solzhesnitchin posted:

they weren't communist enough. their economic systems used market based capitalist pricing methods and firm structures that were incompatible with communism, and never allowed it to reach its full potential.

i think that's what i read here, anyway

that was a really divisive issue back during the 60s but strict value accounting without pricing is kinda nonsensical as you dont have accessible methods of opportunity cost. you can find some value comparison between a ton of steel and wheat, and some cost in man-hours, but it doesn't correlate to economic pressures that produce cost - despite this being a non-market system.

the problem is now how do you do cost estimation without a market telling you what demand is? the structure of bureaucracy needed to do so, it's delay with respect to market behavior and then delay in industry to meet these demands is far less efficient than free/open market systems when consumers make purchasing decisions.

IMHO costing, thus price, is a necessary for quantitative economic command - but the soviet system didn't really create an institution that could understand demand and then translate that to meaningful costs and then translate those to production plans and quotas. there's some error and waste at every juncture from information gathering from consumers, to gosplan, to the production, the logistical support (which produces some of the most bizzare stories of empty trains, etc), and down to consumption.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

and why did these societies so readily and seemingly inevitably revert to nationalism upon it's collapse?

the degeneration of the bureaucracy that was established in the USSR after Lenin's death to cope with the fact that they were going to be invaded in the near future by some imperialist power and needed national unity, a professional military, and a centralized (as opposed to the decentralized Chinese style peasant communes that were experimented with but eventually abandoned as border skirmishes with the USSR threatened the PRC) economy.

imho, short form; the hegemony of capitalism isolated and destroyed the worker's republic that was being established in russia and degenerated that state into something else

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Groulxsmith posted:

Appeals to your heritage and your community's values rather obviously provide a sense of worth that some artificially decreed universalism simply benefitting bureaucrats 2000 km away, sharing neither your faith nor language, could never match

This definitely seems a big part of it, coupled with the fact that the centre of the USSR would fatten itself on the resources of the periphery while giving them little in return; a situation which seemingly happens under both communist and capitalist variants of imperialism.

If this is true how come literacy, poverty, life expectancy, employment etc where all significantly better in the constituent SSR than in capitalist periphery states reaching close to parity with the Russian SSR in the late 70's/early 80's m8? That seems like a really retarded comparison even if there was resource exploitation.

Lykourgos posted:

Every society stands or falls on the quality of its gentlemen. Communists make terrible gentlemen.

what about the quality of a society's gentlemen's clubs? are they not a factor as well?


the one near my place called headlights has a no c-section scar guarantee posted on the front door. with rules like those, i'd say our society is on firm standing

Panopticon posted:

when adam delved and eve span, who was then the gentleman?

how are people failing to upvote this quote?

Noosphere posted:

Panopticon posted:

when adam delved and eve span, who was then the gentleman?

how are people failing to upvote this quote?

probably it being a biblical reference

but i like pre-capitalist peasants struggles

babyfinland posted:

have u read carlo ginzburgs stuff

nope what work of his would you recommend

babyfinland posted:

Panopticon posted:
babyfinland posted:
have u read carlo ginzburgs stuff
nope what work of his would you recommend


the night battles specifically deals with some witches/witch-hunters and their relevancy to 17th C peasant uprisings in central europe

the cheese and the worms isn't so relevant to uprisings but it's kind of a fun look at a lay person's cosmology in the 16th C

you might also check out montaillou if u havent read that already, an extremely detailed historical ethnography of sorts of a 14th C heretical french village, including all the personal relationships, conversations and ideologies etc that were floating around

fun stuff, mostly garnered from inquisitional records

know where to get The Cheese and the Worms as a pdf?
i asked my library to get it on loan but that could take weeks
aaaaarg is coming up empty

Noosphere posted:

babyfinland posted:

Panopticon posted:
babyfinland posted:
have u read carlo ginzburgs stuff
nope what work of his would you recommend


the night battles specifically deals with some witches/witch-hunters and their relevancy to 17th C peasant uprisings in central europe

the cheese and the worms isn't so relevant to uprisings but it's kind of a fun look at a lay person's cosmology in the 16th C

you might also check out montaillou if u havent read that already, an extremely detailed historical ethnography of sorts of a 14th C heretical french village, including all the personal relationships, conversations and ideologies etc that were floating around

fun stuff, mostly garnered from inquisitional records

know where to get The Cheese and the Worms as a pdf?
i asked my library to get it on loan but that could take weeks
aaaaarg is coming up empty

i do not sorry

you can probably find very cheap copies on half.com

babyfinland posted:

Panopticon posted:

babyfinland posted:

have u read carlo ginzburgs stuff

nope what work of his would you recommend

the night battles specifically deals with some witches/witch-hunters and their relevancy to 17th C peasant uprisings in central europe

the cheese and the worms isn't so relevant to uprisings but it's kind of a fun look at a lay person's cosmology in the 16th C

you might also check out montaillou if u havent read that already, an extremely detailed historical ethnography of sorts of a 14th C heretical french village, including all the personal relationships, conversations and ideologies etc that were floating around

fun stuff, mostly garnered from inquisitional records

if you dig carlo ginzburg you should also read a midwife's tale

babyhueypnewton posted:

This discussion is very undialectical.

So?

We can't just say the Soviet economy didn't work well or that planning was inefficient. Inefficient compared to whom? For what purpose? Why is efficiency something we should be striving for? Of course bourgeois economics are going to use bourgeois economic categories to judge the USSR and of course they will fail.

Yeah, we can because the title of the thread is "Why did state communism collapse in the late 80s."

hth

babyfinland posted:

On May 17, 1991, the host of an extremely popular TV program about culture and history, “The Fifth Wheel” (Piatoe koleso), that had a national audience of several million viewers, 15 introduced his guest as a famous political figure, historian and movie actor. The guest was Sergei Kuryokhin, whom we encountered in our first example above but who was then still unknown to most viewers in the Soviet Union. After the introduction, Kuryokhin conducted a brilliant 1.5-hour lecture in front of the TV cameras about some previously unknown secrets of Lenin’s nature and their role in the Bolshevik revolution. Kuryokhin turned to his favorite style: he spoke in an earnest and serious tone, using the method of overidentification with the dominant discourse, while pushing the meaning of what he was saying to its most extraordinary limits. By that time, Kuryokhin had honed his skills in this genre to such perfection that uninitiated viewers could not discern any signs of a provocation.

Kuryokhin started by saying that he had just returned from Mexico where he studied the influence of hallucinogenic substances on social revolutions. Quoting from published memoirs, scholarly books, and other literary sources (as he pulled books from an impressive library behind him), Kuryokhin explained that Lenin and his revolutionary comrades were great lovers of the wild mushrooms that grow in Russian forests. After that, showing excerpts of previously recorded inter- views with mycologists and botanists about mushrooms, Kuryokhin explained that many Russian mushrooms, such as the fly agaric mushroom affect consciousness as strongly as the famous Mexican hallucinogenic cactus, Lophophora Williamsii. He added his own “research finding”: if an individual regularly consumes these mush- rooms for many years, that individual’s personality becomes gradually displaced by the personality of a mushroom. Kuryokhin then made his famous claim: “I have absolutely irrefutable evidence that the October Revolution was carried out by people who for many years had been consuming certain mushrooms. And in the process of being consumed by these people, the mushrooms displaced their personality. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.”

kuryokhin rules. he was probably the most important improvising musician (other than the ganelin trio's members) in the ussr and even though some of the pop mechanics stuff suffers from terminal bloat, it's adorable in the way that vaclav havel's faves, plastic people of the universe, were adorable. unlike plastic people, though, kuryokhin actually made good music on occasion