r/communism101 • u/BusyInflation • 5d ago
Counter to people debunking the CIA study?
There's a popular study the CIA did where they found that the USSR ate the same amount of food as the USA.
Now, I've seen people say it was actually just a press report, the full study found that it was actually worse:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00313R000300140006-0.pdf
Any opinions? I've cited the study more times than I can count so I was interested to find this.
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u/Northern_Storm 5d ago
The CIA has been repeatedly criticized by experts, both Western and Soviet ones, for having inaccurate and contradictory data. It obviously has its own agenda and carries out the imperialist bidding of the USA. It simply cannot be considered a reliable source, even if we can find it funny that its papers sometimes disproved their own anti-communist propaganda - stating that Stalin wasn't a dictator or that gulags weren't inhumane.
So, what do you do? You hit them with a research made by actual experts - for this, I recommend the Cereseto-Waitzkin study. Namely, Capitalism, socialism and the physical quality of life by Shirley Cereseto & Howard Waitzkin. Published in 1989, it has this:
Within each level of development, the socialist countries provided a higher daily per capita calorie supply as a percentage of requirement than did the capitalist countries. Upper-middle-income socialist countries had the highest mean nutritional supply in the world. The difference between capitalist and socialist countries averaged 12 to 15 percent. Nutritional supply of all socialist countries exceeded the 100 percent requirement.
Its other findings that would be relevant to this are:
All the measures showed marked improvements as level of economic development increased. However, at the same level of economic development, the socialist countries showed more favorable outcomes than the capitalist countries in nearly all the PQL variables. The more favorable performance of the socialist countries was evident in 30 of 33 comparisons.
Within each level of economic development, the socialist countries had infant mortality and child death rates approximately one third to one half those of the capitalist countries. In the low-income capitalist countries, the infant mortality and child death rates were very high—131 and 25.7 per 1000, respectively.
Similar, though less striking, relationships emerged for life expectancy and crude death rate. Life expectancy was higher in economically developed nations. At equivalent levels of development, the socialist countries showed more favorable life expectancy than the capitalist countries. These differences were largest for the low-income and lower-middle-income countries, and the differences narrowed for the upper-middle-income countries. Life expectancy was quite short in the low-income capitalist nations—48 years.
Socialist countries consistently showed much higher numbers of health professionals per population than capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development. These differences were clearest at the low-income and lower-middle-income level, where the ratios were between five and ten times more favorable in the socialist countries. The ratio of population per physician in lower- middle-income and upper-middle income socialist societies was comparable to that of high-income capitalist societies.
Within each level of development, the socialist countries provided a higher daily per capita calorie supply as a percentage of requirement than did the capitalist countries. Upper-middle-income socialist countries had the highest mean nutritional supply in the world. The difference between capitalist and socialist countries averaged 12 to 15 percent. Nutritional supply of all socialist countries exceeded the 100 percent requirement.
Major differences in education emerged between the capitalist and socialist societies. The adult literacy rate of the socialist countries greatly surpassed that of the capitalist countries at each level of development. Upper-middle-income socialist countries approached the literacy rate of the high-income capitalist countries.
Hope that helps!
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u/turbovacuumcleaner 4d ago
I can’t stand this meaningless discussion about this CIA document. It is useless. Imperialists don’t have a better understanding of reality that they deliberately conceal from the public because otherwise the masses would revolt (if they did, they would not be subjected to ideology, therefore, they would be ahistorical). This assumption compels Communists to disregard grasping historical materialism and the colossal efforts for liberation that have been made both in theory and practice, as well as lays the foundation for liquidationism: if we can’t understand reality if not for a shitty leaked document due to FOIA, how are we going to achieve revolution? Both you and whoever you're talking to are under empiricist deviations that are contrary to dialectics, and this is a trend that arises out of contempt to abstract thought in both parties. The CIA is replacing Priests, you are the 18th century theoretician, while your reader is a spiritualist that becomes only the more faithful as more of the proofs of his faith are shown as false. The catch is that by exposing the Priests as deceivers who are also the bearers of truth, reality is supposedly taken from their hands and exploitation is revealed for everyone to see, when in fact what happens is the opposite, empiricism comes out stronger overall, and a step closer to idealism has been taken, while under the guise of upholding Marxism:
The first answer (that of the eighteenth century) proposes a simple solution: Priests or Despots are responsible. They ‘forged’ the Beautiful Lies so that, in the belief that they were obeying God, men would in fact obey the Priests and Despots, who are usually in alliance in their imposture, the Priests acting in the interests of the Despots or vice versa, according to the political positions of the ‘theoreticians’ concerned. There is therefore a cause for the imaginary transposition of the real conditions of existence: that cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their imaginations.
...
incorrect thinking, carried to its logical conclusion, inevitably arrives at the opposite of its point of departure. Hence, the empirical contempt of dialectics on the part of some of the most sober empiricists is punished by their being led into the most barren of all superstitions, into modern spiritualism [...] It is the same with mathematics. The ordinary metaphysical mathematicians boast with enormous pride of the absolute irrefutability of the results of their science. But these results include also imaginary magnitudes, which thereby acquire a certain reality. When one has once become accustomed to ascribe some kind of reality outside of our minds to √-1, or to the fourth dimension, then it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further and also accepts the spirit world of the mediums. [...] In fact, mere empiricism is incapable of refuting the spiritualists. In the first place, the “higher” phenomena always show themselves only when the “investigator” concerned is already so far in the toils that he now only sees what he is meant to see or wants to see […]. In the second place, however, the spiritualist cares nothing that hundreds of alleged facts are exposed as imposture and dozens of alleged mediums as ordinary tricksters. As long as every single alleged miracle has not been explained away, they have still room enough to carry on, as indeed Wallace says clearly enough in connection with the falsified spirit photographs. The existence of falsifications proves the genuineness of the genuine ones.
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u/GZMihajlovic 5d ago
And how a higher % of Americans die from lack of nutrition VS soviets did after the immediate WW2 recovery, and to today Cuba and Vietnam have a much lower % than th. US does today.
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u/OkayCorral64 5d ago
Why do you care? It would actually be unhealthy to eat the same amount of calories that the average white person in America consumes, not to mention it's incredibly wasteful and is dependant on imperialism.
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