Why did the Soviet Union collapse, Holla Forums?

The workers did not own the means of production. Even by the looser definition that includes state ownership, the state still has to be at the mercy of the workers–and the USSR was a dictatorship. Not the metaphorical kind Marx meant either

Don't listen to him. The important point is worker ownership, and wage labor is not a sign of worker ownership.

Societies have been based on commodity production for thousands of years? People have been buying their food, clothes, shelter, and litterally everything else for thousands of years?

Because centrally planned capitalism is not as efficient as market based ones.

Commodity production hasn't been dominant until capitalism bruh. Read Capital.

This is a key point. Commodity production obviously came before capitalism. And I would argue it is going to exist after it until we either reach fully automated luxury communism or a large enough level of people productively employed with a high enough level of productivity that no one bothers much with money, prices or clocking working hours.

This meme tho. At least you included state-ownership as a looser definition. Even the revisionist USSR which had a one party-state hosted more competitive elections then burgerland with its two parties and beloved separation of powers.

Some interesting work is being done by bourgeois scholars associated with the new school of sovietology showing that the workers of the USSR were far from the traditional Cold War view that they were just slaves on the job with no say in what happened.

Keep in mind coming out of the 1910s Russia experienced WWI and a Civil War almost as bad. That kind of brutalization would make it hard for even a cynical realistic bourgeois democracy to work, much less socialism or full communism.

Almost everyone said they wanted to democratize it further including Stalin who tried to pass through a truly democratic constitution but was fiercely resisted by the very bureaucracy that he was supposedly the errand boy of. That all took place shortly before the terror and the Japanese-Finnish border wars so how it might have played out is a mystery.

Worker owned companies and coops often pay wages even if they are run fairly democratically. Until the point where money is no longer really necessary I am not sure what you would do to compensate workers other then perhaps giving them ownership stakes in ownership in a worker controlled firm or industry but to my mind that might be worse than wages in reproducing the alienation of workers from the means of production.

There is the third alternative of the "social-wage" which gives things to workers (medicine, pensions, apartments, education, certain essential goods) unconditionally which at times was quite substantial. That meant pay could be used largely for consumption goods even if it wasn't lavish. To my mind that isn't too different from UBI which a wide variety of leftists in the developed world are demanded. That is a kind of partial de-commodification of labor imo even if it can be justified on the basis of liberal human rights and economic necessity.

The proletarian population was too small and productivity in Russia wasn't high enough to break with the value-form that has dominated commodity production since the start of civilization. Even just assuring constantly rising pay for workers by giving them back the full product of their labor would leave out children, the elderly, disabled, peasants, and formerly colonized peoples at extremely low levels of development.

The Soviet Union endeavored to bring these people up and to bring their point of view and working conditions closer to the proletariat via economic rationalization and cleansing the country of pre-capitalist rentier interests. Even still the real wages of workers rose even if peasants and colonized people arguably benefited more.

It was getting to the point where around 1940 had things continued the Soviet Union would've outstripped the entire Western world in industrial capacity but then came Hitler and a massive destruction of Soviet population and GDP. It was so bad allied economists figured they'd never recover and were stunned when it actually did.

The point is that such a large and growing proportion of industrial capacity could have allowed the Soviet Union to get past the commodity form or at least necessity to pay wages or tie them productivity–what Lenin called "bourgeois right" (whether this designation made sense is debatable).

Whatever the Soviet Union at its prime was–I think it was a lot more interesting than the everything-is-state-capitalism narratives of Tony Cliff and Bettelheim.

Because the Bolsheviks from the outset didn't allow the workers to democratize the workplace, and thus set the precedent for a very drawn-out failure of an attempt at socialism.

Obviously there's a whole lot of historical shit to attribute to the fall of the USSR, and I don't think there's even a definitive answer to it, but as I see it these are all irrelevant because the USSR as it really was, was nothing like the USSR that it was supposed to be. So in my mind the USSR from the very beginning had collapsed once the Bolsheviks took power.

I don't think that is the case. The revolution was doomed as soon as it failed to spread across Europe. The Soviets were then left in the uncomfortable position of being undeveloped and isolated. That left no real choice other than to develop capitalism and aid/promote revolution abroad. Then after Lenin died they abandoned the whole project in favor of just maintaining a state-capitalist nation. For all his shortcomings I do think Lenin did his best given bad circumstances.

Authoritarian ideologies like state capitalism will always eventually fail.

They are simply a part of the dialectical movement between ideologies and cultures.

