and gathered food with little or no technology for many thousands of years. But the introduction of collectivized, mechanized agriculture broke the back of pre-revolutionary Russian agrarian society, and no amount of technical supervision from Moscow was able to restore the prolific productivity of the backward old village.
In most parts of Russia, agriculture has always been a somewhat dubious proposition. The growing season is short. The soils are thin outside of a single belt of fertile black soil called chernozëm that runs through Ukraine and some of Russia’s southern regions. There are frequent spring droughts and early cold snaps. These factors make very marginal yields and outright failed harvests quite common, and there have been several episodes of outright starvation. Because agriculture is so unreliable, throughout their long history Russians have augmented it with other types of traditional economic activity (so-called promysly) such as fur trapping, hunting, fishing and logging. Nevertheless, before the havoc wreaked by World War I and the ensuing revolution, Russia was by all accounts a well-fed country, known for its blini-eating contests, that supplied wheat to Western Europe. In Soviet times, it had to import wheat from the United States and Canada on credit, and many people were forced to supplement what was available in the state-run shops with what they could buy at the farmers’ markets, gather in the woods and produce from their own small kitchen garden plots.
Corporate, mechanized agriculture in the United States is often viewed as a success story, able to supply its people with a high-fat, high-protein diet, which also contains plenty of salt and sugar, along with many mystery chemicals. Never mind that it spans the entire spectrum of flavors — from sawdust all the way to cardboard — cleverly disguised by the fat, salt, sugar and mystery chemicals. Never mind that this questionable food is often ingested in a hurry, from a piece of paper or plastic. Never mind that it makes the people fat, crazy and sick. The portions are nothing if not generous, even for the poorest people, many of whom sport cathedral-like domes and buttresses of fat.
The US also produces many agricultural commodities for export. However, this agricultural system depends on the availability of fossil fuel-based energy, mainly in the form of diesel for agricultural machinery and transportation and natural gas for fertilizer and other chemical manufacturing. In effect, the industrialized agricultural system transforms fossil fuels into food calories with the help of soil (which it gradually destroys in the process) and sunlight. The ratio of fossil fuel energy to derived food energy has been calculated to be about ten calories from fossil fuels for each calorie of consumed food. The combination of depleted domestic oil and gas resources and demand outstripping foreign supplies, coupled with increasing demand for biofuels and the predicted onset of dust-bowl conditions due to global warming, represents a less than rosy scenario for American food security in the coming years.
Consumer Goods
The Soviets’ inability to compete in the area of mass-produced consumer goods stemmed mainly from an administrative preference for financing capital goods expenditures while ignoring light industry. Also, consumer goods production requires a flexible economic model that is difficult to accommodate within a centrally planned economy. Consumer goods were regarded not as an important segment of the Soviet economic system but as a cost to the government, competing with other, more essential social services such as housing, education and health care. As it turned out, the trickle of imported consumer items eventually turned into a flood; coupled with falling oil export revenues, this exacerbated the Soviet Union’s financial shortfalls.
Since the talent to design fashionable, attractive clothing was certainly always present, this was strictly a failure — one of many — on the part of the Soviet leadership. What they entirely missed was the ability of consumer goods, especially clothing, to undermine morale by allowing privileged young people to differentiate themselves in appearance from the rest of the population, and to do so in a way that quietly made a mockery of the official ideology, without any sign of overt dissent. It is well known that putting on a uniform has a profound effect on a person’s behavior. Attire that is branded with an ideologically charged symbol actually influences one’s ideology, because putting it on implies making a statement, and because people tend to agree with themselves, standing by the statements they make. Consequently, putting on attire that is branded with an ideologically hollow symbol, such as a designer logo, is a way of shrugging off ideology altogether and of denying the power of ideologically charged symbols. It gave young people a painless way to opt out of looking and feeling Soviet.
Today, the United States is being flooded with imported consumer goods, just as the Soviet Union was during the stagnation period of the ’80s, and with similar impact on the country’s trade deficits, but here these branded products are too common to serve as a social differentiator. To the contrary, with the exception of sports brands, it is the cheap clothing that is most often emblazoned with a corporate brand, not the high-priced articles. The few consumer articles that are still manufactured in the United States more often than not have a strangely old-fashioned, stolid, institutional look, reminiscent of Soviet production, and maintain their tentative foothold within the domestic market by appealing to the US consumer’s sense of patriotism. When the exporting countries finally decide to stop selling their products on credit, and their container ships stop visiting America’s ports, perhaps the institutional look will become fashionable. Then again, the homemade look may win out, or the threadbare look, or the clothing-optional look; the future of fashion is hard to predict. The worst possible outcome is that everyone will don uniforms, fashioning themselves into identical, mass-produced, ideologically lobotomized servants of the fully privatized, corporate-run state.
Information Technology
One area of superpower competition in which the United States declared early victory, and in which it is now handily defeating itself, is the area of information technology. The Soviet Union failed to keep up for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important one was the insistence that the whole endeavor be shrouded in secrecy, for security reasons, due to the Soviet government’s deep mistrust of its own people. Their failure to keep up was especially striking in view of the fact that they had some of the best talent. During the late ’70s, many of the pioneering American computer companies were staffed by specialists who had recently emigrated from Russia.
Also, the explosive development of computer technology has generally proceeded through oversight and random, accidental successes, rather than through successful central planning. The US funded the development of Internet routing protocols hoping to create a network that would be resilient in the face of nuclear attack. Luckily, this ability was never to be tested, but the factors that made it resilient also made it anarchic, and this eventually gave us worms and viruses, botnets, peer-to-peer networks and spam. IBM released their PC architecture into the wild, thinking it worthless, and others took the basic blueprint and made a multitude of cheap clones of it. A few tinkerers in a garage came up with the first generation of Apple’s machines. A few other tinkerers at Bell Labs used their copious spare time to write the Unix operating system, more or less as a joke, and it eventually took over most of the bigger machines. It later morphed into Linux, which is now gradually taking over many of the smaller ones. Microsoft blundered across a good thing when IBM mistakenly failed to provide a viable operating system for the PC, and no amount of subsequent blundering has been able to erase this initial advantage. The Soviets, with their secretiveness and tight central control, simply could not match this level of amateurism, haphazard innovation and random improvisation.
It took a while, but the United States eventually found ways to approximate the Soviet failure in this area, and is presently hard at work looking for creative ways to kill the goose that lays golden eggs — by developing some secretiveness and tight central control of its own. The US is executing a three-pronged attack on the goose: through enforcing intellectual property laws, through criminalizing work in the area of computer security and through perpetuating a fraud called enterprise software, which has become something of a poster child for national dysfunction.
It is in the nature of all information to want to spread freely, and networked computers make it ridiculously easy for it
