Real reason Soviet Union Collapsed - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14557973
The real reason is obviously that Mossad did not like a third of the worlds population not being exploited by capitalists and felt that they needed to sort it out.
#14558246
The USSR had sketchy infrastructure and non-existent banking, both of which are necessary for modern consumption. I agree that Reagan had nothing to do with the collapse of the USSR other than perhaps accelerating the inevitable implosion by trying to keep up with an arms race when the other side (Reagan) was doing about all he could do to taunt the Soviets. Reagan was reckless when it came to international politics.
#14587218
Massive economic inefficiency, incompetent old men divorced from reality in control, some of which actually believed their own kool aid(Gorbi in particular), and the population not giving a damn about the ideology and being more interested in consumer goods than in the marxism-leninism kool aid.
#14587223
Ignatyev wrote:Massive economic inefficiency, incompetent old men divorced from reality in control, some of which actually believed their own kool aid(Gorbi in particular), and the population not giving a damn about the ideology and being more interested in consumer goods than in the marxism-leninism kool aid.


Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists. In fact, the Soviet Union did have economic problems, but none that could not have been overcome. What it could not overcome was a crisis in confidence within the nomenklatura (of which Gorbachev was an exemplar). The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.
#14587228
quetzalcoatl wrote:
Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists. In fact, the Soviet Union did have economic problems, but none that could not have been overcome. What it could not overcome was a crisis in confidence within the nomenklatura (of which Gorbachev was an exemplar). The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.

Wrong, Gorbi did preside over the collapse, but the rot was there already.Granted, with enough will power and the right climate a China style perestroika, with economic liberalization could have happened, but northing of the sort could be produced by the feckless nomenclature.
productivity, especially in the sectors that manufactured consumer goods and in agriculture, was laughable, and made worse by the lack of any meaningful competition or compliance with the laws of actual supply and demand, and the populace was sick and tired of ideological reaching and did not give a rat's ass about Marx and the mummy in the middle of Red Square.
You had to wait 20 or more years for a crappy car,
In the 1980s, 3% of the land was in private plots which produced more than a quarter of the total agricultural output.[19] i.e. private plots produced somewhere around 1600% and 1100% as much as common ownership plots in 1973 and 1980. Soviet figures claimed that the Soviets produced 20–25% as much as the U.S. per farmer in the 1980s.


Aleksandr Bushkov imo did a decent job at summarizing the average soviet citizen's views in his book about the Russian Oligarchy.
#14607853
Sections of the Soviet elite stopped believing in Marxism-Leninism and saw capitalism as a way to secure power and to make themselves wealthy. The Soviet system was toppled from within by a "revolution from above."

The Soviet economy suffered a growth slowdown after 1975 but still maintained positive, albeit sluggish, growth rates until 1990 when the planning system was dismantled. I do not agree that the USSR collapsed primarily because of unresolvable economic problems. Instead, the USSR collapsed because of the contradictions inherent in maintaining a socialist economic system alongside an extremely hierarchical political system where the bulk of the masses are totally depoliticized and all power is held in the hands of a party-state elite. You see this pattern in other Marxist-Leninist states where the party-state elite eliminates many of the socialist features of their system and materially benefits from a transition to capitalism (see the Chinese princelings, the children of party elites who have become wealthy from nepotism and cronyism in the post-socialist system).

The reason why the Soviet Union broke up was mainly due to the politics of the Republics, and especially the power of the Boris Yeltsin pro-capitalist faction in Russia that saw the other Republics as unfairly benefiting from Russian productivity while not giving their fair share back.
#14612194
Ignatyev wrote:Massive economic inefficiency, incompetent old men divorced from reality in control, some of which actually believed their own kool aid(Gorbi in particular), and the population not giving a damn about the ideology and being more interested in consumer goods than in the marxism-leninism kool aid.

quetzalcoatl wrote:Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists.

Nope. Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce. It is not at all easy to do this in the absence of a functioning market.
In fact, the Soviet Union did have economic problems, but none that could not have been overcome. What it could not overcome was a crisis in confidence within the nomenklatura (of which Gorbachev was an exemplar). The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.

