:USSR:
Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois “socialism always fails” propaganda.
On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:
- The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
- The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
- The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don’t know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my “Things in history I wish would have turned out differently” list.
- Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn’t be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
- The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn’t like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn’t be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
- The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
- A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.
De-Stalinization undertaken by Khruschev was basically the starting point for everything going wrong. Not that mistakes weren’t made prior to this, or that the SU wasn’t able to accomplish great things after it, but the trend line across Soviet history where Marxism becomes less important as a guiding ideology and the people and the party leaders’ desires begin to diverge from each other starts descending there. As Xi Jinpeng puts it:
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
Most of the stuff pointed out (cultural conservatism, bourgeois “rights”) are liberal posthoc stories told by the west as cover. The soviet union failed plain and simple because the party itself did not believe it was legitimate. Economic dysfunction is not an automatic death sentence for a regime, otherwise the high inflation and chronic shortage nations like Argentina and Mexico would have their nation states fragmented and replaced every few years.
The USSR, starting with Khrushchev as ssjmarx puts it, was run by a vanguard party that shit all over its past leaders and embraced nothing but personal gain and bureaucratic ladder climbing. By the time you get to 1980s USSR, the CPSU was not a party of the people but a party over the people.
In fact, Gorbachev’s glastnost policies were the impetus for the west to seize upon nationalist movements in undermining the USSR. The state security apparatus that had kept the union together for decades suddenly couldn’t act on nationalist sentiment. And once people got used to complaining about the CPSU it was pretty much all over. Opportunists inside the party and all over worked overtime to heighten every crisis . Ultimately, you can trace the start of the collapse to Gorby flying to Crimea to renegotiate the Union treaty into something more like federalism, but by then Union hardliners had enough. They couped him and in the resulting chaos opportunists like Yeltsin were able to seize the initiative and dismantle the USSR republic by republic.
:shocked-pikachu:
It would not be entirely wrong to call the Yeltsin regime compradors. They were very dependent on foreign imperial powers both materially and ideologically.
It would not be entirely wrong to call the Yeltsin regime compradors.
I would fight anyone not calling them compradors/gusanos
Another thing that ties with most other points is that , by little choice of its own and due to cold war shennanigans, the USSR for decades even afterWWII spend a good 20-25%+ of their GDP on the military and intelligence operations. Thats a huge handicap to have for a country with their starting material conditions that went through a devestation such as WWII and limited the wiggle room they had domesticaly for more treats to the citizens and in general more whole scale departure from exploitation and overtaking the west in many cultural and economical ereas
So, it was a near run thing. As late as early 1991 it could probably have been saved (I don’t hold much chance of the August coup succeeding.
- The people were old and there were some issues with turning things over, but the next generation of potential leaders were often those who were the worst looters.
Also, they were not that old despite the memes, Biden is older than every Soviet leader when they got into power. He’s nearly older than every leader when they died! (Gorby is the exception) Andropov was 69 which is old, but not unheard of even in nations where Leaders are traditionally in their 40s when attaining power (Churchill was 66 I think in 1940 and people thought him too old for power.)
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I would not go as far as calling the Nomenklatura a new class. They were not and people drastically underestimate the power workplace councils and local Soviets had in the SU due to Great Man theory and CIA propaganda. But yes, the Beauracratisation of the SU was an issue, one that Lenin precipitated, Stalin made worse before realising his mistake, and almost every leader tried and failed to solve. It is one of the reasons the SU could not reform.
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The S-S split is a tragedy, and if it didn’t happen yes, the SU would be here still. It’s a serious lesson in Left Unity, and the reason I always support states like the DPRK that I otherwise might strongly critique. We cannot afford bullshit like that ever again.
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Cultural Conservatism waxed and waned, though it is something to critique. I might note that a lack of it didn’t help the GDR
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This gets close to the major cause, but the USSR was exposed to bourgeois subversion. If everyone had believed in the system, the USSR would have pushed through what was a far less serious crisis than that of it’s first 30 years. Many useful reforms could have been made. But after Stalin’s democratisation measures were repeatedly voted down and Corn Pop cemented rule of the party nomenklatura, its hard to see how more power could be devolved to local Soviets. China has made great strides in solving this. IMO, Cuba and Vietnam have done even better.
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The wealth gap was a huge issue in the 80s, mostly because the SU decide it was. But it was primarily an issue in the upper ranks, who basically dissolved the SU for treats.
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Gorby did kill the SU through about 5-6 consecutive bad decisions and yeah, tactically, he’s the precipitator of the fall.
