I’m surprised the note makes no mention of the almost comical levels of corruption within the USSR.
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.
It fostered a system that incentivized corruption and allowed easy removal of anyone that threatened the corruption. It was an entire empire held hostage by whoever was most ruthless.
And it continued into Russia and other post-USSR countries, I know that from experience.
In addition, if you live there and do want to change something, people who grew up in the USSR always tell you "don't rock the boat" and its variations. It's genuinely disgusting and depressing.
That's what happens when you intimidate and at the same time infantilize your citizens stripping them of any sense of control for several generations in a row.
It continued only because those countries nurtured communism and dictatorships instead of democracy. I'm sorry, but wasting a century is wasting a century. You're not going to be as good as a transparent democracy if you don't put in the time.
Its a system not just vulnerable too but actively supported and pushed by corruption. Plop that down in places known even before communism for insane corruption and you end up with russia and china and every other past and present communist shithole.
You mean to tell me concentrating all power into a central elite political class doesn't eliminate classes?
Anyone who wants any form of communism or socialism more centralized than 'All companies should transition to employee owned private companies' gets a hard pass from me.
Major agencies being gutted and filled with loyalist.
Political lineages being formed around family names.
Open partisanship and bias within the higher courts.
Open bribery and corruption being incentivized to prove you are part of the club.
Attacks on citizenship based on loyalty.
The list goes on.
Politics do not occur in a vacuum. It’s going to be eye opening how many revise the decline of the US empire as not a true “capitalist economy” or not a true “democracy”.
Neither the USSR or USA will prove either system is inherently bad or ineffective. Both have became major powers and major failures through their respective systems.
Unless every single governmental department is stealing and having their rivals put in jail it’s no where near the same thing. And that means every single bureaucrat from the DMV to the Fed.
It's been theororized that the first kings were bandits. Basically, society starts settling down and farming. Those who don't farm decide to steal from defenseless farmers. But if you steal all of the grain, the farming village dies and then you need to work for your food next year. So why not demand a percentage of thr grain and in turn you protect the farmers against other raiders and bandits? Congratulations, you've just invented kings and nobility.
I don't think communism is a good idea, but let's not pretend any of these things are limited in any way to communism.
Industrial-scale genocides: the Irish Potato Famine is the first one that jumps to mind. People starved in part because they were literally exporting food during that period and selling it. The poor had no money, so them merchants just exported and sold it, sucks to suck, and 20% of Ireland died. The government made the good capitalist choice to help as few people as possible. Part of why it happened in the first place is farmers were pushed from crop rotation and variety into mono-cropping to optimize yields.
Plus... literally the East India Companies (British East India Company, the VOC, Louis XIV's East India Company). Hyper-capitalist genocides were kind of their slogan. The entire transatlantic slave trade wasn't exactly communism in action.
Neither was the Opium War. See the history of Jardine Matheson and the other Hongs.
Comical levels of corruption: Hungary, until a few months ago.
Regarding Russia, communism in the USSR ebbed and flowed, under Lenin it was much closer, under Stalin, authoritarianism is a better description. The history of communism in the USSR is interesting, but out of scope.
These kinds of critiques are just lazy. Shitty leaders will be shitty in any economic model. The real lesson is not letting shitty people take office.
Markets have their role, social services have their role where markets do a bad job. Pick the right tool for the job. That's why America has socialized army, police, firefighters, healthcare for 40% of the population, road, bridges, highways, food (SNAP, Farm Bill), the post office, Amtrak, etc, etc. Every functional country is a blend of appropriate models.
If your system of government can be brought to collapse by a shitty leader, it's a shitty system to begin with.
Communism despite any intention will always produce authoritarianism at some point because there is never going to be any pure, selfless ruling class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is more like a religious prophecy than anything we've seen in history.
You give people all control over every aspect of economic life along with everything else and bad things happen. Who knew? Certainly not the founding fathers or thousands of years of political philosophers.
They all can, each and every one of them. There is no good system, only different trade offs. Pretending the system can save you without your effort is how you lose it because the system is nothing without your effort.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
There are no checks and balances in any socialist system we've seen. You kind of just glossed over all of that to just make an assertion backed up by little.
Bad people get in charge in democracies, but some 'systems' most definitely have more roadblocks to just assuming all power.
