Foreign Exchange Student, Bodoe, Norway 78/79;
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 81/82,
Norwegian and Russian Language and Literature
Posted on 04/15/2006 4:04:50 AM PDT by wotan
Maybe, it makes a difference who is doing the commanding. Soviet communism promoted for party loyalty. That does not produce managerial genius. Also, totalitarian oppression that outlaws any private economic activity gives it a do or die quality. The current economic expansion in China began with just relaxing that rule in dire circumstances.
Undoubtedly.
Over time, the quality of the leadership tends to decline, but this can be interrupted by "palace" revolutions, etc.
The state expires however when confronted by changing circumstances. Before reading this article, I had pretty much assumed it was the widening technological gap and Reagan's military pressure that caused the collapse. I was unaware of the decline in oil production. This last may have been the precipitating event. The superiority of the US military then ensured that the economic collapse would cause political collapse rather than lead to Soviet attempts to solve their resource problem by, say, invading Iran.
Don't forget one little fact: OPEC cut oil prices by huge amounts and with the USSR a major exporter, their one major source of funds dried up and left the country bankrupt. I know this sounds like heresy, but Reagan only helped with their demise.
"then why did it last in one form or another for over 70 years in Russia and the Soviet Union before it finally died. Did it last so long because inherently it provides a good economic system or did it last so long because inherently it was not as inefficient as we are made to believe"
What a piece of ####. It lasted so long because anyone, who openly criticized It was seriously spanked by the system. In a democratic country, even If people somehow chose that by mistake, they would crash It a few months later.
The Soviet Union existed as a Dictatorship and personality cult of Josef Stalin.
When Stalin died it was pretty much a downhill ride from there since no subsequent Soviet Leader had the personal approval of the people to the extent that the people would sacrifice.
I can see only one tenable answer: Communism survived because of the intellectual and spiritual weakness of the West. NickFlooding (post 10) is on the right track, but we need to go deeper. The author is certainly wrong in saying that Communism was inherently not as inefficient (a polite word) as we were led to believe. On the contrary, almost all sources exaggerated the economic strength of Communism and minimized its deficiencies (certainly this was true of the CIA's findings). When writers like Solzhenitsyn and Conquest presented a more realistic view, the "right-thinking" discounted their reports.
On another point: the article observes (and I believe this) that the price of oil in the Soviet bloc was artificially set much lower than the free-market price. If this were to happen in a predominantly free economy (as it did in the U.S. in the 1970s) oil production would fall automatically (as it did). Of course it is different in a totalitarian system; but no amount of coercion will make it possible to produce without capital. If, as I gather, the Soviet oil industry was systematically starved of capital, then the eventual collapse of oil production was inevitable. That it did happen only confirms that Communism, in the long run, cannot work. If the crisis had not come in the oil industry, then it would have come in some other way.
Government economic policy and the policies of controling financial institutions (like central banks and investment exchanges) generally attempt to accommodate small changes in the present, but to put off adjustment to large changes to the future.
It is not clear whether a "free market" or a "command economy" are more durable. The Soviet experiment is not a good model, because they had such primitive information technology with which to plan and implement the controls.
Advances in information technology, a better understanding of the political and sociological tasks involved with control, and modern techniques for shaping public opinion through direct and indirect means all provide much better tools for running a planned economy.
"The quote may not be obviously true, but it is certainly not obviously false."
True enough but one outcome is guranteed.
Thank you, very good points.
Obviously the collapse of the Soviet Bloc started long before the Gulf War. However, the rapid defeat of the Soviet-armed Iraqi Forces was an important factor in the final demise of the Soviet ruling class and probably had a lot to do with the failure of the coup attempt of August 1991.
I don't know if Russia collapsed properly (Putin). We got lazy and did not follow up after 1991, this is mostly Clinton's fault.
Russia and China abandoned most of their command economies, Vietnam, Cuba and even North Korea (yes, Kim John Il has SOME sense) are in the process of abandoning theirs.
Pong
He lost me with this illogical mental back-flip.
Only a moron would propose that question.
If Marxist-Leninist Communism was efficient,
they would be US and we would be them.
Murder Bill Gates, put one of his shipping
clerks in charge of Microsoft and see how
many people starve.
Worth noting Bill Casey's job description in the OSS during WWII: developing and implementing an economic warfare plan against Nazi Germany. I'm given to understand that Casey practically invented the discipline, at least the intelligence side of it.
One of the first and most important things Casey did when he took over the CIA was to develop intelligence sources on the Soviet economy, something the CIA had either ignored previously, or had settled for flawed information.
Casey found that the Soviet economy was much weaker than previously believed, and he attacked it at its weakest points. Oil was indeed a major focus. Among other things Casey worked (and sought coordination from overt administration strategy as well) to deny the Soviets hard-rock drilling equipment from the West which they could not produce themselves, and to scuttle the development of a pipeline which would have brought Soviet oil directly to European markets.
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Because they had the guns, the secret police and were brutal.
Foreign Exchange Student, Bodoe, Norway 78/79;
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 81/82,
Norwegian and Russian Language and Literature
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