Given the chance to read for pleasure, about every five or six books I go through ends up being at least tangentially about the Cold War. Not the military or political aspects of it necessarily, but about some aspect of society, life, and the state of the world during that time period. It's not something I do intentionally; it's just an endlessly fascinating time period to me and if something half-decent is written about it there's a better than average chance it'll end up in the queue.
One thing that strikes me every time I read about the collapse of the Cold War paradigm and the Eastern Bloc is the oddly familiar language with which the Soviet system is described in its final stages of decline. Whenever I read someone's take on the flaws that led to its ultimate demise it sounds an awful lot like someone moderately cynical describing the United States today. When someone describes the USSR as little more than a massively expensive military and a lavish pension system for the aged I can't help thinking, hmm.
And the America of 2016 is different how?
Every characteristic that knowledgeable people identify as a contributor to the ultimate "victory" of free market capitalism over Soviet-style planned economies has slowly come to be a prominent characteristic of Western societies, particularly in the U.S. The public lost faith in the system and saw its leaders as increasingly inept. The economy produced what vested interests wanted, not what was actually needed. The resources of the society and the state were diverted to an unsustainable degree to wildly expensive and ill advised military adventures and martial infrastructure.
Unemployment, underemployment, idleness, and laziness were epidemic in a workforce that saw little to gain from working hard and almost inevitably saw innovation punished. Constant appeals to patriotism, nationalism, and the enemy within and without produced diminishing returns as people grew tired of hearing the same propaganda lines repeatedly. The media system was consolidated into a small number of hands and did not offer the general public a full and factual accounting of issues of importance. Increasingly heavy-handed police state tactics were employed to deal with public demonstrations and protests (which grew in frequency).
The list goes on.
The point is not that the United States is on the brink of collapsing into the Dustbin of History alongside Marxist-Leninist systems of the type seen in the post-War period. It's instead an interesting intellectual exercise to try to figure out what aspects of our system allow it to survive (so far) that which the USSR and its kind could not – and how far we can push it before we suffer the same fate.
Anubis Bard says:
It's taken awhile for opioids and their kin to make the kind of inroads that vodka blazed among Soviets, but we're catching up fast.
mago says:
"a lavish pension system for the aged". you're shitting me, right?
Huntly says:
Do I smell a book club?
Anubis Bard says:
I think you're not a fan of Zizek, but have you ever run across his "trilemma of socialism" – about the people who perpetuated the system to its crash?
"Of the three features – personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence – it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive."
Can you come with a better summation of the coalition that is the modern Republican Party? Or even, dare I say it, the more establishmentarian Democrats . . .
Major Kong says:
The Soviet Union was arguably brought down by cheap oil more than anything. Oil was their primary export and sole source of hard currency. The oil glut of the late 80s and early 90s drove the price so low that they went broke.
They never even tried to match our defense spending increases of the 1980s, so the idea that Reagan somehow defeated them is bunk. The same people who now say Reagan defeated them were at the time massively overestimating their strength. Even when their system was obviously in collapse we were told that it was just an act to trick us into letting their guard down.
carrstone says:
"The economy produced what vested interests wanted, not what was actually needed."
Could it be that the decision-makers and the decision-influencers lacked the profit motive?
HoosierPoli says:
The country most like the US in the world is Russia. I guess it's the narcissism of small differences at play.
Talisker says:
Some of Ed's analysis is superficial to say the least.
Take military spending. The US defense budget is 3.5% of GDP now, down from 5.6% at the height of Reagan's Cold War buildup. It's a lot by international standards: South Korea, with a serious threat on its northern border, spends 2.6%; the UK 2.0%; Germany 1.2%. Still, it's not obviously unsustainable. The military budget of the USSR in the late 1980s is estimated at 17% of GDP, which is a whole different story.
As for the media,
is a curiously polite description of the Soviet system of state censorship, with criticism of the government punishable by death or the gulag. The US media has its problems, but comparing it to the USSR is just silly.
