Why was the Soviet Union so incredibly inefficient?
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Was it really an inherent issue of a command economy? Or was it down to corruption?
Why was it so damn corrupt?
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The commies were in a catch 22. Because there was only one party no one could take down corrupt party members through any sort of official process and the party didn’t want to go after corruption because then they would have to admit corruption existed which would make them look bad. They just pretended it wasn’t real until it destroyed the people’s faith in the party.
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this
basically people were afraid to critisize their ideology
if you’re afraid to critizise ANYTHING, be it the state, the garden gnomes, allah or god you SHOULD. -
>the party didn’t want to go after corruption because then they would have to admit corruption existed which would make them look bad.
Not true. Under the short-lived Andropov leadership, there was actually a huge crackdown on corruption that was allowed to fester during the Brezhnev era. It would have likely continued had Andropov lived longer to implement reforms aimed at making central planning more efficient and responsive to consumer demands, but Gorbachev gently caressed it all up with full-fledged liberalization that undid the entire economic system. -
Plenty of one party states can deal with corruption. I mean the soviets had Trotsky to deal with rogue elements prior and that worked out pretty well.
The purge was theoretically to get rid of corrupt and venal party members, but of course it had the opposite effect.Fun fact: most soviet industries had their output measured in weight, not amount actually made
As a result, factory overseers would just make heavier and larger than necessary things.
For example, look at Soviet nails. They’re gently caressing huge for no reason other than it helped make the shipments weigh more
Another thing I read once is that even towards to the end of the Soviet Union, they still had insanely inefficient practices, like floating cut trees down rivers to a sawmill to be refined, even though this meant losing up to 40% of the logs
While the "Measuring efficiency by weight" was totally a real thing, the soviet nail story is not, nor are the logging practises out of the ordinary.
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Fun fact: most soviet industries had their output measured in weight, not amount actually made
As a result, factory overseers would just make heavier and larger than necessary things.
For example, look at Soviet nails. They’re gently caressing huge for no reason other than it helped make the shipments weigh more
Another thing I read once is that even towards to the end of the Soviet Union, they still had insanely inefficient practices, like floating cut trees down rivers to a sawmill to be refined, even though this meant losing up to 40% of the logs
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Post a real soviet nail anon, sounds too good to be true
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>floating cut trees down rivers to a sawmill to be refined, even though this meant losing up to 40% of the logs
this is totally standard practise for logging
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Why are westoids so gullible? Is it the fluoride?
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> Why was the Soviet Union so damn inefficient?
> Why was it so damn corrupt?The forced “equality” within Communism means there is little incentive to improve; why bust your ass at work when it’ll get you nothing and you’ll still be stuck living in the same commieblock apartment next to the guy who doesn’t give a gently caress.
Also the oppressive nature of Communism meant interactions between subordinates and higher ups became a quasi-medieval system of patronage; you backed up your boss so that you’d gain benefits and he backed you up to create a powerbase to move up the ladder or at least maintain his position, so there was little incentive in complaining to higher ups about your ineffective boss as you’ll lose your patron if he’s fired and little reason to crack down on those below you, as you’d lose your powerbase.
Thus everybody lied to everybody else up and down the chain of command; a collective farm was ordered by Moscow to produce 10 ons of grain but because Communism is a shit system, the tractor broke down, they didn’t get enough fertilizer, etc. and only 7 tons were produced.
So workers lied to the manager and said 10 tons were produced, who lied to his boss, who lied to his boss and so on up the chain with everybody involved finding excuses and pointing fingers at others for the shortage claiming it wasn’t their fault and Moscow couldn’t really do anything but accept those 7 tons of grain, because they were the ones calling the shots and that meant admitting Communism was a shit system.
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>The forced “equality” within Communism means there is little incentive to improve; why bust your ass at work when it’ll get you nothing and you’ll still be stuck living in the same commieblock apartment next to the guy who doesn’t give a gently caress.
Not only that. There was actually a negative pressure to innovate.
You see, in capitalist societies you can expect to be rewarded for an innovation. You may get a hefty salary as an innovative engineer, simply because your employer wants to keep you and not risk you finding another workplace. Or you may patent some shit an reap the rewards yourself.
In communist there was little of such award available. There was, for example, no alternative employer you could go to if your current boss is a hack. In fact, as an innovator you might had been seen as a threat to the position of your factory director or your local party leader. It was in your best interest to keep to yourself. Especially since your idea would probably never be implemented due to lack of technical expertise or materials.
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>In communist there was little of such award available
t. Someone who has never read anything about the USSRThis thread is just horrible boomer tier responses.
The USSR wasn’t horribly inefficient, that being said they had bad economic practices in place. Shared ownership of the means of production was problematic for factories, who would sometimes under-produce to receive more capital. They couldn’t do this every year otherwise they would be sacked, or in some cases shot, but it would happen. They had a persistent shortage of consumer goods, which is another big reason why they went belly up. They over spent on their military because they thought they needed to. They gave away too much in foreign aid, including rebuilding Eastern Europe after the industrialized parts of their nation had been flattened in the largest war human history has ever seen. Leaders kept getting older, more decrepid, and refused to modernize the economy to keep pace with global trends.
