It’s almost not a useful question to ask. The USSR was trending poorly for 10-20 years prior to its collapse, ultimately succumbing to the economic war that America was waging against it. There is no one cause nor one solution. It’s entirely conceivable that it could still exist had it not been dissolved, and it’s entirely possible that this hypothetical version of itself would be a sick and hollow iteration of what it once was. Nobody could know.
If you look at it’s opposite, at America, I think we might find a clearer answer. As a reaction to the economic crises of the 70s, the United States’ ruling class elected to go all-in on the imperialist pillaging of the world. I would say that the imperialist destruction of the global south and their successful economic quarantine of the USSR was what really drove international socialism into the ground, in this way the 80s were the birthing ground of the global counterrevolutionary era.
But what could the USSR have done about this? Go to war with the West? This would have killed hundreds of millions, and destroyed everything they had built anyway. The political ascendancy of Reagan guaranteed this. The cultural zeitgeist thought it would happen. By the early 80s, the USSR was economically on its knees and the Reagan administration was feverish to deliver the killing blow.
There is no one action the USSR could have taken, if any. The world system is interconnected and this was beyond their control, being only one piece of an increasingly interwoven humanity. You must look at the whole picture, which also includes the rising brutality of the United States, the neocolonization of Africa, the vassalization of Latin America, and the containment of China. There is an ebb and a flow to all of these things.
Where the early 20th century was an era of change and revolution, the late 20th century was an era of reaction and counterrevolution. The counterrevolution has appeared to have won, but in its victory has grown decadent and plodding. If the previous three decades have been an era of victorious stagnation, what follows is a weakening of the dominant order and a turning into something new.
The world is getting old. Now is when we get to build the movements anew (at least in the western view). This century will see immense change, as did the last. Most of us just grew up in the quiet decadent stagnation of the previous 30-50 years and haven’t seen much. Talk to some old people and they’ll tell you about change.
I do think there are many things that USSR could have done differently. It was a huge country and could have been largely self sufficient given that DPRK managed to survive being much smaller and having far less advantages.
In my view, the problems come down to the way selection process in the party worked, which allowed people like Khrushchev and Gorbachev get to the top. Khrushchev destroyed relations with China which facilitated American detente in the 70s and further isolated USSR. If The Soviet Union and China combined powers instead, we’d be living in a completely different world today.
Another example would be shutting down of Artels (Артель) which provided a structure of many small-scale producers in USSR that would fill the niches like belt buckles, specific forms of toys and other minute necessities that can be fulfilled more efficiently without central planning. Such a worker formations worked for themselves, were prohibited from growing beyond a certain size and had to prove they had no exploited workers, but they allowed to have more flexibility in the market.
Then there was OGAS which could have been implemented in the 70s, and would’ve been completely transformative. Incidentally, it does look like China is moving in that direction. Their use of digital currency is a step towards facilitating that. This was a surprisingly good read on the subject. Once you have digital tracking integrated into the supply chain, you have real-time information about the state of all the pieces in the supply chain. And nowadays, we have stuff like AI systems that can do dynamic allocation better than markets can. While in the west, most of the focus with this tech has been on making chat bots, in China it’s being actively integrated into industry and supply chains where it will provide immense value.
Overall, the big insight Stalin had with Artels and CPC has embraced was that markets can be used as allocators within central planning. One of the core weakness of the Soviet model is that the planners need to have accurate and up to date information to make sound decisions. But the problem is that you inevitably have a lot of noise in the system. There are honest mistakes, corruption, lack of transparency or inadequate data collections, and so on. The data also takes time to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed. So, by the time the plans are made, they are based on incomplete data that’s also out of date. Then it takes more time for the plan to be implemented, and thing get more and more out of sync as the process goes on. The tendency ends up being to overcorrect, which further compounds the problems.
Chinese approach is to avoid doing micromanagement. The central planners set general direction, and provide incentives, then let the markets do dynamic allocation at each level. In this scenario, planners simply have to figure out how to create the right selection pressures to direct labor and resources in the desired direction. Support companies that do things that fit with the plan, pass legislation to suppress enterprises that go counter to it, and let things work themselves out.
DeepSeek is a really good example of this approach in action. The party decided that quant trading was harmful and banned it. High-Flyer was one of the hedge funds involved in it, and they saw the writing on the wall. They realized they had a bunch of GPUs and math talent on hand, so they pivoted to AI, and ended up producing one of the best models around. The government never had to tell them to do any of this explicitly, they simply created the conditions for it.
