Reinventing Collapse. Dmitry Orlov
a direct comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union incongruous, if not downright insulting. After all, what grounds are there to compare a failed Communist empire to the undisputed world leader? Others might find it preposterous that the loser might have advice for the winner in what they might see as an ideological conflict. Since the differences between the two appear glaring to most, let me just indicate some similarities, which I hope you will find are no less obvious.
The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.
They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality and a guaranteed — albeit lower — standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn’t realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don’t know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.
Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing, funneling arms and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology and thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails (South Africa was a contender at one point). In this last category, the US is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex.
While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden, the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. These almost universal negative feelings are likely to prove more durable than the superpower’s good fortune: nobody likes a loser, especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union, and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either.
The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating an international financial crisis. Russia’s finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices along with rising oil exports, and it is now well on its way to becoming an energy superpower.
The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world’s largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.
There are many other similarities. For instance, both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the US, a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap and, after that, probably won’t work at all.
All the similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization. But what is interesting for our purposes is to identify and describe the key elements that made these superpower contestants so evenly matched that their sparring went on for decades.
None of these key elements can be sustained forever. The hypothesis I wish to test is that the lack of these same key elements, readily identifiable in the Soviet collapse, likewise spells the demise of America, definitely as a superpower, probably as a major part of the world economy, and possibly as a recognizable entity on the political map.
The Myth of Inclusiveness
Like that of our metaphorical heavyweight champion, a superpower’s diet must contain plenty of red meat — in this case, human flesh. A superpower must continually ingest plenty of highly skilled and motivated personnel — managers, scientists, engineers, military officers — who must be willing to endure hardship, give up their best years, ruin their health, perhaps even give their lives, slaving away designing and building things, fighting and doing all the dirty work. Motivating the needed quantities of people with money is out of the question, because that would not leave enough for the ruling elites to siphon off. The upper classes tend to already be highly motivated by both money and status, but they also tend to be allergic to dirty work, and they can never be numerous enough to satisfy a superpower’s appetite for flesh. The only thing that can possibly provide the necessary motivating force is an idea: a communal myth powerful enough to cause people to commit their insignificant yet essential selves to the righteousness and glory of the great whole. A superpower’s vitality is critically dependent on the sustaining power of this myth. Shortly after it fails, so does the superpower.
Both the Soviet and the American models featured an inclusiveness myth as their centerpiece. In the Soviet case, it was the myth of the classless society. The great revolutionary upheaval was said to have erased class and ethnic distinctions, creating an egalitarian society that provided for everybody’s basic needs, curbed excesses of wealth and allowed people from humble origins to become educated and rise to positions of respect and authority. This myth proved to be so powerful that it propelled a poor, industrializing but still mainly agrarian nation on a trajectory to becoming a leading military and industrial power. As the decades wore on, the myth gradually lost most of its luster. The satisfaction of basic needs gave rise to an insatiable appetite for imported consumer goods, which were either inaccessible or in short supply, except to the elite, and this, in turn, ruined the appearance of egalitarianism. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” went the saying, and morale plummeted. This led to a situation where no new common effort could be organized. As everyone started thinking for themselves, a slow rot set in, and the superpower gradually became enfeebled.
America’s belated and half-hearted answer to the classless society of the Soviets is the middle class society. After wallowing through the Great Depression and grasping at straws during the New Deal, the United States reaped a gigantic windfall following World War II, as the only large industrial player left standing. Much of the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure had been bombed to rubble, giving the United States an opening. They used it to put every American within striking distance of achieving a cheap simulacrum of landed gentry, symbolized by a detached house surrounded by a patch of land big enough to accommodate private parking, a patch of grass and some shrubbery, and adorned, as an absolute necessity, by one’s own private automobile. American society is classless, at least in theory, since no one wants to admit to being either upper or lower class. There is, supposedly, one large and homogeneous middle class; in fact, though, it has a small upper portion and a large and rapidly expanding lower portion.
The wonderful thing about the American middle class concept is its malleability, because it is almost entirely symbolic. You could be middle class, own an ancestral mansion in an old brick and fieldstone suburb, drive a Mercedes and send