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Socialism Betrayed

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The Gorbachev program after 1986, above all its core commitment to reducing the influence of the CPSU, reflected Gorbachev’s determination to learn from what he saw as Khrushchev’s failure to deal decisively with his opponents in the Party. — location: 3380 ^ref-58562

Indeed the whole idea that the class struggle is over in a world still dominated by capitalism and imperialism, or within the socialist state, is itself a manifestation of the class struggle at an ideological level. Succumbing to that idea is one of the gravest threats to building socialism. — location: 3395 ^ref-63925

What was disturbing was that the Communist Party proved unable to thwart Gorbachev’s opportunism as it had thwarted that of his forerunners. — location: 3412 ^ref-37825

The Soviet counterrevolution occurred because the policies of Gorbachev set in motion a process by which social groups with a material and ideological stake in private property and the free market eventually overpowered and displaced the formerly dominant socialist economic relations, that is, the planned, publicly owned, “first” economy. — location: 3433 ^ref-60226

The result has been massive human tragedy. Among other calamities some 75 percent of Russians now live below or barely above the poverty line; 50-80 percent of school-age children are classified as having a physical or mental defect, and male life expectancy has plunged to less than sixty years. And ominously a fully nuclearized country and its devices of mass destruction have, for the first time in history, been seriously destabilized, the Kursk submarine disaster in August being yet another example. — location: 3447 ^ref-16720

Communists call a theoretical justification of unnecessary retreat, revisionism. — location: 3464 ^ref-30732

Unlike his two predecessors, the Soviet leader assumed no social basis for opportunism existed in developing socialism. This denial found expression in Khrushchev’s notions that the working class state had become the “state of the whole people” and the Communist Party the “party of the whole people.” Gorbachev’s betrayal showed the folly of Khrushchev’s optimism. — location: 3470 ^ref-46000

If the word “democracy” means the empowerment of working people, then the Soviet Union had democratic features that surpassed any capitalist society. — location: 3483 ^ref-23923

The fastest Soviet growth rates ever achieved came in 1929-53 when the Soviet leadership firmly upheld central planning and suppressed the market relations formerly tolerated in the NEP of 1921-29. — location: 3562 ^ref-45385

The more commodity-money relations expanded, the more perestroika failed. — location: 3566 ^ref-42927

In his view, commodity production in the USSR economy was confined to the sphere of personal consumption, — location: 3587 ^ref-57476

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