this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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I can imagine plenty of viable alternatives. There's plenty of arguments to be made that the USSR was just as productive as the US on a per capita basis. They addressed the productivity issues of decentralized socialism through centralization.
The issue comes down to the lack of dissent within the system. Private ownership provides a natural counterbalance to the power of the state. Even in the most ideal of democratic socialist systems, there is no functional check on the power of the majority to vote in their own benefit over minorities. Every government system regardless of its economic base has resulted in rapid expansion without a check on power, internally or externally.
You are right that I cannot imagine a viable alternative. Neither can you. You just think you have but have not addressed the core power problem. Mark Fisher is great at framing away this issue but it still exists and is the core issue with true leftist ideologies.
Actually the reason USSR failed was the state itself not being very agile. Different state entities would impede each other while fighting for funds, for their project to become standard (the competing projects would become standards as well, there'd be plenty of incompatible standards), for them to be more politically important (Politburo wasn't a dictatorial institution).
Naturally in such a climate any cooperation between state entities would involve more complex and obscure diplomacy and deals than how it happens between companies in typical market economies.
So this:
is the opposite of reality. Productivity was USSR's weakest side. It really honestly succeeded in some unexpected aspects, but efficiency is not one of them.
So, I agree. Decentralization of the Soviets was immensely worse early after the revolution though so they centralized early. The CCP early in its creation had the same criticisms of the USSR resulting in a much longer attempt at decentralization and actual famine.
If NEP is what you mean by "decentralization" (because nothing else makes sense even remotely, Soviets by definition are a vertical structure, like a tree with its root being the center), then it's generally accepted that NEP was the thing which allowed to restore Soviet Russia from a famished wasteland after the Civil War.
They had almost a decade of slowly pushing out communist dissenters out of the political field (all non-communist leftists were already banned closer to the end of the Civil War, and the rest - hahaha), which may give you the wrong impression. However, they were heavily centralized from day one. That was part of the ideology. It's not some European leftists we are talking about.
For these people political competitiveness or pluralism or due process in courts or human rights were not high on the list of priorities. Building industries to arm heavily and "spread the revolution" was.
Their ideal was some sort of a communist version of the German Empire.
Otherwise pretty basic points that any decent book on socialism or alternatives to capitalism basically addresses in the first chapter.
Basic points that I have never seen in any book on socialism and you are yet to provide. Maybe you should be the one reading more instead of vaguely suggesting that I do. Maybe then you could provide them.
I mean the most introductory book Blackcoats and Reds deals a lot with this and there's a whole chapter on the weaknesses of stable socialist/ML states. Whatever you think is stable or good under a capitalist government is merely because the negatives you associate specifically with socialism are exported, but are actually far more severe.
I'm going through this one now, it's framed as a thought experiment for a bottom up society: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p-m-bolo-bolo
This thought experiment is based on an unrealistic view not only of natural history but also of the human condition and modern economics. It is based on a view of how easy the perceived human condition was before the existence of larger society.
"In prehistoric times our deal seems to have been not so bad. During the Old Stone Age (50,000 years ago) we were only few, food (game and plants) was abundant, and survival required only little working time and moderate efforts."
This period of hunter-gatherers was largely the experience of 90% of the time looking for food. It was only the emergence of sustained and coordinated agriculture requiring public works that this started to change. Modern industrialized agriculture has enabled populations not sustainable in that text and requires a larger coordination of people than a small commune can support. That text does not cover larger governance and relies on high-output lands to sustain itself, let alone others. If you cannot enable specialization, you cannot scale nor can you provide the lifestyle people are accustomed to enjoying post-WWII.
There are already communes like this everywhere and nobody is saying that you cannot start one. The only issue is people trying to force others into this system. It starts based on oppression regardless of feasibility.
It does cover how larger industry would be coordinated, it is not advocating for communes. Feel like we're reading two different things...