Failure to move from extensive to intensive industrialization doomed state socialism
Evidence
This crisis was brought about by the failures of the reform movements on the one hand and, on the other, by the onset of a secular decline in the overall rates of growth and their eventual inability to make a transition from extensive industrialization, which had marked the years immediately following the war, to an intensive technological revolution in the means of production, of the kind advanced capitalism was already embarked upon. This failure was as much a consequence of the costs of military confrontation which imperialism was able to impose, leading to acute scarcity of resources and sectoral imbalances, as it was owed to bungled allocation of priorities favouring the bureaucracy, both at the micro-level of managerial decisionmaking and at the macro-level of central planning. It was the economic side of the crisis – the failure to make a transition from extensive to intensive industrialization, inevitably leading to rising social and ecological costs of whatever further industrialization did take place – which eventually proved decisive. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 45
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: A crisis-free state capitalism would trap humanity in permanent hopelessness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1171; Soviet central planning failed because it could not harness its own technological innovations — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 768