Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * > > On 7/29/17 5:54 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > > I cite Moshe Lewin: > > https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/14/joseph-stalin-nostalgia/ > > Stalin´s rule was marked mostly by a lack of planning. Despite the > announcement of 5-year plans, the economy had more in common with > bureaucratic fiat than scientific planning. All this is discussed in > chapter 5 entitled "The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan" in Moshe > Lewin´s "Russia USSR Russia". > The material cited by Proyect is quite useful. At the same time, it is should be understood that Soviet state-capitalism had *both* planning and anarchy of production. Clearly the state apparatus sent vast resources into industry through a decision, not the spontaneous operation of market forces, while the way the enterprises operated, and the precise allocation of various resources, displayed the vast anarchy of production in the Soviet economy. The unrealistic or even absurd nature of various features of the plan, discussed in the material cited by Proyect, was part of this anarchy of production. The anarchy of Soviet production was noted by all serious economic commentators, but they differ on its significance. I discussed the Stalinist anarchy of production, and how it existed alongside planning, and why it existed alongside planning, in the following article, which was based on material from a number of different careful studies of the Soviet economy: "The anarchy of production beneath the veneer of Soviet revisionist planning", March 1, 1997, by Joseph Green http://www.communistvoice.org/12cSovAnarchy.html Earlier in this thread, Walter Daum posted a chapter from his book on statified capitalism. I think that his book comes the closest of any major Trotskyist work to a correct assessment of the Stalinist economy. For example, unlike Tony Cliff, Daum pays attention to the *internal* sources of anarchy (which he calls decentralization) in the Soviet economy, rather than simply blaming the anarchy on the connection of the Soviet Union to the surrounding capitalist world economy. But at the same Daum's attempt to put everything into a Trotskyist framework and defend Trotsky's statements about the Soviet economy involved him in a number of crying contradictions; it sometimes seems that Daum strongly asserts things only for the sake of denying them later in his book. In this sense, Daum not only discusses the life and death of Stalinism, but gives an illustration of the life and death of Trotskyist theorizing. See my review of Daum's book: "On Walter Daum's 'The Life and Death of Stalinism': Competition among Soviet enterprises and ministries, and the collapse of the Soviet Union" by Joseph Green, Dec. 1998 http://www.communistvoice.org/19cDaum.html The basic features of state-capitalism appeared not just in the Soviet economy, but in other state-capitalist economies as the well.This includes the Cuban economy. Mark Williams of the Detroit Workers' Voice has written a series of articles on different time periods of the Castroist economy. This includes: Cuba in the 1960s: Bureaucrats head to 'communism' without the workers" by Mark Williams, April 1998 http://www.communistvoice.org/17cCuba60s.html and "Did Castro steer Cuba towards socialism in the late 1980s?" by Mark Williams, December 1996 http://www.communistvoice.org/11cCuba1980s.html For more on Cuba, see http://www.communistvoice.org/00Cuba.html. --- Joseph Green m...@communistvoice.org _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 7/29/17 5:54 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: I also have high regard for anything written by Moshe Lewin, who started off as a blast furnace operator in a Polish factory during WWII and then became a major figure in academic Sovietology. I read his Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate and recommend it highly. I cite Moshe Lewin: https://louisproyect.org/2009/09/14/joseph-stalin-nostalgia/ Stalin’s rule was marked mostly by a lack of planning. Despite the announcement of 5-year plans, the economy had more in common with bureaucratic fiat than scientific planning. All this is discussed in chapter 5 entitled “The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan” in Moshe Lewin’s “Russia USSR Russia”. The Soviet government announced the first five year plan in 1928. Stalin loyalists, like Krzhizanovksy and Strumlin, who headed Gosplan, the minister of planning, worried about the excess rigidity of this plan. They noted that the success of the plan was based on 4 factors: 1) five good consecutive crops, 2) more external trade and help than in 1928, 3) a “sharp improvement” in overall economic indicators, and 4) a smaller ration than before of military expenditures in the state’s total expenditures. How could anybody predict five consecutive good crops in the USSR? The plan assumed the most optimistic conditions and nobody had a contingency plan to allow for failure of any of the necessary conditions. Bazarov, another Stalin loyalist in Gosplan, pointed to another area of risk: the lack of political cadres. He warned the Gosplan presidium in 1929, “If you plan simultaneously a series of undertakings on such a gigantic scale without knowing in advance the organizational forms, without having cadres and without knowing what they should be taught, then you get a chaos guaranteed in advance; difficulties will arise which will not only slow down the execution of the five-year plan, which will take seven if not ten years to achieve, but results even worse may occur; here such a blatantly squandering of means could happen which would discredit the whole idea of industrialization.” Strumlin admitted that the planners preferred to “stand for higher tempos rather than sit in prison for lower ones.” Strumlin