Cute meme but false, the Stalin era economy grew between 10-14% annually unprecedented at the time and only ever experienced in a few countries. According to economic historian Robert C. Allen the Soviet Union during its existence experienced the longest and highest period of sustained growth of any nation in the 20th century bar Japan. Only Japan grew faster for a longer period and American planners actually took lessons from the Soviet Union to make Japanese capitalism work better. The market-oriented economies of the West had a higher starting point, some even argue that this was even achieved before capitalism.

Not true. Every mode of production was based on class entailed commodity production and some alienation of the producers from that product. Capitalism is the first system to systematically commodify labor and to shift the primary method of labor exploitation from rent and other tributary exploitation to profit.

Capitalism was the first system of commodity production to systematically commodify labor and to shift the primary method of exploitation from rent and other tributary forms of exploitation to profit. In the process workers and peasants systematically stripped of the means of production that they previously used to produce goods for their own use-value which they traded as commodities amongst themselves.

Previous class societies and modes of production had only partially alienated artisans and peasants from the products of their labor and the means of production. Capitalism was first to do that relentlessly and systematically in pursuit of larger profits and increasing labor productivity.

Not surprisingly given ever-expanding commodity production and insatiable profit-making capitalism moved to commodify almost everything, a process that traditional societies attempted to stem even if they allowed the exploitation of the producer and alienation of commodities themselves. As an example even access to the means of exchange itself became a commodity with usury, a practice often railed against and sometimes fought effectively in pre-capitalist class societies but never fully eliminated. Arguably debt was onipresent before widespread barter and trade.

The problem of the commodity is the commodity itself, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. Even when two peasant communities trade between each other on an equal footing exchanging rough equivalents, the exchange-value of a commodity tends to detach itself from use-value. In pre-civilized modes of production it was common for people to just share and not worry too much about who owed who what. In that stage, you can say there is no real commodity production as the producers appropriate and share the use-values of their production directly.

I don't think our job will be finished when we grab the means of production and say that now its worker owned. We will need to supersede commodity production.

From that perspective I don't see Soviet state-socialism as necessarily capitalist as market-pricing that we probably agree is common to both capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production was eliminated and society was ordered around a plan around social need, not production for profit (one definition Marx gives for the capitalist mode of production). Likewise, there wasn't really a business cycle which may have existed in the 60s-70s under what MLs call the revisionist period but did not appear visibly in the 80s. That is a excellent for Marxism as the business cycle is an essential part of capitalism.

However, if the Soviet Union was socialism then it was certainly a lower stage–and I don't mean that as a compliment. Wage labor, differences in pay based on productivity, separations between manual and intellectual labor, and commodity production all still exist of course.

To me, the most striking thing is the way that the Soviet Union was the pursuit and realization of the most radical dreams and formulation of bourgeois democracy: eliminate the landlords along with other unproductive capitalists, strive to eliminate historical structural injustices prior to democracy, pay everyone according to the value of their labor, free healthcare and other forms of assured state income to all citizens, even early clumsy measures to preserve the environment.
Ironically, they used authoritarian means to achieve this.

This is okay as far as political practice goes but does not strike the essential of getting passed the value-form. And when they couldn't do that they turned around and went right back to the market and capitalism; it was easier then asking people who had just endured WWII to give up rising incomes to buy commodities for a decade or two so they could expand production and productivity. And maybe that would've only been the start of the struggle tbh

*pr0blem@tic for Marxism

Because dictatorship plus social conservatism made people unhappy and fed up with it.

the ossification of the party leadership and its ideology

it didn't, it was dissolved.

HHHNNNNNGGG

While simple commodity production was an aspect of these systems it was by no means their basis.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_referendum,_1991

They never destroyed the distinction between creators of surplus value and appropriators of surplus value and thus had a state capitalism. The collapse of the state is the inevitable outcome of any state capitalism. At least when you have a private capitalist government you can have politicians who occasionally break the mold and impose regulatory measures somewhat keeping the wealthy in check. When the government officials are themselves the porkies, you get inevitable, ever-growing corruption until a tipping point is reached and the state gets overthrown.

This. The concept of a vanguard party dictatorship was never compatible with socialism to begin with.

You're the only poster ITT that didn't make me cringe. Does anybody have that screencap of that guy posting Caracella and accurately describing Holla Forums? It fits this thread perfectly. It's painfully obvious people here are just parroting what the board told them to believe about the USSR without doing any research of their own. Hence all the one-sentence answers that are no more detailed than "it was the state capitalist dictatorship."

It's a dense read but I'm going through this right now, oh enlightened user.

Proletarians conscious that their role, as a class, is to replace capitalism with socialism.

Proletarians conscious that their role, as a class, is to replace capitalism with socialism, who organize themselves in order to do so.

Proletarians conscious that their role, as a class, is to replace capitalism with socialism, who organize themselves in order to do so and who get exclusive political power.

