is that this video focuses on theoretical draw backs of motivating workers in socialist economies, and how economic planning can lead to the inefficient production and allocation of resources.
The state terror policies and forced labor of Stalin are behind the overly optimistic goals and lying about actual output figures (people were afraid of making constructive criticisms of the system, and were afraid of failing to hit targets. The consequences could be horrendous either way for them personally). But this is a failure of political policy, not a proof or sign that the USSR's economic configuration was fatally flawed. Even with the inefficiencies of the overly-powerful and oppressive political apparatus, the USSR experienced massive leaps in growth for Industrial and agricultural power throughout the 1930s, a time where most of the world experienced the collapse of capitalism.
The USSR then lost about half its productive capacity because of world war II (the nazis had seen to that), and despite this, by the 1960s, the USSR was the second fastest growing economy in the world.
These are critical things to consider when making an objective assessment of whether or not the Soviet economic system worked. The inefficiencies, I think, were due to flaws in the USSR's government system. We see in capitalist countries how this same contradiction between state policies and economic function can lead to massively different outcomes for those economies (look at the 2008 financial crisis, or the sovereign debt crisis).
Also, on the battle of Kursk bit: The Soviet T-34 is considered by many military historians to be the one of best all-around tanks of World War II; it wasn't as strong as some of the more massively armored and big-gunned German tanks, but it provided sufficient fire-power and protection, all at an efficient cost, to easily win the war; it was at least as good as the Germany Panzer Mk IV or the American m4 Sherman. The fact that the Soviet economy not only designed this but mass produced it more than Germany ever could is, again, telling. The Soviet military then massively produced one of the most iconic, well designed (because of its un-rivalled reliability and good power), and most wide-spread firearms of all-time: the AK-47. This also isn't to mention that the USSR then leads the space-race initially, and is well able to design powerful and long range ICBMS and nuclear submarines....and it does this all with a smaller and less developed economy than the combined might of the U.S and half of Europe. We have to remember: the USA and Briton began their industrialization basically a full century sooner than the USSR does, and the USSR has the smaller population.
This. This is so so true. With the misinformation of this video, i thank you.
@@capsicumannuum4624 its not misinformation as much as it is being unable to cover the topic without it being an hour long video.
I found the "giving people money for sure ultimately they get lazy" argument a bit easy too.
Nice argument 🔥
One should keep in mind that the "great terror" happened in 1930s. Large portion of people involved have seen WW1, then fought in the civil war and against Antanta intervention. It should not come as a surprise that they had substantially different view on life.
I'd suggest that many people viewed terror as an opportunity to legally get rid of ones they hated: people who were known to come from merchant and noble families, people who got rich during "new economic policy". So it's like a civil war echo.
My grandparents lived through Socialism. As long as you didn't talk trash about the system, you had a pretty comfortable, down to earth life. No false dreams of becoming a billionaire out of nothing like the US.
Considering it went from an agrarian feudal state to launching first satellites (earth, moon, venus) and astronauts, being an industrial and military superpower in just 30 years, and all of that after a devastating war and under heavy embargo from the 'civilised world', it's safe to say it did great. By far better than ''free market'' could have done.
This had the potential to be a good video with actual valid appraisal of the USSR's attempts to build an almost wholly planned economic system, but you neglected to talk at all about the system of piece rate worker compensation in the Stalin years and the bureaucratic problems with such an institution in the pre-digital age, as well as the structural problems that came with replacing this system with the post Stalin set up introduced under Khrushchev. It was great for motivating workers, but at the same time awful for red tape and literally cost more in paper and clerk labour to process than the worker's payment itself. You also completely neglected to talk about Gosplan and it's actual requisition system. Without discussing Gosplan you cannot have any serious discourse about the economic system of the Soviet Union.
Can you make any recommendations for where to read about Soviet economics? TBH I'm unfamiliar with what Gosplan is and I'd love learn about it.
@@edwardiris58 Gospan was the state agency that mapped out and administered the 5 year plans that drove the Soviet economy; all targets, objectives, adjustments and industrial strategy originate from that bureaucratic apparatus. A good, up to date introductory text on Gosplan and the Soviet economic model in it's entirety is "Socialist Planning" by Michael Ellman. Good luck with your studying, it's a fascinating subject.
@@Mrjmaxted0291 can you like this comment
Thanks for making a fair assessment.
0:58 Never knew Obi Wan Kenobi was working for the Soviets all along!
That's Engels and he did not serve the USSR lol.
No of course he wasn't. This is in Berlin!
I was about to say Donald Sutherland.
@@MegaBanne It's pretty funny that Marx gets all the credit, but Engels was equally/more important.
You meant Count Dooku from clone wars?
"Quantitive accumulation leads to qualitative changes"
Just need to add, that the soviet tanks were not inferior to the germans in terms of firepower or armor. And though the assembly of the soviet cars was really bad, there were some really genius design decisions to make the cars work despite the means of production.
they were vastly inferior in firepower, the kwk l76 8.8cm had a vastly higher rate of fire. less dispersion after 100m and lower gun depression....not to mention the penetration difference
@@007kingifrit hahhahaaaaaa
History isn't gaming you know...
@@tsvetankunchev4477 not a response