I’d like to add a reason of my own
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The underdeveloped nature of the Soviet Bloc. Only Czechoslovakia and the GDR could be considered fully developed as economies, and both had been wrecked and looted, first by WW2, then by Nazis fleeing west with half the factories, then by Soviet reparations. The SU was largely Feudal in 1917 and despite mistakes their modernisation of the economy was far, far less bloody than the famines and clearances that accompanied Capitalist development. Despite this, the Soviet Union never quite managed to complete industrialisation in many areas beyond an 1850s-style primary resource economy (with modern bells) At it’s peak just before the Sino-Soviet Split, the entire Communist World had a third to a half of the economic power of the USA. China today is more powerful economically than every other socialist state, living or dead, combined.
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Following on from this is the fact that market socialism is hard to do, you either have an NEP/Dengism and let some billionaires in and hope they don’t slip the leash, or you do a full command economy, which in the 70s meant you could only command about 100 products, and that not well. Everything else was just kind of half-assed between quotas from stats agencies and an informal fixer arrangement. The SU, assuming it doesn’t continue the NEP into the 1930s, made two horribly poor decisions here. One was to not cybernetise the economy and develop an internet in the 60s. The second was to implement market reforms at the exact fucking moment command economies that controlled most primary and secondary industries became possible. The SU literally marketised its internal industries just as the People’s Republic of Walmart was swallowing up its suppliers and vertically integrating its logistics.
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Seige Socialism: After the failure of the Rhur Uprising and the Soviet defeat at Warsaw, the Soviet Union can be seen as a state under a slow, strangling siege from the west. This never stopped, and since the west out-competed them economically, it was only a matter of time before one crisis or another killed it, or it managed to achieve command economy take-off and out-compete the west. China has taken the road of the NEP, and looks like it could probably start integrating it’s primary industries entirely! Xi is making some moves in this direction, though not as many as I’d like.
If everyone had believed in the system, the USSR would have pushed through what was a far less serious crisis than that of it’s first 30 years
Carlos Martinez, in his essays on the fall, interestingly ties the lack of faith in the system to de-stalinization. His point is, many/most Soviet citizens didn’t exactly have advanced knowledge of Marxism or Communism (not a criticism). What they did know is that when Stalin was in charge, their material conditions improved on a scale that’s almost hard to comprehend. So many folks associated socialism and the Soviet system with Stalin. So by denouncing Stalin, the Corn Man completely undermined the faith people had in the system.
As late as early 1991 it could probably have been saved
I remember reading somewhere that, as late as 1986 or so, the notion of the USSR collapsing would seem highly unlikely - both from the POV of the Soviets and the Americans. All the problems we know about were there and the Soviet leaders understood a lot of them. So something had to be done.
But Gorby’s reforms in the mid/late 80s, instead of addressing the problems in a constructive way, only cranked up the contradictions to 11, which toppled the system.
Personally, I wonder if China wasn’t maybe in a somewhat similar situation to the USSR when Xi rose to power. Certainly not in as dire of a situation. But Xi is the anti-Gorbachev. He saw the problems going on (like the rising power of the neoliberals and corruption in the system) and has addressed it the right way.
The people were old
I’ll also add that there is an important historical event everyone seems to gloss over, to no fault of their own since it’s literally outside the experience of damn near everyone alive right now:
The Great Patriotic War costed the Soviet Union 27 million lives. Among those 27 million are many of the best and brightest future leaders of the Bolshevik Party who sacrificed their lives for the survival of the Soviet peoples. The Komsomol, the youth league of the CPSU was bled dry of both its young members and it’s older cadre.
It stands to be understandable to a fault why the Bolcheviks national level was a Gerontocracy: many surviving members below the old leadership were pencil pushing bureaucrats that helped hold the State together but were wholesale unsuited for leadership, therefore a new generation of leaders needed to be educated. Which in turn was a problem unto itself because the many educators that would help cultivate a newer generation through educational theory and practice were also sent to the front lines.
What of the survivors you ask? Couldn’t they help educate the newer generation to come? They were faces with a devastated land in ruins, great work had to be done to restore it and that left little time for in-depth education.
I’ll paraphrase Molotov, in his book ‘Molotov Remembers’; The Founding Bolcheviks all knew Kapital through and through, they could debate all the finer details of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth, writings with the same degree of skill they had for their respective fields of work. The following generation faced the Great War, having so little time to dedicate to reading the theoretical material in-depth had to settle for selected readings to learn the basics of the ideology while fighting for their lives and struggling to rebuild. The generations following them learned from pamphlets and summarized briefs on the writings of theoreticians.
I’ll paraphrase Molotov
I’d never thought of it like that. That’s such a tragedy. Fucking Nazis.
