[lbo-talk] Ticktin was right

[James Heartfield]

Chris Doss points out an error in Ticktin's view that the Soviet population ever offered any political opposition to the bureaucracy. But that does not take away from the fact that Ticktin pointed out the utter depletion of the Soviet Union's economic dynamic when both the regimes apologists and its cold war critics were colluding in a massive overestimation of the quality of Soviet industrialisation, the latter uncritically reproducing the former's quantitative output figures.

Only Ticktin, as far as I can see, anticipated the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and deduced it from the economy's central failing - that it had abolished the market without creating an alternative economic regulator. 'Planning' in the USSR remained an empty letter because the bureaucracy distrusted the populace too much to put them in charge of the plan. And Ticktin worked out that the Soviet economy had run out of steam 1973, in his essay, 'Towards a Political Economy of the USSR', when everyone else was lauding, or bemoaning Soviet success.

Nostalgia for Brezhnev says very little about what happened then, and everything about how people feel now.
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