Sure, it's not compatible with socialism…

Of course the guy you agree with has the Good Facts. Everyone else just didn't read the right stuff or do any research at all.

Pressure from outside

The Bolsheviks were intellectual petit bourgs you twit. And a small group seizing the state and imposing another system is far from the entire proletariat-bourgeois class structure being eliminated. Socialism, the concept of workers having the real power in production and directing themselves, must come from the bottom up in the end.

… embracing proletarian ideology.

Actually destroying the state, with another one.

It depends on which system is "imposed"; if socialism is imposed, then yes, by definition, the entire proletariat-bourgeois class structure is eliminated.
As for the bolsheviks, they destroyed the feudal state and society and imposed capitalism. They never pretended having done anything more… until Stalin.

The Soviet Union had an unsustainable military budget that made 20-25% of the nation's estimated GDP by the time of the collapse.

It should be noted that the Soviet Union was still the world's largest heavy industrial manufacturer of the world and second largest economy by the time it collapsed.

All that potential wasted on tanks and guns for a war that never came to pass (their minor conflicts like Afghanistan did not justify such excess production in arms).

The Soviet people would have willing to put up with the secret police and other repressive authoritarian draconian policies if they were at least taken care of. Not that I'm condoning authoritarianism, I'm merely saying that authoritarianism without benevolent dictatorship will eventually collapse.

...

Liberalization as a part of the plan to eventually merge with the EU. The system couldn't handle it and so it collapsed.

The USSR focused on catching up with the west yet in the 1960's they ran into a problem of diminishing returns that they never really solved even though a number of solutions were purposed.

When growth became stagnate, Gorbachev reintroduced free markets that caused the entire system to fail as managers became capitalists and starting sucking investment capital out of the system.

Thanks famrade.

I don't have that screen and I definitely want to see it. But enjoy this meme that encompasses basically every Holla Forums discussion of the USSR

Impotence of bureaucracy. As Molotov said, they were all just tired.

Planning is hard and tiresome, and it becomes harder and harder as number of plan indicators rises with the development of industry.

We can try to automate planning to some degree by the use of computer technology. But for that we need colossal amount of investment and it will take time.

On the other hand, we can use all that surplus value to buy people's trust. After all, interregnum is a dangerous time, you know, we need to keep people calm.

And anyway, we can solve planning problems much more cost-effective. By delegating some of the plan functions to the market. By making plan not directive, but coordinative. You're not against initiative from the bottom, are you? They, on the local level, know better whats good for them.

After all, central planning authority can't cope with growing complexity of the plan, don't you see?
Country wide infrastructure of linked computational centers? Central automatic processing of economic statistical data? Progect ОГАС? Do you understand how much it will *cost* us!? We need to be pragmatic. No good will come out of chasing chimeras.

There is no need for artificial complexity, theory of equilibrium works just fine. Supply and demand, comrade, supply and demand.

We need a balanced structure of economy. Where is it seen that production of the means of production expand faster than production of the consumption goods? Ugly disbalance. All aspects of economy must be in harmony.

Don't worry, comrade, we will see much bigger growth rates. If this disbalanced Stalinist economy grows at 15% per year, imagine what we can achive with the *scientifically* orginized economy.

Because its economic policies were too good

If their economic policies were too good then the USSR would have already colonized the moon to bring communism to the stars.

Opps, posted one image twice.

Pretty much this. It is sheer arrogance to think that computers can replace the information generating and processing capabilities of trillions of uncoordinated market exchanges happening daily. The idea becomes even more ludicrous when one considers that we would have to create this planning system after the revolution (and thereby risk the economy on unproven technology).

But the biggest punch line is that left wing parties around the world consistently fail to understand capitalism, leading them to mismanage the economy in catastrophic ways. How could one possibly expect a revolutionary economic program that will manage the complexity of industrial civilization better than the current system when socialists can't even manage the current one?

The reason is simple.

NOMENCLATURE!

The cast of bureaucrats slowed down progress in order not to lose it's place in society.
Thus, new technologies weren't passed to the people as effectively, organization and planning didn't go fullautomation, and, in the end, it became more about imperialism and keeping the satellite states under control, than building satellites.

We all know, how non automated the algorithms of the stock market are, and how it never leads to catastrophies (2008), and how EXELENTLY capitalists "manage" the current system.

Hint: The current system is all about profit. You cannot build socialism using capitalist tools (in terms of economics).

What are you even trying to say here? The stock market is not the entire economy. How will your magical algos determine how many black pants the store down the road gets from factory #1137, and why should it do better than individuals determining that quantity through market exchange?

Furthermore, the capitalists not being able to manage their economy does not prove that socialism is the solution. I am still waiting for a socialist to provide any evidence that their computerized central plan is in anyway better than the EXELENT management of the capitalists.