They no longer believed in what they were doing because too many of them knew for a fact that it was not working, and could probably never work. The system only lasted as long as it did because so few people in the USSR had any significant knowledge of actual conditions in the capitalist West. There was one trade mission where some Soviet officials who had never been outside the Iron Curtain went to an international conference in Texas, and asked their hosts to show them where typical American consumers shop. The driver pulled into the nearest supermarket and everyone went inside to look around. The Soviets looked at the hundreds of meters of shelves packed with consumer goods, but just looked bored. See, they assumed they were being shown a Potemkin supermarket (as foreign visitors would be in the USSR), and that the real stores were barren wastelands, like Soviet stores. Then they slowly realized that the customers they were seeing in the store could not possibly be actors or paid shills, and had to be ordinary Americans -- the fat Latina woman with her screaming 2-year-old; the smelly drunk buying junk food and a case of beer; the elderly couple wearing stained clothing 30 years out of date, etc. -- and that the astounding abundance they saw all around them was indeed the actual state of affairs under capitalism. They returned home in a state of profound shock so severe they could barely think.
Last edited by Truth To Power on 24 Oct 2015 00:50, edited 1 time in total.
#14612213
Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists. In fact, the Soviet Union did have economic problems, but none that could not have been overcome. What it could not overcome was a crisis in confidence within the nomenklatura (of which Gorbachev was an exemplar). The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.


Correct.

The Soviet Union came to rely too much on the US as its bogyman. When this began to fail their was nowhere else to turn to alibi their economic failures. (I do not believe the fall was largely economic in the first place......)


It would have been possible to find accommodation with the West given enlightened leadership. There could have been a move to a freer Soviet Union. The people were certain that there could not be a change in the moribund leadership and so threw the baby out with the bath water.
#14612238
Truth To Power wrote:Nope. Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce. It is not at all easy to do this in the absence of a functioning market.


What a marvelously circular line of reasoning!

Value is a market-determined quantity. You are using "value" as a justification for the existence of a market, when "value" cannot be determined without the prior existence of said market. And, yes, it is not easy to accomplish this impossible task outside the virtual reality of a market.

Markets, as you (and most economists) conceive them, function as magical black boxes. In the real world, every transaction is limited by second law considerations. In a closed system, there will always be a loss.

In the past couple of centuries, these losses have been effectively hidden. We have been able to draw upon stores of chemical energy it took literally millions of years to develop. We are borrowing against the past - partying like it's 1999.

Efficiency, if it is to have any real meaning, must be conceived in terms of minimizing energy loss. Its alleged utility as a tool for determining distribution of goods is fraudulent - its real utility within a market setting is to facilitate the movement of wealth upward.
#14612273
quetzalcoatl wrote:What a marvelously circular line of reasoning!

Value is a market-determined quantity. You are using "value" as a justification for the existence of a market, when "value" cannot be determined without the prior existence of said market. And, yes, it is not easy to accomplish this impossible task outside the virtual reality of a market.

Markets, as you (and most economists) conceive them, function as magical black boxes. In the real world, every transaction is limited by second law considerations. In a closed system, there will always be a loss.

In the past couple of centuries, these losses have been effectively hidden. We have been able to draw upon stores of chemical energy it took literally millions of years to develop. We are borrowing against the past - partying like it's 1999.

Efficiency, if it is to have any real meaning, must be conceived in terms of minimizing energy loss. Its alleged utility as a tool for determining distribution of goods is fraudulent - its real utility within a market setting is to facilitate the movement of wealth upward.

Value is determined by markets but markets are just people, so yes value is determined by people. No people, no value. So what?

People or markets do operate in a closed system but that closed system is the whole fucking universe.. Astronomers assure me that the universe is big enough for all of us. So no problem there.

