Questions regarding the collapse of ussr

so basically they wanted to become the neo-bourgasie so bad that they ended up fucking everything up. damn

Correct answer

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Cockshott belives this too I think. His stats said that the living standards for the working class rose faster in the USSR than in the US, but the living standards of the educated professionals and technical experts rose much faster in the West. He concluded that the managerial class held too much sway over politics in the Soviet Union and were able to dismantle it for their own gain. I've heard this argument stated by other MLs here also.

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Yeah, Cockshott mentions how the USSR's managerial class identified strongly with the west's (petit-)bourgeoisie and thought that capitalist restoration would put them in the same position. Which did work out for some of them, but not for most.

a lack of discipline for the most part. this is well established even by bourgeoisie economists.

The USSR economy "stagnated" for the same reason the Western economy stagnated. The USSR just didn't have the "financial sector" to give it the illusion of growth.

Also the USSR didn't have massive investment in the developing world. Sleeping giants like Brazil, India, China, etc. boosted corporate profits in unprecedented ways.

Ah yes, the "Great Man Theory" pushed through USSR's state hierarchy. If your state needs good kings to not die maybe the state structure is flawed form within

Why not just fired or kicked out of the party, why the killing

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the devastation of ussr during ww2 brought to the fore the rightist tendency that stalin was trying to destroy: before then, this line was represented by bukharin who said that the industrialization should focus on light industry to produce consumer goods and an internal market to be propped up for such goods. stalin had managed to suppress such tendencies but as ww2 exhausted the country, this line won the intraparty struggle after the death of stalin. khruschev declared that class struggle was over in the ussr, that the whole country was united and all that hogwash, and that the goal of ussr should now be to develop the living standards of the people. the outlook of the foreign policy also shifted accordingly, now ussr was seeking something called "peaceful coexistence" where different economic systems can live in peace in different parts of the world which was impossible given the imperialist nature of capitalism. in the end, ussr ideologically capitulated and decided to try to beat the west in their own game instead of pursuing their own project.

they have failed, ofc, given the headstart imperialism gave to the west and also that imperialism was still there, strong as ever, under different mechanisms, and kept value flowing to the west. this meant that the ussr failed to give the consumption related lifestyle it promised, to the level of their western counterparts, as their light industry wasnt geared or developed to achieve this. in order to offset this, ussr started to import goods in significant volumes and export products to be able to pay for this.

yet what could the soviets export to the west? the production of consumer goods in ussr wasnt good enough even to provide for its citizens, why would people abroad buy them? ussr had heavy industry, but it was directed under central planning and not profits, which meant that it wasnt that profitable for other countries who wanted to export products of heavy industry, such exports came usually from the west. this reduced ussr to being an exporter of raw materials, mostly oil, especially given how europe doesnt have sources of oil in proximity. the only exception here was the weapons industry where the competition wasnt that high.

two things followed this development. the first one is that money kept flowing into the ussr, passing thru certain people (not necessarily politburo). the oil crisis of 70s jacked the prices of oil very high so the amount of money poured into ussr kept growing. the problem with money is that, internally ussr mostly functioned with labor vouchers etc, the ordinary worker of ussr didnt have the opportunity to accumulate wealth. the money flowing from the west changed this.

second issue is that, as the industries i mentioned above werent profitable when it came to export, and as exporting oil was highly profitable, the income ussr got thru trade was invested and reinvested and reinvested into oil extraction and pipelines. not a big surprise that the greatest projects of post-stalin era were pipelines. in the end, this partially made ussr an appendage of western capitalism as an exporter of raw products. yet the economy still more of less functioned, there was no reason to expect that ussr would collapse, even according to the western economists back then, it came as a complete surprise as the system functioned quite healthily.

so what truly caused the collapse was that those who received money from these exports saw that they needed a system of private property in order to keep the wealth they accumulated and pass it down to their children. no wonder, then, after the union fell, the whole country fell into the hands of oligarchs pretty fast, and these oligarchs ran the oil biz. back from that era, the only companies that werent asset-stripped and sold or bankrupted are the oil companies and the weapon producers. everything else collapsed pretty quickly because of their western competitors.

but this explanation doesnt explain one important thing, which might define the way you look at the ussr: where did this rightist wing come from in the first place? was this coming from the leftovers of the tsarist era? or was it the result of the NEP? or does bureaucracy constitute a separate class that can cause such rightist deviations? either you say that socialism inevitably creates such individual from the bureaucracy etc (the conservative position), that russia was too backward to have a socialist revolution (adventurist trot position), that NEP created this (one of the leftcom positions), death of stalin was the most important factor (tankie position). the maoist position ascribes the starting point of all of ussr's ills to the personal nature of landed property following the revolution: the peasants individually seized plots of land from aristocratic landowners which led to all these problems about kulaks and shit, unlike china where the communal property was (and still is to a degree) more or less kept intact. whether this has led to the problems i have mentioned above, i do not know.

this was systemic, the planners couldn't control the managers and the managers couldn't control the workers. that's what I mean by lack of discipline.

Um, it didn't.

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Thats true