Ardennes posted:

The Soviets didn't know it was a hoax, that was the problem.

indigi posted:

this may be off topic, but given the outcome, are we sure the late 80s Soviet reformers were operating in good faith?

mila kunis posted:

Yeah I have the same question. The housing problem in the soviet economy looks pretty good in comparison with what we have to deal with in 2020 in the advanced capitalist countries. Full employment also seems pretty good, and most of the problems, while real, don't seem that bad or bad enough to cause any kind of inevitable crash that required marketization to stave it off. From the same Parenti book:

Enver Zogha posted:

Obviously lots of ordinary people are nostalgic about the socialist period in the former USSR, GDR, Yugoslavia, etc., considering capitalism is an exploitative system subject to periodic crises (and considering how capitalist restoration was associated with a blatant decline in living standards.) But the point is that socialism is supposed to be superior

indigi posted:

I’m not certain but it seems like people saying life was better under socialism is a key data point in judging whether or not socialism is superior to capitalism

Enver Zogha posted:

I've communicated with people who lived in Jonestown and overall enjoyed life there despite being lorded over by a deranged cult leader. This does not mean Jonestown was a viable alternative to capitalism.

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Agricultural output of grain, corn, livestock, and other products plummeted in the former communist countries, as thousands of cooperative farms were forcibly broken up. The new private farmers have small plots, often cannot get loans, seeds, fe rtilizer, or machin­ery, and are rapidly losing their holdings or reverting to subsistence farming. Hungary's agricultural cooperatives had been one sector of the socialist economy that performed well. But with privatization, farm output tumbled 40 percent in 1993 (Los Angeles Times, 1/29/94).

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A drastic deterioration in agricultural production occurred in Bulgaria, once considered the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, caus­ing severe bread shortages by 1996. Bulgaria was also suffering from a 20 percent monthly inflation and was sinking into that familiar cycle of foreign debt: cutting back on services to qualify for IMF loans, borrowing to pay off past borrowing. "The [Bulgarian] gov­ernment must impose more free market austerity measures to get vital international loans to repay portions of the $9.4 billion foreign debt" (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/ 18/96).

In 1992, the Lithuanian government decreed that former owners and their descendants could reclaim property confiscated during the socialist era. As a result, tens of thousands of farming families, about 70 percent of the rural population, were evicted from land they had worked for over a half century, destroying the country's agricultural base in the process.

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Much production in East Germany was dismantled to prevent competition with We st German firms. This was especially evident when collective agriculture was broken up to protect the heavily sub­sidized and less productive private farms of West Germany.8 Without making compensation, We st German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in the GDR, including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system -assets worth about $2 trillion - in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history. The end result of all this free-market privatization in East Germany is that rents, once 5 percent of one's income, have climbed to as much as two-thirds; likewise the costs of transportation, child care, health care, and higher education have soared beyond the reach of many.

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In Russia, the living standard of the average family has fallen almost by half since the market "reforms" took hold (New York Times, 6116196).

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In the emerging free-market paradise of Russia and Eastern Europe, price deregulation produced not competitive prices but prices set by private monopolies, adding to the galloping inflation. Beggars, pimps, dope pushers, and other hustlers ply their trades as never before. And there has been a dramatic rise in unemployment, homelessness, air and water pollution, prostitution, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill.

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The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One­third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fe ll below its death rate for the first time since World War II.

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With the end of subsidized rents, estimates of homelessness in Moscow alone run as high as 300,000. The loss of resident permits deprives the homeless of medical care and other state benefits, such as they are. Dressed in rags and victimized by both mobsters and government militia, thousands of indigents die of cold and hunger on the streets of various cities. In Rumania, thousands of homeless children live in sewers and train stations, sniffing glue to numb their hunger, begging and falling prey to various predators (National Public Radio news, 7/21/96).

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Real income has shrunk by as much as 30 to 40 percent in the ex­communist countries. In 1992 alone, Russia saw its consumer spend­ing drop by 38 percent. (By comparison, during the Great Depression, consumer spending in the United States fell 21 percent over four years. ) In both Poland and Bulgaria, an estimated 70 per-- cent now live below or just above the poverty line. In Russia, it is 75 to 85 percent, with a third of the population barely subsisting in absolute economic desperation. In Hungary, which has received most of the We st's investment in Eastern Europe, over one-third of its citizens live in abject poverty, and 70 percent of the men hold two or more jobs, working up to 14 hours a day, according to the Ministry of Labor.

mila kunis posted:

Lmao come off it. There's a massive difference between that and people describing real material differences in living and living standards, and also functioning worse economically.

