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8/7/2025, 11:21:49 PM
>>24619318
>The point here being not that USSR was le awesome state loved by it's citizens - the point is that collapse of the USSR involved a gorrilion issues and factors, but among them did not involve the wider population whatsoever. The masses were watching the Swan Lake all the way thought it, nobody asked them either way. The idea of USSR collapsing because it's people got tired of it and that made it's government sorta kinda give up is some grade A Langley bullshit
NTA but this is an interesting thing. I think the bigger problem with the USSR is that when it did collapse (due to a variety of complex factors as you point out), people didn't go out and fight to prevent it from collapsing. I think it's because the Soviet Union depoliticized people to a remarkable degree. One might even argue it had legitimacy to a certain extent, but if so, a lot of that had to do with inertia and it being the only system most of the population had ever known, unless they were really old. There was a great deal of fatalism in the population and a belief that trying to change anything was impossible, so when the reforms did occur, they occurred from the top down, and then it went totally out of control and the population had no idea WTF was going on.
Whether this is characteristic of all political systems or the Soviet one in particular is a different argument. Maybe it's a mix of both, but I think the arguments that the bureaucratic elite in the USSR had become detached from the mass of citizens is probably correct. And also a lot of the elites stopped believing in the ideology, it was something they repeated because it was important for their careers, and they joined the party because it was a career for them. I think that happens in politics a lot. It's true for even small-time Marxist groups where you have a clique of "professional organizers" who basically make a living off of it, and they have a couple thousand (at best) activists who do free labor for them, and they have ways of wringing money out of them through the dues they pay, and eventually those activists get burned out, so there's constant churn, but there's always a new batch of twentysomethings.
I think this is a big problem in Democratic Party, which is a weird and hilarious analogy. I'm not talking about the average person or the social base of the party, but the "party" bureaucracy. If you ever read about these political campaigns and how big of a grift it is, there's just an entire system of "consultants" and vendors and campaign ad agencies, and they exist to spend ludicrous amounts of money. Like the ad for the dome in Vegas with Kamala Harris on it, they probaly spent millions of dollars on it, but the money from the campaign goes through these vendors who take a cut. And there's just a bunch of people who are making money doing this, but it's very inefficient and they lose elections, and they really resist changes because that would be a threat to their jobs.
>The point here being not that USSR was le awesome state loved by it's citizens - the point is that collapse of the USSR involved a gorrilion issues and factors, but among them did not involve the wider population whatsoever. The masses were watching the Swan Lake all the way thought it, nobody asked them either way. The idea of USSR collapsing because it's people got tired of it and that made it's government sorta kinda give up is some grade A Langley bullshit
NTA but this is an interesting thing. I think the bigger problem with the USSR is that when it did collapse (due to a variety of complex factors as you point out), people didn't go out and fight to prevent it from collapsing. I think it's because the Soviet Union depoliticized people to a remarkable degree. One might even argue it had legitimacy to a certain extent, but if so, a lot of that had to do with inertia and it being the only system most of the population had ever known, unless they were really old. There was a great deal of fatalism in the population and a belief that trying to change anything was impossible, so when the reforms did occur, they occurred from the top down, and then it went totally out of control and the population had no idea WTF was going on.
Whether this is characteristic of all political systems or the Soviet one in particular is a different argument. Maybe it's a mix of both, but I think the arguments that the bureaucratic elite in the USSR had become detached from the mass of citizens is probably correct. And also a lot of the elites stopped believing in the ideology, it was something they repeated because it was important for their careers, and they joined the party because it was a career for them. I think that happens in politics a lot. It's true for even small-time Marxist groups where you have a clique of "professional organizers" who basically make a living off of it, and they have a couple thousand (at best) activists who do free labor for them, and they have ways of wringing money out of them through the dues they pay, and eventually those activists get burned out, so there's constant churn, but there's always a new batch of twentysomethings.
I think this is a big problem in Democratic Party, which is a weird and hilarious analogy. I'm not talking about the average person or the social base of the party, but the "party" bureaucracy. If you ever read about these political campaigns and how big of a grift it is, there's just an entire system of "consultants" and vendors and campaign ad agencies, and they exist to spend ludicrous amounts of money. Like the ad for the dome in Vegas with Kamala Harris on it, they probaly spent millions of dollars on it, but the money from the campaign goes through these vendors who take a cut. And there's just a bunch of people who are making money doing this, but it's very inefficient and they lose elections, and they really resist changes because that would be a threat to their jobs.
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