Here's where Ed is onto something:
In both cases we have a stagnant, complacent ruling elite, bound by a rigid ideology and unwilling to compromise it in order to address practical problems. In the USSR, the elite were senior party, military and KGB officials; in the USA they are elected officials and corporate executives (including, but not limited to, banks and media corporations). The respective shibboleths are "Central Planning" and "The Free Market" but otherwise the positions are quite similar.
@HoosierPoli: Really? I think Ed's pointed out that Australia is a much closer fit in terms of language, culture, and history. At the risk of stating the obvious, the USA is not known for its love of tea or chess, suffering 30 million deaths at the hands of the Nazis, or living under a totalitarian Communist government until 1991.
markd says:
@ carrstone Dumbass. There was a profit motive in mortgage backed securities. But who other than the vested interests, wanted them?
RosiesDad says:
Food security was a huge issue in the Soviet Union. If your populace has to stand on line for hours to buy a loaf of bread, you are teetering on the brink. We are not close to this by any stretch. As long as the masses can drive through Wendy's or Chik-Fil-A to stave off hunger, the system has a greater chance of being preserved.
Katydid says:
In college, I double-majored in comp sci and Russian (this was in the Cold War era). We read a lot of source materials and watched news broadcasts and read newspapers. One difference I see is that the Soviet Union actually spent money on education and subsidized things like books and cultural activities. Public transportation was so cheap it was nearly free. Another difference is that the average Soviet citizen knew the news they were getting was…ahem…carefully edited. You didn't get whole segments of the population carefully parroting back the propaganda from any particular news program the way you do in the USA.
geoff says:
@Katydid– so what you're saying is that the US has a much more sophisticated and "successful" propaganda operation than the former USSR? And that's why it's still standing? Hmmm.
@Ed- you might like Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse" which explicitly compares the fall of the SU to conditions in the US. Orlov's a Russian expat who lived through the collapse.
anotherbozo says:
The phrase "late-stage capitalism" does that for me, as does the stranglehold of corporations on the government at all levels. (See the NY Times editorial from Sunday about the big bucks spent on downticket campaigns by said corporate wealth, to insure right-wing state legislatures and the US Senate, no matter who wins the White House) Giving Bernie's continuation of the Occupy Wall Street movement extra poignancy. Whether that momentum dies at the Democratic Convention or continues in different hands is a big question.
Is this awakening too little, too late? Being American, I stupidly hope not. But as Ed has so ably pointed out before, the wealthy don't tend to stop with even most of the pie–they seem to want it all, and corporations will sacrifice the planet itself for next quarter's profits, never mind the little ol' U.S.A.
Katydid says:
@Geoff; no, I guess what I'm saying is the Former Soviet Union had better-educated and less gullible people? Fox News and its ilk are completely risible to anyone with half a brain, but sadly, in the USA, there are many people who appear to lack half their brain.
Michael says:
Would love to get a suggested reading list!
coloradoblue says:
While more about democracy coming to the Eastern European communist states and the fall of the Berlin Wall than about the break-up of the USSR, Michael Meyer's 'The Year That Changed The World' is excellent.
SeaTea says:
A GnT book club isn't a terrible idea. Having Ed recommend books he's found worth his time and trouble along with mini-reviews seems like a great thing that would make the world a better place.
Kaleberg says:
I got that creepy feeling reading Emmanuel Todd's 'The Final Fall'. It came out in the 1970s and argued that the USSR was going to collapse in 10-20 years which it did. Interestingly, it wasn't cheap oil that did in the USSR. In the 1970s, when oil prices soared, the Soviet empire went into the red, quickly and deeply. I'm guessing this had to do with the costs of subsidizing its client nations. There was a good article on this in Science back in the mid-80s.
Todd argued that the USSR couldn't afford to make the economic changes necessary to continue the growth of the 50s and 60s for political reasons. Large cities, for example, were a political risk, so the population was capped at about 500,000. They couldn't afford too much of the wrong kind of education for rather obvious reasons. They couldn't decentralize production decisions as that would lead to alternate power bases. They couldn't build a consumer culture as this would require decentralization.
