>>Despite the crimes perpetrated in its early decades and the continuing
>>departures from the socialist ideal, the Soviet system brought rapid
>>economic progress for some 50 years after its creation in the late 1920s.
>>The transformation from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban,
>>industrialized one--a process taking 30 to 50 years in other countries, was
>>accomplished in only 12 years, during 1928-40.
>>
You can't separate the political repression from economics. Capitalist economy thrives on repression, but since the sine qua non of the Soviet economy was the plan, or self-conscious application of democratic choice to production, political repression makes the plan void.
The advantage of the plan was not that it was free of capitalist exigencies, but that it introduced a higher mode of economic regulation, what Lukacs called 'societal self-determination'.
But where repression prevents democratic decision-making that contradicts the very point at which a planned economy has the advantage. In effect, there was no plan - just the empty decrees of bureaucrats, who were lied to and lied about the real state of the economy.
So, the following is based on false statistics. The GNP estimates produced by Soviet planners were based on false reporting. Whole industries were empty shells producing goods that existed on paper, but in fact were useless.
>>Excluding the period of war and recovery associated with World War II, much
>>of which was fought on Soviet territory, the Soviet gross national product
>>(GNP) grew at a high average rate of 5.1% per year during 1928-75, based on
>>Western estimates (see Table 1, p 24). Even during 1950-75, after basic
>>industrialization had been completed, the Soviet economy still grew
>>rapidly--much more rapidly than the US economy during those years, as Table
>>1 shows.
All of which begs the question why did the superior economic entity collapse in the face of the inferior? No. The answer is that soviet industry proved to be a paper tiger.
-- Jim heartfield