Some Differences between the US and the Gorbachev-Era USSR

From the Net:

There will never be an American Gorbachev because the American system is completely different from the Soviet system.

In the USSR, the Communist Party was everything and commanded all the socio-metabolical aspects of society through a centralized state. When Gorbachev killed the Party, he killed the USSR. That’s why it simply collapsed overnight and in a relatively peaceful way.

The USA is a pure-blood capitalist society. It functions through a confederation of capitalists who command and own different parts of the means of production. The state, albeit powerful, is just one institution among many others in this free market anarchy.

The USA, therefore, is a relatively decentralized society (for its size it is incredibly decentralized). In this sense, the USA is more akin to the old Roman Empire than any other recent liberal or late-feudal empire.

My guess is the USA will degenerate slowly and very violently and chaotically, with a succession of weak POTUS over a course of at least many decades. It can or cannot lose territory in this process (I don’t think it ever will unless you’re talking about Puerto Rico or the possessions in the Southwestern Pacific).

It almost certainly will provoke many more wars against foreign nations. It will be a very dangerous period of humanity’s history, if it does not mark its end and a total nuclear war happens.

This is correct. The US is decentralized as any capitalist society is. On the other hand though, Germany was as decentralized as the US is in 1933, and all it took was Hitler to quite rapidly centralize the whole place.

Any free market capitalist society will always be quite decentralized because that is the nature of the market, a decentralizing mechanism itself if there ever was one.

In fact the decentralization is not a bug of the capitalist system – it is one of its features, and this nature is part of why capitalists hate the centralizing state so much.

The other reason is that they simply have no use for a state at all, as the state does not benefit capitalists much at all other than having a military to use to open markets, destroy competitors and ruin competing pro-people (socialist) systems. Other than that the state causes nothing but pain and annoyance to the capitalist.

There are works written by businessmen (merchants) all the way back in the Italian Renaissance by what is called the original Italian Humanists. These works were written from 1400-1600, and many have been collected. The works written by Italian merchants in 1500 could have been written by the Wall Street Journal or Reason Magazine yesterday.

These merchants had no use whatsoever for any sort of state or government and saw any such entity as an annoyance at best and an impediment at worst. Basically this thing called the state mostly just needed to get out of the way, according to these merchants. Here it is 500 years later and not a thing has changed.

Plus le change…

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