Command-economy growth

Submitted by martin on 31 August, 2021 - 5:33
Aral sea, environmental devastation

Environmental devastation in the Soviet Union


Tony Southwell (Solidarity 603) is right that calling on capitalist states to reduce our consumption for climate reasons is hopeless. And he’s right that a socialist planned economy could dampen the drive for people to own more “stuff” (more cars, etc.)

He suggests, though, that Stalinist-type planned economies could also avert the “more stuff” compulsion. I can’t believe that the growth-target focus of those economies was just coincidence that the individual choices of the bureaucrats all went that way. Their system was organically tied to “development” in emulation of “ordinary” capitalist economies; and systematically biased towards adding new production capacity, never scrapping old capacity.

Capitalists vie for the highest returns, but that means those with lower returns collapse, so total growth may be lower than in a command economy.

Alan Gilbert, London

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