In the period 1981-85 there was practically no economic growth. Unprecedented stagnation and crisis occurred during the period 1979-82, when production of 40 percent of all industrial goods actually fell.49
The official figures for the Soviet-type economies had already in the late 1960s shown a long-term tendency for their growth rates to decline, by between a third and two thirds.50 The long-term decline in growth rates was paralleled by-and dependent on-something else. The output/capital ratio kept falling-from 2.4 in 195 1 -5, to 1 .6 in 1 956-60 and 1 .3 in 1 961-65. Or, to put it another way, the amount of constant capital required to produce a certain amount of new output kept rising.
The problem was made worse because growing gross output in material terms was not good enough for the ruling bureaucracies. Their concern was with how this material output compared with that produced by their international rivals-that is with the value of the output in international terms. This led to recurrent attempts by sections of the bureaucracy to implement economic reforms, amid complaints about productivity and the quality of what was produced: in the early 1 950s after Stalin's death, in the early 1960s under Nikita Khrushchev and then in the late 1960s under Leonid Brezhnev and his prime minister, Alexei Kosygin.
The reforms had only limited effects. A rise in workers' living standards, in contrast to the very sharp fall in the 1930s, encouraged greater commitment by the workforce and a rise in productivity. But the pressures of competitive international accumulation (military in the case of the USSR, market as well as military in the case of the East European states) led to a repeated tendency of increased consumer goods and food output to be sacrificed to the needs of industrial investment. As Soviet statisticians explained in 1969, "Owing to the international situation it has not been possible to allocate as many resources as intended to agricultural investment" .51 Such a switching of resources from one sort of production to another necessarily led to increasing waste, undermined the morale of the workforce, and led people at every level of managerial hierarchies to hide the resources at their disposal so as to enable them to cope if inputs were suddenly curtailed.52
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