Imgflip Logo Icon

Good news! Under capitalism, you can have both! (Hehehe you thought this was gonna be an anti-communist meme didn’t you)

Good news! Under capitalism, you can have both! (Hehehe you thought this was gonna be an anti-communist meme didn’t you) | made w/ Imgflip meme maker
1,575 views 2 upvotes Made by aCollectionOfCellsThatMakesMemes 2 years ago in IMGFLIP_PRESIDENTS
10 Comments
2 ups, 2y,
1 reply
“But the USSR had no food!” I hear a liberal cry in the comment section before rushing to cry about how Stalin was an evil communist totalitarian nutjob while citing Wikipedia, the totally reliable source for learning anything about history.

Luckily, the CIA, not biased towards communism by any means, has denounced this ludicrous claim in a declassified document that I’ve kept in handy just in case something like this happens.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5.pdf
2 ups, 2y,
1 reply
Oh, NOW you trust the CIA. Aren’t “liberals” not supposed to cite the CIA because it’s biased?
Interesting how it’s suddenly credible if it fits your preconceived worldview.
2 ups, 2y,
3 replies
It’s interesting how there’s a disconnect between your mouth and your brain.

Do you know what declassified means? It means it used to be a classified document not meant for people to see, including liberals. Now it’s DEclassified, so people can access it. That still doesn’t mean it was made for the public to see in the first place, it’s just that they can now see it.
1 up, 2y
“Soviet citizen eats 3280 calories and American citizen eats 3520 calories"

This still doesn’t address other problems with the Soviet system of distributing and producing food.

In 1983, the United States has grocery stores with dozens of varieties of breakfast cereal on the shelves. Customers could make choices on quality, quantity, and price on literally thousands of products in a typical store in an urban area, and hundreds of products even in a rural area. An average shopper usually spent around an hour a week to purchase food.

Meanwhile, a typical Soviet store required customers to spend hours in line, possibly multiple times per week, at a massive economic cost, and had no choice as to the food items available.

In areas of the Soviet Union, 93% of men were Vitamin C deficient, while in neighboring Finland this was 2%.