Enver Zogha posted:

Obviously lots of ordinary people are nostalgic about the socialist period in the former USSR, GDR, Yugoslavia, etc., considering capitalism is an exploitative system subject to periodic crises (and considering how capitalist restoration was associated with a blatant decline in living standards.) But the point is that socialism is supposed to be superior: capable of achieving higher productivity than capitalism, capable of more rationally allocating labor and goods compared to the anarchy of capitalist production, and so on. Yet that didn't seem to be the case in the USSR and other 20th century efforts at building socialist economies. I think the Communist Party of China is right in arguing that the most logical conclusion to draw from this is that a planned socialist economy requires a higher level of productive forces than was existed in these countries (including China), so that in the absence of said productive forces the only alternative is to tolerate some sort of market economy.

Enver Zogha posted:

Well again, for Marxists the superiority of an economic system is based on its ability to negate earlier modes of production. This clearly did not happen in the USSR, where not only did the law of value continue to operate (as Stalin acknowledged it did), but Soviet officialdom basically treated this law as subordinate to whatever these officials felt like doing to the economy. This cavalier attitude led to black markets and corruption.

The point is that by ignoring the need for market reforms, the leaders of the CPSU unwittingly created the material conditions for political counter-revolution, which meant that when capitalist relations did return it would be in conditions where the bourgeoisie held state power.

The existing socialist countries have all sought to a greater or lesser extent to embark on market reforms. Whatever one thinks of the Chinese economy, the CPC's approach toward capitalism has clearly been a lot better for ordinary people compared to how capitalist restoration went in the former USSR. The same can clearly be said for Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba (reforms in the DPRK seem to have been either very limited or stillborn, so not much room to comment there.)

Ardennes posted:

Basically, according to you, unless a system can take a war-torn agricultural country and not only make it a superpower but have it completely dominate an alliance of countries with 10 times its economy, it completely failed and there is nothing to learn from it. Game over etc etc.

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Btw, productivity really wasn't the Soviets' major problem it was access to capital and technology at least in "commanding height" industries.

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Also, in all honesty, if Deng's reforms happened co-aligned with an opening of Chinese trade, very little would have happened. You could say market reforms allowed to adjust more readily to foreign trade, but without that foreign trade in the first place, they would have gone nowhere.

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Market reforms only worked when it was connected to an opening in foreign trade with the West, but it didn't magically just fix what was going on unless there was capital flowing in.

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Also, there are aspects of contemporary China, like housing that honestly would benefit from better and more direct central planning

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alongside the fact that the state still have a huge hand in guiding the economy including entire swaths of the economy.

Enver Zogha posted:

Whatever one thinks of the Chinese economy, the CPC's approach toward capitalism has clearly been a lot better for ordinary people compared to how capitalist restoration went in the former USSR.

uncop posted:

The Chinese revisionists didn’t save the people from decades of poverty, they condemned them to decades of poverty. We can only start talking about real improvement of social conditions in the 21st century, decades after the systems that kept the people from poverty had been purposefully dismantled. They hosed up a whole generation and basically blamed the social damage on the Cultural Revolution.

Enver Zogha posted:

Well again, for Marxists the superiority of an economic system is based on its ability to negate earlier modes of production.

Trash Ops posted:

Enver Zogha posted:

There's plenty to learn from the USSR and friends, both negative and positive.

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Do you have a source you'd like to share?

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No poo poo, capitalism is an international system and the growth of modern productive forces requires foreign trade. That's why Deng treated "opening up" and domestic reform as inseparable. What's your point?

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You're assuming that these two things aren't naturally interrelated, as if (for example) Cuba's market reforms aren't linked to efforts at greater foreign investment.

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Yes, yes it does. What's your point? A workers' state making use of market mechanisms doesn't mean embracing the outlook of Murray Rothbard.

