Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The first reason was the Soviet government’s authoritarianism.
✏️ The first reason for Soviet’s failed attempt at socialism. 🔗 View Highlight
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Democracy under capitalism is a shallow thing: it stops at the door of the workplace, and no one can claim with a straight face that ordinary workers exert as much influence on the political process as wealthy CEOs
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Socialism’s promise was always to deepen democracy by extending to the economy. Even at the height of the Khrushchev Thaw, though, the USSR was a repressive one-party state. Stalin may have been a unique monster, but any system in which a monster can accumulate that much power has much bigger problems.
✏️ The promise of socialism maintains its extension to the economy, but the USSR reality didn’t achieve that and instead depicted authoritarian power grabbing. 🔗 View Highlight
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The second problem, which became increasingly obvious as the decades wore on, was that the centrally planned Soviet economy was dysfunctional. It was “all thumbs and no fingers” — good at mass producing tractors and tanks during the period of rapid industrialization, but very bad at aligning production with consumer preferences.
✏️ The second reason for the failure. 🔗 View Highlight
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experienced the paucity, shoddiness and uniformity of their goods not merely as inconveniences; they experienced them as violations of their basic rights.” This is a major reason why so few workers had any interest in lifting a finger to defend the “workers state” when the system was starting to wobble.
✏️ Elaborating on the second reason, if you do the bare minimum for your people, it will have repercussions. 🔗 View Highlight
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Under capitalism, private business owners compete with each other for profits while the majority of the working population has little choice but to sell their working hours to one capitalist or another. Historically, socialists have sought to end the division of society into capitalists and workers through some form of collective ownership, and most socialists have thought this would involve the replacement of market competition with rational planning.
✏️ The ideal of socialism historically 🔗 View Highlight
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hardly anyone thought that the Soviet experiment in economic planning was a success. Many socialists simply abandoned their ideals, now convinced that socialism of any kind was “impossible to realize, or virtually impossible, or anyway something they can no longer summon the energy to fight for.”
✏️ When the Soviet experiment failed, people reacted with fully abandoning their ideals, or modifying them to encompass some form of capitalism within the socialism. 🔗 View Highlight
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Others sought to separate the goal of empowering workers through collective ownership from the goal of replacing markets with planning. Giving up on the latter, they held onto the former and advocated some form of “market socialism.”
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Even so, the variability in individual talents, the variability of productivity between different economic sectors, and so on would guarantee that some people would earn significantly less than others through no fault of their own. So even this kind of socialism, Cohen thought, would be “second best” to the North Star of a socialist society in which markets wouldn’t play any role.
✏️ Market socialism is a step, but still not ideal. 🔗 View Highlight