Thought Experiment: Communism Without the Bullshit

Straha

Banned
There's been a lot of discussion lately about variations on the Soviet communist system; on whether it was really as dysfunctional as it's been said to be, on what made it fail, and on whether it could have worked. To add to this discussion, I would like to add this question: Was the problem with the Soviet command economy that it was a command economy per se, or was it that the command economy was crippled by the ideological imperatives of Communism and ultimately untenable due to its failure to perform as Communist dogma held it should?

After all, it has been pointed out that many large corporations are essentially "command economies" in their internal systems, while Japan, many of the Asian "tiger economies" and some of the Western European "social democracies" all managed to produce good economic results using systems with far more central planning and state interference than most free marketeers would find acceptable. On the other hand, one can point out that large "centrally planned" corporations often suffered for the inefficiencies of their systems, and the current vogue is for more local initiative and internal competition in business, and that the state sector in "mixed economies" often performs very poorly. But one could counter that current business practices are driven as much by free market ideology as sound business advice, and that state owned businesses tend to do poorly because of pressure to compromise business principles with policy objectives.

At any rate, what I propose is a thought experiment,would a Soviet style command economy, essentially a state monopoly on production, distribution, and employment, actually work, if you cut out the bullshit (both the idealist promises of socialism: full employment, social equality, improving standards of living; and the ideology of the system itself, the constant need to show that central planning is more productive and efficient than the free market, and the arrogance of thinking that a planned economy means you can essentially do anything by fiat)?

To do this let us examine a hypothetical state that develops a command economy, not through a socialist revolution, but from an extreme corporate monopoly. Exactly how and where this develops, we won't deal with, but those who insist that a purely theoretical scenario is OT are invited to imagine it developing from one of any number of OTL colonial "companies" that historically excercised sovereignty and some sort of monopoly. But to avoid getting bogged down in historical details, let us refer to it as the Citystate of Corpora.

Corpora is owned and run by the Cartered Corpora Corporation. The CCC is a diversified, vertically intergrated company with a control obsession and a nasty jealous streak. The CCC owns all land in Corpora, controls all legitimate businesses, and is the sole source of legitimate employment. It considers maximizing the efficiency of its workforce to be part of its business, and thus takes an active, perhaps even totalitarian, role in scrutinizing the activities of its employees and potential employees (everyone in Corpora is a potential employee).

The CCC doesn't mind importing stuff they don't produce, but any goods in competition with CCC stuff get a hefty surcharge, if they are available at all. The CCC is actively interested in the export market, but sees Corpora as a captive market that can be used to pump up production until something can be produced at internationally competative rates. The CCC is not interested in unprofitably ventures, but is interested in an extremely diverse range of industries.

Also, the CCC is not particularly concerned with social services per se, but has found it necessary to provide a number of services to facilitate productivity and employee functionality, and stamp out independent providers. Hence the company provides services like daycare, medical care, and schooling.

One might think of Corpora as a corporate mining town writ large (minus the intrusion of a national government) but the scope of the CCC's interests is such that it approximates a full industrial economy.

So how well does Corpora do, compared to a Soviet style Communist state, or a "free market" state?
 
First off: it would have been interwesting to see what would have happened if the USSR wouldn`t have spend 25 % of it`s GNP and 50 % of it`s industrial production on defence. That kind of drain would have crippled the most advanced capitalist economy as well.
(For comparison at the same time NATO members agreed to raise their defence spending to 3 % of their GNP, at present Germany spends 1.2 %)
There are other things you want to change if you want to make a planned economy work. You will have to find a way to reward really hard workers and you will have to have some competition at the developement level. Case in point: While production was centralised for planes there were several construction bureaus (i.e. MIG, Suchoi, Tupolev) which competed for the best design. If the USSR could have expanded that approach to civilian production the Moskvitch might not have been the latest word in soviet automobiles.
 
Roland Wolf said:
Case in point: While production was centralised for planes there were several construction bureaus (i.e. MIG, Suchoi, Tupolev) which competed for the best design. If the USSR could have expanded that approach to civilian production the Moskvitch might not have been the latest word in soviet automobiles.

Nitpick: design bureaus, not construction ones. The selected design would be built in factories designated by the state. OKBs MiG, Tupolev, Sukhoi and so on didn't have any production facilities(IIRC, not even for prototypes).

Anyway, I agree that extending competition to other fields would increase efficiency, but would it be enough?
 
Guilherme Loureiro said:
Nitpick: design bureaus, not construction ones. The selected design would be built in factories designated by the state. OKBs MiG, Tupolev, Sukhoi and so on didn't have any production facilities(IIRC, not even for prototypes).

Anyway, I agree that extending competition to other fields would increase efficiency, but would it be enough?

Mental note: Must not post when tired... :D

It was just a part of what is need. But if you combine it with a drastically reduced defence spending it might give a country like the USSR decent consumer goods to export. If for example the Ural works would not have turned out a second-rate BMW motorcycle copy from a WW2 design but somthing like the 75/5 at a decent price there would have been a lot of customers in the West.
Selling finished products instead of raw meratials like in OTL would have given the USSR the ability to obtain materials as needed. In OTL the economy of COMCON states was severly hampered by not being able to import machinery or by having to reverse engeneer some products. There was a STASI (East German secret police) study which showed that a 256kbyte chip clone costed the GDR 520 Marks when it was a cent item in the West.
If you combine more foreign currency with a lower military standing-hence likly less import controls the USSR could have eliminated these inefficencies.
More competition between state-owned factories (the CEO of the winner gets a datcha in Sochi (Black Sea) the looser one near Irkustsk (Siberia)) might have also inproved efficency.
 
Only the directors? What about your average worker Ivan Ivanovich? Don't they get anything? I thought it was supposed to be the worker's paradise...

But I just had another idea:

What about a kind of "capitalist research, communist production": There are many competing research divisions in every branch of industry who try to design the fastest / cheapest possible car / whatever; the best designs are produced in the state controlled factory, everywhere through the conutry the same way?
 
Hmm, where have I seen this before? You know, Straha, if you are going to quote someone else's words, you really must cite it. Without citing your reference, this is plagiarism.

To see the original: soc.history.what-if
 
Top