Left to itself, over-rapid accumulation by certain key enterprises would soon have absorbed the resources many enterprises depended on to keep operating at existing levels, leading to the wholesale closure of their plants and the destruction of the markets for the output of other enterprises. It would have become a crisis of overproduction of commodities. But as in the West in the long boom, the state stepped in to try and pre-empt this by "cooling down" the economy. It ordered enterprises to "freeze" certain investments and to divert resources to others. This involved factories suddenly switching from one sort of output to another. The myth of the pre-planning of production gave way to the reality of after the event, "a posteriori" , allocation, with a repeated shifting of inputs and outputs. One plan target which always suffered in the process was that for consumer goods production. The result was to increase still further the discrepancy between the funds laid out by enterprises on wages and the goods available for these wages to buy-to increase open or hidden inflation.
Deep social and political crises in 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Poland and Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia) and 1970-71 (Poland again) showed how the tensions this produced could find sudden expression. But so long as it was possible to restore growth rates, the tensions could be reduced, usually by a combination of repression on the one hand and concessions over living standards on the other. Such remedies hid temporarily the underlying pressures towards crisis
Those who failed to analyse the system in terms of competitive accumulation failed to see this. This was true of the Western procapitalist theorists of "totalitarianism". One can search their writings of the 1 950s and 1 960s in vain for some hints that Russian type systems contained inbuilt economic contradictions. It was also true of most of those who saw them as some sort of socialist or workers' states. They were continually over-optimistic about the economic prospects-in their own way mirroring the illusions of the Western Keynesians.
The Long Boom
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