The Soviet central planning system was not a substitute for "capitalist" (meaning Western European, if the term is to have any empirical meaning), economy, but a quick fix designed to implement that economy in the backward Russia and later Eastern Europe. In other words, its goal was rapid industrialization, rather than creating a utopian social system.
The ideology used to justify that project was not that much socialist as peasant communitarianism. The use of that ideology falls almost straight from Marx (The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte):
"Man make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please... but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such period of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
For anyone who directly experienced the Soviet system and retained reasonably open mind about it, it is virtually impossible to miss that the Soviet ideology was above all Russian peasant populism writ large. That peasant populism was the "costume and borrowed language of the past" used to justify the accelerated industrialization program for the peasant masses.
The program needed a lot of justification because of what we would call today "austerity measures" or systematic limiting consumption to increase investment. It is quite obvious that self-financing the industrialization project (instead of borrowing) required diverting the resource form other sectors, mainly consumption and agriculture. For the entire argument see Alexander Gerschenkron, _Economic backwardness in a historical perspective_).
>From that perspective it is quite obvious that the Soviet system, far from
"collapsing", worked superbly well to achieve its real goal - propelling
Russia and Eastern Europe to the 20th century. In fact, it made Russia a
superwpower, and put many backward Eastern European countries (such as
Poland) on a par with their Western neighbors (so they could join the EU,
for example). What England or France achieved in two centuries, Eastern
Europe achieved in less than 50 years. If that is a failure, I do not know
what the meaning of success is.
However, this is not how the legacy of the Soviet system is judged. That legacy is judged almost entirely on the ideological dimension - how the system scored in implementing the "socialist" or rather populist peasant utopia. That culturalist fallacy is probably the biggest lie of the 20th century, shared by ideologues on both left and right. For both of them, the Soviet Union was mainly a symbol or rather a hierophany - of either ultimate good or ultimate evil - and that symbolic dimension almost totally overshadowed the empirical reality on which it was grafted.
These folks either lament or cherish the "fall of communism." For me, however, it was merely casting off a borrowed costume when the performance was over.
Wojtek
I can't claim to have experienced Soviet planning from the inside, but I've read a fair amount, and some of the above doesn't quite correspond to what my reading has led me to believe.
1)Stalin's five-year plans were aimed at industrializing the USSR, alright, but this wasn't carried out on a capitalist basis, but took as a given the expropriation of the capitlists and landlords carried out in 1917 and shortly afterwards. I don't know what you mean when you say that "Western European" is the only real meaning we can give to "capitalist." Capitalism means the private ownership of the means of production, in Western Europe or anywhere else, although W. Europe certainly represented the highest degree of capitalist development at the time. In any case, Soviet industrialization was carried out on the basis not of private ownership, but of state ownership--a fact that placed it in an antagonistic relationship with the entire capitalist world, whether Stalin liked it or not. (He mostly didn't.)
2) The Stalinist regime may have sounded many a peasant-populist note, but its official ideology was always socialism. And it was--unfortunately--synonomous with socialism for Stalinist workers and intellectuals the world over, and, I suspect, in the USSR itself.
3)The Soviet industrialization drive did meet with much initial success. It was this success, especially in contrast to the depression-blighted Werstern economies of the 1930s, that gave it immense prestige in the eyes of progrssive people internationally, and a certain amount of credit with the Soviet peoples, the barbarity of famines and purges notwithstanding.
4) But at a certain point, in the late 60s and 70s, Soviet growth rates slowed down, and it became apparent to large numbers of people that Stalinism's promise to catch up with and overtake the West simply wasn't being kept. Soviet goods were no match for Western goods. The USSR missed out on the entire cyber-revolution. The cost of keeping up with the US militarily became insupportalbly high.
5)While the Soviet and Eastern bloc peoples did, to an extent, judge the bureaucracy in terms of its broken promises of limitless progress, this assessment was practical as much as ideological. The masses were probably more concerned about things like not having enough toilet paper and not being able to get their broken fridges repaired than they were about attaining some Communist or peasant-populist utopia.
I sent along the Trotsky quotation because I think it was remarkably prescient for 1937. Most other people were judging the USSR on a "hierophantic" basis at the time. The most notable exception was Trotsky, whose assessment is singularly san and balanced.
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