The desire to own private property, and gain the fruits of your own labor are natural human instincts.
Which is something even communists generally agree on. Why should people work when the fruits of their labour go to those few capitalists? *wry smirk*
Communism is a aberration in human history. Being compelled to work for others, without benefitting from it is called slavery.
Marx agrees with you! Ever heard about '
wage slavery'?
In the Soviet Union you needed government permission to live in a location, take a job, or travel from one region to another, so you were unable to market your labor, you had to take what they wanted you to have, and be happy with it.
Let's seperate the police state with the command economy, here. It's quite possible to do so - China has done it
very well.
I'm going to focus on the job aspect as the only one relevant to this discussion. In fact, for most of the post-war USSR you could
not be forced to do whatever job They said. There were only two exceptions; #1 your 'first assignment' after completing further education [ie university] and #2 if you were
deliberately unemployed.
The first one was considered you 'paying back for your education'. That after this 'posting', you were then free to change jobs and/or locations. The second one was a means of stopping, basically freeloading on the welfare-net. And this wasn't actually
that bad because there was no mass unemployment and They wouldn't force you onto a crummy 'Workfare' BS.
Being weak, and isolated is no reason to terrorize your population into loyalty. The mindset of such governments are terroristic to begin with, since they don't accept the concept of individual rights against State interests during the best of times.
No, their mindset was
authortarian. In a country which was 85% peasant, mainly illiterate and with almost nil level of 'Western ideas' such as democracy, liberty and so on.
Taking care of your family, and seeing they have the best opportunities in life are also universal. In Communist countries the way to attain the things people want in life is joining the privileged ranks of the all powerful Party, which bestows all good things, and can just as quickly take them away.
And? Most capitalist countries operate in a similar manner, save 'the Party' is in fact 'the elite'. And this point is irrelevent to the discussion.
China no longer has State ownership of all means of production, because they understand how grossly inefficient that is, and now declare "It is glorious to be rich." But the State did not wither away, it instead determines who can be rich. In China all public officials, and the armed forces swear an oath not to the Nation, or the People, or the Constitution, but to the Communist Party. The death grip on power continues, without the high sounding rhetoric about "The dictatorship of the Preliterate." It least it's more honest.
I sorta agree. Which - if you actually
read my posts - I make the point repeatedly that the USSR would need to
reform to be able to deal with the demands of 'intensive' economic growth [which I'd say would be needed after c1960]. And there were methods of reforming which did
not involve the re-introduction of capitalism.
So just what was this "Crisis Point" that was coming, that they had to be prepared for? We know when it happened, but it could've happened sooner, or later, once everyone realized it was all BS, and the fear was gone. The crisis was actually precipitated by a failed Communist coup, so they struck the final blow themselves.
Same can be said right now. Anglo-Saxon capitalism is very close to a 'Crisis Point' of it's own. Simply stating 'it wouldn't work in the long run Just Because' is just
another form of historical determinism.
of the 9 oligarchs that stripped russia of money in the 1990s, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky, Pyotr Aven, Vladimir Vinogradov and Vitaly Malkin, literally, none worked in the USSR's government. This is an accusation floated around a lot that's holds little water.
#1: Pedantic point of the day; I believe Potanin was a scion of the nomenklatura and was about to join the Foreign Service when deciding not to. #2: I think the more general point was that a lot of the 'Red Directors' managed to make the transition to capitalism very well, often by basically turning control of their companies into
ownership.
As with Tirpitz's point about agriculture; yes the post-War Soviet production levels were
terrible. The communal farms were not only inefficient but after c1960 stopped even turning a profit to help pay for development. However, there were several major issues here;
#1: Going back to individual peasant holdings would - due to the lack of capital and know-how - cause production levels to slump.
#2: The state helping individual peasant holdings up production etc is basically, 'helping capitalism' and thus, politically impossible.
#3: The poor QoL for most rural folks led to a generational brain-drain. Most urbanites would pull strings to make sure their 'first posting' was not in such places [if they could].
#4: There was precious little incentive for the ruralites to produce more ag anyway. Sometimes, it actually
cost them money to produce more.
In this case, the best
non-capitalist option for development was one proposed in the 1960s; that the communal farms were broken down into units with no more than 30 full-time workers - that the size is large enough to take advantage of cooperation etc, but small enough for people to be held 'personally responsible' and to personally benefit from good work.
This, coupled with my earlier point of prices being utterly out of whack; if the farm can see a
direct benefit of increasing production / efficiency [the latter being the more important one] and are capable of doing so, they will. Part of the issue [discovered later] was that simply 'giving more money' wasn't enough; said money needed to be able to be
spent on stuff. There was often complaints that as late as the 1970s rural shops were almost empty. There's a solution for this; mail order. Allow every communal farm an account with one [with a cash order limit] thus ensuring that
some of the 'goodies' seen in urban shops do get into the 'backwoods'.