A couple of people have already mentioned this, but a particularly bad example is Mao’s suggestion of backyard iron furnaces. In general, they worked badly, producing unusable iron. The members of the collectives had to throw things made of iron that were still in good shape into the furnaces, destroying good items. Another bad thing was that the Chinese government and particularly Mao insisted that the collectives would be able to produce food and other things in much larger amounts than they actually could. They got rid of any local officials who didn’t report the amounts that the government required. They then taxed the collectives and took their agricultural production according to the amounts that were reported by the officials who didn’t want to get fired or killed. There was a large amount of starvation because of this. The problem with the government was dishonesty, their own dishonesty and the dishonesty they forced on the local officials. A good government is one that tries many things, gives up on the things that don’t work, and never lies about how good some process is working.
‘Dunbar’s Number’ is just shorthand for saying, “Collectivism only works when individuals can still coordinate activity through personal relationships.” That falls apart when the number of people is high enough to create anonymity. Dunbar’s number isn’t even the same across cultures and populations. BUt it never exceeds the human capacity to track individual relationships.
If you think it’s silly or just a ‘libertarian’ thing, why don’t you give us actual reasons why instead of just taking drive-by potshots at thigs or people you don’t like?
I mean there’s not much to say when the other person’s assumptions include their conclusion.
This seems more a religious matter.
Excepting of course, as has already been pointed out to you, that those five-year plans of Stalin to industrialize the country weren’t failures at all, and successfully turned a backwards agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse. As long as the cost in bodies doesn’t bother you, as it certainly didn’t bother Stalin, it can be enormously successful.
And as has also already been pointed out to you, central planning of a war economy isn’t even an option, it’s a requirement. The invisible hand of the free market isn’t going to produce the war materials a country needs, the only thing that will is a command economy with the government directing what will be produced, tightly controlling what won’t, and rationing civilian consumption. This isn’t something that only communist command economies do, it’s something every country does, and it isn’t something that fails.
Well, there were and they weren’t-https://fhshistory.weebly.com/uploads/7/8/3/8/7838735/five_year_plans_model_answer.pdf
And yet it can be shown that Stalin’s great push for industrialisation had major flaws that held it
back. Firstly, the figures were never entirely what they seemed. Deceit was built into the system,
from local officials fiddling the numbers to avoid denunciation or demotion, to the party leaders who
wanted to proclaim success. The Central Administration for Economic Statistics announced first that
the production figures for 1936 amounted to 70.1 billion roubles, however later announced that
80.9 roubles was the total for 1936. It is obvious that the statistics do not tell us the true story. In
addition to this, the quality of production was often so poor that the output materials were not fit
for use, poor quality steel for example being fit for nothing but meeting production quotas. The
heinous cost of collectivisation, resulting in a massive decrease in food output and famine in
Ukraine, lessened the pool of potential workers who could be sustained through food rations in the
cities, weakening industry’s ability to pull ahead even faster. Purges of the middle and upper classes
resulted in a lack of expertise to drive industry on successfully; without experienced managers and
engineers, progress was bound to be slower than otherwise. When looking at the massive increases
in production before 1928 – and the difficult conditions Russia had gone through in the decade and a
half before this, World War One, revolution, civil war – it is hard to see what value the Five Year
Plans actually added. Coal production had risen from 77m roubles to 120m roubles from 1925/6 to
1927/8, demonstrating the huge capacity for growth that already existed. To sum up, Stalin’s chaotic
collectivisation, the poor quality of production, the ‘brain drain’, and pre-existing success show us
that the Five Year Plans, if anything, underperformed on what they would have been expected to
achieve.
I consider ‘cost in bodies’ to be an aspect of failure. Yes, a five-year plan can ‘work’ in a simple economy, as long as you don’t care about collateral damage. Unless you are willing to shoot lazy workers as Stalin was, or you don’t mind the occasional famine resulting from central planners diverting workers from farms to factories or failing to provide farms with the equipment they needed, your plan might not work. And anyway, plenty of those plans failed despite the totalitarian methods used to complete them.