The workers didn't control the memes of production.

got sources on the democracy stuff? that sounds very interesting. ive always been under the impression there was basically always just one name to vote for + ive never heard of that constitution before

If you define anti-communists like Chavez as left-wing then I'd have to agree with you. Thankfully those boobs have nothing to do with us though and we have historical proof of non-market economies registering major economic achievements. Even North Korea was developing properly for a while despite a devastating war of annihilation being waged on it by the American plutocracy. By the 50's Soviet-type economies had been running for decades and there was no evidence this highly stable model would ever have any real problems before it was erased in a series of ruthless deforms with a centrally-managed market put in it's place. It should be seen as laughable that you people take it as decisively proven that the bourgeoisie are the only ones capable of running an economy when, as history shows, they're only capable of providing a rising standard of living to agrarian and feudal societies. Sorry you've been brainwashed to reject everything that interferes with the will of the god-market but you might not want to consider bringing up this point here again until you have an argument more nuanced than "economies are big." I would have liked to provide sources to give my post more legitimacy than your pseudo-argument but I just have a phone right now and only felt compelled to reply because I know some people here might be dumb enough to believe you.

gommunism has never been tried amirite?

Sure thing bud.

Citation needed.

This is just laughable. Does the country AMERICA not ring a bell to you? Or Western Europe after WW2? Or South Korea? Or any of the other various flavors of market societies that decisively won out?

You type like an autist and you call me brainwashed? You even refused to answer my hypothetical or show me any proof that stock market algos can be extended to the whole economy!

Yes, I would love to see the sources that say that the United States, Western Bloc, China, Japan, SE Asia, and Chile are actually economic failures. I would love to see the book that says these countries have been complete economic failures because of the bourgeoisie. Please provide!

Furr's work details Stalin's struggle to reform the USSR to be more democratic: clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html
clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html

The 1936 constitution can be read here: departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons01.html

On the claim that burgerland elections were as or less competitive than those of the Soviet Union:

archive.is/HYQaA

Martens has a few good chapters on labor conditions and certain class struggle under Stalinist socialism but I'd have to go back to find other bourgeois sources to it.

Why?

TL:DR, workers didn't have firm control of means of production, individuals that did collaborated with the state and reverted to capitalism

Got some good sauce on this?

H.W. Edwards estimated that the bourgeois/petit population of the USSR was about this large or slightly less (he says its about 17-20 million I believe).

He also puts the Soviet standard of living on par with Italy in the early 60s when it was written. There are bourgeois statistics that probably more or less substantiate that, but the key thing is essentials were subsidized, workers had apartments for life etc. that's difficult to capture with capitalist price-comparisons and GDP estimates.
web.archive.org/web/20091202171659/http://doc.maoist.ws/ar/ar.htm (ignore the fact its a mautist site its a good work)

Are you talking about the type of democracy that was in the ussr, or one that wasn't implemented?

Right, thus the USSR failed even by the metrics of its own propaganda as the stated goal was industrial growth.

In this case I'm talking about a model of workers democracy that wasn't implemented that I addressed here:

I am pretty skeptical of the "but there wasn't any democracy!" maymay though.

It's notable that you agree with argumentation in my post. It really is.

What i always found fascinating about history of soviet economic reforms, is that not many economists *believed* in plan as ultimate and only way of organizing production of the entire society. Reading published protocols of economic discussions about the role of the law of value in soviet economy, i found myself baffled at how many of those people were really not planners, but mixed-economists at best. In their view, plan was just a tool, by the use of which state makes theory of equilibrium work in reality. Bucharins legacy indeed. Or even Keynes.
But there were also other kind of views, views that with time, there will be no more cooperative sector, no more individual sector, no more market, only state sector and only total plan. Views that balance in itself has no meaning, that it can't be ultimate goal of the economy. Views that each planning period society begins from a blank page. Views that as long as there exist market, law of vertical integration in the state sector should rule supreme. You can call those views totalitarian indeed.

What about clusters? What about supply chains?
Where there is large ecomonic entities, there is always some degree of coordination.
It's funny really.
Main contradiction of capitalism, as i see it, in that it brings concentration of capital, which in turn brings plan to life. How do you think large diversified corporations manage their shit? Vertical integration is a really sensitive topic for market apologists indeed.

One can reduce capitalism vs nextsocioeconomicformation to
MARKET vs PLAN

...

If it doesn't work in one country there's even less reason to assume it will work in multiple ones.

Well in that case it sort of seems that Stalin was the errand boy, since he caved to their demands.

tbqh contrary to popular belief Stalin wasn't all powerful he couldn't just will something and it would get done.