All due respect to the poetic rhythm of that kind of outlook, I don’t believe this sort of teleological narrative is supported by a historical materialist analysis.
Attributing the Soviet collapse to the will of teleology and the omnipotence of the United States is also a unhelpful framework that only serves to bind leftists to psychological paralysis. This would be counter-intuitive as, to quote Carlos Martinez:
“The more our movement can learn about the Soviet collapse, the better prepared we will be to prevent historic reverses and defeats in future, and the better equipped we will be to develop a compelling, convincing vision of socialism that is relevant to the here and now.”
The reality is that while the United States and the West played a major role in abetting the counter-revolution, they were not some almighty force such that a power like the Soviet Union can be characterized as some “antediluvian victim” to the age of American unipolarity.
The majority of the blame can be attributed to the last generation of Soviet leadership. This is supported by analyses from across the political spectrum: liberal (Zubok’s “Collapse”), social democrat (Kotz and Weir’s “Revolution from Above”) and Marxist Leninist (Keeran and Kenny’s “Socialism Betrayed”).
That’s an excellent criticism. This was not to say that there are not immense lessons to be learned from the collapse of the USSR. There were a host of mistakes they made and we must absolutely internalize and not repeat them. And my comment above certainly disregards the agency in which leaders and nations operated in their respective times. It can be too easy to lapse into a hollow use of laws of opposites and short circuit real analysis. Appreciate your insight and reading suggestions!
I have been recently doing a comparative reading on the Soviet collapse and it really highlights the malfeasance of the Soviet Politburo. I think while it holds that one of the basic principles of historical literacy is avoiding the “great man” theory pitfall, the particular nature of socialist democratic centralism means that socialist political systems are particularly vulnerable to reverberations from the top. In terms of its negatives, we can dialectically see the downsides of the practice in how parties with enforced democratic centralism like the CPUSA and DSA can throttle downstream radicalism and also in terms of the USSR’s “revolution from above.”
This was the revelation that, in part, compelled Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution and “bombard the headquarters” but the contradictions were never resolved and there is still no answer to how such a “revolution from above” can be truly thwarted. For example, if someone like Li Qiang, who is China’s present premier and from all appearances appears to be a financier Shanghai liberal, takes over the CPC after Xi, there are no real mechanisms in place to block a Chinese Gorbachevization if the material conditions are sufficiently conducive. It’s there a relevant question of paramount importance for all socialist systems, whether at the party grassroots organizational level or at the state level, today.
Could you elaborate on your thoughts regarding the CPUSA and DSA? Specifically, the DSA? I am American and my understanding of the DSA is that it is not a democratic centralist organization whatsoever. They’re just a democratic socialist faction of the Democratic Party, which is itself a ruling class party anyway. Do you mean to refer to another organization?
I can’t say much about CPUSA. They aren’t really… seen. Anymore. They were extremely active about 50 years ago with huge names in their cadre but have been effectively dismantled/sidelined from my understanding. I am quite active and I’ve never once seen them on the streets, much “smaller” organizations appear at protests and in the news these days.
But I think I do actually intimately understand what you mean, from experience. All leaders are imperfect but I find incredible trust in the cadre I interface with daily. I think that’s one of the more important facets of party-building - we require cadre who would resist in face of failure from the top. The organization must develop the capacity for self-correction, even if this is somewhat hypothetical and new in application. It’s all there in theory but we require the membership to be confident enough in itself to hold the party accountable, a feature which often develops asymmetrically.
The CPUSA’s national leadership is known for stifling any move towards radicalism by local chapters. The most charitable interpretation for their leadership is that the fear of becoming scapegoated like Eugene Debbs was, whose imprisonment killed off the SPA, is one where no electoralist approach has yet found a solution for a century later.
For the DSA, I was specifically referring to the DSA’s National Political Committee, which notoriously de-chartered their Palestine/BDS working group in 2022 after the DSA endorsed an Iron Dome-voting Zionist congressman. My understanding from individuals who were part of the DSA’s East Bay chapter, which partly led the opposition to the attack on the Palestine working group, was that the DSA NPC had been, and gave off the impression during the dispute, attempting to exercise a de facto sort of democratic centralism, which was unsupported by the DSA’s constitution. From what I understand, nowadays, their present issue appears to be an overcorrection towards the other direction, most recently exemplified in the fight with the DSA-LA chapter over LA’s new mayor.
