USSR's economy under Kruschev

[Rooster]

I'm trying to understand what's so different about this that it's been called revisionism. I'm still learning about this period but from the impression that I got, the economy had gotten too complex for the old way of planning to work (measuring outputs in tons and square feet and stuff), and they tried to remedy this by decentralising decision making in the economy, yeah? And also the guys at the top decided to focus more on consumer goods and raising living standards? Am I okay so far? What would the anti-revisionist have done different, say, if Stalin had lived for another 20 years? Wasn't this just a natural evolution of the policy of central decision making and planning under that system?

[promethean]

I'm trying to understand what's so different about this that it's been called revisionism. I'm still learning about this period but from the impression that I got, the economy had gotten too complex for the old way of planning to work (measuring outputs in tons and square feet and stuff), and they tried to remedy this by decentralising decision making in the economy, yeah? And also the guys at the top decided to focus more on consumer goods and raising living standards? Am I okay so far? What would the anti-revisionist have done different, say, if Stalin had lived for another 20 years? Wasn't this just a natural evolution of the policy of central decision making and planning under that system?
I am not aware of any big changes to the economic system under Khrushchev as far as mode of production goes or the way the economy was run. I think the changes under Khrushchev were more super-structural than economic. Yes, there were some guidelines given to factory managers to run their factories based on the profits generated in each of them, but this was not a fundamental change to how the economy was run. Actually speaking, the Soviet economy did not change the way it was run throughout its existence, though it did become stagnant under Brezhnev, which made it harder for those Trotskyists and stalinists who continued to support the "superior" "socialist" economy of the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, I think the "anti-revisionists" hold these two factors against Khrushchev, both of which were more on a political and ideological level than economic:

1) Khrushchev Thaw: This led to de-Stalinisation and a partial reduction in repression and censorship.

2) The Secret Speech: This was where Khrushchev, speaking as the leader of the bourgeois state, acknowledged the amount of damage done to the image of the bourgeois state by the previous leader, Stalin, in carrying out Stalinist repression, censorship and mass executions. All of these were of course necessary to completely erase any acknowledgment of the proletarian origins of the Russian revolutions within the Russian people.

Mainly it is the Secret Speech that the anti-revisionist Stalinists hold against Khrushchev and those stalinists who continued to support the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and later leaders.

[Nox]

I believe that it was during Khrushchev's leadership that the economic problems began to develop, then Brezhnev totally ignored them, then Andropov started an extremely expensive, pointless war that failed, then Chernenko did nothing, then Gorbachev realised it was too late and tried to do something but failed and the USSR collapsed.

That's a very very simple summary, so you could argue that it's Khrushchev's fault that the USSR collapsed.

[Rooster]

I believe that it was during Khrushchev's leadership that the economic problems began to develop

What problems and how and why did they develop?

[Jose Gracchus]

Khrushchev oversaw the continued (partial) dismantling of the overtly coercive Stalinist economy and system. It became increasingly clear that the methods of the 1940s could not be credibly maintained; workers could not be induced to produce with such reliance on non-economic compulsion. To deal with the total dirth of labor productivity and quality, as well as social unrest (for example, Novocherkassk in '62 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novocherkassk_massacre)), Khrushchev was obliged to continue moves toward economic incentives, improved availability of essential services (for example and most notably, dealing with the considerable shortage of decent housing), and consumer goods.

He attempted to reform the means by which the party elite and ruling class managed and administrated the economy, by means of 'regional' planning priorities, and separate agricultural and industrial organization. His goal politically was to undermine the institutional clout of the large, unwieldy, and unresponsive industrial ministries. It failed.

Khrushchev also attempted to expand the developed agricultural production in the 'Virgin Land Campaign', but much of the soil was simply unsuitable.

Documented by Paresh Chattopadhyay, you also had the USSR's extensive accumulation model hit a "raw materials barrier" (originally attested in Soviet economists' writings, actually) shortly after the Khrushchev was deposed. The attempted patch to that would be the Kosygin-Liberman economic reforms of 1965.