Engineers have a fetish for energy efficiency and there is nothing wrong with that but that is not what people primarily value or else no one would buy souped up subarus with which to transport themselves around. Efficiency in the context of the market, (which is people exchanging things to get the things they want even more than the things they are letting go in exchange) is a much more holistic business than bean counting spent joules. Efficiency is taking stuff and doing something to it or moving it somewhere else so that it is worth more in the eyes of the beholder than it was before you did stuff to it. Markets are not a conspiracy to make some people rich but it is a game and some people play better than others and some are just luckier.
#14612498
Truth To Power wrote:Nope. Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce. It is not at all easy to do this in the absence of a functioning market.

quetzalcoatl wrote:What a marvelously circular line of reasoning!

It's not circular. Why would you even bother saying something so absurd?
Value is a market-determined quantity.

And...?
You are using "value" as a justification for the existence of a market,

Wrong. The existence of a market is justified by the individual rights to liberty and property in the fruits of one's labor. Enhanced value creation is a benefit of the market, but not its justification.
when "value" cannot be determined without the prior existence of said market.

More accurately, value is a characteristic determined by conditions in a given market.
And, yes, it is not easy to accomplish this impossible task outside the virtual reality of a market.

There is nothing impossible about it if you are willing to know facts. You aren't. Simple.
Markets, as you (and most economists) conceive them, function as magical black boxes.

There is nothing magical about it. You just don't understand it. It's normal for a primitive intellect to attribute to magic phenomena that it lacks the capacity to understand.
In the real world, every transaction is limited by second law considerations.

Pseudo-scientific bloviation.
In a closed system, there will always be a loss.

The economy is not a closed system.

It is obvious that you are just saying anything, now.
In the past couple of centuries, these losses have been effectively hidden. We have been able to draw upon stores of chemical energy it took literally millions of years to develop. We are borrowing against the past - partying like it's 1999.

Utter rot. Fossil fuels are just a resource. Long before they are exhausted, we'll be using something else.

By your "logic," we should all be sitting in the dark now, because we ran out of whales to burn for lighting late in the 19th C.
Efficiency, if it is to have any real meaning, must be conceived in terms of minimizing energy loss.

That's energy efficiency, a matter of engineering. Totally different issue.
Its alleged utility as a tool for determining distribution of goods is fraudulent

It's not a tool for determining distribution of goods, but for allocating productive resources.

You aren't doing very well, here, are you? Just one baldly false claim after another. You'll find that happens pretty regularly, as long as you presume to dispute with me.
- its real utility within a market setting is to facilitate the movement of wealth upward.

Garbage with no basis in fact, logic or reality. It does play that role in modern mainstream neoclassical economics, but that's not based on fact, logic or reality, either.
#14612552
Truth To Power wrote:Garbage with no basis in fact, logic or reality. It does play that role in modern mainstream neoclassical economics, but that's not based on fact, logic or reality, either.

Why do you ignore the plain meaning of your own words?
Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce.

This is quite clearly a justification of markets based on value. But value has no meaning outside of markets (unless you're a Marxist, which I doubt). You are literally making an empty statement: market value cannot be determined outside of a market setting. This is true in the most trivial sense, but it does nothing to help us understand the need for markets.

Incidentally, we do need markets, just not the kind we have now.
The existence of a market is justified by the individual rights to liberty and property in the fruits of one's labor.
There is no logical connection between the subject and predicate. Controlling the fruits of other people's labor is is not a right I am willing to acknowledge.
#14612555
The existence of a market is justified by the individual rights to liberty and property in the fruits of one's labor. Enhanced value creation is a benefit of the market, but not its justification.


Good Lord. Another Randroid.

This statement does not even make sense. It is quite possible to have flourishing markets in places where individuals have little liberty or property and have little control over their labor. I could name dozens of examples. These need no "justification". (Whatever that means.)

There is nothing magical about it. You just don't understand it. It's normal for a primitive intellect to attribute to magic phenomena that it lacks the capacity to understand.


There is no need for you to be insulting. Ever. It is particularly important to avoid it when your attempts to insult others result in your proving that it is you who does not understand the subject at hand. I recommend that you study Black Box Theory. Once you understand what it is, you can come back and apologize to Quetzalcoatl.
#14612644
lucky wrote:Resource allocation waste and lack of any real cost/benefit accounting is one thing. Even more important is stagnation. You can't plan innovation.