It’s almost not a useful question to ask. The USSR was trending poorly for 10-20 years prior to its collapse, ultimately succumbing to the economic war that America was waging against it. There is no one cause nor one solution. It’s entirely conceivable that it could still exist had it not been dissolved, and it’s entirely possible that this hypothetical version of itself would be a sick and hollow iteration of what it once was. Nobody could know.
If you look at it’s opposite, at America, I think we might find a clearer answer. As a reaction to the economic crises of the 70s, the United States’ ruling class elected to go all-in on the imperialist pillaging of the world. I would say that the imperialist destruction of the global south and their successful economic quarantine of the USSR was what really drove international socialism into the ground, in this way the 80s were the birthing ground of the global counterrevolutionary era.
But what could the USSR have done about this? Go to war with the West? This would have killed hundreds of millions, and destroyed everything they had built anyway. The political ascendancy of Reagan guaranteed this. The cultural zeitgeist thought it would happen. By the early 80s, the USSR was economically on its knees and the Reagan administration was feverish to deliver the killing blow.
There is no one action the USSR could have taken, if any. The world system is interconnected and this was beyond their control, being only one piece of an increasingly interwoven humanity. You must look at the whole picture, which also includes the rising brutality of the United States, the neocolonization of Africa, the vassalization of Latin America, and the containment of China. There is an ebb and a flow to all of these things.
Where the early 20th century was an era of change and revolution, the late 20th century was an era of reaction and counterrevolution. The counterrevolution has appeared to have won, but in its victory has grown decadent and plodding. If the previous three decades have been an era of victorious stagnation, what follows is a weakening of the dominant order and a turning into something new.
The world is getting old. Now is when we get to build the movements anew (at least in the western view). This century will see immense change, as did the last. Most of us just grew up in the quiet decadent stagnation of the previous 30-50 years and haven’t seen much. Talk to some old people and they’ll tell you about change.
I do think there are many things that USSR could have done differently. It was a huge country and could have been largely self sufficient given that DPRK managed to survive being much smaller and having far less advantages.
In my view, the problems come down to the way selection process in the party worked, which allowed people like Khrushchev and Gorbachev get to the top. Khrushchev destroyed relations with China which facilitated American detente in the 70s and further isolated USSR. If The Soviet Union and China combined powers instead, we’d be living in a completely different world today.
Another example would be shutting down of Artels (Артель) which provided a structure of many small-scale producers in USSR that would fill the niches like belt buckles, specific forms of toys and other minute necessities that can be fulfilled more efficiently without central planning. Such a worker formations worked for themselves, were prohibited from growing beyond a certain size and had to prove they had no exploited workers, but they allowed to have more flexibility in the market.
Then there was OGAS which could have been implemented in the 70s, and would’ve been completely transformative. Incidentally, it does look like China is moving in that direction. Their use of digital currency is a step towards facilitating that. This was a surprisingly good read on the subject. Once you have digital tracking integrated into the supply chain, you have real-time information about the state of all the pieces in the supply chain. And nowadays, we have stuff like AI systems that can do dynamic allocation better than markets can. While in the west, most of the focus with this tech has been on making chat bots, in China it’s being actively integrated into industry and supply chains where it will provide immense value.
Overall, the big insight Stalin had with Artels and CPC has embraced was that markets can be used as allocators within central planning. One of the core weakness of the Soviet model is that the planners need to have accurate and up to date information to make sound decisions. But the problem is that you inevitably have a lot of noise in the system. There are honest mistakes, corruption, lack of transparency or inadequate data collections, and so on. The data also takes time to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed. So, by the time the plans are made, they are based on incomplete data that’s also out of date. Then it takes more time for the plan to be implemented, and thing get more and more out of sync as the process goes on. The tendency ends up being to overcorrect, which further compounds the problems.
Chinese approach is to avoid doing micromanagement. The central planners set general direction, and provide incentives, then let the markets do dynamic allocation at each level. In this scenario, planners simply have to figure out how to create the right selection pressures to direct labor and resources in the desired direction. Support companies that do things that fit with the plan, pass legislation to suppress enterprises that go counter to it, and let things work themselves out.
DeepSeek is a really good example of this approach in action. The party decided that quant trading was harmful and banned it. High-Flyer was one of the hedge funds involved in it, and they saw the writing on the wall. They realized they had a bunch of GPUs and math talent on hand, so they pivoted to AI, and ended up producing one of the best models around. The government never had to tell them to do any of this explicitly, they simply created the conditions for it.
