>In the main, however, central planning eliminated mass chronic unemployment
>as a social problem. There was nothing comparable to working-class
>districts in capitalist societies where jobless line sidewalks, hanging out
>in summer and winter, in good years and in bad, a constant feature of the
>social landscape.
I'm no Soviet basher; they did accomplish a lot, and the dismantling of the system has been a total disaster. But the USSR did have a little problem with political democracy and worker control. Nove says Stalin's idea in developing Gosplan was to make the center's word law in the economic realm as it was in the political; it doesn't make you Hayek to say that the planners' control of labor and social resources made self-organization (in politics, economics, culture) very difficult. The post-1989 collapse makes it clear how weak other social insitutions outside the state were. And while there was no mass unemployment in the USSR, there was no shortage of alienation, which is something that socialists should care a lot about.
Doug