[Die Neue Zeit]

He attempted to reform the means by which the party elite and ruling class managed and administrated the economy, by means of 'regional' planning priorities, and separate agricultural and industrial organization. His goal politically was to undermine the institutional clout of the large, unwieldy, and unresponsive industrial ministries. It failed.

Only the sovnarkhozy could be seen as an attempt to replace branch-based economic administration and the excesses of "departmentalism." The bifurcation was a return to branch-based economic administration, and this was coupled by the creation of branch-based "state committees," many of whom were industrial ministries in all but name.


I think the changes under Khrushchev were more super-structural than economic. Yes, there were some guidelines given to factory managers to run their factories based on the profits generated in each of them, but this was not a fundamental change to how the economy was run.

"Socialist profits" were not popularized until the Kosygin-Liberman reforms of 1965.

[Comrade_Stalin]

I'm trying to understand what's so different about this that it's been called revisionism. I'm still learning about this period but from the impression that I got, the economy had gotten too complex for the old way of planning to work (measuring outputs in tons and square feet and stuff), and they tried to remedy this by decentralising decision making in the economy, yeah? And also the guys at the top decided to focus more on consumer goods and raising living standards? Am I okay so far? What would the anti-revisionist have done different, say, if Stalin had lived for another 20 years? Wasn't this just a natural evolution of the policy of central decision making and planning under that system?

I did some talking with some people in the Old USSR while it was still the old USSR. And yes they here and they get banned here a lot, for tell us how thing worked in there nation during there time.

Here how it worked. Under Stalin the workers own the means of production. They would then pay the state a wage (called by everyone else a "guota") in the form of a number of units produced at the factory. This wage was for the goverment to pay for thing like protecting the factory with the red army, to buying equipment. This is the reason that worker at a factory that over produced, got a "bouns" for over producing.

What the revisionist did was turn the system on it head. USSR's economy under Kruschev made it so that the State owned the means of production and payed the workers a wage, just like a capitalist.

"consumer goods and raising living standards" is the standerd capitalist line, they use to tell us that we should keep them in power. Just think about it for a second. How many time have you heard that if we increased our consumer goods, we will increase our standerd of living.

[Jose Gracchus]

Uh, no none of that is true. And you'll have to better than 'someone you can't cross-reference and who has no name but I say exists said so, trust me lol.'

I happen to live with a Russian and have met her family who grew up under Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no one considered the factories to be 'theirs'. Striking Soviet workers had the regime's number. They often declared they were struggling against the "red bourgeoisie".

[promethean]

Here how it worked. Finally, the answer to all questions by none other than Comrade Stalin himself!


Under Stalin the workers own the means of production. They would then pay the state a wage (called by everyone else a "guota") in the form of a number of units produced at the factory. This wage was for the goverment to pay for thing like protecting the factory with the red army, to buying equipment. This is the reason that worker at a factory that over produced, got a "bouns" for over producing.
None of this meant that the workers owned the means of production. The state still owned the means of production. I don't know what you understand by workers owning the means of production, but Stalin's Soviet Union was not an example for it.


What the revisionist did was turn the system on it head. USSR's economy under Kruschev made it so that the State owned the means of production and payed the workers a wage, just like a capitalist.
This was not any different from how it was under Stalin. Khrushchev never actually did change the fact that the state owned the means of production. The state always owned the means of production, even under Stalin. In effect, Khrushchev did nothing on an economic level to do away with the 'socialism' that supposedly existed under Stalin. The only thing he did do was denounce Stalin's crimes and the fact that those crimes made the Stalinist state look bad. This was at most the 'baddest' thing that Khrushchev did and this is what people like Comrade_Stalin and other Stalinists are up in arms against.

Of course, the roots of this anti-revisionist ideology lie within the political necessities of the leaders of two other bourgeois states, Mao and Hoxha. Neither of these two Stalinist leaders actually knew or cared about workers in the Soviet Union. The only reason for them creating the personality cult around Stalin was their own little political necessities facing their states. The rest of the nonsense about capitalism suddenly appearing under Khrushchev and workers suddenly being exploited after leading a truly wonderful life under the socialist paradise under Stalin (!) are later fabrications made to justify these political needs.

