Lou wrote:
>By all objective measurements, the Soviet economy was functioning quite
>well up until the mid-70s. What this upper crust of the officialdom was
>reacting to was not poor performance, but their own class interests.
Kotz & Weir write in _Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet
System_: "After 1975 industrial labor productivity growth fell
drastically -- by nearly 50 per cent according to official statistics
and by two-thirds based on Western estimates. However, by the labor
productivity growth measure, Soviet performance, while losing its
previous edge over US performance, did not fall significantly below
the (also) reduced US productivity performance of 1975-85....It is
intriguing that, at almost the exact date of the onset of stagnation
in the Soviet Union, the major Western capitalist countries also
entered a period of sharply reduced economic growth. Most economists
date the Western slowdown to around 1973, although some find evidence
of emerging problems as early as 1966. For the United States,
Western Europe, and Japan, the period since the early 1970s has been
one of much slower economic growth, and much slower growth in labor
productivity than the preceding decades" (45, 48).
It seems to me that the Soviet Union and rich capitalist nations had
more things in common than are usually acknowledged. In both
systems, workers became more urban & educated (unlike previous
generations of workers who got recruited from rural agriculture) and
clashed with authoritarian management (which previous generations of
ex-country boys and -country girls put up with). Workers in both
systems wanted to express anger against alienation. With their jobs
guaranteed, workers in the Soviet Union, if anything, may have found
it easier than their Western counterparts to sabotage production and
get away with it (e.g. informal slowdowns). And managers in both
systems got alarmed: "labor discipline is breaking down! We got to
do something about it!"
Both neoliberalism in the West and experiments with market socialism
+ eventual restoration of capitalism in the East may be to a large
extent understood as the same response to the same problem of uppity
workers.
Yoshie
