An Explanation for the Collapse of the USSR?

[Soseloshvili]

A lot of people are probably going to hate me for saying this, but it occurred to me the other day. Taking into account the Marxist conception of the bourgeoisie, I think I can explain (philosophically) why the USSR collapsed (ignoring all economic reasons, I'm talking philosophy right now).

Okay, within the USSR the Communist Party's higher cadre have been described as being their own class entity, not because of monetary reasons but because of the access they had to the resources of the state. They had access to the best health care, best residences, best everything. They lived in luxury even if their paycheque didn't read as so. I believe this was called the "new class" phenomenon.

Consider the Soviet bourgeoisie. Until the 1980s, they could hardly have been said to exist. But with the Gorbachev era and Perestroika they grew to a sizable force in the economy. And the old Soviet élite, the "new class," was extremely hateful of this economic force.

Marx wrote about the ability of the bourgeoisie to be revolutionary in the overthrowing of the aristocracy. Isn't it possible to say the the revolutions of 1989 can be explained as the new Soviet bourgeoisie committing a revolutionary act by overthrowing the "new class" aristocracy?

Like I said, a lot of people are going to hate me for saying this. All you Stalinists and such, please don't take this as an insult against you. If anything this is confirming anti-revisionism, I suppose.

[el_chavista]

Would you say the "negation of the negation" or the "interpenatration of opposites" dialectic law applies?

[fa2991]

The "new class" wasn't that well off. They are in absolutely no way comparable to the bourgeoisie. At best they may have lived liked an upper middle class American. That's not bourgeois.

[fa2991]

Also, ignore "Soviet bourgeoisie." How about the Western bourgeoisie's massive contributions? To paraphrase Michael Parenti, "these were the most well-financed 'revolutions' in history."

[RedMaterialist]

Taking into account the Marxist conception of the bourgeoisie, I think I can explain (philosophically)...

I wrote a post about the same thing a couple of weeks ago: I called it The Withering Away of the Soviet State. Obviously I don't think it radical or revisionist to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I think it was the first state in history to collapse on its own, no military intervention, or civil war.

You can read my post if you want, but my basic idea is: 1. Soviet state emerges in 1917. 2. Dictatorship of proletariat established (and a really brutal one at that, at least as brutal as the previous Tsarist regime, about which we rarely hear.) 3. After roughly 60 yrs the bourgeois class is mostly extinguished. 4. After this, as Marx predicted, the proletariat class had no class to suppress, and therefore, the reason for the existence of a state (class suppression) disappeared. 5. The Soviet state disappeared.

Now, all of this, like every thing in nature, does not happen perfectly, or exactly as predicted. When the Soviet state disappeared there were left remnants of the bourgeois class. These remnants gained a lot of economic power under the drunk Yeltsin and wrecked the Russian economy. However,
under Putin the bourgeoisie were regulated and, for the most part controlled; workers were given 50% control of many industries and the state took control of the largest (Gazprom, for instance) industries.

What now exists in Russia is a part socialist, part capitalist state. Marx believed that socialism could only grow out of a fully developed capitalist society. It appears that what is happening is that socialism and capitalism are developing at the same time in one country (also, China, Vietnam and others; many in the U.S. claim that Western Europe is socialist.)

[Tavarisch_Mike]

I think I can explain (philosophically) why the USSR collapsed (ignoring all economic reasons, I'm talking philosophy right now).



You see that just doesnt work.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I was under the impression that they collapsed from excessive spending.

[Niccolò Rossi]

The bureacratic nightmare assumed by state capitalism in Russian was simply not dynamic enough.

Nic.

[RedMaterialist]

I was under the impression that they collapsed from excessive spending.

According to U.N. statistics the Soviet economy grew from about 450 billion (U.S. dollars) in 1979 to 1.5 trillion in 1990. Their revenues were 422 billion and expenses 510 billion in 1990. By comparison, the U.S. revenue and expenditure in 2010 is 3.7 and 5.0 trillion.

