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Soon (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

The USSR wasn't an Empire, which played into that. Further, the reforms it introduced weren't because it opened up too late, but because they played against the socialist system of planning. The PRC's approach to economic reform retained full state control and is focused on unity, rather than disunity, which is why it's working.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Neither is US. The empire reference is related to the imperialist state policies. Not the same but similar to that was the policies of USSR with other countries of the Soviet block and what Kzar Putin is trying to do with th Baltic's today.

    Your point of view about the Glasnost, Perestroika and consequently the dissolution seems more from the structuralist point of view (which is valid and revelvant for the dissolution), while my argument is more from the economic point of view.

    In a very pragmatic way, the closed economy model of USSR imposed many of the issues that deepened the structural problems (like you mentioned) and accelerated the dissolution. Based on Gorbachev own opinion, the Chernobyl disaster was the start of the dissolution: combination of a repressive internal policy creating a fertile environment for corruption, burocracy and inneficiency, together with an outdated industry caused by isolationism.

    US seems to be doing the same: closing its economy, negationism, losing diplomatic relevance, ...

    Although a completely imbecile, Elon is right in one point: there is only one party in US right now, and it is not even remotely aligned with what the Americans need/desire. Same type of structural corrosion that brought the Soviet block to dissolution.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The US is absolutely an Empire, it practices imperialism, by which it extracts vast wealth from the global south. The USSR didn't do that.

    Further, I'm absolutely focused on economics. The Soviet economy slowed, but was still growing. The dissolution of the USSR was multifaceted, complex, and not boiled down to one failure. Further, its conditions are entirely different from the US, which is a decaying Empire, the fruits of imperialism are diminishing and disparity is rising.

    I'm a Marxist-Leninist, economics are core to my analysis.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Saying that USSR didn't extract wealth from other countries in the block, treating them as colonies is a huge stretch. All the political control was crntralized in Moskow, Russia promoted a vast resource extraction, specially from Ukraine, imposed language suppression, cultural assimilation and demographic engineering e.g. Holodomor.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    No, this is wrong.

    1. The Soviet economic system was federated and planned. The political control in Moscow wasn't absolute by any stretch.

    2. The various Soviet Republics were not colonies, not by any stretch. Resources and goods were shipped around the whole system as needed, not just imported into Moscow.

    3. There was no forcible cultural assimilation. There was a huge effort to cultivate a soviet identity, but there wasn't an attempt to erase cultural identity. The famine in the 1930s was caused by natural causes, not "demographic engineering," grain was re-allocated to Ukraine once it was known that there were famine conditions. There was forcible re-allocation of various ethnic groups like Koreans, which did exist, but this isn't the same claim you made either in scope or character.

    So no. The USSR was not imperialist, not by the correct concept of imperialism as a form of international extraction, nor the vague "Soviet Bad" thing you tried to make it out to be.

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