It's interesting to compare the USSR with modern China which has similar political problems. Growth has stalled out in China, and even now the political grip is tightening. I don't think we'll see a lot of surprises in how this plays out.
The US has a similar problem. For years, the US was noted for its lack of ideology with regards to getting its economy to work. A good book on this is 'Without Marx, Without Jesus'. In the 1980s, the US economy came under ideological control and living standards have stagnated since then. To counter this stagnation, women entered the workforce in the 1980s so most families had two breadwinners. In the 1990s, the stock market soared which got more money into circulation. In the 2000s, it was home equity loans based on a real estate bubble. Now, well, now we have a nearly stagnant economy which is considered politically useful.
You aren't alone in noting just how similar the modern US is to the old USSR. Our ideology prevents us from decentralizing as anti-trust enforcement has flagged. We can't spend money on economically useful things like roads, education or research, instead we have a big military budget. We have a surprisingly limited political discourse with a complacent press beholden to those in power. Compare news coverage in the 1970s with news coverage today. It's kind of embarrassing. Dig up an old copy of Soviet Life and it will seem surprisingly familiar.
Interestingly, the Cold War required capitalism to prove itself by delivering rising living standards which led to a less ideological approach. Anything was OK if it wasn't exactly communism. As the USSR neared collapse, the US slipped into an ideological coma as it now could afford to do so. If you followed the Politburo, almost every speech in the 1980s talked about Great Patriotic War and the current military challenge. The only thing holding the USSR together was Reagan's military buildup as Kennan, the guy who came up with the term 'cold war', noted later.
Mo says:
And China's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (i.e., Capitalism) seems to be running into the same swamp of corrupt oligarchy, powerful criminal organizations (only in the US we call ours "Wall Street" instead of Mafia or Tong), cynical citizenry, captured media, nativist reactionary wingers…
Something in the planet's water?
schmitt trigger says:
"the Cold War required capitalism to prove itself by delivering rising living standards"
Exactly;
Once that the alternate economic model was defeated, capitalism was able to remove is mask and to stop pretending.
In the name of economic globalization, started the race to the bottom.
Drew says:
@Anubis
That's so weird because I just started re-reading the book that essay is from: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Zizek is an enjoyable read but man, he recycles so much material he'd make even the laziest Hollywood producer blush.
Katydid says:
@Kaleberg; in the 1990s the stock market soared because corporations stopped their pensions and instead dumped the employees' retirement money (now funded by the employees) into a 401k scheme. The Baby Boomers got pensions; Gen X got periodic stock market collapses that wiped out their retirement savings. Back in 2005 I stopped dumping money into my 401k and instead dumped the same percent I was throwing in the 401k-hole into a bank account. While the money in my 401k has withered without constant infusions of new cash, the amount in the bank account has grown.
sluggo says:
Ed,
Since you are a cold war junkie, I strongly recommend the FX TV show "The Americans". It is set in the early 80's with some historic tie ins. But if think it captures the mindset of the spy vs spy cold war.
Amazon Prime will allow you to binge watch. Start at the beginning.
Lit3Bolt says:
For capitalism, the success of the 40s-70s should correctly be seen as an anomaly, not the norm. In the 80s, the race was on to return to the Gilded Age, while keeping the regulatory agencies around as toothless hounds so they could act as a corporate fig leaf and continuing "proof" that regulation would never work.
The funny thing about locust capitalism is it assumes there is always a educated middle class in a stable nation state to buy its products. As the cities drown and the island tax havens sink beneath the waves, the rich in their glorious meritocracy will bewail why no one told them that this would happen.
Khaled says:
@Major Kong you're right about the oil.
Saudi Arabia kept the oil pumping (thanks Bush family!) and cratered the USSR economy. Without the cash from oil exports, they couldn't keep the system afloat.
quixote says:
Katydid makes good points about the subsidized benefits in the USSR. As a very young American (but Russian-speaking) tourist, I remember being boggled at the mere pennies that books cost. And how people would take the Trans-siberian train to Vladivostok just for fun because it was so cheap.
