starkillerfish

Yeah they definitely have some issues in that regard

dropsite and breakthrough news are solid in general imho. breakthrough is more explicitly socialist. it also depends on region: for LatAm, telesur is a good source. for Palestine, Aljazeera has good coverage (on anything else though its pretty western aligned). in the US, PSL publishes their party paper - Liberation News, but its a bit infrequent.

its always good to ask questions! i just linked the thread because i thought the resources would be relevant to you. would love to see if anyone has new perspectives or articles on the topic

i actually asked a similar question some months ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9813455

you should approach everything with a critical lens. don't accept writing as dogma because someone told you its the absolute truth.

weird for iskra to publish since they also publish a full collection of stalin. i kind of trusted iskra to be better

I quite enjoyed Everything for everyone by M. E. O'Brien and Adbelhadi. It's set in an imagined communist future and a big part of it is the queer experience.

NATO

We will never know. To speculate, I would say that it would have resolved the issue of economic complexity, but it leaves a lot of questions on implementation. How resistant is the system to tampering? How is the economy modeled? How centralized is the system?

A proper implementation of OGAS would probably have taken a decade or two to test and debug so it could run reliably on a national scale. Considering that the USSR has a great shortage of computing power (due to sanctions mostly) I’m not sure it wouldve been possible to complete OGAS.

And then, you still have labour shortage and party organisation issues that OGAS does not solve.

thank you! this is exactly the kind of connection I was thinking about.

i wrote a comment about this a while ago. reposted:

1. WW2 destruction and recovery. Around a third of the population was either dead or wounded. The most industrially and agriculturally developed areas (for one Ukraine) were devastated. After the war, USSR was economically and politically isolated, they did not benefit from the Marshall Plan like western europe. USSR invested into the eastern block to rebuild cities and industries there. A capitalist country under such economic and demographic strain would fold in 5 years imho. Later on, there were huge investments into the military industry, including support to socialist revolutions around the world, which put more strain on the economy.
2. Increasing economic complexity. After the war, the amount of commodities/materials/indicators in the economy has increased exponentially. As there was a labour shortage (see point 1.), the economic planning model had to be adjusted to accommodate the capacity of the Gosplan. There was a point where cybernetics was considered, but the idea was dropped for being quite experimental and costly to implement. So instead, a retreat to markets was implemented in the form of Kosygin reforms (profit was created as an indicator, other indicators were simplified etc.).
3. Kruschev and dilution of party goals. During his leadership, Kruschev implemented party reforms that have diluted its class character and down-played importance of struggle (like the anti-Stalin speech for instance). It was one of the issues that flung the party and USSR into a spiral of "reforms for the sake of reforms" rather than analysis them as either a retreat or advancement towards communism.
4. Sabotage and public property misuse (corruption). The limited market reforms + party ideological crisis has created a certain "proto-capitalist" class that mainly consisted of factory managers who often appropriated public property for personal gains. They were the main proponents (as a class) for market reforms, but they only really gain power after Gorbachev's liberalisation and legalisation of private enterprises. Before Gorbachev, this class was very marginal and could be dealt with anti-corruption measures and modernisation, policies that were proposed by Andropov in 1982.

to conclude, there were no deeply ingrained issues, but a lack of capacity, imposed by the war and global isolation.

im sure you'll do well!