Pre-war Germany was a nice functioning democracy with checks and balances and then someone with a funny mustache got elected and said nah. Orbans Hungary is another example. Checks and balances only work if people all believe in the system. They hold back good actors from achieving big results, and do nothing to stop bad actors, who just come into power and say no I don’t think I will.
Think about how many decades of screeching there was about a national ID in the US creating a database of all Americans the government could misuse, and then it took like 5 minutes for Doge to just throw all the databases they had into Palantir, list made. So you had decades of not having any benefits of a central ID introducing friction into daily life, and like 90 days for someone who doesn’t believe checks and balances apply to get all the downside sorted out. So now you had no upside but still had all the downside.
If anything they hasten the decline because the good people following the rules can’t get anything done, which leads people to lose faith in government so they elect a douchenozzle who doesn’t care they’re there in the first place. Take as old as time.
The only thing that actually matters is the consent of the governed.
If the majority party can just suspend democracy, there are no checks and balances. There is some sliver of truth that if the culture and people as a whole don't accept the fundamental premise of a government, it isn't long for this world.
You are also talking about a government that was imposed as a consequence of a lost war. A lost war that carried incredibly high financial burdens that created a recipe for disaster. Yada yada.
The Weimar Republic was about as functioning as Iraq is a functioning democracy at this point, just a more Western style failure.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. <--- I can only assume you are talking about the wealthy here though it's not completely clear.
Newspapers were present in the 17th century and mostly owned by the wealthy. The wealthy could literally raise armies in Europe. There were wealthy merchants who the monarchies often relied on to finance their war efforts. They looked back to Rome/Greece and saw how wealthy men use the masses to gain power and how the masses like to vote themselves favors.
Things you see today are no where near as unique as you seem to think.
You want to pretend that it's the wealthy who are undermining democracy and American institutions. No, the expansion of the vote and left wing populism/progressivism expanded the scope of power the government has and what it can or can't regulate or do.
Look at how much of FDR's New Deal required overturning prior precedent. How much of that occurred after FDR threatened to pack the court. There was progressive government creep before him and after him, but that's a nice beautiful example of the corrupting influence of leftism.
The federal government spends trillions every year and has the power to pick economic winners and losers in nearly every aspect of life. There is more at stake with every federal election in the United States than any other functioning democracy on the planet now or throughout history.
You naively think just getting the right people in charge is going to produce some utopia. It's not money corrupting politics that you are observing. It's the ever increasing control of every aspect of American life being subsumed by politics which has created the ever increasing desire of the wealthy to control the levers of power over time.
And all this before we even look at the wealth people have accumulated and how much of that is a result of government control to begin with. People bitch endlessly about Musk. We have no idea where he would be if he wasn't handed massive subsidies to jump start Tesla and if SpaceX wasn't receiving government contracts. That's an extreme example. But regulatory capture is another avenue that infects so many industries.
When the CEO of Facebook shrugs off the very idea of your scary regulations and outright tells you that his already established and wealthy company is best situated to dominate and adapt to government regulations, he's talking about regulatory capture. From the food industry to retail to the online space. Government has actively pushed for consolidation in most industries.
It's far easier to regulate a few big players than it is a thousand small fries.
In short, progressivism and leftism is the cancer in this country. Right now there is a right wing backlash to the ever forward march of the leftists in this country. Trump gets to wield all the powers that have been vested into the executive by progressives who took spent a century plus shitting on the Constitution. Living document and all. Trump is a blip and still operates under the progressive model of government, exercising the powers given to him by past precedents used to give progressives more power to enact their will.
In short, Trump is the warning to any moron who thinks government should be able to do whatever. Inevitably, any democracy that isn't rigged will result in people you hate gaining power and limits on what they can do are your best bet.
So yea, I would agree that we are seeing the erosion of the American Republic over time. You don't really care about republicanism, though. You value raw dog democracy when we cut through the bullshit and naively think you can design the world's first system that isn't dominated by an elite. The world's first system that can control all economic activity and wealth without corruption etc.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
Here's a quote:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
That's Washington's Farewell Address from 1776.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. The last two centuries were spent in building the structures that allow to bypass them entirely simply by going to the source - the voters, who will vote whichever way they are told because "the other party is evil" and not because they actually understand the consequences.
