The soviet union was less efficient in that it allowed compradors to take power and end it. It was a less efficient proletarian-dictatorship than the rival bourgeoise-dictatorship. Its principle mistake were structural mistakes allowing the liberals into power.

Yeah having all of their cities and a quarter of their population destroyed will do that.

Under Stalin and Lenin it was extremely efficient, growing and developing the economy at extreme rates unseen in human history up that point until the German invasion of WW2. The destruction of WW2 and the Liberal-revisionist take-over of the post-war government after Stalin's death led to liberalization and stagnation right at the time where they needed to recover the most via command planned economy. Kruschev's social imperialism and revisionism led to the Sino-Soviet split.

There was a failure there, a failure in purging out the social-imperialists and revisionists like Krushchev and his ilk.

Yeah assuming that the better system always wins out is pure ideology. Everything is circumstance. A bunch of crabs that recently learned how to make spears and developed minor mathematical capabilities could defeat a nuclear nation given the right circumstances. And whoever is the Victor is not automatically correct.

AES is in many ways a good term, especially because it reminds us we should materially support the projects that actually currently threaten global capitalism, but the implicit ideology that “survival = more morally correct” is incorrect at it’s core. I’m an ML because I actually think the vanguard party is a good idea from a theory perspective and a historical perspective, not because the vanguard party winning all the time is morally right. Morality has nothing to do with it. And if you were to bring morality into the equation, I would actual agree with anarchists because the society they describe is both possible and better than one that is newly socialist, I just don’t think it’s possible right now.