Gorbachev was a teenager in 1950. You’d be better off making sure he got a better political education than he did, though really his problem was just that he was a likable, competent bureaucrat who was also a completely uninspired dumbass when it came to leadership so he let his policy get written by anticommunist extremists. Without Khrushchev’s dumbass failures and revisionism, without Brezhnev’s failure to correct course, without Andropov’s early death, and without longstanding systemic rot that allowed a large liberal bloc to form and give everyone the dumbest brainworms possible, Gorbachev would just be some friendly party official competently carrying out what he was told to do.
Taking out Khrushchev’s bloc is probably the single most decisive thing: without their liberalization reforms and general revisionism the Soviet economy continues growing rapidly, the Sino-Soviet split probably doesn’t happen, and without China opening up as a base of labor and a market for capital from the US the US hits a hard wall in the 1970s with no solution to maintaining capitalist growth.
I fail to see how that makes him harder to deal with.
You’d be better off making sure he got a better political education than he did
Firstly, what makes you think that the issue was education and not him becoming a lib in spite of it?
Secondly, if it was, indeed, education that was at fault, what would you change, then?
though really his problem was just that he was a likable, competent bureaucrat who was also a completely uninspired dumbass when it came to leadership
He was quite literally a liberal self-admittedly dedicated to destroying the USSR by the time he got the position.
so he let his policy get written by anticommunist extremists
He was an anti-communist PoS.
and without China opening up as a base of labor and a market for capital from the US the US hits a hard wall in the 1970s with no solution to maintaining capitalist growth
I wouldn’t be so sure, considering that there was the whole rest of the colonial world to exploit. It would just be more dispersed, I’d wager.
Secondly, if it was, indeed, education that was at fault, what would you change, then?
Oust the liberals from academia and also prevent the dumbass spiral towards liberalization caused by Khrushchev’s bloc’s reforms and the tacit acceptance of the “second economy” that the post-Stalin USSR had. Without all those conditions he’d just be some guy.
I wouldn’t be so sure, considering that there was the whole rest of the colonial world to exploit. It would just be more dispersed, I’d wager.
China was unique in that it had a massive well-educated population and at least some infrastructure ready to go, while primarily lacking industrial capital. It was basically the conditions of post-war Japan on a much larger scale, and the incorporation of Japan into the US economy as a colonized industrial base was basically the same phenomenon decades earlier: a way to increase the US’s overall material wealth in consumer goods without the cost of scaling up production domestically.
The opening of China as a market had an even bigger effect and came at an even more opportune time, however, because it happened right as American industrial capital was aging and needed to be replaced anyways, and as a lot of local labor pools were almost fully utilized. That is, American industry was running up against material barriers to further expansion and was coming up on costly replacements and upgrades, and China solved both of those: with a huge pool of educated workers, lots of room for new development, and an eagerness to buy fresh industrial capital, it became possible for American industrial companies to get larger factories with more workers than they could have had in the US for the same cost as upgrading their existing factories, or to shift some of their production entirely to Chinese companies and just serve as middlemen.
In short, they got a cheaper investment that cut their ongoing costs and increased their supply, enabling rapid growth and letting them avoid the wall of full-exploitation that they’d run up against. There really wasn’t any other place that could offer the same benefits at the same scale as China.
And without the recovery of the US and the seeming wealth in consumer goods that outsourcing to China enabled, a generation of Soviet students don’t get the dumbest brainworms ever by mistaking American colonial plunder for some sort of secret magic efficiency of markets.
How would you determine who is a liberal and who is not? Also, you are risking ousting too many liberals there (consider the fact that people who already live well and want even more - like highly educated scientists, engineers, or famous performance artists - seem to be rather likely to be liberals) in the sense that ousting them would leave you with too little an educational and research, outputs.
and also prevent the dumbass spiral towards liberalization caused by Khrushchev’s bloc’s reforms
How? What actions would you take?
China was unique in that it had a massive well-educated population and at least some infrastructure ready to go
Gorbachev was a teenager in 1950. You’d be better off making sure he got a better political education than he did, though really his problem was just that he was a likable, competent bureaucrat who was also a completely uninspired dumbass when it came to leadership so he let his policy get written by anticommunist extremists. Without Khrushchev’s dumbass failures and revisionism, without Brezhnev’s failure to correct course, without Andropov’s early death, and without longstanding systemic rot that allowed a large liberal bloc to form and give everyone the dumbest brainworms possible, Gorbachev would just be some friendly party official competently carrying out what he was told to do.
Taking out Khrushchev’s bloc is probably the single most decisive thing: without their liberalization reforms and general revisionism the Soviet economy continues growing rapidly, the Sino-Soviet split probably doesn’t happen, and without China opening up as a base of labor and a market for capital from the US the US hits a hard wall in the 1970s with no solution to maintaining capitalist growth.
I fail to see how that makes him harder to deal with.
Firstly, what makes you think that the issue was education and not him becoming a lib in spite of it?
Secondly, if it was, indeed, education that was at fault, what would you change, then?
He was quite literally a liberal self-admittedly dedicated to destroying the USSR by the time he got the position.
He was an anti-communist PoS.
I wouldn’t be so sure, considering that there was the whole rest of the colonial world to exploit. It would just be more dispersed, I’d wager.
Oust the liberals from academia and also prevent the dumbass spiral towards liberalization caused by Khrushchev’s bloc’s reforms and the tacit acceptance of the “second economy” that the post-Stalin USSR had. Without all those conditions he’d just be some guy.
China was unique in that it had a massive well-educated population and at least some infrastructure ready to go, while primarily lacking industrial capital. It was basically the conditions of post-war Japan on a much larger scale, and the incorporation of Japan into the US economy as a colonized industrial base was basically the same phenomenon decades earlier: a way to increase the US’s overall material wealth in consumer goods without the cost of scaling up production domestically.
The opening of China as a market had an even bigger effect and came at an even more opportune time, however, because it happened right as American industrial capital was aging and needed to be replaced anyways, and as a lot of local labor pools were almost fully utilized. That is, American industry was running up against material barriers to further expansion and was coming up on costly replacements and upgrades, and China solved both of those: with a huge pool of educated workers, lots of room for new development, and an eagerness to buy fresh industrial capital, it became possible for American industrial companies to get larger factories with more workers than they could have had in the US for the same cost as upgrading their existing factories, or to shift some of their production entirely to Chinese companies and just serve as middlemen.
In short, they got a cheaper investment that cut their ongoing costs and increased their supply, enabling rapid growth and letting them avoid the wall of full-exploitation that they’d run up against. There really wasn’t any other place that could offer the same benefits at the same scale as China.
And without the recovery of the US and the seeming wealth in consumer goods that outsourcing to China enabled, a generation of Soviet students don’t get the dumbest brainworms ever by mistaking American colonial plunder for some sort of secret magic efficiency of markets.
How would you determine who is a liberal and who is not? Also, you are risking ousting too many liberals there (consider the fact that people who already live well and want even more - like highly educated scientists, engineers, or famous performance artists - seem to be rather likely to be liberals) in the sense that ousting them would leave you with too little an educational and research, outputs.
How? What actions would you take?
I hadn’t considered that part.