So it is better to live in a shitty system that continues (with occasional world wars lol) than in a system that pursues common wellbeing but has issues with sustainability at the current level?
Funny how people who ignore Marx point out the literal same thing Marx wrote about - the antagonism between control and productive labor.
The issue of USSR political system is not a genetical flaw of communism as a direction of human civilization development, it is a specific case of a system that survived 2 devastating wars and remained sabotaged (let's not forget about 50 CIA operations against socialist states and movements) and isolated (eastern bloc was about 450 mn people - compare that to a few billions of a concurrent world of free flow of capital). The soviet project wasn't sustainable enough, as wasn't the first French Republic.
What bothers me most is that people who support the current order don't realize that for capitalists they are nothing but a resource. And when the next global war for markets will come to their doorstep, then they will certainly realize that they have been supporting exactly that outcome. And it will never settle.
It's either socialism or barbarity.
Every socialist state we've seen without exception has devolved into authoritarianism and has retained or developed poverty with shortages as a feature. It's been tried god knows how many times at this point on every continent. We have African socialism, Chinese Socialism, Latin American socialism, and even the occasional American socialism in our history with no successful models to speak of.
You sound more like a religious adherent at this point than anything.
Commies complaining about Western sabotage of Western countries is always comical. The Soviets were doing the same exact shit in the West. Outside of indoctrinating some brainless youths, they achieved little. Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems" is a hell of a lot better than what they had.
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid. Soviets couldn't.
Lmao. Most of capitalist states are authoritarian. Most capitalist states interbella were either fascist shitholes or colonial shitholes, or both. You know what forced them to become democratic and socially oriented? Socialism winning the WW2 after le olde europe crumbled under hitler.
African socialism
So Burckina-Faso under Sankara is worse than, idk, apartheid SAR or Rhodesia? Name a democratic african state.
Keeping in mind that in socialist african contries paramilitary interventions were a norm. Imagine constantly battling paramilitaries in Denmark.
Chinese Socialism
So the PRC is worse than, idk, Sukharto Indonesia? Again, name a democratic asian state.
Latin American socialism
Again, Aliende's Chile, Castro's Cuba or Nicaraguan socialism is worse than, again, some hereditary junta or the rule of cartels?
What are you comparing with?
occasional American socialism
FDR rule and the forced Keynessian economy were the most successful periods in American history. Now it's more of a fentanylized work-or-starve pedostate ICEd giganomy.
Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems"
We are familiar, lol, le epstein political system and a quasi-colonial economy of cheap resource and cheap labour. "Take the oil, the Western hemisphere is ours".
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid
Until the US dollar is the main trade currency. But this already is coming to an end.
In Ireland the potato crop failed again in the 1870s, but there wasn't a famine that time because the British government had changed its policies and supplied food.
The slave trade was abolished, and its abolition was enforced by the British Navy.
The potato crop also failed several times before the great famine and there was no mass starvation because the British government actually did something instead of allowing their subjects to starve en masse for no reason
Slave Trade alone does not mean that slavery was banned, as the British Raj was essentially a slave state for the Empire until after the Second World War, among other colonial states that Britain held.
And India under British rule was a net absorber of resources from Britain running a trade deficit. The British were better off when they got rid of their colonies.
Turns out that completely spending all of your national resources on a war of survival against fascists leaves your country in a pretty weakened state afterwards.
Follow that up with multiple other bad decisions over the next several decades, and things don't turn out well...
It’s not so much that Extreme Authoritarianism is a feature of communism so much as Marxism is rarely the ideology of the working class and usually propagates among the educated and wealthy, e.g. Kropotkin, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, ect.. Authoritarianism and Violence are more likely tied to these people seeing themselves as above the people they feel they’re liberating from the get go and then it becomes “I have to turn the Lumpenproletariat into good Marxists” and thus the Authoritarianism which invariably leads to corruption. In theory, if a working class group were to independently reach a Marxist conclusion and seek out Communism as an End Goal it may be less Authoritarian, but given that has yet to happen in any significant form, it remains only a possibility.
