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The Stalinist economies were subject to severe anarchy of production, as has
been noted by
all serious economists who studied the Soviet economy, no matter what their
general point of
view, provided they weren't hacks. It was manifested in a number of features of
the economy,
noted even by the Soviet authorities themselves, and yet repeated over and over
again, year
after year. For example, there was -- aside from enterprises fioghting among
themselves to
get the resources that they were supposedly entitled to in the plan, and even
having special
executives whose job was to conduct this fight -- dolgostroi ("slow-build"),
which was the
phenomenon that it took longer and longer, as the years went on, for Soviet
construction
projects to be finished. The planning authorities cried and lamented and beat
their breasts
about this year after year, and yet continued to specify plans that put forward
an unrealizable
amount of construction. This wasn't a failure in the technical ability to plan,
or else it would
have been solved in a few years. Instead it got worse over the years. It
stemmed from the
very nature of the economy, and no doubt contributed to the prolonged
stagnation that the
Soviet economy eventually fell into.
The difference among serious students of these economies is why did this
anarchy exist. In
my view, it's because they were state-capitalist economies, not socialist
economies and not
transitional economies. It was a sign the economy was run by a new bourgeoisie,
and it
occurred because the individual and small-group interests of the different
members of the
ruling bourgeoisie conflicted, and these interests had priority, in the way the
Soviet economy
actually worked, over the general interests of the ruling bourgeoisie as a
whole, to say
nothing of the economy as a whole or the population as a whole.
See "The anarchy of production under the veneer of Soviet revisioinist
planning"
at http://www.communistvoice.org/12cSovAnarchy.html
Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2018/0701_pd/why-didn%E2%80%99t-socialism-have-over-production-crises
> _
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