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I’m (clearly) not as familiar with the history as either of you, but I’m having a hard time squaring these posts

indigi posted:

I thought it was about providing a more just and socially beneficial economic system? I haven’t read Capital or other Big Theory books, but from what I got from various pamphlets by Engels/Marx/Lenin wasn’t that communism promised to out-efficient and out-produce capitalism, rather that it would take control of the means of production in order to share its fruits more equitably. they didn’t seem to spend time focusing on being superior on the ledger sheet, and in fact blamed a lot of the evils of capitalism on its ruthless pursuit of value

Ardennes posted:

The Davies series on the Industrialization of the Soviet Union covers what was occurring during the 1920s/1930s pretty well, but most of the situation doesn't change. The Soviet Union, while it has issues with productivity, the issue is always foreign trade and that the Soviet Union simply is an a massive technological disadvantage through its existence and it has to use excess capital to import machinery to make up the difference, this is still going on in the 1980s.

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Btw, Cuba has struggled for years because of its trade deficit, and liberalization more recently was to try to accrue slightly more capital from tourists. The question is if market reforms are actually more efficient in isolation, or are simply conditional. In Cuba's case, it really seems conditional based on changing tourism patterns.

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The problem is seeing market reforms as a panacea

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rather than completely contingent on if the West is willing to play along.

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As recently as December 1986, when the Vietnamese Constitution was amended to guarantee the rights of private property, the public sector still dominated the economy. The rapid change that swept Vietnam in the ensuing three years was described by The Wall Street Journal last May as "almost revolutionary, particularly in the way they have opened the country to the outside world."

The newly liberated private sector in Ho Chi Minh City was characterized as "booming, reaching an almost frenzied state." Stating that by midyear 1989, "conditions in the city have reverted to just about what they were before 1975," the article comported with my own impression in two recent visits.

More consumer goods were readily available in the three blocks of stalls and stores surrounding my hotel than could be found in all of Moscow. Indeed, Soviet workers scramble for the opportunity to serve in Vietnam so they can pick up televisions, radios and Western goods unavailable in their own country.

Enver Zogha posted:

Obviously Marx, Engels, and Lenin criticized capitalism, but they did so with the knowledge that capitalism represented a historical advance compared to slavery and feudalism and was laying the foundations for its own destruction. As Engels put it, "Only at a certain level of development of the productive forces of society, an even very high level for our modern conditions, does it become possible to raise production to such an extent that the abolition of class distinctions can be a real progress, can be lasting without bringing about stagnation or even decline in the mode of social production."

I recently wrote a whole article on the subject, contrasting how Marx and Engels viewed capitalism compared to how utopian socialists viewed it: https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=102313

They absolutely did argue that communism would be more productive than capitalism, e.g. Marx writing in his critique of the Gotha Programme that only after "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly. . . can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" Not only that but capitalism's ever-increasing productivity leads it into ever more severe economic crises which can only be resolved by socializing the means of production, since at that point capitalism becomes a fetter on the productive forces.

Enver Zogha posted:

Yeah but I'm not talking about the 1920s-30s, I'm talking about the 1950s-80s. This is important because the Stalin era was concerned primarily with "extensive" development (building enterprises or even entire new industries), whereas his successors were increasingly tasked with "intensive" development (improving the efficiency of the existing enterprises.) This is why productivity became such a big deal by the time Gorby came to power, whereas under Stalin it was more like "okay yes we're wasting tons of materials and whatnot, but that's secondary to building up enough of an industrial base to defeat an imperialist invasion and lay the basis for a higher standard of living later on.")

quote:

I never suggested market reforms "in isolation" though. My point is that Soviet-style economies have all been obliged to pursue market reforms to a greater or lesser extent, precisely under pressure from international changes combined with the limitations of their own productive forces. How they pursue these reforms is up to them. There's no single "market reform."

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Which I never did. Perestroika was certainly a case of market reforms, yet those resulted in disaster. The New Economic Mechanism in Hungary made that country the most market-oriented in the Warsaw Pact (at least till Gorby came along anyway), yet by the end of the 80s it was acknowledged that the NEM had failed. Yugoslavia had market reforms as part of its system of workers' self-management, but again these ended up being a pretty big disappointment by the mid-80s.

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I wouldn't say "completely contingent," although it obviously varies depending on the country. To give an example contrary to your view, Vietnamese reforms in the late 80s turned it from a country that imported rice to a country that exported it. A 1990 New York Times op-ed described it as an economic miracle:
Keep in mind that at this point Vietnam was still treated as practically an enemy country by the US, which had an embargo on the country and maintained no diplomatic relations with it.

