Where did the Soviet Bloc produced crap meme come from and why does it still persist today when shit build quality and...

Where did the Soviet Bloc produced crap meme come from and why does it still persist today when shit build quality and poor design is the norm?

Western propaganda, what else would it be? Ever since the eastern bloc isn't around anymore the lies have actually been ramped up and presented as facts while in the past you could easily laugh away anyone making claims about "collectivization of women" and shit like that.

TBH in former Eastern Bloc country I used to hear only meme that Soviet produced devices are rough and sluggish, however imperishable.

Capitalist propaganda.

Also, anti-Soviet elements within USSR itself popularized this myth greatly in the 80s, once they got the need to justify privatization of socialized property (initially, as Perestroika): the Revisionist government of Gorbachev officially declared products to be utterly bad and "uncompetitive" - hence, the need to transfer more and more power to local authorities. Eventually, Privatization was introduced as the solution that would allow "efficient managers" to operate with the full freedom.

By this you mean party bureaucrats and not the local soviets right?

worse, chosen oligarchs

They were well designed and built for the tech and planned production cost. For example while the Trabant is a favourite for people to rift on the western equivalent would be the Chevette in terms of cost. What the Soviet bloc was behind in was production methods to be able to spit out cars like the Trabant as quickly as the west.

Neither.

The role of Party (in the post-Stalin period, especially) is greatly exaggerated. For all intents and purposes, you can consider the dreaded "Nomenklatura" to be a fiction (not that there were no events currently associated with it, but the mechanisms were different).

I'm talking about the technocratic Petit-Bourgeoisie (high-ranking specialists, so-called "red directors"). People who were managing factories and such. They were the ones who were helping demolish Central Planning, to remove class character of Soviets, and to support Revisionism and Reaction within USSR. They also were the ones who (more often than not) were main beneficiaries of privatization that followed.

Not that there was some grand conspiracy, mind you. Petit-Bourgeois simply protected their interests - by participating in class struggle within USSR - which automatically made them enemies of Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

The USSR made some good Big Muffs, even though they were American-designed

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The left will never be able to advance as long it fails to admit the Soviet Union and its allies and puppet states were all shit.

Well, there's three of us, at least.

It is beyond doubt that the USSR was a failure. But we will never have a proper analysis of why it was shit if we take all propaganda at face value. An analysis that arises from false premises will not be useful for anything.

Don't you think the main reason for inferior/too few necessary goods and services was simply guns and butter?

Choose one and only one.

So low in material cost but high in labor time required compared with the west, right?


Is this not what we mean by nomenklatura? Also, don't pretend the interests of the party weren't opposed to those of the proletariat, and that the managers didn't act with their consent. Party, managers… both crap. The soviets were the only organ of proletarian power.


ITT anti-communists see nuance as uncritical defense because they're drunk on liberal kool-aid


One of, you can't chalk it up to just that. You also have to keep in mind that eastern european countries were underdeveloped before and after AES.

What was the goal of the USSR? According to the Bolsheviks, how would the world look today, a hundred years later, if the USSR was a complete success? Like this?
Unless you honestly think the answer to the latter of those questions would be yes, I fail to see how the conclusion could be anything other than that at some point, it failed.
Now, whether it was doomed from the start, or that this failure was caused by post-Stalin revisionism, the inescapable material conditions, or anything else, is up to debate.

No. Nomenklatura - in it's initial meaning - referred to Party functionaries. I.e. administration of politics, rather than managing economy.

While Soviet Technocrats often held high posts within Party, their power was not based on politics as such. Consequently, it is misleading to identify them as Nomenklatura - who were populists. I.e. relied on popular support to advance.

That's wrong both factually and theoretically (i.e. anti-Marxist).

If there is any doubt, I did not embrace Cultural Marxism, nor any other form of Revisionism that claims Marx to be utterly wrong.

You make no sense. Obviously, almost everyone acts with some level of consent from every other member of society. It's called "law", and those people who do not are referred to as criminals.

And how does following propaganda of those Soviet Technocrats makes you feel?

"It's all Capitalist lies!", "The Trabant was actually a good car"

The only nuanced thing you could say it that they weren't designed with planned obsolescence, but the same can be said for western produced goods decades ago which still hold up today better than many modern goods. Except those western produced goods are actually good in addition to being long lasting, which cannot be said of Eastern Bloc goods.

Why is the term tankie even an insult when everyone in leftist circles is a tankie at the end of the day who will defend the glory of the Soviet Union?

Yes because the Soviet Bloc wanted full employment, labor savings was a problem as the firms had little incentive to save labor while being averse to retooling costs plus even if they did make it through retooling it would mean the bureaucratic task of reassigning that pool of workers somewhere else.

Christ, lots of ideology to unpack here.


The state manages the economy, that's the whole point.
Then why were these technocrats never made obsolete by the benevolent party with complete backing of the populace? Also, the party was self-elected, nothing more.
Oh please. You're repeating the same excuses fascists use for class collaboration and neoliberals for trashing democracy in favor of "experts".
Cultural marxism doesn't exist, and unironically defending the USSR's political and economic structure is as anti-marxist as you can get.
wew lad
Do you know what a soviet is?


That's… not what I'm saying, at all. I'm saying that propagand about supermarket shelves being empty 99% of the time needs to be challenged just as much as the claims made by Stalinists.


Why not just reduce working hours? smh

Nobody says the Trabant is a good car but you have to compare it to cars in its league meaning cars like the Citroen 2cv.


Congratulations you are smarter then a Comecon economist.

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This is such an important point. The US also had a massive amount of natural resources to exploit, including way more arable land.

Right. Anarchist. "We can establish Communism by decree".

No. You can't make them obsolete without either abolishing division of labour, or going back to pre-industrial economy.

That refutes nothing.

Yeah. Pull the other one.

Apologies for not taking opinion of neo-fascist about Marxism seriously.

Do we have an expert here? Because I'll be delighted to discuss the case of Industrial Party with you.

Gee, I wonder why the US dominated the world after most of Europe was destroyed in World War Two….

That is not much of an issue since the Comecon was a massive economic bloc, one that started out doing well planting the seeds for good trade relations with China, India, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. With proper economic planning and cooperation within the Comecon and its trading partners it could have easily have matched the USA in productive capacity. This is what made the CIA so scared of USSR growth in the 1960's as they could see this in the raw numbers when they added all the resources from East Berlin to Valvostok plus China plus Africa plus India,ect.