>>I think that is probably correct. The Soviet Union was quite successful in negotiating the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one but they ran aground when they attempted to make the transition to an economy based on high technology.<<
I don't buy it. Just look at the space station. It is being kept aloft and staffed by good, old, reliable, "Stalinist" Soviet tech; the "high tech" military-aerospace-industrial complex's Space Shuttle fleet has proved to be a boondoggle beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. It costs a half billion dollars or more for each space shuttle launch, that's more than $60 million a seat for the maximum design crew of eight. The Russians sell seats on the Soyuz for $20 million and that's about the complete cost of a mission. And of course Soyuz don't have the same kind of failure rate as the shuttle. That technology built and operated the MIR space station and its predecessors for a couple of decades and has been steadily refined and upgraded over the years. It forms the basis for the Chinese human space flight program and if it doesn't also become the basis for the "next generation" U.S. human space flight vehicle it will be because the U.S. has way too much money and way too little sense.
The irony is that the old Soviet Union's economy could comfortably afford to build and maintain the space station, despite the supposed economic crisis. The new capitalist Russia most decidedly cannot unless they have paying passengers which is why the Spaniard went on that last flight. It was not socialized property forms that caused the real economic crisis in the old empire of the tsars; it was the reintroduction of capitalism that trashed the economy and with it the standard of living and even life expectancy of working people.
As for making a successful transition to "high technology," just look at how the U.S. is doing it. There is virtually no production of consumer electronics left in the United States, nor of computer components save the CPU silicon.
It is said the U.S. is moving towards an "information economy." Well, you can't drive information, you can't eat information, you can't build houses out of information.
What the U.S. has been tending to keep are products where "intellectual property" -- government enforced monopolies -- guarantee such monstrous superprofits as to make direct manufacturing costs basically irrelevant. This includes all sorts of "cultural" production from vacuous corporate "strategic branding" advertising campaigns to even more vacuous movies and music.
A lot of American companies are being run on the idea that advertising and design are what gives products value. They all envy Steve Jobs. But there is a reason why Apple retains only a sliver of market share in computers. Jobs and his collaborators make way-cool toys for the boys, and there is lot of money to be made in the luxury products niche. But it is just that, a niche, an extremely narrow foundation for the world's biggest economy.
Each sliver of silicon with a dollar's worth of labor that Intel sells for $100 represents $99 that has been stolen from someone. Overwhelmingly that "someone" is the colonial and semicolonial world. The value is transferred through unequal exchange, the financial rape and looting of the third world, the "brain" drain (which is just a part of a much bigger "labor power" drain), predatory trade practices (subsidies, dumping, quotas, tariffs, etc.) and various other mechanisms.
The problem with the "information economy" is that information wants to be free. The more information becomes detached from traditional physical substrates and becomes trivially easy to copy and distribute, the more transparent this truth becomes. The free software foundations types want it to be "free as in freedom, not as in free beer," but it is quite transparent it wants to be free in *all* senses. The only way to prevent it is by restoring the status quo ante, i.e., by making it no longer trivially easy to copy and distribute information.
Thus we have Microsoft's Palladium project, corrupt audio disks, rights restricted rental ripoffs masquerading as Napster and all the rest of it. There's a bill been submitted to Congress by that copyright cartel lapdog Feinstein and some other witless bought-and-paid-for media monopoly stooge to make movie sharing on the Internet a felony. Like it's legal now, and the reason I keep having to add ever-larger hard drives every few months to my home network is that people haven't minded paying the $150,000 per file hit congress decreed for sharing files on the Internet in the mid-1990's. But the real solution is something like Microsoft's Digital Rights Management scheme, but on steroids. Re-engineering computers and the Internet so that only files verifiably authorized for it can be copied or shared. That's what the FCC just voted for in the field of High Definition TV. The theory is studios don't want to put high-def movies on over-the-air HDTV because of all the people with terabyte hard drives and gigabit internet connections would "pirate" the movies.
If applied universally, such schemes would, of course, be the end of computers and the internet as we know them, and they would have to be universal to be effective. Congress in its infinite wisdom in 1992 ordered anti-copying technology be built into digital audio tape devices. This did not in the end prevent the sharing of digital audio, but it was quite effective in killing off the digital audio tape industry.
Which raises the very interesting question: What happens to an information economy when the tools needed to work with information are outlawed?
So I just don't see this humongous problem that the Soviets had that everyone else didn't have. People first started talking about the "information wants to be free" issue in places like the MIT media lab back in the mid-1980s. Even with only floppy copying and sneakernet bandwidth, the problem was obvious, as was the fact that each iteration of Moore's law would make it more acute.
Nor am I familiar with the data showing there was this huge economic collapse and resulting social crisis in the Soviet block at that time. Economic growth may have been lackadaisical, but so what? From where most people sit, the U.S. economy has been in a downward spiral for three years, and the fallout has been limited. Nor have I seen any convincing argument that it was somehow impossible for the bureaucracy to make more intelligent economic plans that those adopted under Brezhnev.
What really happened, I believe, is that the bureaucracy wanted to secure its privileges much more definitively than conditions in the workers states allowed. This implied in an immediate sense doing anything and everything needed to get imperialism to call off the cold war, and then transforming themselves from holders of privileged positions to owners of property. As it turned out the bureaucracy had long ago suffocated the last embers of October among the masses of working people, and, basically, they got away with it.
José
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
