[l332mn]

How? The planned economic system of USSR means that wartime production is a net economic loss serving no financial purpose. In contrast with the capitalist system, where war serves as a basis for the transfer of capital to the war profiteers, i.e. the national bourgeoisie. The comparison is invalid.

[_etyf]

>The planned economic system of USSR means that wartime production is a net economic loss serving no financial purpose.

It's a net loss under capitalist systems, too. Both systems can and do commit huge amounts of resources to pointless, destructive forever-wars. The political/military/security bureacracy of the USSR watched out for its own interests and sought ways to justify its own existence just as the military-industrial complex does in the USA.

The Soviet invasion enriched fewer bureacrats, but it also (compared to the NATO invasion) killed 10x more civilians and 3x more invaders in half the time, so in that sense I suppose we can say it was more efficient.

[l332mn]

> Both systems can and do commit huge amounts of resources to pointless, destructive forever-wars.

Only in capitalist systems is this a process of enrichment of the ruling class. The transfer of wealth in the US to the richest % on the basis of war has been immense. They're not pointless geopolitically either, since it serves to stifle and subjugate foreign governments into US alignment to support western predatory and exploitative economic policies (enforcing predatory loans and commanding oil trade). Hence aggressive imperialism combines several aspects of maintaining economic and military hegemony.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The power dynamics are identical.

I think you'd have to be quite naive to maintain that the USSR didn't have its local equivalent of a bourgeoisie. Or that a nominally Marxist economy like North Korea isn't really a dynastic monarchy hiding behind Marxist iconography.

[l332mn]

The USSR did not have a bourgeoisie nor a "local equivalent" thereof.

[alexanderdmitri]

I found this relevant question on Quora that had some pretty good answers: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-social-classes-in-Soviet...

[samvega_]

A lot of people have opinions on the class structure in the USSR. What is common to most of these people is that they don't understand or use Marx's conception of class, and instead use their own intuitions based off a liberal perspective, and often confusing state function with private power. The USSR was not classless, but it did not have a ruling bourgeoisie-like class (although bourgeois ideology lay latent in society).