[Jose Gracchus]

What's worse is major left economists like Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim developed a whole body of apologia for these absurd political contrivances.

[promethean]

Though I have not read any of his works, going by Aufheben, Hillel Ticktin's work on this topic is supposed to be a good reference against such apologists.

[Jose Gracchus]

Bettelheim is the expositor of the infamous "the 1965 Liberman reforms restored capitalism because of profit-indexes and more devolution to enterprises!" theory. Though on the other hand, he did inspire Paresh Chattopadhyay to write The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience. Had a chance to read it? By far the best defense of a theory of Soviet capitalism available. I basically adhere to a (meta-)synthesis of Chattopadhyay, Daum, and Aufheben's own Bordiga-Ticktin synthesis (theory of the deformation of value in the USSR).

[promethean]

Agree about forming a synthesis of all these current-day views on the nature of the Soviet economy. I have not been able to read Chattopadhyay's work in full so far, though I have read parts of it.

[Rooster]

I did some talking with some people in the Old USSR while it was still the old USSR. And yes they here and they get banned here a lot, for tell us how thing worked in there nation during there time.

So these people were around under Stalin then lived through Khruschev then managed to survive to post on revleft?


Here how it worked. Under Stalin the workers own the means of production.

You're going to have to prove that and not just through legalistic semantics. You're also going to have to explain away draconian labour laws such as absenteeism where women were sent to court because they couldn't get to work because their baby sitter didn't turn up, etc.


They would then pay the state a wage (called by everyone else a "guota") in the form of a number of units produced at the factory. This wage was for the goverment to pay for thing like protecting the factory with the red army, to buying equipment. This is the reason that worker at a factory that over produced, got a "bouns" for over producing.

You're going to have to clarify this as I have no idea what you're talking about. I'll try to disentangle what you're saying here:

1. Workers give money to the state
2. The state would use this money to protect the factory with the red army, buy equipment.
3. This is the reason why people got bonuses

No, sorry, I still can't understand any of that. From my reading, workers were employed by state enterprises who paid a tax (turnover tax being the main contributor to the state's pocket). The state set out plans that certain industries had to fulfil such as tons of sheet metal, like I said. Meeting this target on time and/or over fulfilling the target quota granted the factories involved bonuses. Which is stupid, if you ask me, because how can you work to a plan when you're constantly trying to out work it?


What the revisionist did was turn the system on it head. USSR's economy under Kruschev made it so that the State owned the means of production and payed the workers a wage, just like a capitalist.

No, see, what I think you tried to do was say that the worker's controlled the means of production in the previous part of that post and now just to demonise Kruschev you stick that in. My reading of the subject so far shows me that the main economic system under Stalin was kept in place, the difference being that it was decentralised and I really would like to know why that was. Was it because the economy became too complex for the method of planning involved?


"consumer goods and raising living standards" is the standerd capitalist line, they use to tell us that we should keep them in power. Just think about it for a second. How many time have you heard that if we increased our consumer goods, we will increase our standerd of living.

Because it's true. Food is a consumer good, clothes are consumer goods, houses are consumer goods. If you have a lack of them then your quality of life is going to be pretty low. The USSR already had a large industrial base by the time of Kruschev. I want to know if this focus on consumer goods, if it really happened, away from heavy industry, meant the economy got too complex for the plan? It was still pretty top down, wasn't it? Factories/regions couldn't trade with each other horizontally, could they?

[Jose Gracchus]

Factories could trade with each other horizontally, but it is a lot more complicated than saying it was one way or another.

Formally speaking, GOSPLAN would assess the content of all material, labor, and capital resources in the state, and draw up a 'plan' which would instruct each enterprise where it should buy its raw materials, what its wages should be, how much and what it should produce, and directly allocate the financial resources (loans, transfers, whatever) to effect those contracts successfully, while setting a turnover tax (state profit, in essence) to supply state income. These instructions had force of law.

