We have seen above that it is difficult to discern which exactly were the developmental trends at work within authoritarian collectivism, insofar as they ended rather suddenly. Indeed, they probably ended before the system exhausted its developmental possibilities. The economy had problems, but these led to some desperation only due to the competition of the Soviet Union with the West, which showed much greater strength and innovative capacity. Politically, relations were fraught, but if reforms were not undertaken the system could have survived for longer or even a very long time. Once there was an opening it quickly became crystal clear that if the genie was out of the bottle and political tensions ran their course unimpeded, authoritarian collectivism could not survive. And in fact it did not survive – not in the Soviet Union and not in the countries more directly connected to it when they had no true autonomous revolutionary process behind them. Even those that did, such as Yugoslavia, which moreover had a more supple and participatory economic system as well as less repression, could not stick to ‘real socialism’ in the ambience of change that overwhelmingly prevailed in Eastern Europe. In Africa, surrender was far-reaching. It was only in Asia and in a small Latin American country that successful attempts to survive were rolled out.

If we focus on the economic side, it was the blockages that over-centralization produced once heavy industrialization was accomplished that were a developmental problem. The sort of planning practised was highly defective. Low frequency signals, which a more decentralized (market-oriented or network-based) economy could provide, were lost in the top-down model adopted since Stalin and partly even before him, despite the formidable war machinery it was able to build and the growing welfare it managed to provide the Soviet working class, especially during the 1980s (Nove [1983] 1991; Blackburn 1991). Consumer goods for dispersed individual consumers and high technology were hardly achievable goals. ‘Relations of production’ and ‘productive forces’ clashed, whether there was a possibility to surpass the blockage within the ‘mode of production’ or not. In the end, it was the complicated intertwinement of political and economic conditions that further generated what became insurmountable contradictions.