As the Soviet economy became more complex, more failures occurred. The Soviet Union’s planned economy was no match for western maket based economiss. Also, the Socviets allowed extensive black markets to,offset the failures of central planning.
They don’t award Nobel Prizes for religion. They do award them for illuminating how information is created and used in a modern economy:
Also important is the speech Hayek gave when he was awarded the Nobel:
“The Pretense of Knowledge”:
Nothing he says in the paper or the speech has been refuted. In fact, as we learn more about complexity science it becomes clear that Hayek was right on target.
Everyone with an interest in economics should read these, they are short and very readable.
Hey if you want to take an axiomatic view that’s your prerogative. I get it, math is indeed hard.
Indeed, the Mass genocide of the Ukrainians was a horrific act. It’s hard to look at that and say “As long as the cost in bodies doesn’t bother you”. ,
His info is backed by cites. Do you have any?
His math seems good, are you having issues with it?
Why bully for you old chap, you’ve noticed that brutal dictatorships are both brutal and dictatorships. We weren’t talking about ‘plenty of them failing’ though, we were talking about your blanket statement that
When it has already been demonstrated to you that they actually have worked. Your sudden 180 degree does make this exchange upthread rather awkward now though, doesn’t it?
Rather curious, no? I imagine you must consider things like the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids to be abject failures as they had a ‘cost in bodies’. I imagine you must also consider the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese empire, hell every empire in history to have been colossal failures, as I assure you, they were created and maintained at a huge cost in bodies.
You must be truly disguised by America as well, from its initial colonization through to slavery and onward to Manifest Destiny. Talk about a cost in bodies. What a colossal failure.
I’ll also note that you made absolutely no effort to address the point that central planning and command economies are a requirement for war economies since at least the industrial revolution. Again, the invisible hand of the free market isn’t going to produce the war materials nations need to fight wars. The government controlling what is produced is the only way that happens. There wasn’t much to choose from between the way FDR, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler ran their war economies. And to remind you, what you now are considering the ‘failure’ of Stalin’s five-year plans produced an industrial economy that buried Germany in industrial production during WWII, when 20 years earlier Imperial Russia couldn’t even produce enough rifles for its riflemen.
There’s a huge difference between saying Stalin accomplished this success at a morally reprehensible cost and saying it was a failure.
This was disputed by my cite in post 145.
Aagin, experts dispute it was anything but a political success.
And, Mussolini didn’t really get the trains to run on time.
Dictatorships are simply not effective in economic areas.
No, it wasn’t. As always, you don’t read your own cites. Not that I’d recommend anyone actually clicking on your link, and I’d check your PC if I were you. This is what I get when attempting to load your link:
This is a known dangerous webpage. It is highly recommended that you do NOT visit this page.
In any event, all your quoted text says is that the five-year plans underperformed compared to what could have been achieved, not that they failed. You’ll notice there’s still that problem you have with the fact that the USSR went from an industrial basket case to an industrial powerhouse under Stalin’s five-year plans, enough so that it buried Germany in a mountain of industrial war materials. Rather hard to qualify that as a failure, which again, your cite doesn’t do.
No one said they failed- but they weren’t any big success.
From my cite- which you seem to have a lack of-
To look at the officially published figures, the Five Year Plans were an outstanding economic success.
In truth, however, the benefits to the Soviet regime were more political in nature, the economic
transformation proving to be something of a mirage.
Yes, the five year plans achieved something, but as my cite shows- no where near what you claim.
The great success is just Soviet Propaganda. By no means was the mild success worth the cost in human lives. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the Ukrainian Genocide, where up to 7 million were killed by you “successes”.
And, Mussolini didn’t really get the trains to run on time.
People can actually still read what you wrote, you know. You said your cite disputed that they actually worked, i.e. that it failed. It did not.
Oh, and no comment on your cite being a known dangerous webpage?