The original "analysis" of why the Soviet Union collapsed was that Ronald Reagan had frightened it out of existence. I don't think there really has been any serious economic analysis of the collapse.

[Chimurenga.]

I would point you to Sam Marcy's book "Perestroika: A Marxist Critique" written in 1990, before the actual overthrow. I have only read a little bit of it but I think it will help you understand the situation better.

http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/sampere/index.htm

[RED DAVE]

What now exists in Russia is a part socialist, part capitalist state. Marx believed that socialism could only grow out of a fully developed capitalist society. It appears that what is happening is that socialism and capitalism are developing at the same time in one country (also, China, Vietnam and others; many in the U.S. claim that Western Europe is socialist.)Nonsense.

Socialism is the rule of the working class; capitalism is the rule of the bourgeoisie. The twos ystems are incompatible. What you have in Russia is capitalism. The workers have no control over the means of production as they had no control under the previous system of state capitalism.

RED DAVE

[Soseloshvili]

I wrote a post about the same thing a couple of weeks ago: I called it The Withering Away of the Soviet State. Obviously I don't think it radical or revisionist to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I think it was the first state in history to collapse on its own, no military intervention, or civil war.

You can read my post if you want, but my basic idea is: 1. Soviet state emerges in 1917. 2. Dictatorship of proletariat established (and a really brutal one at that, at least as brutal as the previous Tsarist regime, about which we rarely hear.) 3. After roughly 60 yrs the bourgeois class is mostly extinguished. 4. After this, as Marx predicted, the proletariat class had no class to suppress, and therefore, the reason for the existence of a state (class suppression) disappeared. 5. The Soviet state disappeared.

Now, all of this, like every thing in nature, does not happen perfectly, or exactly as predicted. When the Soviet state disappeared there were left remnants of the bourgeois class. These remnants gained a lot of economic power under the drunk Yeltsin and wrecked the Russian economy. However,
under Putin the bourgeoisie were regulated and, for the most part controlled; workers were given 50% control of many industries and the state took control of the largest (Gazprom, for instance) industries.

What now exists in Russia is a part socialist, part capitalist state. Marx believed that socialism could only grow out of a fully developed capitalist society. It appears that what is happening is that socialism and capitalism are developing at the same time in one country (also, China, Vietnam and others; many in the U.S. claim that Western Europe is socialist.)

No civil war wasn't exactly accurate. There were tanks on the streets of Moscow in 1991, the attempted coup of the more anti-revisionist Communist Party cadre was to some degree violent. Not to mention that the fall of the USSR's satellite states was in many cases violent (need I mention Romania).

And the Soviet state didn't really "disappear," it kind of exploded. What came of the revolutions of 1989 was not really a disappearance of the Soviet state, it was more a sudden and brutal jump from a Socialist state to a western-style Capitalist republic.

Can't say I really agree with a lot you had to say there :/

[RED DAVE]

[A] sudden and brutal jump from a Socialist state to a western-style Capitalist republic.How did this happen without massive protests, if not actual revolt, by the workers?

RED DAVE

[Soseloshvili]

How did this happen without massive protests, if not actual revolt, by the workers?

RED DAVE

It happened because of a populist movement among the Communist Party's lower cadre, so yes, to some degree a worker's revolt. Their were protests by workers too, though massive I don't know.

[punisa]

How did this happen without massive protests, if not actual revolt, by the workers?

RED DAVE

Workers all over the eastern bloc cheered and welcomed capitalism.
This is a major problem :(

[mikelepore]

Why are you people using the word "collapsed"? That word implies a disintegration caused by a weak structure that can't support a weight. The abolition of the USSR was a political decision. In various legislatures, politicians stood up and proposed the independence of each republic, and the replacement of the USSR with a Commonwealth of Independent States. The legislatures voted on the motion, an the motion passed. There was no collapse. If you mean to ask "why was the previous system so miserable that almost everyone wanted to get rid of it?", then that's another question.

In reporting on this event, the word "collapse" was introduced by U.S. capitalist propaganda media, such as Time and Newsweek magazines. Their use of that word was part of an argument that they were making that any economic system that doesn't have a "free market" must be so inefficient that it must automatically fall apart; in other words, the Ludwig von Mises hypothesis.

