echidna

M&M, you could try :
http://www.starvingmind.net/detail/0793143675.html

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by Happy Wonderer
This is a non-sequitor. Obviously the Soviets created factories, generally in response to a master X-year plan.

But they were state capitalist, not true communist.

I don't think that history has been very kind to planned economies; they tend to be inflexible and discourage innovation.

That's an understatement!

In a more pure Marxist society, people working to further the goal of the commune would realize that a factory needed to be made (although Marx was suspicious of factories in general having seen the slums caused by the factories in England.)

Note, though, that the factory may be *FAR* beyond what the commune can make.

Take a chip fabricator, for example. The price tag is in the *10* figures.

The key idea is that none of the positions are rewarded better than any others.

Then nobody would to the harder jobs.

The incentive for building the factory is the good of the community as a whole. The idea is that life is better for everybody if we have this factory -- now we can produce better woolen mittens for our fellow comarades much faster, helping them to produce more potatos to feed us with.

But you won't end up with any big factories. You'll lose horribly on economies of scale. Big projects will be impossible.

The Soviet Union limped along with this kind of motivation for quite some time, and I don't think that all of their problems could be blamed on their social system. We are very blessed in the US with lots of easily-exploited natural resources (which we are using up, but that is another story.)

Russia had lots of resources also.

It may seem strange to us that a community would build something like a factory without some huge financial incentive -- but consider what a community threatened by military threat or natural disaster can do.

Much smaller projects, however.

The problem is that for a large, complex society there needs to be some group that does the long-term planning. This almost by definition turns into an exploitation of capital (in other words the people doing the planning have natural incentives to make decisions that reward themselves rather than the community.) Power and capital are almost inseperable, except in Utopia.

What I've been saying from a different direction--power lies somewhere, it's not distributed.

Loren Pechtel

The point of stock is to get a group of people get together to do something financially that they would not be able to do individually. Stock provides a means to represent ownership in a tradeable form.

IoftheBholder

Although this thread has wound it's way through some interesting conversation, I just figured the *motivation* for building factories in communism would be the same as under capitalism. Namely, people get out and work to avoid daytime TV.

i!

99Percent

Under capitalism the reason for building factories is to make money not to give jobs.

Aerion

But providing jobs is the usual secondary effect.

Autonemesis

I can: ours (US). Farmers are paid by the government to destroy crops while people elsewhere go hungry. That's more screwed up than what you were objecting to by a LONG shot.

echidna

Actually one of the fascinating things which communism achieves, is that through its lack of employment incentives, at a grassroots level it actually promotes the old barter system more strongly than ever before since Medieval times.

For example (and very simplistically), a dentist is paid the same as a builder. So when it comes time for the builder to get fillings for his kids, he will build the dentist a new extension, or the mechanic needing legal advice will service his lawyer�s car for a year, and such. It�s why corruption and the black market thrive so strongly under communism.

In reality, this is why anyone who deals with business in a communist country is so bewildered at the prevailing expectant attitude that business transactions must be accompanied by favours. True, corruption is a feature of all developing countries, but by fixing wages apart from market value, the communist system entrenches corruption to survive as grass-roots recognition for the different value attributed to different jobs.

Loren Pechtel

Except that's one sector rather than the whole economy. Otherwise I would agree with you.

Loren Pechtel

It's the same old story--when the government attempts to fix prices you see a black market spring up to circumvent it.