babyfinland posted:

Impper posted:
indeed, if to the left-liberal george bush was responsible for the hastening of the collapse of usa, would not then stalin be a hero based on the left-liberal's dual assumptions that socialism is a bad thing and that stalin hastened the destruction of the ussr?

more or less. while i don't rule out the possibility of liberal (or, for that matter, reactionary) anti-imperialism, i don't see much of it, and am inclined to believe it's time to move on.

this fascist on pofo was a staunch supporter of gaddafi in a kind of fraternal way as he viewed him as an excellent leader focused on his people's wellbeing who sprung from his people's ethnic and geographic background

stegosaurus posted:
is there some kernel of local planning that could possibly be socialist, in your opinion, or is it a total wash?

well most socialist models nowadays are premised on local and individual participation in some way. one of the interesting things to come out of latin america in the past while is a concept called "protagonism" which basically means each person trying to assert themselves as a leader within the process of building socialism, which is part of the idea behind things like the community councils. but i try to be practical about that, the basic fact is that community councils still encompass hundreds of families, and really that's probably still too big to have meaningful face-to-face democracy with everyone involved. the failed referendum a few years back would have dedicated 5% of the national budget to the councils. right now a lot of management of local health clinics and community gardens and such are taken on by the councils.

but another sort of pragmatic thing is that large systems have imperatives and best practices that need to be decided democratically but have nothing much to do with councils. like take a public transit system. it's mostly math - so many minutes on each route with so many passengers, etc. and it needs to be deeply coordinated across a large number of people. you can't have a council run the bus for one section of street or something. which sounds crass to say but what it means is that you need federalism, and a sort of federalism that isn't just nested. but that means you need common accounting systems that people can work with across plural institutions, and an associated legal framework that sort of guides that system. if you have higher-level governments then you've accepted a sort of parliamentarism at least because the idea that councils would just delegate people to make general decisions about city finances makes as much sense to me as saying that american senators should be appointed by the states.

one thing i think is interesting, although nowadays it is associated with more centrist politics, is something called associationalism. associationalism is basically the idea that as much of our activity as possible should be within self-governing democratic organizations, and that the government should promote these sorts of organizations. so while now the economy is basically the domain of the state and capital, an associational state would devolve most social activity into things like cooperatives, with a social-democratic state sort of guiding the process and providing services that didn't work well as competing cooperatives or just things like providing income supports and so on. but i can imagine something like a plurality of state-owned enterprises, cooperatives of various sizes, small businesses and individual labour and so on. these could be coordinated within rough sectoral plans, with semi-state planning in areas to guarantee access and so on.

moreover i think that you can imagine a real politics in that model, whereas most socialist models seem to talk very little about political conflict within a socialist system, sort of absorbing all politics into a sort of consensual worker council or something.

getfiscal posted:
the planning system wasn't a basically decent system that was made dysfunctional by intruding market elements. the market elements (broadly defined) were always present and helped lubricate the system. planners tried really hard under high stalinism to coordinate the entire economy from the center and the planners saw that this created huge problems for them, such as unreliable data, difficulty to diffuse technology, huge waste in industry (and depreciation), persistence of black markets, confused incentives and so on.

the basic system had so many problems under stalinism that the second planners had a chance in the post-stalin era they felt compelled to build in firm autonomy and devolved planning authority just as basic, critical reforms to have credible accounting. that's also why maoists consider the mid-1950s as the date for restoration of capitalism, because that's when the basic principle of comprehensive central coordination and non-competition was abandoned.

the thing is, once you've conceded a basic system of competing firms and locality-specific policy development, however much within a coordinated whole, then the organizational incentives start screaming at you to make associated policy changes, such as allowing people to bid on goods and so on, rather than setting prices in more traditionally planned ways. it also means letting state firms compete over capital goods. it's not that much of this didn't happen before gorbachev, it's that it happened in black or grey markets. in china, much of the reform period was just legalizing things that were done illegally early on, like localities selling each other things off the books.

while there was illegal economic activity in the ussr for its entire lifespan, it was negligible under stalin, slowly increased under khrushchev due to economic reforms, and exploded under brezhnev's non-enforcement of the law. its prevalence was heavily dependent on soviet policy towards firm autonomy and enforcement of laws.

i didn't really expand too much on the causes of the economic problems in the 60s-80s in my post, there were massive problems with soviet investment strategy which certainly didn't help. instead of building new plants, the ussr decided to retrofit their old ones. this was done for 3 main reasons: preventing unemployment caused by plant closures, housing and social services were tied to employers so new plants means reconfiguring housing and social services, and soviet planners thought they could save money by retrofitting.

instead, retrofitting proved to be way more expensive than green field development because the old factories weren't built to handle the volume of raw materials processed and there are compatibility problems w/ retrofitting.

in farm to factory by robert allen, he makes a great comparison between soviet steel development and japanese steel development to show that green field investment is a much better investment, and as long as the soviet union developed in a similar way as japan, it didn't have problems diffusing technology.

i also disagree that it performed a lubricating function rather than a parasitic one over the long term. in the short term, it may have fixed misallocations in planning, but then it was impossible to fix the misallocations because there wasn't any feedback. the second economy got its labor by leeching off of the planned economy, it got its materials by pilfering from the planned economy, and it was the class basis for capitalist restoration. any way you look at it, it was a force that eroded the economic and political system.

Edited by pogfan1996 (Jan. 2, 2012 19:00:47)

reignofevil posted:
Was the reason for few black markets under Stalin due to the harshness of penalties, or some other reason?

I have trouble believing the human drive to exchange goods on a local level would be so well suppressed, especially during the time period. Seems more likely to me the reports of black markets would simply be falsified.

illegal economic activity was done almost entirely in the countryside before Khrushchev became the general secretary, farmers would sell/trade their goods in informal farmers markets but those were eventually legalized because they weren't nearly as parasitic, partly due to the oversupply of labor in rural areas.

to get an idea of the explosion in illegal economic activity, here's a quote from socialism betrayed:

Based on macroeconomic figures, Koriagina estimated that the annual value of illegal goods and services grew from approximately 5 billion rubles in the early 1960s to 90 billion rubles in the late 1980s. If the value of the Soviet national income in current prices was 145 billion rubles in 1960, 422 billion rubles in 1988, and 701 billion rubles in 1990, then the value of the second economy was approximately 3.4 percent of national income in 1960, 20 percent in 1988 and 12.8 percent in 1990. (By 1990, some previously illegal activity was now legal.) In 1988, Koriagina estimated that the total accumulated illegally attained personal wealth amounted to 200-240 billion rubles, or 20-25% of all personal wealth.

Edited by pogfan1996 (Jan. 2, 2012 15:15:44)

littlegreenpills posted:
when is an illegal economic act "theft from the national economy" and when is it "market corrections of suboptimally planned resource allocation" hmmm perhaps it's just like yore opinion Man

illegal economic activity was used to correct misallocations (it was also increasingly used for private profit) but this method of fixing misallocations was demonstrably a Bad Thing

shennong posted:
im pretty sure the peasants who were conducting Illegal Transactions To Get Eggs would disagree with you

i don't think we disagree very much about illegal economic activity in the countryside, i said it wasn't nearly as parasitic as large enterprises fixing allocations off the books (which is what my last post was referring to)