You can most definitely definitely plan innovation: You employ the scientists and engineers in research centres and design bureaus, keep them funded so they can research, design, prototype and test new tech, then you pick the most efficient models out of whatever the design bureaus have churned up and mass-produce them.

Rinse'n'repeat ad infinitum.
#14612680
I think that there is the mistaken impression out there that our beloved free enterprise system is funding the technical innovation from which the US has derived so much of its wealth. This is not entirely true. The federal government is directly funding 32% of all research in the US. Further. The majority of federal non-defense spending goes to basic and applied research and the majority of industry research money goes to development. STRIKING NUMBER: Less than 7% of private industry money went to basic research with over 80% going to development. And our vaunted pharma industry? 12% of total sales go to R & D. This is less than 1/2 what our semiconductor/manufacturing sector spends. (And remember how much of that is development?) After WWII the federal numbers were significantly higher by the way.

So in the context of this thread, had the Soviet Union applied the real American model to assigning its federal assets to R & D it could have laid the groundwork for a prosperous socialist state. Instead, in a world that knew that nuclear war was unthinkable and that a western invasion of the USSR unthinkable for the same reason, it chose to engage in an arms race for no good reason other than whatever prestige comes from having bigger and more nukes and a navy and army vastly overbuilt for the real mission of defense.

Looking at the Red Army, for example, its forces were justifiable only if the USSR were arming for an invasion of Western Europe. It was dramatically overbuilt. The US and the European countries were able to assign much less numerous forces against it and still stymie any possibility of a Soviet invasion. Likewise Soviet strategic rocket forces were much larger than was ever necessary to protect it from a preemptive US strike. These were simply numbers games for international prestige in a money war that the USSR could never hope to win. And because of the structure of US R & D dollars one that served the dual purpose of developing new weaponry while funding basic research that had positive economic consequences.

So had the later-era, more enlightened Soviet leaders understood and managed their economic resources better they could have not only survived but become an economic power of much greater import. In this regard all Reagan had to do was poke them with what for the US was a very affordable increase in defense spending (with positive economic consequences anyway) and they were bound to simply tip over trying to keep up. In this regard Reagan does get some credit. He got the Soviet Union back on its economic heals and they just fell over. As we all know "the only way to win is to not play the game". If the Soviet leaders had only seen that movie.......
#14612685
Drlee wrote:Looking at the Red Army, for example, it forces were justifiable only if the USSR were arming for an invasion of Western Europe. It was dramatically overbuilt.


Not really. They were aiming to be able to preempt counter-revolutionary aggression against any socialist country anywhere in the world, and they needed to have man-portable artillery and small arms to spare so that they could supply any revolutionary movement that had a prayer at winning anywhere. The Warsaw Pact was plenty troublesome as it is, and going for broke in order to add more countries of variable loyalty and competence to it was a dubious proposition at best.

The only plausible scenario for a Soviet intervention in some part of Western europe would be if a Western European country more or less spontaneously underwent Socialist revolution. Then depending on whether or not team SOV thought it could pull it off they might have chosen to guarantee its independence and send in some WarPac troops to defend it. After WWII the entirety of Soviet policy wrt Western Europe could be summed up in one phrase, namely 'keep'em too scared to attack us again'.
#14612754
Angelamerkel wrote:This allowed individual government entities to spend resources on negative or low return projects. The dead weight of too many lousy quality projects, coupled to the oil price drop, Chernobyl, and the overspending on weapons caused an economic crunch.

I always look at it in terms of hard power. The Warsaw Pact collapsed, because it was economically unsustainable. The morality of Gorbachev or Reagan had nothing to do with it. Russia's launching of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into Syria and use of laser-guided bombs in Syria in the recent conflict in Syria has an important historical implication going back to the fall of the Soviet Union. Understood geopolitically, Russia has to overspend on weapons. It's territory is easily invaded. So it has to be able to survive an invasion and then repel it as part of its geostrategy. Once Russia/the Soviet Union expanded beyond the Urals and the Caucuses, it had to go still further, because it's relatively easy to invade steppes, whereas it's hard to fight in the mountains (Afghanistan, anyone?). Russia overbuilt it's tank offenses/defenses with relatively poor quality hardware compared to the response from the West so that it could fight on two land fronts.