and Krzhizanovksy had been expressing doubts about the plan for some time and Stalin removed these acolytes from Gosplan in 1930. In order for the planners, who were operating under terrible political pressure, to make sense of the plan, they had to play all kinds of games. They had to falsify productivity and yield goals in order to allow the input and output portions of the plan to balance. V.V. Kuibyshev, another high-level planner and one of Stalin’s proteges, confessed in a letter to his wife how he had finessed the industrial plan he had developing. “Here is what worried me yesterday and today; I am unable to tie up the balance, and as I cannot go for contracting the capital outlays–contracting the tempo–there will be no other way but to take upon myself an almost unmanageable task in the realm of lowering costs.” Eventually Kuibyshev swallowed any doubts he may have had and began cooking the books in such a way as to make the five-year plan, risky as it was, totally unrealizable. Real life proved how senseless the plan was. Kuibyshev had recklessly predicted that costs would go down, meanwhile they went up: although the plan allocated 22 billion rubles for industry, transportation and building, the Soviets spent 41.6 billion. The money in circulation, which planners limited to a growth of only 1.25 billion rubles, consequently grew to 5.7 billion in 1933. Now we get to the real problem for those who speak about “planning” during this period. As madcap and as utopian as the original plan was, Stalin tossed it into the garbage can immediately after the planners submitted it to him. He commanded new goals in 1929-30 that disregarded any economic criteria. For example, instead of a goal of producing 10 million tons of pig iron in 1933, the Soviets now targeted 17 million. All this scientific “planning” was taking place when a bloody war against the Kulaks was turning the Russian countryside into chaos. Molotov declared that to talk about a 5-year plan during this period was “nonsense.” Stalin told Gosplan to forget about coming up with a new plan that made sense. The main driving force now was speed. The slogan “tempos decide everything” became policy. The overwhelming majority of Gosplan, hand-picked by Stalin, viewed the new policy with shock. Molotov said this was too bad, and cleaned
Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Michael Lebowitz wrote Impossible not to respond to Andrew Stewart's query: "Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going tobe a whole other debate)?" Here was my entry: "Contradictions of 'Real Socialism': the Conductor and the Conducted", published by Monthly Review Press in 2012 (with a Cuban edition in 2015 and revised Spanish translations forthcoming in Chile, Ecuador and Spain) and reviewed nicely by Louis at http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/the-contradictions-of-real-socialism/ and Walter Daum wrote I offer a chapter of my book, The Life and Death of Stalinism, published in 1990: http://lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf. Since then Soviet archives have been opened to scholars, and I believe that the broad ideas in this chapter are illustrated in, for example, the book The Political Economy of Stalinism by Paul R. Gregory, which might be available online. t. I have recently read Michael's fine book and just finished reading Walter Daum's, both for an online discussion group, and I found both enlightening, informative and helpful. Michael's book is the more recent (2012?), containing much food for thought - lessons to be learned, as has been true of all of his books. Walter's was written in the period from 1985-1989 and therefore is kind of prescient. It's exhaustively researched and closely reasoned on the principles of Marxism and on the topic of the rise and fall of Stalinism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. So readem both; they offer somewhat differing views, both worth considering. Walter's is even online yet, and Michael's is very accessible in paperback. --- 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
Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Obviously there are many books on this issue. Concerning Stalinism and the Cuban economy I would add: Michael Pröbsting: Cuba‘s Revolution Sold Out? The Road from Revolution to the Restoration of Capitalism The book can be downloaded as a pdf here:https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/cuba-s-revolution-sold-out/ Am 29.07.2017 um 23:32 schrieb Andrew Stewart via Marxism: POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going to be a whole other debate)? -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. 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
Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * quite interesting on the matter: Cohen, Farm to factory : http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7611.html > > > > On 7/29/17 5:32 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote: >> Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation >> of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going to >> be a whole other debate)? > _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Soviet economic model
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 7/29/17 5:32 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote: Does anyone have a decent, understandable brief that explains the operation of the Soviet economy at its best moment (what that is probably is going to be a whole other debate)? I also have high regard for anything written by Moshe Lewin, who started off as a blast furnace operator in a Polish factory during WWII and then became a major figure in academic Sovietology. I read his Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate and recommend it highly. _ 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