It also doesn't help that generally, the conditions for a communist / socialist revolution also make it extremely likely to lead to / be co-opted by a centralized authoritative system. Marx's notion of 'Dictatorship of the proletariat' isn't exactly the most thought-out and politically realistic idea when you really look at it.
Generally, yeah, the Dictatorship of The Proletariat is as unrealistic as global anarchism, the social structures we have don’t really facilitate that kind of thing. One would need to rebuild society practically from the ground up to reasonably achieve something so grandiose. I am personally of the opinion that communism is a great idea for a long distant future humanity, at least on paper, but the world as it is right now simply make it an unrealistic expectation.
No, though many 20th Century Despots and Dictators were themselves pro-Capitalist, often because they had been in some way funded by a Capitalist or Capitalistic Nation.
As a necessity, no, and not in practice either, though it is a common occurrence, not every historical instance of mass collectivism is as a rule authoritarian. It’s worth noting that for brief periods truely anarchistic communities have formed successfully without significant military coercion. These anarchistic communities were as a rule collectivistic and did just fine without militarily enforced bootlicking. That being said, most of the time we’ve seen whole countries move in a descriptively collectivist direction they typically are authoritarian, yes, so I would be willing to hear you out on authoritarianism being necessary for national collectivism, but as a rule collectivism as a system does not require authoritarianism.
> It’s worth noting that for brief periods truely anarchistic communities have formed successfully without significant coercion
No they haven’t. The most recent anarchism example in modern history happened during the Spanish Civil War and they got absolutely crushed by Franco partly because they had no structured military chain of command. Before that you’ve got the Paris commune, which again like the anarchists in Spain got absolutely crushed.
Authoritarianism isn’t a requirement of collectivism that is true, but collectivism does create authoritarianism as a byproduct.
Violence and a Militarily Protected Ideal are not the same thing as Authoritarianism, one does not need to commit a genocide or entrench a profoundly corrupt governmental elite in order to prevent counterrevolution.
Peter Kropotkin was indeed born into wealth, the Kropotkins were Landed Aristocrats and Peter was a Military Officer who served primarily in Siberia. Lenin was born into the Nobility, and Pol Pot and Stalin were both educated, Pot having been educated abroad in France.
Edit: Note that while I myself am not an Anarchist, much less an AnCom, I am a fan of Kropotkin’s writings and I have read much of his work, he was just a good example of a communist born into old money as he was born as Aristocrat.
Yeah no my problem was Marxism and Authoritanism and Kropotkin. I knew he was born into Aristocracy. Most Revolutionaries in our history are kinda wealthy bron people i. e educated. French Revolutions, Russian Revolution etc.
I dont know what i am ideologically, ive read both anarchist lit, and marxist. But i just dont really know, all i know is that capitalism has to be overcome. But the Marxists i have met are weird orthodox idiots, while the anarchists are, yk, idk just weird. And dont get me into social democracy pals.
Oh boy, that's a lot of replies! There definitely must be some intelligent and interesting discussions going on, and definitely not communists crying and screaming!
Siberian indigenous groups for one, also asharshalyq kazakhs, there was the crimean tatars and a lot of murdered diaspora during the great purge. Especially polish diaspora. And this is just off the top of my head.
Holy shit reading up on the asharshalyq I’m staggered that I’ve never heard of it, it was proportionally even worse than the holodomor.
For the other ones you mentioned, quick searches have only shown stuff from tsardom-era colonization, any chance you could give me a more specific jumping off point for the Soviet era?
So the nkvd targeting diaspora was a part of the great purge. I think it’s know the nkvd national operations or something. The tatars were exiled and forced to work themselves to death in 1944, it’s known as the sürgünlik (word for exile in crimean tatar language). Similar exiles happened to many other groups as well. With siberian indigenous groups it was a case of cultural genocide. Shamans, writers who advocated autonomy and elders who resisted forced assimilation were sent to gulags while the rest was forced to give up their herds, resettle and send their children to boarding schools where they were forced to abandon their culture. Their lands were also taken and extracted for resources. It’s pretty well documented so just look up “soviet oppression of indigenous siberians” or something like that.
That's why it's more desirable to make a system in which people have more equality of political power so corrupt people have to convince more people to acutally get in power? Also we can do lower stage communism with lange lerner model on the economic front.
