• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    Famines were extremely common in both Tsarist Russia and feudal China. Their respective famines in the beginning were ended because they developed out of that underdeveloped form of agriculture. This is not difficult to understand. Why compare the Soviet Union and PRC to capitalist countries, when we should be comparing them to their former selves?

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        No, what’s toxic is comparing countries with wildly different circumstances and prior levels of development without properly contextualizing. The famines were not caused by communism, nor mismanagement. The famines were caused by a combination of weather disaster and dramatic underdevelopment of agriculture, which is why both regions commonly had famine before, and why both countries had these as their last famines outside wartime, as they industrialized.