If the USSR was never a socialist prototype, then that begs the question what was it? They certainly thought they were the epitome of socialism.

Personally I do not like the world ‘socialism’ because it is so heavily freighted with propaganda that people cannot think about the underlying phenomena objectively. I prefer the phrase ‘democratic, cooperative economic production’. Clearly the USSR was not an example of such a system. Soviet communism was an economic and political system created by sadistic, autocratic ideologues and imposed by force of terror on a culture with no tradition of democratic institutions. Furthermore, the USSR was fully committed to economic growth and to short term exploitation resources in the pursuit of power and wealth, though admittedly they were much less efficient at this process than we were.

One could have argued that the failure of the democratic Greek city states and the failure of the Roman republic constituted definitive proof that democratic institutions are inconsistent with human nature and should be relegated to the scrap heap of history with greater force of reason than arguing that the failure of the Soviet Union constitutes proof that democratic, cooperative economic production is a practical impossibility. If your intuition tells you than such a form of social organization is inconsistent with human nature I certainly cannot disprove your intuition, but you really need to come up with better supporting reasons for it than the fall of the USSR.

Personally, I find the communism vs. capitalism debate to be somewhat beside the point. We are all heavily dependent on the community in which we live. If Bill Gates along with a mountain of gold bars were transported to an uninhabited world then Bill would be rich no longer. The only true source of wealth is a healthy functioning community. All so called ‘stores of value’ are merely claims against the output of the community. If explicitly recognizing this fact is ‘communism’ the communism is merely common sense.

On the other hand if we are to have any production enterprises above the scale of cottage industries then some method must found of capitalizing such production enterprises. The craft guilds of the middle ages were capitalized industries. The question is whether the current system for investing in production infrastructure, which I call private finance capitalism to distinguish it from capitalism in a more general sense, can function effectively in a world in which production is being limited by the availability of resources. I believe that the clear answer to this question is “no”. The only effective way to deal with resource depletion is to voluntarily limit consumption. In the current economic system limiting consumption would lead to a huge economic depression and massive unemployment. This reality is a fundamental structural defect of private finance capitalism which must be fixed if we have any hope of creating a humane, democratic society in the long term. If it is really true that our only choices are Wall Street or the Politburo, then I fear that the Politburo is our future.