[mykittyhasaboner]

Long Term

During the period from 1930 to 1970, and excluding the war years, the USSR experienced very rapid economic growth. There is considerable dispute about just how fast the economy grew, but it is generally agreed to have grown significantly faster than the USA between 1928 and 1975, with the growth rate slowing down to the US level after that4 (http://21stcenturysocialism.blogspot.com/2007/09/venezuela-and-new-socialism.html#sdfootnote4sym). This growth took it from a peasant country whose level of development had been comparable to India in 1922, to become the worlds second industrial and technological and military power by the mid 1960s.
Observers have given a number of reasons for this relative slowdown in growth in the latter period.
It is easier for an economy to grow rapidly during the initial phase of industrialisation when labour is being switched from agriculture to industry. Afterwards growth has to rely upon improvements in labour productivity in an already industrialised economy, which are typically less than the difference in productivity between agriculture and industry.
A relatively large portion of Soviet industrial output was devoted to defence, particularly in the latter stages of the Cold War, when they were in competition with Regan's 'Star Wars' programmes. The skilled manpower used up for defence restricted the number of scientists and engineers who could be allocated to inventing new and more productive industrial equipment.
The USA and other capitalist countries imposed embargoes on the supply of advanced technological equipment to the USSR. This meant that the USSR had to rely to an unusually high degree on domestic designs of equipment. In the west there were no comparable barriers to the export of technology so that the industrial development of the western capitalist countries was synergistic.
Labour was probably not used as efficiently in Soviet industry as it was in the USA or West Germany. In one sense, or course the USSR used labour very effectively, it had no unemployment and the proportion of women in full time employment was higher than in any other country. But a developed industrial economy has to be able transfer labour to where it can be most efficiently used. Under capitalism this is achieved by the existence of a reserve of unemployment, which, whilst it is inefficient at a macro-economic level, does allow rapid expansion of new industries.
The Soviet enterprise tended to hoard workers, keeping people on its books just in case they were needed to meet future demands from the planning authorities. This was made possible both by the relatively low level of money wages, and because the state bank readily extended credit to cover such costs. The low level of money wages was in turn a consequence of the way the state raised its revenue from the profits of state enterprises rather than from income taxes.
Although Soviet industrial growth in the 80s slowed down to US levels, this by itself was not a disaster, after all the USA had experienced this sort of growth rate (2.5% a year) for decades without crisis. Indeed whilst, working class incomes in the USA actually stagnated over the 80s, in the USSR they continued to rise. The difference was in the position of the intelligentsia and the managerial strata in the two countries. In the USA income differentials became progressively greater, so that the rise in national income nearly all went to the top 10% of the population. In the USSR income differentials were relatively narrow, and whilst all groups continued to experience a rise in incomes, this was much smaller than had been the case in the 1950s and 1960's. This 2.5% growth was experienced by some of the Soviet intelligentsia as intolerable stagnation – perhaps because they compared themselves with managers and professionals in the USA or Germany. A perception thus took root among this class that the socialist system was failing when compared to the USA.
Again this would not have been critical to the future survival of the system were it not for the fact that these strata were disproportionately influential within the USSR. Although the ruling Communist Party was notionally a workers party, a disproportionately high proportion of its members were drawn from the most skilled technical and professional employees, manual workers were proportionately under represented.
The slowdown in Soviet growth was in large measure the inevitable result of economic maturity, a movement towards the rate of growth typical of mature industrial countries. A modest programme of measures to improve the efficiency of economic management would probably have produced some recovery in the growth rate, but it would have been unrealistic to expect the rapid growth of the 50s and 60s to return. What the USSR got however, was not a modest programme of reform, but a radical demolition job on its basic economic structures. This demolition job was motivated by neo-liberal ideology. Neo-liberal economists, both with the USSR and visiting from the USA promised that once the planning system was removed and once enterprises were left free to compete in the market, then economic efficiency would be radically improved.



