Why did USSR have such a boner for heavy industry/machinery instead of consumer goods...

Why did USSR have such a boner for heavy industry/machinery instead of consumer goods, or even agriculture for that matter? When you read about it, it looks like they universally neglected consumer goods and kept autistically prioritizing heavy industry. Even after Stalin was this the case.

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federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/92/1989
nytimes.com/1989/05/31/world/soviet-military-budget-128-billion-bombshell.html
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Because you need heavy industry before you can make and transport consumer goods. You also need it to be a self sufficient military power.

Because a capitalist state must generate capital before circulating capital

I think the idea is you need machines to make machines. The machines you build to build machines to build machines (etc) mean you'll also need lots of raw resources, which is why there was a lot of emphasis on raw materials and heavy industry.

The Soviets needed lots of heavy industry and infrastructure to catch up with the west; they managed this in a very short period of time. Unfortunately, they didn't manage to scale these sectors down well enough when there was less demand for them; they couldn't just fire everybody and not worry about them like capitalists could.

Because heavy industry can make tanks.
You need tanks to not be bum rushed by porky.
When you're essentially under siege from the rest of the world your industrial priorities have to be more martial.

It is simple when you understand the point of view of someone industrializing. For example, you want tractors to make food production more efficient yet that requires metal and you need even more metal for the machines that makes the tractor; the machines that extract the ore, smelts the ore and transforms it into steel, don't forget the steel required for the railway to connect all of that. Heavy industry looks like the bed rock which all industry rests on from the point of view of a planner trying to industrialize.

they didn't have iPHONES!!!

Because abstaining from production of consumer goods to focus on capital accumulation leads to a higher standard of living in the long run.

Trotsky points this out a lot in TRB. The USSR's heavy industry was world-class and yet their light industry, agriculture, and consumer goods were a fucking joke compared to even a moderately advanced capitalist country.

After WWII the USSR was pretty much industrialized for the most part. The problem was that Stalin was a fucking idiot who starved off the Ukrainian "kulaks" (hint: soviets of single family farms that had their own means of production to farm their own land….) to the point that the German army basically left the region deserted. Of course, this is not to mention that Smith's theory of labor value was brain dead from its conception, so that there was never any real need to divert resources from making capital goods because "huehuehue subjective theory of value is bourgeois trash, capital production is more labor intensive and therefore produces more value" even though it was fucking clear to any onlooker that the USSR needed to refocus on consumer goods.

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I N D U S T R I A L A E S T H E T I C S

No they "starved off" themselves. It was evolution. I thought that the capitalists love that social darwinist shit.

I'm not a capitalist m8 (as in I want to abolish capitalism). I just think that Marxist economics is ideological garbage for the most part.

this but i'm unsure if it was ironic to begin with.

well what then lol. Egoist?
If so, welcome to the union of egoists, my property.

1-you cannot escape ideology. 2-Nice debunking there. Really made me reject all Marxist theory.

Amerigan GDP was twice that of the Soviet Union in 1985, and in 1989 the Soviet military budget was ca 128 billion dollars, while the American military budget was over 400 billion.

federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/92/1989
nytimes.com/1989/05/31/world/soviet-military-budget-128-billion-bombshell.html

Yeah it's a real shame the Soviet Union et al wasn't flooded with cheap consumer crap but toys and baubles aren't going to stop Tomahawks or Pattons.

This.
Saved as fuck.

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