Comic Strips

The Soviet system lasted nearly a full century, and worked very well for the vast majority of its existence. If someone wants to make the claim that collapse is inevitable just because the USSR was dissolved, they need to do the legwork to prove it as such. We can discuss what went right and what went wrong in the USSR, including how and why it dissolved, but without legwork assertions like "collapse was inevitable" can be ignored and not taken seriously as there's nothing to take seriously.

As for scarcity of resources, that's something that can actually be addressed, but I want to clear up the rest of that paragraph first. For 1, I never said the USSR was "optimal," and no Marxist believes it to have been a perfect wonderland, just a much better system with its own flaws, albeit lesser flaws. For 2, social services aren't a bad thing, especially not in a system that saw by far the most devastation from World War II. The fact is, addressing hunger was a priority for the Socialist system as full employment was one of the benefits and necessities for that form of economy, unlike Capitalism, so even if we assume everyone acted selfishly there was no need for a "reserve army of labor."

Now to actually address scarcity of resources. The fundamental issue with the Soviet system and resource gathering was that it could not depend on international trade for anything. The Capitalist countries all made deliberate choices to provide unstable or unfavorable trade with the Socialists, so they had to develop all of their resources internally, even ones scarce in the regions controlled by the Socialists. Even then, GDP growth was some of the highest in the world while wealth disparity some of the lowest. Further, much of the economy was spent on millitary research and development in order to keep the US at bay.

As for your final paragraph, I don't think we actually disagree here, though I imagine your "socially conscious democracy" is different from what you think the Marxist-Leninist states look like. Surviving Imperialism as the highest form of Capitalism requires, above all, an end to the US Empire as the world's greatest Imperialist power, and an uplifiting of the Global South. We can't move beyond Capitalism globally while the US Empire still functions the way it does, by "dollar recycling" off of all the other countries and owning 800 millitary bases globally to keep the Dollar standard going.