Medium Term

The medium term causes of Soviet economic collapse lay in the policies that the Gorbachov government embarked on in its attempts to improve the economy. The combined effect of these policies was to bankrupt the state and debauch the currency.
One has to realise that the financial basis of the Soviet state lay mainly in the taxes that it levied on turnover by enterprises and on sales taxes.
In an effort to stamp out the heavy drinking which led to absenteeism from work, and to poor health, the Gorbachov government banned alcohol. This and the general tightening up of work discipline, led, in the first couple of years of his government to some improvement in economic growth. It had however, unforeseen side effects. Since sales of vodka could no longer take place in government shops, a black market of illegally distilled vodka sprang up, controlled by the criminal underworld. The criminal class who gained money and strength from this later turned out to be most dangerous enemy.
Whilst money from the illegal drinks trade went into the hands of criminals, the state lost a significant source of tax revenue, which, because it was not made up by other taxes, touched off an inflationary process.
Were the loss of the taxes on drinks the only problem for state finance, it could have been solved by raising the prices of some other commodities to compensate. But the situation was made worse when, influenced by the arguments of neo-liberal economists, Gorbachov allowed enterprises to keep a large part of the turnover tax revenue that they owed the state. The neo-liberals argued that if managers were allowed to keep this revenue, they would make more efficient use of it than the government.
What actually ensued was a catastrophic revenue crisis for the state, who were forced to rely on the issue of credit by the central bank to finance their current expenditure. The expansion of the money stock led to rapid inflation and the erosion of public confidence in the economy. Meanwhile, the additional unaudited funds in the hands of enterprise managers opened up huge opportunities for corruption. The Gorbachov government had recently legalised worker co-operatives, allowing them to trade independently. This legal form was then used by a new stratum of corrupt officials, gangsters and petty business men to launder corruptly obtained funds.
Immediate

The Soviet economy had gone through the stages of slowdown, mismanaged crisis and now went into a phase of catastrophic collapse, quite unprecedented in peacetime.
Following a failed coup by sections of the armed forces and security services, Yeltsin, instead of helping restore the constitutional government of President Gorbachov, seized power for himself. Acting on the instructions of US advisers he introduced a shock programme to convert the economy from socialism to capitalism in 100 days.


In the old USSR there was no capitalist class. In the west governments could privatise individual firms by selling them off on the stockmarket where the shares would be quickly snapped up by the upper classes, or in the case of Thatcher's privatisation, by sections of the middle class. But in the USSR things were very different. There was no class of individuals wealthy enough to buy up state companies by legal means. Also the scale of the privatisation was so vast, that even in a market economy, the savings of the population would have been insufficient to buy up the entire industry of the nation. Logic alone would predict that the only way that industry could pass into private hands was through corruption and gangsterism. This is exactly what happened, a handful of Mafia connected oligarchs ended up owning most of the economy.
Neo liberal theory held that once enterprises were free from the state, the 'magic of the market' would ensure that they would interact productively and efficiently for the public good. But this vision of the economy greatly overstated the role of markets. Even in so called market economies, markets of the sort described in economics textbooks are the exception – restricted to specialist areas like the world oil and currency markets. The main industrial structure of an economy depends on a complex interlinked system of regular producer/consumer relationships in which the same suppliers make regular deliveries to the same customers week in week out.
In the USSR this interlinked system stretched across two continents, and drew into its network other economies : East Europe, Cuba, North Vietnam. Enterprises depended on regular state orders, the contents of which might be dispatched to other enterprises thousands of miles away. Whole towns and communities across the wilds of Siberia relied on these regular orders for their economic survival. Once the state was too bankrupt to continue making these orders, once it could no longer afford to pay wages, and once the planning network which had coordinated these orders was removed, what occurred was not the spontaneous self organisation of the economy promised by neo-liberal theory, but a domino process of collapse.
Without any orders, factories engaged in primary industries closed down. Without deliveries of components and supplies secondary industries could no longer continue production, so they too closed. In a rapid and destructive cascade, industry after industry closed down. The process was made far worse by the way the unitary USSR split into a dozen different countries all with their own separate economies. The industrial system had been designed to work as an integrated whole, split up by national barriers it lay in ruins.