Idk I’m simplifying a lot here but that’s a part of it.
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No that’s all made up, FIAT owned the auto industry, various western companies owned other stuff. Communism is just a market economy.
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FIAT didn’t enter the country until 1970 and it was built on a license. It never owned the auto industry nor did it ever come close. You need to cite a source other than your poopyhole to prove otherwise.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+soviet+car+industry&oq=ford+soviet+car+industry&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i22i29i30l4.3340j0j7&client=ms-android-tmus-us-revc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Literally took seconds. The post cooldown is far more time
West created communism.
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You literally just google searched the Soviet car industry. Not a source. Funny bait though I’ll give you that
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Even for private businesses with less procedure, less bureaucracy, less oversight (thus, more efficient), it is difficult to predict supply and demand from a population. You can only imagine how inefficient a bureaucratic, centrally-planner, slow-moving institution would be enormously incapable of doing exactly this. The link below typically refers to a 3-5 year cycle in consumer-producer relationships.
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The real communism hasn’t been in URSS.
Marx:
>For communism we should first a capitalist country like Germany, UK, France or USA, and industrial.
After, evolve in socialism.
And the end in communism.Russian
>Take ours peasant country with no economics and no industry and make communism now ! -
>Is a poor corrupt authoritarian shithole ruled by incompetents
>Goes through a revolution
>>Is still a poor corrupt authoritarian shithole ruled by incompetents
Same with china. You can’t expect things to instantly change just because there was a civil war. There’s still no civil society, it’s still a one party state with no free speech so you get a pork cycle as the other anon pointed out.This is a problem with all one party states really, and not communism in particular. People argue that without needing to be beholden to the shortsighted whims of the masses, party leadership can make the hard and unpopular, but necessary, policy choices. This is unfortunately just a fantasy. A one party state selects it’s leaders not based on who is actually the most capable, but rather on who is the shrewdest operator of party politics. That’s how you end up with monsters like stalin in a position of supreme authority.
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>A one party state selects it’s leaders not based on who is actually the most capable, but rather on who is the shrewdest operator of party politics
Have you ever heard of demagogues and populists in past and today democracies?
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It comes from the fact that communism doesnt work. The free market sets the price, then that determines how much resource is allocated to that. Central planning doesnt have that, so a couple old farts in an office need to decide how to move the whole economy, while also having their own best interests as a priority. Suprisingly, giving very few people the task of controlling all of the economy leads to some mistakes (innefficiencies). All the lieing about meeting quotas, deadlines, and standards, all came from the fact that a few people at the top who had the power to make your life a lot harder couldnt accept that their idealogy was wrong. Obviuosly all the lieing then creates lots more inefficiency and lots of room for corruption.
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Prices are meaningless, oil is it’s own input and everything is priced on energy. So under capitalism prices are an arbitrary value determined by land rent and the products (iphones, coal) are utterly worthless
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The command economy assumes competent leadership and accurate information. If the information given to the leadership is not accurate they can not correct for inefficiencies.
This, I would assume, is the reason for the inefficiency of the soviet Union, if indeed, it was inefficient. -
No free pricing mechanism. Some market economies had similar problems when they introduced price controls.
Also, the incentive structure for industry leaders was less directly based on fulfilling actual consumer demands, which are complex and constantly evolving, but fulfilling a priori criteria instead. There weren’t only shortages in the USSR, but also extreme industrial surpluses* and lower quality grades overall than in the west. The guy in charge of the shoe factory doesn’t lose money on the shoes he doesn’t sell, nor does the guy in charge of the shoe store. Instead, the guy in charge of the shoe factory could get a bonus or a promotion if he went over the quota set for shoe production, so producing more shoes that don’t fit many people’s feet or that look ugly isn’t really a strike against the business-executive-equivalent because.
*Most western countries actually have the same type of wastefulness on agriculture, a sector which is heavily and disproportionately subsidized.
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All dumb answers, all answers ITT are the same and dumb thing about liberals
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You ignore that communism is just a normal market economy with some paperwork change and central plans are just 100 page marketing documents
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Can’t tell if you are being ironic.
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Its obvious, for example western contractors created magnitogorsk. Car industry exported to the west.
Central planning is meaningless you get all your knowledge from the history channel.
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when it wasn’t under weak leadership it was great
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Hilarious movie.
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agreed
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The inherent problem with leftism is that it cannot calculate. Because it cannot calculate, it can’t efficiently allocate resources.
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Moronic; capitalism isnt profitable, everyone is dumb and all profit under capitalsim is fraud and stupidity which is why apple is half the stock market.
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iPhones are worthless. Before then the market was dominated by railway companies which were state monopolies and frauded investors.
Car dealers arent profitable, the industries that matter arent profitable and capitalism doesnt exist in the sense of profit mattering.