However, everyone, from GOSPLAN planners down to people working on the lathe, knew that the plan did not and could not actually plan production. Simply, there was nigh-total opacity of information, and this reality was obvious to all economic actors. GOSPLAN planners, for instance, had no idea what actual resources the factories possessed. Why? We'll get back to that.

Because the state guaranteed income to state enterprises upon formal plan fulfillment, production was not for sale on a competitive consumer market--in a certain sense it can be said the Soviet state also bought all merchandise, and gave it away at subsidized prices. The Soviet enterprise's survival was not contingent on producing consumer goods that were desired by the working-class (the ruling class acquired much of its goods or services via corrupt privileged access to foreign trade and thus imports, political access to foreign goods and hard currency, and direct corrupt appropriation of state resources and production), rather in the peculiar incentive structure, formal profits alone could not govern enterprise behavior adequately. Instead, "plan-fulfillment" in a superficial sense because a dominant and deforming character to the economy, beside profit-rates.(1)

This had, as its consequence, peculiar forms of reciprocal inter-enterprise relations, compared to the coordination of firms via open capital markets for raising capital on the basis of projected profit, to be yielded by competitive production for sale to atomized consumers in archetypical, 'classical' capitalism. Firms instead competed with each other not over profit rates as such (since their survival and perpetuation was not premised on formalized capital markets, but on bureaucratic administration and allocation and all the economic irrationalities that go along with bureaucratic empire-building), but rather to formally fulfill the plan and ensure the career advancement of the apparatchikki who ran the enterprise. Therefore enterprises competed not as much over market-share and profits as they did over material inputs. Because the plan targets were unguided by scientific principles or precision, having no idea what was going on on the ground, they were highly arbitrary, yet fulfillment was the prime means by which enterprises (and men who ran them) would be assessed. The enterprise and ministerial management sought to compete to hoard the limited material inputs in the country, necessary in order to ensure the welfare of the parochial economic unit supervised by the management in question. Resources had to be available to guarantee the capacity to meet plan targets, and thus sought to stockpile inputs such as raw materials and basic parts (acquired via unlawful barter, unlawful black markets, or fabricated by in-house supplementary production). They also hoarded workers, using loopholes in the defined wage brackets, like sliding scales on the pretext they needed more labor resources (thus reproducing labor markets where workers circulated among reciprocally independent enterprises based on the wage and benefit structures they raised to compete amongst each other). This dynamic was because the enterprise had to fulfill its plan but since the targets were arbitrary, resources were limited, and supplies unreliable (because every firm engaged in the competitive relations described).(2)

Consequently, the enterprises' actual behavior rarely had anything do with what was described in the plan. Despite having all their necessary production relationships spelled-out, the inadequacy and total cluelessness of the planners meant that enterprises in fact would use (and this had to be tacitly permitted on some level by the political center) various white loophole/gray, black, and other shaded means to work around the plan, to negotiate fulfillment with higher ministerial and planning authorities. Targets would be re-negotiated down from over-estimates (original GOSPLAN specifications would demand that enterprises produce more than the resources they were allocated could allow--the planners acknowledged the generalized hoarding, and sought to improve efficiency by forcing enterprises to use their secret reserves), financial resources specified (loans, etc.) would be re-negotiated or diverted through 'off-the-books' and other means so the enterprise could acquire what it needed in a chaotic and unpredictable economy (through re-negotiated sales, shadow bartering, illegal trade and other horizontal links between enterprises not specified in the plan). A whole sphere of gray and black market activity, integral to the performance and functioning of the system, developed as a result.

Off-the-books, for-profit small businesses, attached to patron state enterprises, known as "facilitators" were formally illegal, but the enterprises had to have recourse to them to acquire necessary resources and labor. Connections, barter, and favors traded became an essential counter-part to financial and accounting creativity; the Soviet ruble and financial system was not adequate to the purposes of Soviet enterprises and individuals, and consequently foreign currency and political access to imports became a significant part of black markets for consumers, while the use of blat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_%28term%29) (a common feature of all "centrally-administrated economies"(3), compare the Cuban "sociolismo" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolismo)) and industrial barter and 'silent sales' became increasingly important at the enterprise-level of economic life. The system basically produced all the common features of suppressed inflation known to bourgeois economics, and thus money failed to function adequately as the universally equivalent commodity. Instead, foreign currency in black markets, barter in goods or services, trade of favors and connections made up the deficit in the function of the ruble in the Soviet exchange-economy.

