My point addressed only his apparent attribution of a total opposition of the population to the bureaucracy, which is false, and I would guess arises from an uncritcal appropriation of what Trotsky said about conditions in the Soviet Union ("the bureaucracy" vs. "the masses"). I do not know enough about his other views to have an opinion, and in any case have very serious doubts that the Soviet system was capable of doing more than it did (broadly speaking). I don't think "democratizing" it would have done much, though, if that were all that was done.
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 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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