A major US success following at the twilight of the Vietnam War was a realization that our ground forces in Europe were old school. The US needed a way to counteract the Soviet tank menace. So the US developed a multi-pronged approach that included:

- M1 Abrams tanks (could shoot twice as far as T-72s of that era)
- M2 Bradley fighting vehicles (APCs to keep pace with the faster tanks, TOW missile capable)
- Apache anti-tank helicopter (Hellfire missile capable)
- A-10 anti-tank plane
- TOW anti-tank missile
- HUMMV - capable of mounting TOW missile

Another Vietnam War realization was that we needed precision air weapons. In Vietnam we'd lose scores of sorties trying to take out a specific bridge, for example. Vietnam wasn't an industrial power, so fighting the war on conventional or strategic terms (e.g., mass bombing campaigns against industrial targets, nuclear weapons against war industries) would not work. They did have critical infrastructure that could be taken out with precision weapons--dramatically reducing the cost of delivering payloads to their intended destination.

This was accomplished with laser, infra-red and television guided bombs. The Paveway laser-guided bombs hit targets roughly 50% of the time, whereas pipper pickled gravity bombs only hit about 5.5% of the time. So there was literally a 10x improvement in accuracy. This strategy was also used to upgrade dumb bombs with GBUs. GBU-15 for example was a television technology that broadcast a TV image back to a plane and received guidance instructions from the plane to hit larger targets like ships during daytime hours. This technology worked, with the drawback that bombs went from like $4k to $400k in price; although, that was still a hell of a lot cheaper than losing a plane to AAA or SAMs.

Another common military fuck-up has to do with one of getting lost, or selecting the wrong coordinate for artillery or air support. Initiated in 1973 and completely operational by 1995 (it had some use in the Gulf War), the Global Positioning System was designed to provide navigational accuracy to within 50m (Gulf War). The days of getting lost were over. This has a lot of meaningful implications, because officers with shitty navigation skills could get a lot of people killed.

These innovations had been around and were a big part of the Reagan defense build up, but nobody had seen a full frontal coordinated use of these technologies until the Gulf War to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. George W. Bush's use of the term "shock and awe" was actually accomplished by his father in the Gulf War.

Another realization from the Vietnam war was that whoever saw the enemy fighter first usually won the dogfight. That was the major impetus for stealth technology.

The Gulf War illustrated America's new military prowess. Anti-tank strategy notwithstanding, the US's opening shots in the Gulf War came from F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters, which were successfully kept secret with UFO propaganda prior to the Gulf War. Iraq had a fairly formidable air defense, and so the F117As were sent with HARMs to take out Iraqi radar and missile installations, and laser-guided bombs to take out command-and-control and missile sites. This gave the US air superiority above the AAA fire immediately. As laser-guided bombs started picking off AAA batteries, Saddam's air defenses began to crumble.

The attacks in Baghdad left the Iraqi military command confused, so they kept their Republican guard units in a defensive role. Then, General Schwarzkopf's flanking of static Iraqi defenses on the Kuwaiti Southern border allowed the US to rip through Iraqi lines. The Battle of 73 Easting and The Battle of Medina Ridge are considered among the great tank battles of the modern era. Medina Ridge was a classic defense. Iraqi forces constructed a beautiful defilade, and could not be seen just over the horizon. They caught the advancing Americans by surprise, and were able to take out 4 Abrams tanks. However, the Abrams ability to shoot on the move, the Bradley's anti-tank missiles, and support from Apaches and A-10s overwhelmed the Iraqi position. 38 of the 186 tanks taken out at Medina Ridge by the US came from Apaches or A-10s. These battles are relevant, because the Iraqis used tactically brilliant positioning, but still lost a textbook battle.

