People here spend a lot of time arguing over whether historical socialist states were either great successes or complete disasters, but not much time talking about *why* specific things actually worked or failed. So here's a simple question:
>Pick one success and one failure from any historical socialist state.
Not necessarily the biggest or most famous examples, just the ones you think have the most to teach us. What happened? Why did it succeed or fail? Was it a matter of policy, leadership, material conditions, foreign pressure, bureaucracy, ideology, or something else? I'm less interested in moral judgments and more interested in what lessons can actually be drawn from it. Could be the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the GDR, Burkina Faso under Sankara, or anywhere else.
Bonus points if you pick something other than the usual "USSR industrialization" or "Great Leap Forward."
>success
Industrializatiom efforts in the USSR, social services expansion, the best education and healthcare in the world, and more.
>failure
Era of Stagnation caused by obsession with domestic millitary development, that wasnt even that good in the first place proved by afgans. Probably in general the reforms of the 1960's and 1950's directed by Nikitia failing is what doomed the USSR in the long term, most of those reforms couldve easily worked today, literally every single one, but he was couped in 1964 and the bureaucracy around him prevented him from setting realitic quote outputs and expanding resources to them.
>>2869748hehe benis :DDDD
>success
Reform and opening up, which succeeded in large part because Mao built the basis for it by building up literacy and smashing "traditional" culture. Fundamentally, productive forces were not and are not yet developed enough for communism and recognising this reality and adapting to it while maintaining party rule is commendable. In general, export-led development is a good strategy because you cannot force external actors to buy your products, so you have to develop things of the quality and type actually desired.
>failure
Gorbachev's attempted reforms. Nobody actually understood the Soviet economy or how it worked so each attempted tweak made things worse. The more valuable lesson, however, is that an ideological approach was just about the worst approach possible to reform. Gorbachev went back to Lenin to pick up many of his worst ideas (like giving nationalities more power based on Lenin's decisions in the 1920s) and was still fretting about how to maintain worker co-ops and not-really do capitalism even while moving to a market economy, which just confused things further. By the time it was generally recognised that the USSR had to move towards a market economy if it wanted to survive, it was already impossible to do so.
That China is regarded as a betrayer of communism as an ideal while the USSR is looked back on wistfully for martyring itself against underlying reality is an unfortunate emotional impulse that should be checked. It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it hasn't committed suicide there's hope for it yet.
>>2869748>I believe that had this been adopted, the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would have enduredPlease look up "Operation Barbarossa".
ussr best decision:
calling geopolitics bourgeois pseudo-science
ussr worst decision:
calling state capitalism socialism