At 20:19 20/03/01 +0000, you wrote: >Was the USSR under Stalin a variant of state capitalism? Stalin's 'Great Turn' >of 1929 allegedly ended market dominance and replaced the NEP (Lenin's partial >return to capitalism in 1924) with the era of Five Year Plans, the so-called >command-administrative system. > >In reality, Stalin never overcame the workings of the law of value, and >economic activity turned into a peculiar marriage between centralised, >indicative planning, and informal (grey-to-black) markets for all production >factors: capital as well as labour and raw materials. No matter how much they >tried, the planners and the Party never stamped out 'grey' capital markets. Although Stalin tried to maintain his crisp and brisk style of writing, his late work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1951) is a much more reflective work than many might expect. In his section on the Law of Value under Socialism, he does not at least at that date dismiss the LOV, and rather actively permits attention to it: ""In this connection, such things as cost accounting and profitableness, production costs, prices, etc., are of actual importance in our enterprises. Consequently, our enterprises cannot, and must not, function without taking the law of value into account. Is this a good thing? It is not a bad thing. Under present conditions, it really is not a bad thing, since it trains our business executives to conduct production on rational lines and disciplines them. ... It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives to look for, find, and utilize hidden reserves latent in production, and not to trample them underfoot. It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives systematically to improve methods of accounting, and to make their enterprises pay. It is a good practical school which accelerates the development of our executive personnel and their growth into genuine leaders of socialist production at the present stage of development." >This is discussed by Gregory, Paul R., and Tikhonov, Aleksei, "Central >Planning and Unintended Consequences: creating the Soviet financial system, >1930-39", Journal of Economic History, 60(4), December 2000 >http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/Mark.Harrison/sovietarchives/financial.pdf >Even centralized clearing of arrears proved elusive, as it required >knowledge of local circumstances. It was not difficult for a Stalin to >interpret such massive opportunism as deliberate sabotage, rather than as >endemic behavior in a system of soft budget constraints, and to conclude >that terror was the proper instrument to combat it. Although at times Stalin has such views, as the text implies such a response was not the result of the approach of just one Stalin, but was part of a much wider response to something that was much more complicated than expected. I think the observation above is also very interesting because the management of credit at a local level under socialism will remain extremely difficult. In their work "Towards a New Socialism" 1993, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell argue convincingly that there is more than enough power in modern computers to have a totally computerised socialist economy. However the Achilles Heel of their argument, which I do not think they address there, is about the selection of information that the lower level reports to the higher level. I submit that however many regulatory devices are brought in, there will still be a frequent mismatch between how the local level organizes its resources so as to generate a surplus, and how it reserves some of this crucial information from the centre. I submit that as long as there are commodities in an economy, the fuzzy, approximate nature of the law of value, will reassert itself. Certainly it is a contradiction on which much depends. We also now know how some of the executive personnel did not grow into "genuine leaders of socialist production", but, admittedly later, into mafiosi and oligarchs. Chris Burford London _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