If you were to go to the 'ground floor' of the Soviet economy, one would see clearly that 'economic planning' and 'state property' were largely fictions, and the various social relations and actors reflected forms of proprietorship and exchange, however attenuated or deformed by the administrative-command apparat placed on top, attempting to direct--unsuccessfully--the whole process through arbitrary and uniformed diktat.



(1) Not all Soviet enterprises were invulnerable to competitive pressures. Special services for the ruling class, from small-scale personal services at the direct disposal of the social elite, to acquisition of high-priority military hardware, would be subject to naked competitive bidding and complete freedom to set wage-rates and provide benefits, to say nothing of the fact that arms were one of the few in-demand Soviet exports.

It can also be said that the various reforms and the evolution of the USSR economy toward increasing complexity, manifested in the increasingly urgent necessity for the ruling class to re-establish the effective use of money and profit-accountancy in formal and open ways, as these shackles (characterized by Lange, Jacques Sapir, Chattopadhyay as essentially similar to a long-duration 'sui generis' or 'in peacetime' war economy on the capitalist model of WW1 and WW2, without a normal capitalist class) on commercial functioning became increasingly dysfunctional. It became increasingly clear that the economy has to be 'demobilized'.

Obviously profit-rates did matter. The growth of the economy and state finances were dependent on the aggregate profitability of the state-owned capital. There was an overriding necessity that, after all was said and done, that profit-rates would be adequate to meet growth targets and financial needs. Therefore whatever the 'deformation' of the Soviet economy via the central-administration system, enterprises, ministries, and the entire state sector, which can be conceived in some contexts as an a mother conglomerate of all enterprises and ministerial/departmental-conglomerates (many an economist has likened the character of the enormous and powerful Soviet industrial ministries as the Soviet equivalent to Western conglomerate corporations), had at the end of the day to meet certain profit requirements. What I am saying is that without formalized and functioning open capital markets, it was impossible for profit-rates to play the exact role they do in 'market capitalist' states where firms are at least formally free to fail.

(2)Aggregated over a whole economy, this extremely anarchic, informationally opaque, and incentively dysfunctional enterprise or departmental dynamic led to what has been called the 'shortage economy'. Since each actor had no reason to share information or capacity to exchange freely, the hoarding and redirection into social spheres where information and exchange was adequate to needs, like the black market, led to structural shortages of virtually everything from raw materials to skilled workers.

Workers were a scarce and hoarded resource under the primitive extensive accumulation model, and this gave workers unusually high amounts of negative power or leverage over the content of production. Namely, since money could not directly command all commodities (capital was bureaucratically consolidated in a juridicially unified state sector, and low-quality consumer goods and services were intermittently given away at subsidized prices, with medium-quality goods tightly rationed--the years spent waiting to receive even the modest-quality Soviet auto--and high-quality goods--almost invariably foreign if consumer goods, or produced directly for consumption by privileged party-state entities, like party retreats and dachas--socially-politically restricted in access), then you had forced savings, queues physical and temporal, there was no ability to use the labor-market to bid-up wages that could be realized in real consumption gains for workers. Workers also could not organize economically or politically because of the unified and reflexive use of police power by the state. The only control workers could exercise in the relative labor-shortage conditions in the extensive accumulation mobilization-economy was the refusal to work or to allow work to be tightly or intensively controlled by management. Consequently Soviet labor productivity was abysmally low and poorly controlled in precision and content, thus it was very difficult for Soviet enterprises to produce quality goods, even prior to the non-competitive characteristics of sales.

The flipside of the non-performance of the currency unit and thus wages as a material inducement, despite labor shortage, was that enterprises had to use peculiar methods to entice workers, like enterprise and ministerial control of local social and public services, like housing, schools, transportation, and the like. High priority firms might provide more accommodations and services, and thus be able to easier meet its drive to hoard adequate labor-power, again considering the anarchic production relations and the inability to raise abysmal labor productivity.