Ardennes posted:

The Soviet Union's central issue was still capital access after the 1950s and market reforms weren't going to change that. Productivity on its own isn't going to change if you don't have the capital resources to utilize it.

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And why didn't the Kosygin reforms, were allowed time to mature, achieve nothing?

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To quote one author (Vladimir Kontorovich, "Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform"),

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These changes created a greater opportunity for enterprise managers to reach their plan targets by tilting the product mix towards more expensive products, and by introducing new products at inflated prices. The results were the deterioration in the correspondence of product mix to user needs and the acceleration of inflation. . . For a manager, introducing 'new' products at inflated prices is a substitute for devoting more effort to increasing real output and improving quality. Both are ways to reach the plan target, but the former requires less effort. The reform made it easier to use inflation as the means of reaching the target. . . .

The economic reform may have contributed to the slowdown of technological progress. . . Several Soviet authors argue that it was caused by changes in the incentive system that were introduced by the reform. Massive bonuses 'for the main results of economic activity' out of the new material incentive fund dwarfed bonuses for innovation. The share of the latter in the total amount of bonuses plummeted from 19% in 1965 to 5.4% in 1967.

At the same time, the author notes that in 1966 only 1% of industrial enterprises were working under the reform (albeit these were important enterprises), thus while what little existed suggested the reform was a disappointment, "many of the reform measures [had] scarcely been tried." So there is a certain ambiguity.

Another author (Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Economic Reform of Socialism: The Soviet Record") argued, "The reforms were extended gradually throughout industry and in some other sectors during the years 1966-70. But in exercising their increased freedom of action, enterprises responded in ways that the central authorities did not like, such as some distributions of bonus funds and undertaking some kinds of investment projects. Moreover, the hoped-for gains in labor productivity and product quality failed to materialize. In short, firms continued to behave much as before, because the reforms did not alter any of the essentials of Stalinist central planning."

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So why did Perestroika and the other reforms fail in your mind?

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It says it right there "that Vietnam was opening to the outside world" and it was by 1990, a big portion of the Doi Moi reforms was about currency devaluation and opening trade access so Vietnam could sell rice exports cheaply to non-US foreign markets (Vietnam was also doing a positive trade with socialist states during this period). This isn't something that would be possible for the Soviet Union, not only did the US have a very controlled trade with the Soviets they made sure that any state remotely reliant on them traded with the Soviets as little as possible. It isn't a conspiracy, it was the Cold War.

indigi posted:

at what point does a society become able to fully abandon this market poo poo? didn’t they think Germany was there in the 19th century? is China really that far behind?

Enver Zogha posted:

You haven't actually given me a source on how the USSR's "central issue was still capital access after the 1950s." Not that I'm dismissing it, but I'd like to know why you say this.

quote:

I'll quote a post I made last year:

At the same time, the author notes that in 1966 only 1% of industrial enterprises were working under the reform (albeit these were important enterprises), thus while what little existed suggested the reform was a disappointment, "many of the reform measures [had] scarcely been tried." So there is a certain ambiguity.

Another author (Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Economic Reform of Socialism: The Soviet Record") argued, "The reforms were extended gradually throughout industry and in some other sectors during the years 1966-70. But in exercising their increased freedom of action, enterprises responded in ways that the central authorities did not like, such as some distributions of bonus funds and undertaking some kinds of investment projects. Moreover, the hoped-for gains in labor productivity and product quality failed to materialize. In short, firms continued to behave much as before, because the reforms did not alter any of the essentials of Stalinist central planning."

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Well, limiting myself to Perestroika since your posts are focused on the USSR, a major reason was due to being internally incoherent; reforms were often delayed for political reasons. To quote a bourgeois economist, "Initially, price reform was to come in 1989, then 1990, and finally it was postponed with the disclaimer that the Soviet people would rather wait on line than pay higher prices. Every time Gorbachev debated freeing up prices there was a run on the state run stores. This just exacerbated the shortage problem already plaguing the Soviet system. Shortages of everything at the state stores became the common condition. So Gorbachev promised to bring relief through subsidized basic products and the whole process of reform was stalled." (Peter J. Boettke, Why Perestroika Failed, 1993, p. 40)

