[James_K]

>Anything beyond subsistence agriculture would probably be impossible without financialization.

This is patently not true. The USSR had no financial markets and engaged in the production high value goods. Whether it did so more efficiently than its capitalist competition is another matter, and I believe the answer is likely no, but it clearly did more than subsistence farming.

[mlrtime]

It's not a comparison or another matter. It was a disaster and if it didn't fail the way it did, it would have through famine.

[James_K]

This assessment is not based in historical reality. The last famine in the Soviet Union ended in 1947, more than 40 years before its dissolution, and with World War 2 being a major contributing factor.

The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.

[piekvorst]

That’s the point. They could initiate any massive production but it wasn’t maintainable at the scale they intended.