Why the Soviet Union Imploded - Jeffrey Sommers (pt 1)


“Terror and tyranny in the USSR arose more from war and the demands of state security services required to survive, and the paranoid politics it enabled, rather than any “inevitable” path from the socialist path taken,” writes Jeffery Sommers. He joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news to discuss the end of the Soviet Union.

Why the Soviet Union Imploded – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 2)

The Russian Oligarchy and the “Civilization State” – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 3)



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  1. Part 2 of this series is much better. This (Part 1) is a structural take-down of Soviet mistakes from Stalin on. It falls back on the un-Marxian critique that the faults of the USSR were to do with ‘personalities’ or ‘structural errors’. This isn’t good enough from an academic who claims to be a Marxist, where you should be primarily following the evidence of surplus extraction and the class struggle waged over this process (of which there was plenty in the USSR, see Fernandez et al). It’s quite clear that the problems of the Soviet Union were engendered in its founding and the technocratic (elitist) programme pursued by the leaders of the Bolshevik Party who decided (following the crude Marxism of the 2nd International Social Democrats) that in a peculiarly Russian path as conceived by Lenin – and drawing in fact from late Tsarists such as Stolypin – ‘the party’ should replace the lack of a native bourgeoisie and ‘develop the economy’ allegedly because workers’ class consciousness was insufficiently advanced (though if so, how had industrial workers and peasants together on their own initiative created the means for social transformation by October 1917, with minimal input from the Bolshevik Party leadership?). Again, if you look at any other capitalist states in their early development (the primitive accumulation of capital), you see that the state in an absolutist form provides the necessary means of coercion and violence to oversee the implementation of this process from the top down. Therefore the analogy is clear between the horrors of the expropriation of the peasantry/indigenous societies and colonial slave labour in 16th-17th C Europe, and and that under Stalin with ‘collectivisation’ and the gulags. Both were directed by centralised, absolutist states arising out of feudal social relations in a process of class struggle. The first mass trauma took place over 100 years, and the other over 10-20, but both were equally brutal and propelled by the need of arising centres of capital to accumulate and ‘compete’ with other blocs over access to labour and resources. I suggest Mr Sommers needs to get out his Capital Volume 1 and apply it to his study of the USSR, irrespective of the ideological mystification built by ‘Marxism-Leninism’ around the latter. It’s a shame, because his analysis of the post-USSR Russian Federation (in Part 2) is much better.

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