Another thought: this is one of the good things about free markets. The USA was plastered with advertisements on eating citrus to get Vitamin C. However, was that necessary? Was there problems with scurvy or other signs of deficiency?
1 up, 2y,
1 reply
The CIA drew no conclusions about the nutritional makeup of Soviet or American diets.
I could stop there, but clearly I’ll need overwhelming evidence in this situation.You've posted a one page summary of a CIA report. The full thing is at https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf Now for starters, some important things. This CIA report is not looking at what Soviet citizens ingest, it is about food supply. This is very important. Secondly, even within this report you can see there are some huge inequalities across the Soviet Union. Meat consumption in Estonia was 81kg per capita per year, in Uzbekistan it was 31kg. Fruit consumption had an average of 40kg per person per year, but across Siberia it was 12kg. The report indicates that the Soviets had slightly lower calorie in take than America. This understates things considerably. Firstly, Soviet citizens conducted vastly more strenuous work in a significantly colder climate. They did not have the luxury of things like personal cars, or working 9-5 jobs in comfortable offices. The total recommended daily amount of calories for a Soviet person ranged from 2,800 to 3,600 for men and from 2,400 to 3,100 for women, depending on their occupation. In the United States, estimates range from 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day for adult women and 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day for adult men. So right away, it is very important to remember that the Soviets need higher calories than Americans. Adding to this, the Soviet Union was notoriously ineffective at getting food into its citizens. The Soviet Union was the world's largest milk producer, but only 60% of that actually ended up in people. In the United States, 90% of milk produced was consumed by humans. General Secretary Gorbachev noted that reducing field and farm product losses during harvest, transportation, storage and processing could increase food consumption in general by 20%. So any of those figures you see in CIA reports, you can basically take down by one-fifth.
1 up, 2y,
1 reply
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9556127/Hamm_gsas.harvard_0084L_10406.pdf?sequence=3 says: “per capita consumption figures likely overstate actually available amounts, given that the Soviet Union’s inadequate transportation and storage infrastructure led to frequent shortages in stores, as well as significant loss of foodstuffs and raw products due to spoilage... In 1988, at the height of perestroika, it was revealed that Soviet authorities had been inflating meat consumption statistics; it moreover transpired that there existed considerable inequalities in meat consumption, with the intake of the poorest socioeconomic strata actually declining by over 30 percent since 1970... Government experts estimated that the elimination of waste and spoilage in the production, storage, and distribution of food could have increased the availability of grain by 25 percent, of fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, and of meat products by 15 percent.”
1 up, 2y,
1 reply
Despite the Soviets subsidizing food by something like 10% of GDP food was still more expensive than in the West. If you actually read about the daily life in the USSR you will find assessment such as "The prevailing system of food distribution is clearly a major source of dissatisfaction for essentially all income classes, even the best off and even the most privileged of these." As you love CIA reports, here is another one which warns against the sunny outlook in the Western literature: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol12i2/html/v12i2a06p_0001.htm
“In summary, I went to the USSR with a set of notions about what to expect that I had formed over the years from reading and research on the Soviet economy. I also had a collection of judgment factors,partly intuitive and partly derived from this same research and reading, that I applied in drawing conclusions and speculating about probable future developments in the Soviet economy. My four months of living in the country itself, however, greatly altered these preconceptions and modified the implicit judgment factors in many respects. No amount of reading about the Soviet economy in Washington could substitute for the summer in Moscow as I spent it. As a result of this experience I think that our measurements of the position of Soviet consumers in relation to those of the United States (and Western Europe) favor the USSR to a much greater extent than I had thought. The ruble-dollar ratios are far too low for most consumer goods. Cabbages are not cabbages in both countries. The cotton dress worn by the average Soviet woman is not equivalent to the cheapest one in a Sears catalogue; the latter is of better quality and more stylish. The arbitrary 20 percent adjustment that was made in some of the ratios is clearly too little. The difference in variety and assortment of goods available in the two countries is enormous—far greater than I had thought. Queues and spot shortages were far more in evidence than I expected. Shoddy goods were shoddier. And I obtained a totally new impression of the behavior of ordinary Soviet people toward one another.”
1 up, 2y
One of the experts on consumption and nutrition in the USSR is Igor Birman who wrote the book on this topic. You get some interesting stats, like the USSR consume 229% the amount of potatoes as the United States but 39% the amount of meat. He also shows that the Soviets were not hitting their own "Rational Norms" for the consumption of meat, milk milk products, eggs, vegetables, fruits or berries. For example, while the Soviet Rational Norm for for fruit was 113kg, the actual consumption was 38. The US actual was smack bang on 113kg. You get some other fun facts like potato consumption in Tsarist Russia, 1913 was 113kg and after all of Stalin's industrialization and collectivization and decades of development, this increased to... 119kg in 1976. Soviet diets were not good. They did not hit their own set guidelines.
1 up, 2y,
1 reply
Even if we disregard the fact that the Soviets required a much higher caloric intake to have the comfort level of Americans (harsher weather, younger population, and harder labor), there are still many problems with this claim. This one page you cited seems very odd, not only because it is just one page but also because it lacks actual data and methodology. Of course, this is a summary and not the actual report being referenced. So why don’t the communists cite the actual report (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol12i2/html/v12i2a06p_0001.htm)? Trusting the CIA is very convenient for the communists due to the fact that the CIA frequently overestimated the Soviet economy and living conditions. Gertrude Schroeder, at the time an economist for the CIA, noted in 1966 that the CIA statistics on Soviet consumption “…undoubtedly overstate the relative position of the USSR because the calculations cannot allow adequately for the superior quality of U.S. products and the much greater variety and assortment products available here.” Economist Vladimir G. Treml examined the 3,280 calories statistic directly in his paper, Soviet Foreign Trade in Foodstuffs. Treml pointed out that these statistics failed to account for many types of losses, largely due to the diversion of food products prior to human consumption. There are two major sources of this diversion ( 1 ) bread and bakery products fed to livestock and ( 2 ) sugar, bread, and other foods used in home production of moonshine and other alcoholic beverages. In Treml’s estimations, these two factors alone cause a loss of 200 calories per capita per day. This is before accounting for poor harvesting and distribution techniques.
0 ups, 2y
Former Soviet economist Igor Birman also directly responded to the 1982/83 CIA report in his book Personal Consumption in the USSR and USA in 1989. In his book, he criticizes the CIA’s methodology, reporting: “Both American and Soviet statistics differ therefore from the accounts of a national product and personal consumption. These differences hampered many of the authors' calculations. I refer to such cases in my analysis.” Birman’s final adjusted estimates claim Soviet citizens ate 43% of what Americans ate.

Despite Birman’s hesitation to fully trust even his own data (p. 72), it was later revealed to be entirely correct. John Howard Wilhelm noted in the journal Europe-Asia Studies, “Given what has happened and what we now know, Birman clearly did get it right.” He goes on to say, “some of the most 'advanced' techniques were used in studies of the Soviet economy….. But these techniques clearly did not perform as well as Birman's 'anecdotal economics' in getting the Soviet economic situation right.”

You can read more about the Soviet’s food situation here: https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/
Created with the Imgflip Meme Generator
EXTRA IMAGES ADDED: 1
  • D56EFFE9-B6BA-4D55-9E48-788C1D2D2B55.jpeg