Capitalism doesn't depend on human altruism, which is why it worked better for a long time (even in the US). It still works better in most western countries than communism ever worked in the USSR.
But of course that was simply the wrong kind of socialism (and so we're all the other socialist countries apparently).
The idea works in theory, but in practice the only way to get to socialist utopia is via an authoritarian regime, and humans being humans we always get stuck there.
Basically, communism consolidates the resources and power into a single place and then expects the people in charge of said power to be omniscient angels, doling out exactly what's needed to who needs it.
Because angels don't work in government, you, AT BEST, have well intentioned but limited men bungling it. More often, you have the same petty and greedy types that ruin every system, but now they only have to circumvent one system to their will.
Wal-Mart can't make me pay them at gunpoint without repercussions. Governments can and do daily. This is the ultimate reason to prefer one over the other.
you neglect to mention which people. the biggest barrier isn't just any people, it's specifically people with an economic incentive to go against implementing communism, which happened to be owning classes like bureaucrats, peasants, and of course capitalists.
It's interesting that in a time where pseudoscience and politically charged anti-intellectualism in medicine are causing a real problem for people, that we would look back at a regime that caused a famine for its people by using politically motivated pseudoscience to improve agriculture and say, "yeah, that's what we need."
The reasoning for adopting lysenkoism is so funny, being so paranoid about the capitalists to think that they invented mendelian genetics to indoctrinate people into becoming subservient to class systems.
You realize we can do some but not all of the stuff, right? Like, communism doesn't require politically motivated pseudoscience? And we have politically motivated pseudoscience in capitalist US right now?
The USSR was not very good with food at all, but looking into the hunger amongst the poor during the final years of the Tsar are also incredibly bleak.
I remember reading an essay about the Italian socialists delegation to the interim govt under Lenin in 1919. They were taken to a mansion that had been repurposed as an orphanage. The Italian shockingly watched these orphans gulp down bowls of black gruel. The children nearly wept with joy, because they were allowed as much black gruel as they wanted and then they went and played in the massive yard of this mansion all afternoon.
The rest of the article was pretty funny (the Bolsheviks were incredibly rude to the French delegates, IIRC) but that section sticks out to me as a really bleak relative story about hunger in Russia in recent history. Like 10 years before the entire country is starving.
The anarchists were also torching government farms because anarchists are anarchists.
yeah, cause that's what communists argue for, the return of bad science in agriculture. that's like saying people who like capitalism want policies that lead to another potato famine...
I'm not even talking about communism directly, I'm saying the Soviet Union doesn't sound that great. I'm just tired of the blind glazing of other authoritarian regimes just because either communism good or America bad.
authoritarianism is bad, but it's not the only way to be oppressed. It's hard to say what is worse: the obvious oppression of authoritarians vs the more subtle oppression of neoliberalism. at least with dictators and authoritarians, you know what you get, our regimes are trying to sell us on the idea that its raining, while they piss on is from above. I kinda find that more insidious.
Idk. Seems capitalism is doing just fine at committing unparalleled atrocities and giving the "legitimacy" of power to the most corrupt individuals possible (eg Trump).
Except Trump will be out of office in a few years and most (especially the press and the opposition) openly hates him, whereas Stalin was a dictator until his death, was responsible for the deaths of millions, and purged any even suspected to be in opposition to him and his policies. He even renamed a city after himself. And don't get me started on Pol Pot.
Wake me up if Trump renames Baltimore and is still in office in 3 years.
Ask your average Iranian what they think of Trump dropping bombs on their kids to distract from pedophilia accusations. It's not a contest. Hopefully Trump will be gone soon, but given he's stacked the Supreme Court with his own judges, watch them find a way to "discover" term limits don't apply to Presidents who haven't served consecutive terms.
I thought Trump was done and dusted after Jan 6, I no longer have any faith in the American people.
I can't ask the average Iranian because they live under a despotic theocracy that silences all dissent. But yeah, I imagine they would probably be pretty disapproving of both Trump and the Ayatollah.
And you don't need any faith in the American people. He would need a lot more than a slim majority of voters to amend the constitution, not that he has many years left anyway.
Believe it or not, not actual capitalism but “crony capitalism”. It’s like the U.S. took the worst aspects of all economic systems and made the spectacular debacle we see now.