But, some 15-20 years before the fall of the Societ Union, it was obvious to 12 year-old me that the system wasn't going to last. People were deeply, disturbingly *unhappy*. The discontent was palpable, even when you were 12.
It was mainly the lack of enjoyment, the working way too hard for way too little money. It was also the evident waste and corruption everywhere, while you scraped by with three plates because the family couldn't afford a fourth. Something, anything, was going to tip people over into open revolt.
Just one example of what I mean by waste. On a bus trip north from the Black Sea, we followed a grain truck. It was a dump truck just piled with grain, uncovered. The driver couldn't be arsed to latch the back wall of the truck properly, so there was a gap at the bottom with grain leaking out the whole way. That was a year when failed Soviet harvests were in the news and the country was buying wheat from the US and Europe.
So, anyway, my point, if I have one, is that the US is not in the same mental space at all. Americans are angry, resentful, full of begrudgery. But lots and lots of them, enough, are not at all poor on the global scale of things. They're much more worried about hanging on to what they have than convinced they might as well throw it all away because as things are life is barely worth living.
The Soviet Union was a whole different ballgame, as I think Talisker also pointed out upthread.
Katydid says:
@Talisker, I agree with most of what you said except for Americans being poor on the global scale of things. There are medical charities that visit the south and Appalachia to treat third-world medical issues. Food banks all over the country are being emptied weekly because families with 3 working adults can't feed themselves even off the dollar menu. People in Detroit and other areas–urban and rural–don't have access to clean water. In the Rust Belt of "heartland" (gag), people are in their third generation of unemployment. I'm waiting for some celebrity to show up on a tv commercial intoning, "For just pennies a day…"
geoff says:
Maybe That Guy With The Stupid Hair will be our very own Gorbachev and knock over the whole house of cards. (USA!! USA!!)
O/T (and perhaps it will be tomorrow's topic of discussion), but my tinfoil hat spidey-sense is finding it a little weird and convenient that the AP announced Ms. Clinton clinching the Dem nomination on the eve of the CA primary. Couldn't they have waited another day or two, and I dunno, maybe not influenced the voters in today's several primaries, many of whom will now say, "fuck it, why bother?" and stay home? Not that it would have made much difference in the overall outcome (I've never thought Sanders had a prayer of winning the nomination), but still. 48 hours?! Let the coronation… BEGIN!!
OtherAndrew says:
"Couldn't they have waited another day or two, and I dunno, maybe not influenced the voters in today's several primaries…?"
So you think the media simply shouldn't report on the news when it happens for fear that people will be informed by what's being reported and change their behaviour accordingly?
That's an interesting thought.
geoff says:
@OtherAndrewter – well, yes. TV news outlets will typically not call elections until after polls have closed, so as not to influence the outcome. As stated above, I'm not a Sanders hardliner, but the AP's timing seems fishy to me. Perhaps our kind host will hve some thoughts tomorrow.
OtherAndrew says:
They undertook a personal poll of superdelegates with the intention of reporting the results. It's only "fishy" insofar as you might think Sanders still had a chance.
Would it have been "fishy" if the same report was made in February in a three-way match-up between Webb, Clinton and Chafee?
Clinton locked it up when she locked it up. There's nothing fishy about her campaign consistently getting the majority of the Democratic voters (by a margin of about three million at this point) and a majority of the pledged delegates and a majority of the superdelegates. She's been working hard for all three for years. Sanders mounted a strong effort but fell short and yesterday was the day that it became a mathematical certainty, under the normal rules of the process as they go (and went in 2008).
BJM says:
I'm interested to know more about what you mean by "finds innovation punished"
Invictus says:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/lawrence-wilkerson-the-empire-is-in-deep-deep-trouble.html
Aardvark Cheeselog says:
When I was growing up in the 1960s I learned that we were prepared to burn the whole world on 30 minutes notice, if that's what we had to do to defend it from the Soviets.
It's noteworthy how many of the things said to be intolerable about the Soviet system then (elections with only one candidate, State restrictions on who could get on an airplane, news media that parrots the official line, police state repression of protesters…) are now common parts of ours.