Commie says hi!

[Hatshepsut]

She also says that we need to place ourselves abstractly back in the way in Soviet Russia to understand that much of the killings were not Gulags or deliberate executions but simply side effects of policies that still weren't perfect like people starving, etc...

...the reason we think capitalism is human nature is because we are used to it. I'm tired of telling people that no one before liberalism ever thought such system would ever exist or be invented by some lone writer in a cubicle - Just like no one thought the classical period would ever end and Rome would fall...

So how is Mr. Silva doing in Portugal with the North/South thing in the EU Bailout Era? I admit my ignorance regarding political theory and the mechanics of the world system. The historical failure of imagination you speak of, combined with knee-jerk hostility to Marx, blinds us to his demonstration that capitalism predicates for its stability on unlimited economic growth. That just about guarantees capitalism will share the fate of all bacteria growing in finite petri dishes. It will have to be replaced by something else once it exhausts its resources. I don't know if that entails abolition of private property, but it will mean the slaying of its status as a sacred cow. The Australian Aborigines did fine without private property for more than 40000 years.

I'm less willing to see innocence in the killing phenomena of Soviet Russia; the famine in the Ukraine was imposed. We have long been condemning it from our own position of comfort, however, as if this is a thing that monsters do which couldn't happen to us. It may well have went beyond what even Stalin intended, without his full control over it all. Nor was it in the original 1917 game plan, which was ruthlessly cruel yet not unmeasured as the purges came to be. The Gulag was a machine capable of grinding meat on its own, with enough inertia to make it hard to stop.