I think they became paper targets because the leadership came to power through a process of defeating mass participation, in the case of the Soviet Union, though the dissolution of the core of the old Bolshevik party. The targets then became something imposed form the outside, without any real relationship to the lives of the mass of people.
>
>As I argued elsewhere, central planning can be theoretically defended as
>creating superior to market rationality by slashing down transaction costs
>resulting from imperfect information. However, in order to work in that
>capacity, planning must create an efficient mechanism for information flow
>to set forth optimal production targets.
>
>It is a well documented fact, however, that such information flow was less
>than perfect, to say the least. In plain Englsih, SOE managers fed
>misleading information about their true productive capacities, resources
>etc. to the central planning authorities.
But that is not just a technical problem. The deviation of the formal plan from real life was due to the way that the apparatus substituted itself for popular participation. I'm with Ticktin on this one: the problem of the SU was precisely that it was not planned but chaotic, lacking even the mechanisms of the market for the socialisation of labour.
>
>So the real question is why the information exchange system was less
>efficient than planned - which leads us in the direction of examining
>institutional ramification of knowledge producers. It is my contention
>that it is the latter-days "boyarschina" or factory managers and
>intellectuals who finished off efficient planning in the pursit of their
>own class power. This also explains why 'bat'ushka' (uncle) Stalin was so
>paranoid in his distrust of these ratfuckers. Of course, that explanation
>will not play well in the halls of harvard, yale, or chicago.
I agree that the managers developed their own distinctive interests, but the reason that they did so was not just because they could but because they had come to power on the back of a defeat of popular participation. In that sense, Stalin's regime was the cause of the problem, not the solution.
-- Jim heartfield