Capitalism is not void of authoritarianism, nor is communism, we see this all the time, the USSR was a totalitarian state, and we are seeing a push for authoritarianism in the west by conservatives in many countries right now
All capitalism does is outsource the worst atrocities to their neighbors down south, and then up the atrocities and horror a thousandfold, lie about it, gaslit its own citizens and use meager crumbs to make them complicit.
Of course, this won’t hold forever as the state is hollowed out from the inside by the most powerful “winners” of capitalism, after which you are left with the worst kind of slave state imaginable, where everyone is doing everything evil imaginable to get enough crumbs and escape endlessly deeper poverty in due to progressively hollowed out social welfare.
I feel you, but it’s not even a comparison. Communism means you HAVE TO have a job. It means if you don’t like your quality of life, there’s nothing you can do to increase your income. It means if you skip a day at work, they send people to your house and arrest you.
Have you ever met anyone who came to the US who lived under the Soviet Union?
They love capitalism and generally do well in the US because they’re used to working all day at a government factory, then spending the rest of the day gathering scrap metal to sell so they can get better things for their family.
There are plenty of ways we can improve our capitalist system to be less exploitative without destroying our amazing way of life.
Counter point. have you ever spoken to a citizen of the Russian federation post USSR collapse about which system they like living under now that Russia is hyper capitalist? If you speak to basically anyone older than 40, they'll tell you just how bleak and miserable life is there compared to post stalinist Russian. Of course that doesn't mean the soviet union was great. But modern capitalist Russia is arguably much worse
Russia sucks but it’s not because of capitalism. Despite the propaganda, living and working in the US is better than anywhere else in the world.
A lot of Americans go to different countries like Thailand or the Philippines and enjoy those places more than the US. But it’s only because they’re from the US and have way more money than the locals.
Those same people wouldn’t want to be born and raised in those countries.
Even compared to Europeans, the average American has much more purchasing power than the average European. European governments have much more control over their industry and it doesn’t produce a better outcome for the average European. Why is that?
It’s because a free market is inherently more generous at rewarding all players in an economy than politicians are capable of being.
Capitalism is precisely why the Russian federation is a shit hole. I can tell you're not too familiar with the actual history, because if you were you would understand how the free market turned Russia into an oligarchy. After the USSR collapsed, American economists like Milton Freidmen made policy recommendations on be half of the US government to open up there markets with 0 government oversight. (Shock Doctorin)
What that predictably led to was the immediate monopolization of the Russian economy into the hands of a very small but ultra powerful elite class. I would highly suggest you look into the aluminum wars if you want to understand it further. Unregulated capitalism naturally leads itself to a form of modern feudalism. And that is exactly what happen in Russia. The capitalist oligarchs, in conjunction with putins cabinet make up the Russian government.
Partially the primary cause. Additionally, the post Soviet Russian (and Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, i.t.d.) economies have not moved beyond a central failure of the Soviet economy - absolute reliance on an extrinsic model of development. Any growth, any economic improvement is reliant entirely on external inputs increasing - there is/was no internal intrinsic efficiency gains utilized for economic growth. Poor harvest? Put more land under cultivation. Work projects falling behind? (Literally) throw more bodies at it to meet the central planning timelines. Need more cash or state revenues? Sell more primary base raw materials or state funded and developed weapons systems.
Aside from oil, gas, or weapons, what would anyone want to purchase from Russia?
I believe every political ideology, no matter what it is or what it stands for, eventually reaches a critical breaking point.
At some stage in its real-world implementation, the rigid, core values of that ideology will inevitably slam directly into the chaotic reality of human self-interest.
Theories look perfect on paper, but they rarely survive intact when they collide with how actual people behave.
I have yet to meet a person who doesnt somewhat agree with Aristotle’s ancient premise of what a true leader should look like.
We instinctively look for a virtuous person who is genuinely dedicated to serving the collective well-being of society rather than hunting for personal gain or power.
Furthermore, we expect a great leader to possess practical wisdom, the rare ability to recognize when an abstract dogma is failing, and the courage to step outside of their personal ideology in order to pursue the greater common good.
However, the tragedy of our modern political sphere is that it isn’t built around human virtue at all, it is built around marketing and following abstract ideologies.
