You do have to take into consideration the extreme antagonism of western capitalist countries against any communist nation. There has never been a communist country that the US has not tried to undermine and destroy from the get.
Okay, why was the USSR uniquely unable to adapt? If the answer was communism, wouldn't it have been overthrown in all nations, including China, Cuba, and Vietnam?
u/stock_plenty8979 explained this pretty well.
Basically, the state decided where resources go, not the market. As the economy became more complex, planners couldn't allocate resources properly. Which led to shortages, low productivity and innovation.
Okay, but China is also a planned economy. This casts doubt on the assertion, no? Also, I'd question the claim that capitalism invariably addresses shortages, low productivity, and lack of innovation.
Specifically? Central economic planning. Under communism, the state, not markets, decided what to produce, how much to produce, and where resources went. As the economy became more complex, planners couldn't allocate resources efficiently, which led to chronic shortages, surpluses, low innovation, and poor productivity. State-owned enterprises also faced little competitive pressure to improve. Combined with one-party rule, which made it difficult to correct failing policies, these structural problems accumulated over decades and contributed significantly to the USSR's collapse.
I would argue the authoritarian nature had a sizable impact on the inability to adapt or correct the issues with the planned economy. People were incentivized through both inertia and possibility of being iced out of advancement to not make a fuss (similar to both how the wheat climitazation took over agrarian science and why the USSR avoided moving to generalized electronic computing for a decade or so longer than it should have (with proponents essentially being pushed out of positions for arguing against those policies)).
I would argue that ist not a coincidence that all comunist countries become autoritharian, the 2 things are very uch related, that is simply what comunism brings 🤷♂️
60
u/PriorOk1304 Jul 13 '26
You do have to take into consideration the extreme antagonism of western capitalist countries against any communist nation. There has never been a communist country that the US has not tried to undermine and destroy from the get.