American use of fuel air explosives even had British troops questioning whether the US was using tactical nuclear weapons. It got to the point where the psyops had a reverse pyschology effect. The BDAs coming back to Washington from what became known as the "Highway of Death" caused the president to halt military operations.

Image

I recall it vividly. It was absolutely glorious. We hadn't seen a victory like that against a similarly equipped force since Agincourt (obviously, I'm leaving out the imperial wars against non-industrial tribes, etc).

I'm pretty sure every Soviet tank general more or less shit their pants and realized that the Soviet Union, had they been crazy enough to attack, would have met the same result. In my mind, there is no coincidence in the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ceasing operations about a calendar quarter after the UNSC 687 ceasefire agreement. The Soviet Union's military footprint was exposed.

And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about Patriot missiles deployed to Israel and Saudi Arabia to counter the SCUDs.

The Soviet Union effectively ceased on December 24, 1991 and formally on December 26, 1991. Greatest Christmas ever.

America will pay a bitter price for this Obama presidency. The baby boomers in power have been nothing but disappointment after disappointment.
#14612787
blackjack21 wrote:I always look at it in terms of hard power. The Warsaw Pact collapsed, because it was economically unsustainable. The morality of Gorbachev or Reagan had nothing to do with it.

Nah, it was sustainable, but only at the price of social sacrifice ... The Russians just finally figured out that Communism wasn't working, world revolution was not lurking around the next corner, and they were not making any progress. Gorbachev and Reagan merely articulated this reality.

Russia's launching of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into Syria and use of laser-guided bombs in Syria in the recent conflict in Syria has an important historical implication going back to the fall of the Soviet Union.

It goes well beyond that. Arguably back to the Russian experience in WWII. I would commend your summary of soviet military realities and their systems development. I'd only point out that Post WWII - they -DID- expect Marxist revolutions to break out in Europe and positioned themselves to support them. And WWII left them with a deep appreciation for logistical depth, which also served to foster industrial development.

Your evaluation of the American Military's Response to the Soviet strategy is also excellent. We learned a lot in Korea and Vietnam thru practical experience.

America will pay a bitter price for this Obama presidency. The baby boomers in power have been nothing but disappointment after disappointment.

Nah, disengagement has been productive in stimulating outside interest and creating and protecting domestic stability. We learned (or we should have) at the onset of WWII that reliance on outmoded technology was a BIG mistake ... The American arsenal has been long overdue for an overhaul. (as demonstrated by GW bush and his unarmored Humvees).

Zam
#14612862
America will pay a bitter price for this Obama presidency.


You mean like the fact that the economy is vastly stronger than it was under Bush? Or that we have modernized our forces and right-sized our military to face the world threat? That we have virtually extracted ourselves from a tiresome backward region of the world and successfully completed a pivot to the East? We have begun the control of medical costs in the US, improved care and insured more people than ever?


President Obama has been a moderate success. Compared to Bush he is a fucking genius.
#14613087
Drlee wrote:In this regard all Reagan had to do was poke them with what for the US was a very affordable increase in defense spending (with positive economic consequences anyway) and they were bound to simply tip over trying to keep up. In this regard Reagan does get some credit.


I believe this is one of the great myths of the Cold war. There is little evidence in terms of changes in Soviet defense spending or archival documents to show that Reagan's initiatives like SDI had any influence on Soviet policy, at least in the manner suggested.

blackjack21 wrote:I'm pretty sure every Soviet tank general more or less shit their pants and realized that the Soviet Union, had they been crazy enough to attack, would have met the same result ... The Soviet Union's military footprint was exposed.


The extent of the Iraqi collapse in 1991 may have come as a surprise to certain members of the Soviet military leadership (it should not have considering Arab performance during the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Iraq-Iran war) but ultimately the Iraqi military of 1990 was not the Soviet military of 1990. In 1990's Iraq the US had certainly found a Vietnam era combatant, the Soviet military however had left the 1960's well behind them.

blackjack21 wrote:And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about Patriot missiles deployed to Israel and Saudi Arabia to counter the SCUDs.


The performance of Patriot during the first Gulf war (and the second ... hell even today) is widely acknowledged as abysmal.
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