All due respect to the poetic rhythm of that kind of outlook, I don’t believe this sort of teleological narrative is supported by a historical materialist analysis.
Attributing the Soviet collapse to the will of teleology and the omnipotence of the United States is also a unhelpful framework that only serves to bind leftists to psychological paralysis. This would be counter-intuitive as, to quote Carlos Martinez:
The reality is that while the United States and the West played a major role in abetting the counter-revolution, they were not some almighty force such that a power like the Soviet Union can be characterized as some “antediluvian victim” to the age of American unipolarity.
The majority of the blame can be attributed to the last generation of Soviet leadership. This is supported by analyses from across the political spectrum: liberal (Zubok’s “Collapse”), social democrat (Kotz and Weir’s “Revolution from Above”) and Marxist Leninist (Keeran and Kenny’s “Socialism Betrayed”).
That’s an excellent criticism. This was not to say that there are not immense lessons to be learned from the collapse of the USSR. There were a host of mistakes they made and we must absolutely internalize and not repeat them. And my comment above certainly disregards the agency in which leaders and nations operated in their respective times. It can be too easy to lapse into a hollow use of laws of opposites and short circuit real analysis. Appreciate your insight and reading suggestions!
Thanks for appreciating them, comrade!
I have been recently doing a comparative reading on the Soviet collapse and it really highlights the malfeasance of the Soviet Politburo. I think while it holds that one of the basic principles of historical literacy is avoiding the “great man” theory pitfall, the particular nature of socialist democratic centralism means that socialist political systems are particularly vulnerable to reverberations from the top. In terms of its negatives, we can dialectically see the downsides of the practice in how parties with enforced democratic centralism like the CPUSA and DSA can throttle downstream radicalism and also in terms of the USSR’s “revolution from above.”
This was the revelation that, in part, compelled Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution and “bombard the headquarters” but the contradictions were never resolved and there is still no answer to how such a “revolution from above” can be truly thwarted. For example, if someone like Li Qiang, who is China’s present premier and from all appearances appears to be a financier Shanghai liberal, takes over the CPC after Xi, there are no real mechanisms in place to block a Chinese Gorbachevization if the material conditions are sufficiently conducive. It’s there a relevant question of paramount importance for all socialist systems, whether at the party grassroots organizational level or at the state level, today.
Could you elaborate on your thoughts regarding the CPUSA and DSA? Specifically, the DSA? I am American and my understanding of the DSA is that it is not a democratic centralist organization whatsoever. They’re just a democratic socialist faction of the Democratic Party, which is itself a ruling class party anyway. Do you mean to refer to another organization?
I can’t say much about CPUSA. They aren’t really… seen. Anymore. They were extremely active about 50 years ago with huge names in their cadre but have been effectively dismantled/sidelined from my understanding. I am quite active and I’ve never once seen them on the streets, much “smaller” organizations appear at protests and in the news these days.
But I think I do actually intimately understand what you mean, from experience. All leaders are imperfect but I find incredible trust in the cadre I interface with daily. I think that’s one of the more important facets of party-building - we require cadre who would resist in face of failure from the top. The organization must develop the capacity for self-correction, even if this is somewhat hypothetical and new in application. It’s all there in theory but we require the membership to be confident enough in itself to hold the party accountable, a feature which often develops asymmetrically.
The CPUSA’s national leadership is known for stifling any move towards radicalism by local chapters. The most charitable interpretation for their leadership is that the fear of becoming scapegoated like Eugene Debbs was, whose imprisonment killed off the SPA, is one where no electoralist approach has yet found a solution for a century later.
For the DSA, I was specifically referring to the DSA’s National Political Committee, which notoriously de-chartered their Palestine/BDS working group in 2022 after the DSA endorsed an Iron Dome-voting Zionist congressman. My understanding from individuals who were part of the DSA’s East Bay chapter, which partly led the opposition to the attack on the Palestine working group, was that the DSA NPC had been, and gave off the impression during the dispute, attempting to exercise a de facto sort of democratic centralism, which was unsupported by the DSA’s constitution. From what I understand, nowadays, their present issue appears to be an overcorrection towards the other direction, most recently exemplified in the fight with the DSA-LA chapter over LA’s new mayor.
Very good analysis.