One of the illusions created by the rapid non-stop growth of the USSR was that it proceeded smoothly and rationally according to the various Five Year Plans, in contrast with the ups and downs in the West. But the relentless drive to accumulate had as a necessary by-product disorganisation, chaos and waste in whole areas of production. At the beginning of every "plan" vast new industrial projects would begin to be constructed. But after a while it would become clear that they could not all be finished. Some (usually catering for people's consumption needs) would be "frozen", while the resources for them were diverted elsewhere (to the production of means of production). This meant a continual chopping and changing of the goods resources were expected to produce; sudden pressure on people to produce more of one product and less of another; concealment by people at every level in the production process of the resources at their disposal in case they were suddenly pressed to produce more; massive amounts of waste as some of the things contained in the plans were produced, but not other things necessary for their use (such as the case in the 1 980s when vast amounts of fertiliser were wasted because one of the frozen projects was the building of the factory to provide the bags for packing the fertiliser). 47
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has become habitual on both the left and the right to blame all this simply on bureaucratic irrationality, without acknowledging its similarity to the irrationality of the managerial despotism within Western enterprises-and the common roots of both in the subordination of human labour to competitive accumulation, that is, to the self-expansion of capital. Yet it was possible to trace each of the forms of irrationality within the Soviet economy back to overinvestment-just as it is with managerial irrationality within Western corporations.
There was not only waste in the Soviet-type economies. There was also unevenness in growth over time, as in the West. Studies in the 1960s, mainly by Eastern European economists, revealed the presence of cyclical ups and downs in economies modelled on the USSR. The Czechoslovaks Josef Goldman and Karel Korba told in 1968 how:
Analysis of the dynamics of industrial production in Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic and Hungary supplies an interesting picture. The rate of growth shows relatively regular fluctuations . . . These fluctuations are even more pronounced if analysis is confined to producer goods.48
The Long Boom
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