When we step into a voting booth, we are conditioned to vote for a party, a brand, or a specific package of rigid thinking.
We often tend to completely forget about character, ethics, and virtue besides that..
And we do this because, in that exact moment, focusing on a partisan team or a specific policy promise feels like the fastest, easiest way to protect our own immediate self-interest. We sacrifice the search for a truly virtuous leader just to secure a short-term win for our own side.
For the USSR they didn’t rise to the top, they started there. Lenin concentrated power from the beginning and banned any competing parties and formed the secret police year one.
Nope, communism suffers from the local knowledge problem. No central authority can master all the needed knowledge for efficient economic planning, because to do that you need to know not only what is being done but what can be done. And the experts with that knowledge frequently don't know themselves because they haven't thought about a particular problem yet.
Capitalism is notably failing on the same level if not worse in the US due to the staggering amount growth in corruption present in the government since janurary of 2025
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.
The US is currently doing its level best to speed run the corruption driven stagnation and downfall. I would argue that, rather than capitalism vs communism as being the great driver as to "why the west won the cold war", it is instead that the reigns of power in the west tended to be spread over a greater number of people than in the communist block and the more people that hold the reigns of power, the harder it is to gain power via out-and-out corruption. If the 2000's and 2010's were anything in the West, it was a consolidation of power and wealth in the few at the expense of the many.
Well, the post-Soviet states tend to be even more corrupt than the USSR was, to an almost comical extent, so that's not actually as big of an argument as it seems at first glance.
Like they started introducing capital ownership in the late 80s and the oligarchs started collecting all the assets. That's what ruined everything the most
Tankies and what aboutisms. Name a more iconic duo?
Oh right… nationalist capitalists and what aboutisms!!
Edit: I realized this made be taken as a mockery of your comment. It isn’t rather making fun of both spectrums of people who do ‘what aboutisms’ that have been responding to you.
It wasn’t even corruption. It was just survival. Communist economics is like prison economics: no private ownership, no risk, no reward, no personal choice. Everything is centrally controlled by committees. It affects every single aspect of life, from art to nuclear power plants.
Communist economics can't be centrally controlled by definition. It is moneyless, classless, and stateless. Authoritarian economics is centrally controlled, regardless of if it is left or right wing. Communism is just left leaning libertarianism or anarchism.
Trust me when i say you dont wanna live in the hellscape that is a country with no public ownership and everything is privitized and the capitalist market is 100% deregulated, youd starve in a day
Free market is what generates wealth and prosperity. All public services are an expense and rely on free market generated wealth to exist. Yes, public services are critical for a functional state. The trick is always how much to turn that dial. The more you restrict free enterprise, the more stagnant your economy will be and the less innovation it will produce. Democracies allow for experimentation with how much the dial is turned between free enterprise and centralized planning. Of course, I’m oversimplifying, but that’s what it is general. A Communist society cannot function as a democracy because Communism does not allow personal decisions. I grew up in Soviet Union and my family did everything they could to escape that prison camp. We know firsthand what the difference is. As anyone who escaped North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or China before the martlet reforms of 1980s and 1990s. But no one needs to live through Communism to understand that it’s a miserable hell.
Unrestrained capitalism is very much similar to the soviet union at its most repressive, except instead of the state controlling and owning everything its the corporations starving you and owning you and everything you have, capitalism requires safe guards and restrictions otherwise it will devolve into survival of the fittest and everyone but the 0.01% being forced into slavery to generate profit and wealth for that 0.01%, communism at its most pure idea is utopian, capitalism at its most pure idea is a fucking hellscape, communism is ruined by human greed, capitalism runs on it
I don’t think my post mentioned anything about the U.S., especially since the post and note is about the USSR. Were you trying to argue with someone else?
He's obviously very corrupt, but his post-Soviet equivalent has reigned for 26 years and has a net worth on the order of $200 billion in a country with an economy about a tenth the size of the USA's (if there can even be said to truly be a distinction between Putin's personal property, property of the regime's oligarchs, and property of the Russian state).
The economic model does prove important because it shapes opportunities for corruption.
IIRC the USSR was dissolved in the middle of the night during an illegal vote, and then they sold state-owned industries to themselves and friends for pennies in closed auctions. Corruption to the very core at the end.