The same author also gives an idea of how chaotic everything seemed: "In October and November 1989, for example, it appeared as if Leonid Abalkin would push through a radical reform package, including the full adoption of private property and free market prices. Abalkin’s program, however, was defeated in December 1989 by the more cautious program of Nikolai Ryzhkov. Then again in March 1990 it seemed that Ryzhkov would be removed from power and that radical economic reforms would be instituted at the urging of Abalkin and Gorbachev’s personal economic advisor Nikolai Petrakov. Even in early April 1990 Soviet officials were arguing that there was a good chance they would institute radical economic reforms similar to the program instituted in Poland as of 1 January 1990. But by the end of April 1990 market reforms were postponed indefinitely. And, then, in August and September 1990, it was reported that Gorbachev had finally decided decisively for radical market reforms with the adoption of the Shatalin ‘500-Day’ plan. However, as with all the other reform packages the 500-day plan was rejected in favor of a Gorbachev compromise program with the old Soviet institutions of economic management which basically amounted to no reform at all." (p. 41)

A lot of Perestroika's problems were due to inept or vague policies, e.g. enterprises were told to find suppliers rather than rely on planners allocating resources to them as hitherto, yet enterprise managers had no idea how to go about doing that. The founders of urban cooperatives (which in many cases simply acted as private businesses) lived in fear that their ventures could be abruptly terminated by the state at any moment. There were cases where it wasn't quite clear whether a particular transaction was illegal, etc.

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Again, I already explained that market reforms are going to be interrelated with international trade, and I obviously wasn't suggesting that the USSR copy Vietnam.

And I repeat, Vietnam in 1989-90 was under a US embargo. Japan (as the op-ed notes) was also vetoing Vietnam from receiving any World Bank or IMF funding. The point is that something as simple as allowing farmers to sell rice at market prices helped increase production enough to export rice and get rid of the problem of peasants hoarding their products. This does not mean Vietnam thereby solved every economic problem it faced. It does not mean "allow farmers to sell [product] at market price" is automatically great idea for every other country on the planet at any given moment in time. It also does not mean that Vietnam could somehow do away with international trade (I don't know why you keep bringing this up.) But it does show that non-cooperation from the US and international financial institutions doesn't have to mean that any and all market reforms are automatically doomed to fail.

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You'll notice I haven't been suggesting specifically what the Soviets "should" have done in the 1950s-80s, because I honestly don't know. It just seems fairly obvious to me that if every other single socialist country has been obliged to pursue some kind of market reforms, and if the USSR suffered from similar problems of productivity as these countries did, then it isn't magically exempt from the need for reforms just because the US didn't want other Western countries to give the Soviets access to newer technologies or whatever. How those reforms should look and when they should have been implemented is a different matter.
Well as Engels wrote all the way back in 1847, "In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity." What constitutes "sufficient quantity" is something that presumably has to be determined by practice, although it's safe to say that Marx and Engels did not anticipate it taking 150+ years, nor did they assume that in the year 2020 the only places professing to uphold proletarian state power would be restricted to parts of Asia and a Caribbean island.

Ardennes posted:

The problem is "market reform" is a very broad concept and there is a vast difference between allowing some village markets to help increase the rice supply versus ending an economic system dependent on price controls. Also, I would say specifically the USSR was a special case because of its negative relationship with the US and that the success of certain market reforms in Vietnam/China during the 1980s simply wouldn't and couldn't work. If Vietnam, for example, implemented a "500 day style" plan while being under the same trade constrains as the USSR...it probably wouldn't have worked.

quote:

If you want to say "well the Soviets could have allowed some private business here and there, broke up some state farms, maybe offered some more bonuses" etc etc fine, but it is pretty different than what Gorbachev's advisors were trying to get him to do or even PRC system reforms.

THS posted:

i have nothing to contribute to this discussion but im enjoying it. keep arguing imo

Enver Zogha posted:

Well again, for Marxists the superiority of an economic system is based on its ability to negate earlier modes of production. This clearly did not happen in the USSR, where not only did the law of value continue to operate (as Stalin acknowledged it did), but Soviet officialdom basically treated this law as subordinate to whatever these officials felt like doing to the economy. This cavalier attitude led to black markets and corruption.