Ideas of Leadership and Democracy by Paul Cockshott (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/leadershipconcepts.pdf)

[Soseloshvili]

Why are you people using the word "collapsed"? That word implies a disintegration caused by a weak structure that can't support a weight. The abolition of the USSR was a political decision. In various legislatures, politicians stood up and proposed the independence of each republic, and the replacement of the USSR with a Commonwealth of Independent States. The legislatures voted on the motion, an the motion passed. There was no collapse. If you mean to ask "why was the previous system so miserable that almost everyone wanted to get rid of it?", then that's another question.

In reporting on this event, the word "collapse" was introduced by U.S. capitalist propaganda media, such as Time and Newsweek magazines. Their use of that word was part of an argument that they were making that any economic system that doesn't have a "free market" must be so inefficient that it must automatically fall apart; in other words, the Ludwig von Mises hypothesis.

Not exactly true. The higher cadre of the Communist Party were extremely opposed to the USSR's disintegration, and fought back. Need I remind you that there were tanks on the streets of Moscow in the early 90s, the army still being loyal to the old Soviet way.

It did collapse. A populist movement among the lower cadre of the Communist party forced its way into power and it was a brutal, sudden and even bloody jump.

[RedMaterialist]

Not exactly true. The higher cadre of the Communist Party were extremely opposed to the USSR's disintegration, and fought back. Need I remind you that there were tanks on the streets of Moscow in the early 90s, the army still being loyal to the old Soviet way.

It did collapse. A populist movement among the lower cadre of the Communist party forced its way into power and it was a brutal, sudden and even bloody jump.

We're talking about the Soviet Union here. A "civil war" there means at least 10 million dead. A few tanks in the street is a normal Sunday afternoon. It may have been sudden, historically speaking, but what was brutal or bloody about it? How can a collapse be a jump?

If the lower Communist cadre forced its way into power why did it give up power? It gave up power because the state (i.e., the Communist lower cadre) no longer functioned as a repressive state and, therefore, it had no reason to exist. A "state" exists only for the purpose of repressing a particular class, such as slaves, serfs, workers, or capitalists (see Marx, Lenin.)

[Armchair War Criminal]

Kotz and Weir's "Revolution From Above" is by journalists, not economists, but provides a concise and theoretically informed account of the dissolution. They conclude that the Nomenklatura broadly conceived, though not the highest ranks of the Party, realized they would be better off privatizing the state to themselves. They don't comment on other state socialist experiments, but it's not hard to see this mirrored elsewhere in history.

[Soseloshvili]

We're talking about the Soviet Union here. A "civil war" there means at least 10 million dead. A few tanks in the street is a normal Sunday afternoon. It may have been sudden, historically speaking, but what was brutal or bloody about it? How can a collapse be a jump?

Well, I consider hundreds dead in Azerbaijan in 1 night a civil war. I consider the military capture of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius by the soviet military from Lithuanian Nationalists there civil war. I consider Soviet military oppression of the Chechen, Georgian and Moldovan independence movement a civil war. Not to mention the actual civil war that happened in Romania, a Soviet satellite state.

It was a mild civil war, yes. But military force was used by the Soviet élite on several occasions, with deadly results.


If the lower Communist cadre forced its way into power why did it give up power? It gave up power because the state (i.e., the Communist lower cadre) no longer functioned as a repressive state and, therefore, it had no reason to exist. A "state" exists only for the purpose of repressing a particular class, such as slaves, serfs, workers, or capitalists (see Marx, Lenin.)

Meaningless rhetoric on the existence of the state is meaningless.

The lower cadre didn't give it up. They modeled themselves a government so that they were able to keep power. Need I remind you how much Yeltsin suppressed the Communist Party of the Russian Federation? United Russia, Russia's major political party, is the continuation of the CPUSSR's Apparatchik, the lower cadre.