Stuart Bedasso: Aural Treats for the Revolution

The famines that occurred early on in revolutionary societies were in fact the last famines of the capitalist-feudal order that came before. Socialism solved the problem of hunger, which had tormented the peasantry for centuries. Historical records from pre-revolutionary China cite 1,828 catastrophic famines over about 2,000 years, or roughly one per year. These would routinely claim millions of lives. What stopped them? The revolution, with its land reforms and Communist Party forces tasked with serving the people. That process did not happen with the snap of the fingers, but required seismic social transformations — a long struggle of shedding the old and building the new. That is why the last famine occurred after the revolution. We also know what happens when the capitalist dictatorship is restored in a formerly socialist country. After the defeat of the USSR, hunger returned to Russia at levels unseen since the immediate post-war period, when the country was still reeling from the effects of Germany’s war of extermination. The levels of hunger and death imposed by global capital on the people of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990s were historically unprecedented in peacetime.