Comment by mordae
2 years ago
It's not really about communism, though.
You'd have to be blind not to see parallels under capitalism. Employees cannot profit from inventions and improvements, so they don't engage in them. Improving efficiency means budget cuts and animosity from under performers.
This might not be true for smallest companies, but those don't really drive the economy.
We can say with certainty that capitalist economy has a feature of an invention/idea implementation of which is funded, and pursued by motivated people with the goal of becoming rich (often known as 'startups'). Sometimes they succeed, and give a push to economy, or science. No equivalent exists in communist model.
Except employees do in fact benefit from innovations and improvements, and most inventions and innovations of the past 100 years come from capitalist, not socialist, countries. To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions", and without the market value control 99% of them were of course bullshit.
> To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions"
Yes, but very often someone did that rationalizing suggestion and the manager got the reward. Most people suggesting improvements stopped after one small improvement when treated like that, so whole idea was doomed to fail by poor execution.
Bad manager problem does not explain persistent technological lagging of USSR. There were good managers too, after all. The central reason is that any significant innovation implementation is a sort of travel to terra incognita. It's hard, and risky. So it requires someone who expects to get a reward big enough to pay for all the pain. Socialist/communist approach is not compatible with it on fundamental level as big rewards means inequality. Plenty of Soviet engineers proposed ineteresting ideas, and many of them were socialistically rewarded for them (e.g. "gramota" with Lenin's face, and maybe a small bonus), but very few people wanted to risk implementing those ideas. It was always better to rely on a low-risk approach: blueprints stolen from the West.