The point is that by ignoring the need for market reforms, the leaders of the CPSU unwittingly created the material conditions for political counter-revolution, which meant that when capitalist relations did return it would be in conditions where the bourgeoisie held state power.

The existing socialist countries have all sought to a greater or lesser extent to embark on market reforms. Whatever one thinks of the Chinese economy, the CPC's approach toward capitalism has clearly been a lot better for ordinary people compared to how capitalist restoration went in the former USSR. The same can clearly be said for Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba (reforms in the DPRK seem to have been either very limited or stillborn, so not much room to comment there.)

mila kunis posted:

You seem to have danced around the rest of my post, where market reforms were an absolute disaster that destroyed the lives of millions in the soviet bloc. The USSR had a superior economy and was a better place to live in than Russia.

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There's nothing inherently good about market reforms.

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It's not 'the market' that gives you benefits, its capital investment and technical knowhow which you get by bending to the demands of the richest countries in the world which have had centuries, and imperial plunder, to build that up back home.

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Market reforms/privatization blew up and destroyed the USSR

Enver Zogha posted:

I "danced around" it because I wasn't objecting to it. What happened in the 90s was a political and economic counter-revolution. You might as well have said "oh you like market reforms huh, well HOW ABOUT WHEN PINOCHET OVERTHREW ALLENDE AND THE CHICAGO BOYS PROCEEDED TO...."

The question isn't whether the USSR was economically superior to modern Russia (I certainly never claimed it wasn't), it's whether the USSR was capable of catching up to and outpacing the United States and other major capitalist countries in terms of productivity without ever needing to recourse to market reforms at some point. I'd argue the answer is no. It seems to me that the USSR's productive forces were too low relative to the level of socialization it had, therefore sooner or later the Soviets were going to have to pursue some sort of reforms aimed at expanding the role of the market.
I never claimed there was, and explicitly gave examples of where certain models of market reform were either catastrophic (Perestroika) or ultimately found wanting (Yugoslavia, Hungary.)
But that reduces "the market" to a receptacle for foreign investments and technology. Surely market mechanisms have more significance than that. It isn't like János Kornai, Ota Šik, Włodzimierz Brus, and other critics of Soviet-style planned economies thought the system did a great job rationally allocating resources and providing incentives and that its only fault was failing to establish Special Economic Zones for foreign investment or something.

Cuba's experience with private hair salons, restaurants, mechanics, etc. seems to be pretty good, and as far as I know Western capital isn't investing trillions of dollars in Cuban auto repair shops or whatever. The economic gains caused by Vietnam's reforms of the late 80s weren't premised on Western companies handing over the latest and greatest in agricultural technology to rice farmers.
Perestroika blew up and destroyed the USSR. Market reform is not synonymous with the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, nor does it need to be a drastic process affecting the entire economy in the span of months as opposed to something done cautiously over the span of decades.

Enver Zogha posted:

Well first off, I'd like a source for what you describe given how I don't recall coming across it in the works of Alec Nove or other historians of the Soviet economy.

Second, you don't need to wait 10-15 years to notice economic inefficiency at the level of individual enterprises. Knowing that a region will have a particular resource depleted 8 years from now helps in terms of like "don't build an expensive plant here," but it doesn't address the problems within an existing enterprise concerning low productivity, managers wasting large numbers of raw materials, etc.

Hence why Soviet reformers in the late 80s generally sought the creation of a market economy rather than return to Khrushchev's approach of "hey guys let's abolish certain ministries and create new economic organs in a bid to make the system work better."

Prices in the USSR existed to regulate consumption by citizens, not to "improve efficiency" in the workplace. In fact it wasn't until after Stalin died that Kosygin and other reformers sought to link the income received by an enterprise with the successful sale of its products. Saying that price control helped "create new products" make no sense either, since, again, enterprises couldn't just make new products on the fly in accordance with changing prices.
It is in fact true that a somewhat more egalitarian wage structure was enacted after Stalin's death. But wage differentials in the Soviet context weren't necessarily as big a motivator for increased productivity as they might otherwise be, since shortages of consumer goods meant citizens could face situations where they had money but nothing to buy with it.

How was Gosplan "making sure" managers weren't doing this? Where is the evidence Gosplan was successfully stamping out the hoarding of resources?

I'm not aware of Soviet price control policy changing much after Stalin. I don't know what you mean by "product prices weren't reviewed for over a decade" either.