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Government-run things are usually inefficient. Think of going to get some government documents and how much of a hassle it is compared to buying something from Walmart or a privately-owned store at the mall. In USSR the government ran everything.
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Yet another dumb and precisely identical response. Communism is just a market economy.
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Because they used a centrally planned economy in which state planners made guesses what people needed instead markets themselves.
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Dumb response number 900. Before 1928 they didnt even have plans and then the plans themselves are just little marketing pamphlets. Exmaple https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://niti.gov.in/planningcommission.gov.in/docs/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html&ved=2ahUKEwjKkOO6sJXuAhXhJzQIHZqQDXQQFjAEegQIeBAB&usg=AOvVaw3fStit686ZtSp9NBeheK4w from a modern plan
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>Why was the Soviet Union so damn inefficient?
Because if you run a factory and don’t meet your quota you get more funding.If you run a factory and meet your quota you get the same amount of funding and the expectation to do at least as good next year and if you do worse you look like an incompetent.
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Dumb response as always. Literallt entire thread is meme responses from people who have never done research.
Quotas didnt matter, it’s just liberals
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Ok. Then why did it fail?
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Resource depletion. Same as literally every other civilization.
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Are you retarded?
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Fail; try again; see statistics. Give me 15 seconds to hit the button because it was so easy to respond.
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That’s entirely ass backwards.
You run out of resources because of mismanagement. You don’t mismanage because of a lack of resources.
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Literally retarded and not logically possible response. Fantastic.
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>Resource depletion
What resources were depleted in the USSR? Food? Wood? Water? Minerals? All of that shit is still around today in the CIS countries-
Oil obviously. I’m going to stop responding
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oil wasn’t depleted, the prices crashed because OPEC intentionally overproduced
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Gibberish media response, think for yourself.
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>The petroleum industry in Russia is one of the largest in the world. Russia has the largest reserves and is the largest exporter of natural gas.[1] It has the second largest coal reserves, the eighth largest oil reserves, and is one of the largest producers of oil.[2] It is the third largest energy user.[3]
Hmmm-
Dumb response; you display no effort. There is simply no point in responding. Read their oil production history.
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>Read their oil production history.
But not producing oil doesn’t mean you don’t have the resource, it means you’re not taking it out of the ground and refining it. I mean, the resource is still there, you’re just not exploiting it well.
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Ugh. Such low iq.
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The caucases have oil though…
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are you intentionally being retarded
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Obviously you are; I presented citations.
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Feels like all the retarded posts in the thread are by the guy.
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*same guy
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They are, and he says the same things. Kinda funny, but we shouldn’t laugh at the Autistic
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Your worldview is made up; you dont even attempt to support it. You even acknowledged fiat owned the car industry.
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>You even acknowledged fiat owned the car industry.
I did no such thing. Probably for the best you derailed this thread though, the responses were boomer-tier retards who don’t know the USSR never achieved Communism to begin with, only Auth Socialist.-
Then you’re just gibberish.
Construction industry was private, as was farming. Things were only nationalized in that foreign companies owned them.
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TL;DR Communism is fake and gay
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Yeah its just a market economy with window dressing.
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This will continue to be false considering their industries were nationalized
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Obviously not they were sold off or even openly private and never nationalized.
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source: your ass
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Source was your own posts. You already conceded fiat.
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This is one of the worst threads I’ve ever read.
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Yes, communism is just a market economy and theres nothing to discuss except made up stories about nails.
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pure incompetence they would do ludicrous shit like produce a left shoe in ukraine and a right shoe in kazakhstan under some dumb anti-work pretense
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The periphery regions were not taken care of and were only designed for resource hoarding.
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In the big picture the Soviet Union was way too large to be manageable. The governors had and still rarely have true care for their regions of governance, and the logistics are a piece of shit. Sure one can boast about channels and railroads being built, but the yields of co-operation on such a territory were simply not as beneficial as some balkanized territories could have been.
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This is an example of a dumb response that’s made up and doenst have any verifiable information. Becuase communism is just the same as capitalism and theres no point in this thread.
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>Why was it so damn corrupt?
Nobody wanted to report bad news, because it was a good way to be seen as a troublemaker. If you bring bad news, you become associated with disruptions to the Party’s plans. Very easy then for your rivals to claim you are disloyal, or a counter-revolutionary, or whatever the boogeyman du jour is. So in this atmosphere of fear, lying becomes normal. Once people lower in the food chain realize their boss has been covering up their mistakes in order to keep up appearances, they realize they can just bribe him to look the other way while they start running various side hustles on the black market. This weakens the overall economy of the Union, but everybody involved directly in the scheme profits. The people in a position to report on it are either bribed or intimidated to remain silent.You see this exact problem a lot in modern day China. People in charge lie to the Party so they don’t get accused of incompetence or disloyalty, the people immediately beneath them notice and take advantage to set up back alley operations for personal profit, and the cycle of corruption begins.
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>Why was the Soviet Union so damn inefficient?
russians
>Was it really an inherent issue of a command economy?
yes
> Or was it down to corruption?
yes
>Why was it so damn corrupt?
russians
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