Fall of Eastern Bloc regimes and Marxist idea of revolution

[bailey_187]

i been meaning to make this thread for a while, but i forget

so basicaly i was reading A History Of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, again, and basicaly the authors apply the ideas around revolution from marxists to the events of 1989

I cant remmeber them all, but here what i can of the top of my head

1. the ruling class is split, and does not think it can carry on with the current system (or something like that)

this is definetly true, many communists no longer beleived in the system

2. productive forces cant expand any more under current relations of production

this one going to be more controversial. eastern europe was havng real economic problems, they were unable to increase their intensive growth, their growth rates had slowed by the 80s. The loans from the west in the 70s just led to investment in outdated industries like steel, not the new electronic ones etc. they were increasingly falling into more and more debt, and using the example of Poland they were funding the gap between production and consumption with debt - any attempot to increase production and lower consumption was met with fierce resistance

3. the ruling class of the new society grew up within the old society

this was most interestng to me

the new capitalist class that emerged in the 90s was primarily bureacrats that had grown up within the old pre-1989 society, and because of their positions were able to entrench themselves as the ruling class in post-1989 europe


whats peoples opinions on this

[Astarte]

I think you are basically correct on all three accounts. The only thing I would like to add is that it seems that the "new class" of the bureaucracy represents not state-capitalism but a qualitatively different mode than capitalism altogether. I do not think the USSR imploded due to bureaucratic centralism's inability to drive productive forces, but partially because the bureaucratic class of the USSR had achieved in ameliorating the contradictions and problems that brought it to power in the first place: industrialization and the rapid uphill climb from a semi-feudal nation to one on par with the advanced capitalist nations. The new bureaucratic class was brought to power on the ideological basis of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and on the material basis of semi-feudalism and the need for industrialization - once this had been accomplished by the Brezhnev era, and the USSR still found itself economically isolated and severed from the rest of the world, the bureaucracy and working class were at a loss as to what the societal purpose of the bureaucracy was - perestroika was a vague motioning in the direction of the Soviet bureaucracy trying to discover their next role on the historical stage, but their over-arching class interests lead them overwhelmingly to believe the only way they could at the same time deal with the pressures of the West, and the threat to their own position of power internally was to sell out the "peoples' state" and convert themselves to capitalists, and reintroduce the economic mode to private property.

[Psy]

Well back in 1967 computer engineers in Moscow pushed for using cybernetics to streamline the planning processes yet the bureaucracy resisted as it would have to large extent automated the planning process and give far more accurate inventory and statistics by computers in production talking back to the GOSPLAN mainframe, making it harder for the bureaucracy to fudge numbers (in the eyes of bureaucracy, of course you can fudge the numbers of such a system as computers do what they are told to do by authorized users). The thought of a computer big brother watching and recording everything scared the USSR bureaucracy into pulling the plug on the idea of computerizing the planning process.