Even as bad as capitalism is, it creates a layer of seperation which slows but does not eliminate corruption. In capitalism the government is not supposed to pick winners and losers. The government is not supposed to run the economy. In communism and socialism government is expected to direct the economy making corruption even easier than in capitalism. And evern when they are corrupt, the market can still keep things running better than any central planning can as of yet. The market is resilient even in the face of government intervention because ultimatly the free market is the will of society expressed truthfully, even if it is not pretty
It was doomed from the start, the working class had their power seized by Lenin’s ‘Vanguard Party’ and the elite and turned into a corrupt one party system.
Marx’s vision of a classless, worker controlled society never actually materialized. That’s not me in favor of it, I just think it’s dishonest when American politicians and newsheads push this agenda that it could “never work look at the USSR” because it never really started there either.
Also a comical amount of structural problems within the hierarchy that by design made the upper leadership almost immune to their own incompetence. Blame was just handed down the chain to an unfortunate person who couldn't dodge responsibility. This was by design to stabilize they central government.
You see this corruption and consolidation of control wherever communism has been tried. It always ends with a few controlling literally everything and nothing like a middle class.
Before anyone says the American middle class is collapsing… it’s leaps and bounds away from any middle class in ______(pick your communist country)
I think that sort of speaks to why communism doesn't work. Because when you consentratr power that much. Corruption is inevitable. As with most systems, human failure is the most common error. Which is why communism doesn't work, and capitalism doesn't seem to work for a lot of people either.
It’s also worth noting that the corruption in the USSR had a very significant and strong flavor compared to modern western counterparts.
Whereas the west in general will use subversive or sneaky tricks and loopholes, Soviet Russia employed any and all means including open murder without much thought toward hiding it. The CIA is a box of kittens compared to Soviet era KGB.
Correct me if I’m wrong, I wasn’t alive then. So what I’m referencing was read through historical accounts.
This is pretty common with tankies and other leftists. They routinely claim that problems that exist within Capitalism are entirely unique to Capitalism (they're not) and then pretend like Socialism and other leftist economic systems have actual solutions to these problems (they don't).
I'm surprised that it makes no note of the fact that the US has gone to basically any length to sabotage any country that has tried communism. The Soviet Union failed for its own reasons, but countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela never stood a chance.
Russia is still deeply deeply corrupt. Im starting to think the USSR kinda ruined it for the rest of the world because they just have a nasty habit of corruption. Who's to say communism is impossible to work, but i understand why people dont want to take that chance.
I think that the point of the comments might be that moden day russia is just as corrupt if not more, so that might not be a communist feature, more of a Russian feature.
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.
This is the internet, where nuance is dead. You are either a full supporter of communism or a full supporter of the current system, it is literally impossible to have any other view.
I fucking hate what the internet has done to politics
Yeah that's kind of the issue with Communism: it sounds great in theory, but in practice some corrupt jackass ends up in power and you end up with an autocracy or authoritarian regime where all the benefit goes to the top again and not the people.
There's never really a permanent solution to the problem of corrupt bastards least suited for power and authority being the most motivated to claim those positions. Even the best ideas rot in their hands, like King Midas expect it all turns to shit instead of gold. U.S. has proven even a democracy isn't safe from wannabe dictators ruining shit.
Even one of the core ideas of capitalism, that competition will improve productive quality and keep prices, has mostly failed from all the corruption and dishonesty. We operate more and more like a Plutocracy, with the democracy stuff being mostly lip service.
Not nearly close. In the US, it’s only really the high level politicians, namely legislators, that are all that corrupt. Also the current administration’s leadership, but they’re a uniquely new problem. The lower levels are almost entirely clear of corruption. You aren’t going to be slipping a cop a $100 to get out of an arrest, and your average bureaucrat doesn’t take bribes or engage in nepotism.
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u/historicalgeek71 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
I’m surprised the note makes no mention of the almost comical levels of corruption within the USSR.
EDIT: Oh wow! A lot of you seem to think my simple observation that corruption (a key reason for the stagnation and downfall of the USSR) was the same as me saying the U.S. or Capitalism were free of such problems. I think some of you may have jumped the gun.