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As juvenile as the flood across social networks was, I still thought there was some originality to it. Granted, it is difficult to be original on the Left since every idea must fit on a bumper sticker. Such are the rigorous requirements on which slave states are built.
The adaptation is new but the idea is not, not even in the slightest. It goes way, way, way back to the days when Stalin ruled the Soviet intellectual utopia: Blat is higher than Stalin (corruption is greater than Stalin).
I "discovered" this gem in a 2010 Socialism lecture by the great Professor Peter Boettke (the Ted Nugent of Econ), shortly after the 1:00:00 point:
The idea hers is that the grand Soviet plans never worked out the way they were planned. In the Army we used to say "no plan ever survives contact with the enemy," and both are the same basic concept. For the Soviets, the way their society actually functioned was through an underlying market economy. Here, let me repeat myself, the way their society actually functioned was through an underlying market economy.
Even in our own military this activity is in play. During Operation Desert Storm, US Army Aviation Officers of the aviation maintenance community, would meet weekly, if I recall correctly, and trade parts to keep their aircraft flying. This probably happened in other fields too. In the US version of a Soviet Master Plan, the repair parts system was notoriously inefficient. The managers who needed the parts knew what they needed and swapped accordingly.
No, in neither case am I talking about a Free Market economy, the Soviets had one of the farthest things away from that ever devised and the US government tries to replicate that monument to bureaucracy whenever they can. However, a market economy is what was actually making things run in spite of all of the roadblocks arrayed against it. In the West, we call it a black market. In Soviet Russia, it was called blat.
The Crisis in Soviet Economic Planning
GARY NORTH (from page 54)
The almost incredible bureaucratization of Soviet planning is evidenced by two frequently encountered examples. In one case, a plan for the production of ball bearings had to go through so many agencies for approval that a staggering (literally) total of 430 pounds of documents was generated.22 In another instance, one “autonomous” Republic, the Tatar ASSR, had its investment plan changed almost five hundred times in 1961.23 Under these conditions, the task of enterprise management would be impossible if it were not for some ingenious (and often illegal) solutions worked out by factory managers.
The basic solution has been the creation of a vast network of “independent” supplies - a black market. This is the phenomenon known informally as “blat.” Joseph S. Berliner, in his valuable study, Factory and Manager in the USSR (1957), has described this process. Since supply channels are often exasperatingly slow and frequently deliver the wrong or inferior goods, managers must turn to alternative sources of inputs if their production quotas are to be met (and their bonuses and promotions received). For example, a plant may have a surplus in any given year; this, in turn, is probably due to the fact that the manager overstated his supply needs and understated his plant’s productive capacity in the previous year, when the central plans were drawn up. These additional goods may be traded to some other firm for some future service or present luxury from that firm. This aids not only those smaller firms that are on a lower priority list for supplies, but it also helps the high priority industries. during periods of crisis?24 Certain “middlemen” with informal connections are employed, usually under a bogus administrative title, as the agents for the blat operations. They are “pushers” whose activities. coordinate the underground facilities of supply and demand. They are called tolkatchi. Some firms employ only part-time tolkatchi, especially the smaller ones. In recent years, the government has wisely removed the criminal sanctions that were once imposed upon such activities of unauthorized exchange or resale of supplies. In addition to this softening, the procedures for obtaining official authorization to purchase extra supplies have been eased?’25 The state planners have, in effect, recognized the necessity of these “capitalistic” practices. Production goals are sometimes more important than official ideology. These practices go on as long as the conditions of inefficient production and distribution remain. As Berliner says, “The tolkatch thrives in an economic soil watered by shortages and fertilized by unrealistic targets."26
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