The Soviet reforms never succeeded in giving managers "more freedom and more control over capital and investment" (check out chapter 3 of Is the Red Flag Flying? by Al Szymanski for example), instead they mostly just tried to give managers material incentives for economizing on raw materials and producing goods people actually wanted to buy. But even that didn't pan out effectively.

And to say "Gosplan was less involved in directing the economy and outputs and focused more on just creating plans" doesn't really make sense in an economy where managers had to obey those plans. You also aren't making clear what "directing the economy" means in this context separate from drawing up plans. How else was Gosplan supposed to "direct the economy"? How did it "direct the economy" under Stalin in a way it didn't under his successors?

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It may be said that in altering the estimates of the five-year plan so radically the Central Committee is violating the principle of planning and is discrediting the planning organisations. But only hopeless bureaucrats can talk like that. For us Bolsheviks, the five-year plan is not something fixed once and for all. For us the five-year plan, like every other, is merely a plan adopted as a first approximation, which has to be made more precise, altered and perfected in conformity with the experience gained in the localities, with the experience gained in carrying out the plan. No five-year plan can take into account all the possibilities latent in the depths of our system and which reveal themselves only in the course of the work, in the course of carrying out the plan in the factory and mill, in the collective farm and state farm, in the district, and so forth. Only bureaucrats can think that the work of planning ends with the drafting of a plan. The drafting of a plan is only the beginning of planning. Real guidance in planning develops only after the plan bas been drafted, after it has been tested in the localities, in the course of carrying it out, correcting it and making it more precise.

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In our country there is no free play of prices in the market, such as is usually the case in capitalist countries. We, in the main, determine the price of grain. We determine the price of manufactured goods. We try to carry out a policy of reducing production costs and reducing prices of manufactured goods, while striving to stabilise the prices of agricultural produce. Is it not obvious that such special and specific market conditions do not exist in capitalist countries?

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8 directors over 10 years

1955 - split into GOSPLAN (perspective plans) and GOS ECONOM COMISSION (ongoing plans)

1957 - merged back together and re-organized based on sovnarkhoz reforms

1960 - split again GOSPLAN (ongoing plans) and GOS ECONOM SOVIET (perspective plans)

1962 - GOS ECONOM SOVIET becomes GOSPLAN, VSNKh takes over duties of previous GOSPLAN

genericnick posted:

This line of discussion reminds me of the elder Galbraith's New Industrial State. Interestingly, his argument was that both the Soviet and the US economies will have to move to a mode of production that gives companies significant autonomy. Basically his thesis is that all decisions in a modern technological environment need such a broad range of expertise that the decisions need to be taken by committee and can only be effectively managed on a higher level by assembling a replica of said committee, thus making corporate boards and Gosplan an increasingly bad way to run things. Now, obviously that didn't happen and we're mostly just doing things poorly instead, but it is a line of critique that isn't fundamentally based on "market forces".

Lostconfused posted:

The factory output was purchased by state syndicates at fixed prices, which would then go on to sell to the general public. The profitability and the earnings of factory managers and it's workers depend entirely on their ability to meet production targets. The state could absolutely provide incentives to improve production efficiency or output levels by driving down the price at which the outputs are purchased or by providing less raw material for production. . . If the factory managers wanted to keep earning the same amount they did then they have no choice but to find ways to improve their production levels to maintain their income level.

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Ideology was a necessary part in motivating everyone, labourers, party officials, and everyone towards fulfilling five year plans.

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Individual enterprises could now set their own prices

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accumulate more capital for future expansion and self funding

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To resolve all of this the new generation of planners and economists looked to cybernetics and computerization. It was a technocratic approach. They thought that with the right theories, enough computing power, and proper financial incentives they could keep the economy cohesive and functional.

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There was no return to steady development of various branches of industrial capacity, now people planning the economy were hoping for optimal return on their investments of capital and resources.

stephenthinkpad posted:

So, Xi said China wants to join CPTPP too. Obviously, if China really joins CPTPP, it should be renamed to...CCPTPP.

Chomskyan posted:

Any takes on Joshua Wong likely being sent to prison over the protests he organized?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia...tm_medium=email

Ardennes posted:

It would be extremely hilarious if China straight-out hijacked Obama's trade pact.