Dude’s an ultra
Bonus: https://nitter.net/uncle_authority/status/1721967810241335347#m
I guess the Deprogram guys are the Three Stooges now? But the joke doesn’t really work
How are you going to build public infrastructure without a financing mechanism, let alone on a massive scale like the USSR did?
While the rest of the world was still preoccupied with the gold standard, Stalin already understood that public spending is limited not by how much metal you own, but by the availability of labor, resources and technology. The ruble went off gold, and the USSR was able to publicly finance their massive infrastructure projects simply by “printing” as much money as they wanted.
To keep inflation in check, they came up with a “dual circuit monetary system”, which is quite ingenious on its own. You have one circuit where the state development banks spend huge sums of money to finance public projects, and another circuit is where the money is circulated to the hands of the citizens for their retail and consumption etc. The latter is closely regulated to ensure that the amount of money supply does not exceed the capacity of the supply of goods and services (for example, through the monitoring activities of Gossnab), and thus inflation was able to be minimized. (Khrushchev abolished Gossnab in 1953 as soon as Stalin died, among many other things, and everything has gone downhill ever since).
On the other hand, Trotsky was also a huge advocate for state planning, but he also wrote that “FDR’s New Deal would bankrupt America” (America suspended the gold standard during the New Deal). All this suggests that if Trotsky had been in charge, the USSR would have been too afraid to spend money on public infrastructure projects, and it would have experienced a very difficult if not a dire economic situation, especially coming out of the Civil War and the NEP.
All this just to say that Stalin was truly a financial genius, apart from being a political genius. He spent 17 years (!) trying to get the Soviet economists to compile an economic textbook that would help perpetuate the sound economic policies, but apparently this effort went down the drain when Khrushchev took power and instead spent most of his time demonizing Stalin and reversing his policies.
GOOD post, thanks for making those connections and explaining your case, also fuck Trotsky lol. Reading recommendations on the dual circuit and Soviet development during that era?
I have this post that touches on the subject although I’m sure @Kaplya@hexbear.net can expand on the subject as well.
You do it by doing systems of linear equations of input output tables, leontiev style.
The ruble was short hand as was dual circulation systems because they couldn’t precisely calculate the whole economy. They did giant interindustry ones, and smaller at the local scale but then it all have gone out of the window. On the level of single factory its a trivial matrix multiplication.
The plan was first, the ruble was whatever it haas to be.
MMT answer would be to hose with roubles needed insdustries and take in taxes surplus to stop inflation, where on earth that relationship was used in ussr
I am seriously scratching my head over this one, because it doesn’t relate to what I am saying?
How does input output used for planning negates the need for a financial system? How are socialist enterprises and organizations going to settle payments among one another, and with the State Bank? How do socialist enterprises pay their workers wages? How do the Soviet citizens pay for services?
The problem is not so much how to plan the economy, but how are you going to finance the economy.
MMT answer would be to hose with roubles needed insdustries and take in taxes surplus to stop inflation, where on earth that relationship was used in ussr
?? I literally just described how it works in my post above.