Duplication of production in-house was a huge problem. Because of low quality throughout the economy, there was absurd overcapacity in basic machine tools. Why? An auto plant might get a shipment (a month late) of basic parts that had 20% unusable due to quality control deficit. An entire line of workers and machines might be committed to repairing or substituting or rebuilding inadequate parts. Duplicated over an entire economy, this meant enormous waste in material and labor resources.

(3)I prefer Ticktin's characterization of 'centrally-administrated' to 'centrally-planned'. The latter is an ideological claim, and was fictitious as a description of the real state of things.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You're going to have to prove that and not just through legalistic semantics. You're also going to have to explain away draconian labour laws such as absenteeism where women were sent to court because they couldn't get to work because their baby sitter didn't turn up, etc.

Let's hear his take.



They would then pay the state a wage (called by everyone else a "guota") in the form of a number of units produced at the factory. This wage was for the goverment to pay for thing like protecting the factory with the red army, to buying equipment. This is the reason that worker at a factory that over produced, got a "bonus" for over producing.

You're going to have to clarify this as I have no idea what you're talking about. I'll try to disentangle what you're saying here:

1. Workers give money to the state
2. The state would use this money to protect the factory with the red army, buy equipment.
3. This is the reason why people got bonuses

No, sorry, I still can't understand any of that. From my reading, workers were employed by state enterprises who paid a tax (turnover tax being the main contributor to the state's pocket). The state set out plans that certain industries had to fulfil such as tons of sheet metal, like I said. Meeting this target on time and/or over fulfilling the target quota granted the factories involved bonuses. Which is stupid, if you ask me, because how can you work to a plan when you're constantly trying to out work it?

I believe what he is trying to say is that the Soviet economy under the Stalin regime operated somewhat in the opposite to more capitalistic wage-and-profit-making mechanisms.

Directive planning based on material balances, not indicative planning a la Kosygin, was used to establish production targets.

For each product produced towards the production target, a certain percentage was charged a turnover tax. The poster thinks, under this inverse scenario, that the turnover tax was like a wage. Whatever percentage was left would have been like profits.

For each product produced above the production target, no turnover tax was charged and all the proceeds went to the state enterprise and its workers.

Perhaps this is similar to how today's worker cooperatives operate?

I will have to consult with comrade Cockshott again about his objections to turnover taxes, his comparisons with VAT, and if he's aware of the best-guess logic I just laid out. Again, this is in relation to the Stalin era.

[Jose Gracchus]

My understanding is that even though Kosygin-Liberman sought to introduce indicative norms, it was stiffly resisted within the apparat, and the Soviet financial system remained insufficient for the task of actually realizing indicative planning, not to mention that the enterprises were probably still not really 'free' enough. The "plan" still superceded any real enterprise-by-enterprise profit mechanism, prerequisite to realizing real indicative planning. A better example of an attempt to devolve from directive to indicative planning would probably be the economic program of the 'liberals' in the Czechoslovakian CP in 1968. They had a full protracted plan to go from directive planning to indicative planning and from the state monopoly on foreign trade to free trade.

Indicative planning, properly Mitterandism, dirigisme, and the like, presupposes truly independent firms producing for profit or failure in a proper consumer market. In my view, Soviet firms were capitalist, but the military system guaranteed profits at specified outputs, under which constraints, rather than compete over market-share and profit, firms instead hoarded resources to guarantee output. Liberman's theory was proto-Dengist, but in the meantime they were trying to free up "planning" constraints to let the firms do what they had been anyway, figuring it out themselves how to meet plan targets, facilitated by horizontal links between enterprises, and enhanced by self-finance. But "production for 'plan' rather than production for use" [!] with all its illogic and hypertrophy remained über alles.

