What frameworks help us name what we are seeing? What concepts and analyses illuminate the structure beneath the surface?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Once the room has the histories and the testimony, the hard question arrives: what were these societies? A workers’ state, or a new class dictatorship? Socialism, or state capitalism, or something without a name yet? And could a planned economy have worked, or was the whole project doomed at the level of economics? This lens gathers the rival frameworks, Marxist and anti-Marxist, defender and critic, and sets them arguing. It draws on the theory of the state in The State, Strategy, and Power and the planning debates in How Capitalism Works, and refuses to hand the room a settled answer.
Anchor questions
- Was the Soviet Union socialist, a “degenerated workers’ state,” state capitalism, or a new class society? Does the label matter?
- Can an economy be planned without markets? What did Mises say could not be done, and did the socialist states prove or disprove him?
- Does public ownership without workers’ control get you anything Marx would have called socialism?
- Is a one-party state a betrayal of the revolution or a condition of its survival?
- If detailed democratic planning is now computationally feasible, what changes?
Materials
All free unless marked otherwise. Each source’s standpoint is named; they are meant to be read against one another.
What kind of society was it?
- V.I. Lenin (1870 to 1924), The State and Revolution (1917). The blueprint the Bolsheviks carried into power: smash the old state, replace it with the armed people, let the state wither. Read against what the Soviet state actually became. Free: marxists.org
- Leon Trotsky (1879 to 1940), The Revolution Betrayed (1936). The classic thesis: the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state, property nationalized but power usurped by a privileged bureaucratic caste. The founding Trotskyist analysis. Free: marxists.org
- Tony Cliff (1917 to 2000), State Capitalism in Russia (1948). The main rival on the left: not a workers’ state at all but bureaucratic state capitalism, the bureaucracy acting as a collective capitalist under the pressure of arms competition. Free: marxists.org
- Milovan Djilas (1911 to 1995), The New Class (1957). A former Yugoslav vice-president, writing from prison, argues the party-bureaucracy became a new exploiting class that owned the state. Free to borrow: archive.org
The calculation and planning debate
- Ludwig von Mises (1881 to 1973), Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920). The founding anti-socialist argument, and the challenge every planning proposal must answer: without market prices for capital goods, rational allocation is impossible. Austrian-school and hostile. Free: mises.org
- Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism (1971). A sympathetic but searching exchange on why transitional economies drift back toward markets and commodity production. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Alec Nove (1915 to 1994), The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983). A market-socialist’s case that central planning cannot process the information a modern economy generates, with a sketch of a mixed alternative. No borrowable copy exists, and no free companion: Nove died in 1994, before authors were routinely recorded. Paywalled: routledge.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
- W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (1993). The reply from the other side: modern computation makes detailed democratic planning feasible, using labor-time accounting. The strongest recent case for planning. Free PDF: wfu.edu
- David Schweickart (b. 1942), Economic Democracy (2011). A model of market socialism built on worker self-managed firms and social control of investment, learning from the command economy without abandoning planned investment. The book is not free; this essay states the case. Free essay: thenextsystem.org
Video
- “The Soviet Economy, Explained” (Asianometry, 2020). Roughly 18 minutes, about 553,000 views. A measured, critical walk through Gosplan, plan-fulfillment incentives, and chronic shortage. youtube.com/watch?v=geKQnRx3-cc
- “Explaining the Economy of the Soviet Union” (Hakim, 2022). Roughly 28 minutes, about 397,000 views. A Marxist-Leninist defense foregrounding growth, full employment, and social provision. The deliberate counterweight to the video above. youtube.com/watch?v=nGm0u3UHDZM
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on the Chinese and Yugoslav market-reform debates and on ecological critiques of the command economy.