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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 > _________________________________________________________ --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com