The failure of economic reform was not just a failure of implementation. There was a flaw in the very notion of reform itself. The aim was to restructure the Soviet economy so that those sections of it capable of adjusting to the current international level of the forces of production would expand while others closed down. But this was bound to be an enormously painful undertaking, not just for those workers who suffered in the process but for the mass of the individual members of the bureaucracy as well. Restructuring the British economy between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s had involved shutting down about one factory in three and destroying capital on such a scale that gross industrial investment in 1990 was still no higher than in 1 972. It is very doubtful that it could have proceeded smoothly if British capitalism had not had the lucky bonus of enormous North Sea oil revenues. The USSR's economy was much larger than Britain, and its enterprises had been much more insulated from the rest of the world for 60 years. The proportion that was to be destroyed by an immediate opening to international competition was correspondingly greater. This, in turn, did considerable damage to the remaining competitive enterprises as they lost suppliers of materials and components on the one hand and buyers for their output on the other.
The roots of the crisis lay in the pressure to accumulate for the sake of accumulation that arose from the bureaucracy's position as part of a competitive world system. The Soviet economy had reached the point at which the precondition for a further wave of self-expansion of capital was a crisis involving the destruction of at least some past accumulation. The only diference between Russia and, say, France or Britain, was that the destruction was to be on a considerably greater scale. And this was because the Soviet Union had undergone six decades of accumulation without restructuring through crises and bankruptcies, while for the British and French economies it was only four and three decades respectively.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century