We see the effects of under 1 million dead and more retiring or otherwise leaving the labor force. I can’t imagine having 27 times that.
First line of Capital by Karl Marx : “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”"
Average life of worker under capitalism - Work, make wages, buy stuff with wages, repeat.
Average life of worker under USSR - Work, make wages, buy stuff with wages, repeat.
It is this condition of the working class that communists seek to abolish. The working class in USSR suffered the same impersonal domination of the value-form as working classes everywhere.
The USSR could not be communist because communism is an international movement, not something that can be realized in a single nation. Look at any capitalist country, trade(exports and imports) makes up a giant chunk of the GDP.
The USSR called itself communist because since the Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing)
Communism is the real movement of the working class to abolish their present conditions of existence, and replace it with one where there is no longer any domination of capital over man, nor is there domination of man over capital, but capital literally doesn’t exist anymore.
There is no money, exchange, wage labor, commodity production, profit and other such categories in a communist society.
Such a society can only be achieved by an international movement of a revolutionary working class led by a class party that follows the principles of scientific socialism(aka Marxism).
Hope this is clear. If you want to understand more, read the following texts
“Communist Manifesto” by Marx, “German Ideology” by Marx. And these following ICP party texts.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1958/marxism-property.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1957/fundamentals.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm. If you spend the time and effort to understand these 5 texts, (it will take 6 hours at most) you will already be a better communist than 99% of self described communists out there, online and IRL, who simply do not understand the basic concepts of what communism is and what actually has to be done.
A Trot/Left-Com on MY Hexbear??? Astonishing!
First time I’ve seen a leftcom on this site lol.
Actual communists are few are far between in leftoid spaces
Lib
lmao
:so-true:
Given this place is so heavily ML, how do you tolerate sticking around here? I’m just curious because pretty much everything political that’s posted here would contradict your worldview
The USSR called itself communist because since the Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing
Found the ultra lol
: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities"
So how does this apply in the USSR even after the “Stalinist counterrevolution” as you say ? At what level and for which individuals did this accumulation of commodities prevailed as wealth ? Where was ownership leading to that short of accumulation observed ? By the party members that even at the most extreme earned 3-4 times what an average factory worker did and lived in somewhat larger appartments than the average worker ? Is the phenomenon was so rampant you should be able to present proof of how that wealth from immense accumulation of commodities existed widely in the capitalist USSR
The USSR could not be communist because communism is an international movement, not something that can be realized in a single nation. Look at any capitalist country, trade(exports and imports) makes up a giant chunk of the GDP.
Sure but
The USSR called itself communist
This never happened. The party called it self a communist party. Maybe at most the society was called one with communist values. The economy and mode of production and organization of the USSR was never descibed as an existing communist one by the party OR leaders , especially under stalin.
Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing)
Just quoting this cause its a distilled and pure leftcom momment to a very funny degree. And even misunderstands leftcoms of that era who despite not considering the USSR socialist or communist they usualy refrained and distanced themselves from the baby brained “its just capitalism” analysis. Just linking to lasagna man with no context isnt enough
In general you seem quite confused about the exploitation of workers and malding over the boogeyman of “state capitalism” . The “capitalist” USSR economy magicaly wasnt run for profit and didnt include accumulation of wealth or control over production by indivisual people . The image of capitalist opportunists enacting their version of capitalism to materialy benifit them selves is Disney level ahistorisism since even western anti-communist historians or even cia reports dont point out towards rgar. There wasnt a class in the economic sense profiting from the labor of the underclass or enacting a “dictatorship of X class” in the marxist sense over the workers. No one got rich in USSR by making his fellow people poor and exploiting them or even more so from exploiting the rest of the world. Even Stalin for all his faults basicaly died with nothing on his name and living an ascetic life. You can very rightfully argue about the shittiness of the bureocracy and the disconnect of the party from the working class and the elitism. You would be correct. But jumping from there to “state capitalist” hysteria is unfounded
Yes there was exploitation in the USSR and sucking labor value from workers .How else would you finance the enormous military budgets or rebuilt the entire country from strcatch multiple times after ww1/civil war and then after ww2. Since USSR wasnt imperialist in the “exploiting third world labour or extracting resources from the rest of the world” sence and since it was economicaly isolated and sieged Surplus value was extracted from the workers in order to be redirected to those stuff. Its simple as that. And idk about how the USSR could avoid having to maintain huge military expensess or having to rebuild a vast country from rubble 2 times using the labour and value created only within their borders. And yes there wasnt a complete ablolition of wages , commodities class struggle . But the USSR never was and never claimed to have reached communism in order to do so
:very-intelligent: “No no capitalism is when you build things”
