Answer:
In Russian, perestroika means restructuring. The use of the word was intended to indicate the paths to be traced to effect structural changes in the Soviet economy and society. The economy of the USSR did not reach the high rates of economic growth seen in previous times in the 1970s and 1980s. The situation was the result of the exhaustion of Soviet forms of social organization, in which political and economic centralization in the State and the Communist Party prevented the development of mechanisms that would guarantee increased productivity.
Perestroika was thus an attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to end the social crisis through which Soviet society was going. This crisis was related to the development of the USSR itself.
In capitalism, the increase in productivity is guaranteed mainly with the increase in consumption by the working class. This happens, therefore, when consuming the goods necessary for their physical reproduction, the working class stimulates material production at all levels, from agriculture, through industry, to the services that offer the conditions for the realization of this consumption of the products. workers.
Gorbachev's measure, perestroika, intended to change this scenario, guaranteeing greater freedom for workers, but also for the oppositions within the Communist Party's own bureaucracy, seeking to decentralize the decisions that were in the hands of the nomenklatura.
What happened in the USSR was not socialism or communism. What happened was the existence of capitalism not based on private property. Soviet capitalism was based on state ownership. The two types of capitalism are similar in that they maintain the economic and social exploitation of the working class as the basis of their functioning.