Here is what I actually said-
So, in some ways they succeeded, in other ways they were a failure.
Some people just accept, without doubting, Russian propaganda.
I personally don’t believe anything out of the Kremlin without checking.
As for your unsupported claim’
Website security score
86%
WOT’s security score is based on our unique technology and community expert reviews.
Moderating
Back off the personal commentary in this forum.
Side note, I didn’t get a warning about the website, hopefully my device isn’t all icky now.
No warning issued.
Again, people can still see what you actually said. Here, to refresh your memory.
Amazing, it says exactly what I said you said. Clearly everyone who lived through the Cold War and remembers the fears of 60,000 Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap, or thousands of nuclear warheads falling on US cities from Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs must have been delusional, as Stalin didn’t actually industrialize the country. Germany must have had a breeze pushing aside all that non-existent Soviet military industrial output. Clearly the USSR didn’t build 347,900 infantry mortars, 188,100 guns, 95,099 tanks and self-propelled guns, 108,028 combat aircraft and 205,000 motor vehicles and prime movers during WWII, which is more guns, mortars and tanks than any country on the planet produced, even the United States. That would have required Stalin’s five-year plans to have, you know, successfully and massively industrialized the country.
They must not have had those 20,000 tanks in 1939 either, since there’s no way the Soviet Union had more tanks than the combined tank parks of every other country on the planet combined in 1939. That would have required Stalin’s five-year plans to have not failed.
By this point Mao had sunk into magical thinking, insisting almost literally that wheat could know it was “socialist wheat” and thereby by an innate mystical power be miraculously bountiful. Imagine a fundie Christian theocracy that insisted that even without fertilizer, weed killer or pesticides that the wheat crop would surpass that of industrialized agriculture if your faith was pure and you prayed to the Holy Spirit. That’s what happens when you combine ideology that insists it can redefine reality with the absolute power to kill anyone who disagrees with or fails the rulers, and the Supreme Leader is undergoing mental decline as he ages.
Yes, 20000 paper mache tanks, as you said. Deathtrap T26 tanks useless wastes of steel.
The point being the Soviet modernization was not necessarily due to Stalin’s genocidal 5 year plans. Russia was already on course.
And of course a good number of the stuff the Soviets made in WW2 was due to Massive Allied aid- including trains, raw materials, and whole factories.
In the final tally, America sent its Russian ally the following military equipment:
** * 400,000 jeeps and trucks*
-
- 14,000 airplanes*
-
- 8,000 tractors*
-
- 13,000 tanks*
** More than 1.5 million blankets*
** 15 million pairs of army boots*
** 107,000 tons of cotton*
** 2.7 million tons of petroleum products (to fuel airplanes, trucks and tanks)*
** 4.5 million tons of food*
- 13,000 tanks*
Americans also sent guns, ammunition, explosives, copper, steel, aluminum, medicine, field radios, radar tools, books and other items.
The U.S. even transported an entire Ford Company tire factory, which made tires for military vehicles, to the Soviet Union.
From 1941 through 1945, the U.S. sent $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in 2016 dollars, in goods and services to the Soviets.
In a November 1941 letter to Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin wrote:
“Your decision, Mr. President, to give the Soviet Union an interest-free credit of $1 billion in the form of materiel supplies and raw materials has been accepted by the Soviet government with heartfelt gratitude as urgent aid to the Soviet Union in its enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy — bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”
At a dinner toast with Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference in December 1943, Stalin added: “The United States … is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war.”
Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, agreed with Stalin’s assessment. In his memoirs, Khrushchev described how Stalin stressed the value of Lend-Lease aid: “He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”
If collectivization was so much better than Capitalism, why were the Capitalist nations sending massive and necessary aid to the wonderful and great Soviet Collectives, who admitted they couldnt survive without it??
Don’t listen to Russian propaganda- search out the real facts, people.
Lots of pre-war tanks were shit. What does this have to do with industrial capacity?