Talk:Socialist emulation

The song "To the memory of a stakhanovite" by Vladimir Vysotsky in the Talk:Stakhanovite shows the attitude to "socialist work". Mikkalai 07:27, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Kravchenko and Heller

The paragraph about practice of the socialist competition is based on their personal experiences in USSR. Especially Kravchenko, as he was a director of large Soviet industry so he had comprehensive, first-hand knowledge about both the ideology and economy of that era. He describes in details how the Party decisions on planning were driven by ideological goals, rejecting any arguments about feasibility of the plans, and resulted in plans that were completely detached from reality. At the same time execution of the plans was enforced by KGB and non-compliance was treated as"sabotage". This led precisely to the effects described in the paragraph: double accounting, hoarding of resources and false reporting as the only means of avoiding criminal prosecution. This account is not unique to Heller and Kravchenko, other Soviet authors reported the same, for example Nikolai Shmelov (major Soviet economist), Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nikolai Nikulin. Kravietz (talk) 10:46, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

This practice of unrealistic planning cannot be attributed exclusively to socialist emulation. This would be a very simplistic view. You are right about ideological goals. You right about party and kgb pressure. And socemulation played in this its own role. However the overall problems of soviet planning are much broader and must be described in an appropriate article. If you have this book available, please expand the page Soviet-type economic planning. -M.Altenmann >t 14:56, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

In particular, you are overlooking that Soviet economy was centrally planned. therefore the impact of "counterplans" was indirect. Further, "hoarding" has nothing to do with socialist emulation per se. It was a result of unbalanced planning, which had numerous reasons. And so on. In short, ideologically motivated planned economy does not work. And this is a subject of the corresponding page. Notice the qualifier, "ideologically motivated". In capitalist world a huge entreprize is a small country. And it is crazy to think that its economy is not planned. But its plans are not based on ideology. -M.Altenmann >t 15:20, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I agree that it's a quite broad problem, but I don't think the paragraph states that it was an exclusively an outcome of socialist emulation - it merely mentions one aspect of how it looked on the ground from the perspective of Soviet people. The plan was set by the Party, and emulation was promoted to ensure better completion of the plans, so these things were interconnected: individual directors were forced to hoard resources to compete with other directors in plan completion. In any case, if you feel this can be better worded please feel free - it's just something I found in these books and definitely not going to die for it :) Kravietz (talk) 15:28, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) :By the way, the idea of competition, whether capitalist or socialist is sound. It makes people keep running. And socialist emulation was a smart thought. However the implementation was not possible without objective criteria, which are delivered only by market, (at least we don't know better) and without adequate award for performance. -M.Altenmann >t 15:33, 15 July 2015 (UTC)