[Ismail]

Of course, the roots of this anti-revisionist ideology lie within the political necessities of the leaders of two other bourgeois states, Mao and Hoxha. Neither of these two Stalinist leaders actually knew or cared about workers in the Soviet Union. The only reason for them creating the personality cult around Stalin was their own little political necessities facing their states. The rest of the nonsense about capitalism suddenly appearing under Khrushchev and workers suddenly being exploited after leading a truly wonderful life under the socialist paradise under Stalin (!) are later fabrications made to justify these political needs.Except Mao opposed Stalin in practice. Hoxha did not. In fact the Soviet ambassador to Albania noted that Hoxha "cried like a baby" when Stalin died. Hoxha also took great offense to Khrushchev's speech from its very inception, as his diary shows. Furthermore various materials were smuggled into the USSR from Albania encouraging proletarian revolution while Mao was too busy making useless and chauvinistic territorial claims against the USSR.

On the nature of the USSR under Khrushchev and onwards there is this: http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/SovietBB.htm
There is also this: http://kasamaproject.org/2010/12/10/soviet-union-1956-1991-socialist-or-social-imperialist/


What would the anti-revisionist have done different, say, if Stalin had lived for another 20 years? Wasn't this just a natural evolution of the policy of central decision making and planning under that system?No. The Khrushchevites denounced Stalin's work Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. as "left-deviationist," whereas it was the cornerstone of economic planning in Albania. Khrushchev disbanded the machine-tractor stations (which Stalin explicitly warned against doing as it would lead to an explosion of commodity relations in the countryside), abandoned Stalin's calls for products-exchange to take the place of commodity relations in the countryside, elevated the role of profit as the goal of enterprises, etc.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I prefer Ticktin's characterization of 'centrally-administrated' to 'centrally-planned'. The latter is an ideological claim, and was fictitious as a description of the real state of things.

I should add that I'm not a fan of Ticktin's term myself. He hasn't acquainted himself with basic principles of management. Since administration is a form of management, by definition it includes planning (along with organizing, directing, and controlling).

The Soviet planning process involved too much negotiation, while the performance controlling process (through People's Control organs) was not effective enough. "Organization" is too broad, so that leaves us with two alternatives: centrally directed (rational and otherwise, and most evident in the Stalin era) and centrally negotiated (from the Kosygin-Liberman reforms onwards).

[Jose Gracchus]

His point is that the Soviet "planning" was "really no more than bargaining process at best, and a police process at worst."

Believe it or not, but not everyone needs to be a corporate accountant to use the term 'administrate'. Not everything has to have a highly reductionist and controlled technical definition. Especially so when speciously used to imply that the content of Soviet "planning" was due to something like a political preference, or policy choice, or reflects poor ideological 'choices'. I reject this: the nature of "planning" was intrinsically tied to the material outcomes of the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent consolidation of the Soviet social formation over the next generation, particularly in the Stalin "revolution" "from above". The Soviet apparat was completely alienated from society as such, and no planning was in fact possible. No one was able to control the content of the surplus product adequately. The workers' struggle buried the USSR under defective use-values.

[Die Neue Zeit]

His point is that the Soviet "planning" was "really no more than bargaining process at best, and a police process at worst."

That basically means "centrally negotiated" at best and "centrally directed" at worst.


Believe it or not, but not everyone needs to be a corporate accountant to use the term 'administrate'.

Indeed, but I'm referring to its use in the public sector, and it's a jargon consensus that the word refers to a form of management.


Not everything has to have a highly reductionist and controlled technical definition.

Speak for yourself on accusations of reductionism, and there are very good reasons to utilize jargon (so long as the context is so obviously clear for the reader, unlike pretentious post-modernist garbage).


Especially so when speciously used to imply that the content of Soviet "planning" was due to something like a political preference, or policy choice, or reflects poor ideological 'choices'. I reject this: the nature of "planning" was intrinsically tied to the material outcomes of the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent consolidation of the Soviet social formation over the next generation, particularly in the Stalin "revolution" "from above". The Soviet apparat was completely alienated from society as such, and no planning was in fact possible. No one was able to control the content of the surplus product adequately. The workers' struggle buried the USSR under defective use-values.

What you've just advocated is a vulgar "materialist" version of Predestinationism, dismissing the role of policy options.