During the era of Lenin and Stalin, early in the twentieth century, the manufacturing sector in the Soviet Union was organised according to the principles of collectivism. A definition of collectivism is provided from Merriam Webster Online as: ''a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution; also: a system marked by such control." [1]
The soviet collectivism in manufacturing involved organising people participating in the production of goods into collectives. As a result of the Soviet particular political and historical circumstances in the beginning of the 20th centure, their manufacturing plants enforced collectivism in an apolytarian [2] manner in the form compulsory groups of people. During the secord world war the Soviets used collectivism to achieve production of weapons against the armies of the Nazis. These weapons were based on reverse engineering of captured Nazi vehicles and other means of war, before the Soviet engineers managed to develop weapons of their own design, such as the T-34 medium tank [3].
The manufacturing collectivism of the Soviets had elements of mass-production when first introduced and its remnants collapsed along with the Soviet Union when this centralised and rigid model gave in to corruption and under the weight of its inefficient methods: This system worked so badly in practice that in 1921 Lenin retreated from it. War Communism, as the policy was called, had been introduced partly to fight White opposition to the Revolution but mostly for ideological reasons. (The German philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) had believed that capitalist production was exploitive.) War Communism reduced industrial production to one-seventh of what it had been before the Revolution and caused a famine that took five million lives. Like Castro five decades later, Lenin thus announced a New Economic Policy (1921-1928) that allowed a certain amount of small-scale capitalism. [4]
The fall and failure of collectivism in the Soviet Union was caused primarily by the centralisation of the distribution network, which was subject of systematic theft and inefficient planning. There were cases with adjacent cities far from the capital where one produced the goods and the other needed them and yet the goods were transported hundreds of miles to central state storage to be re-allocated to the neighbourging city. Quite often goods were stolen or simply decayed. Regarding the first it was observed in the tragedy of the commons: The contribution of each actor is minute, but summed over all actors, these actions degrade the resource.
[1] http://www.meriamwebster.com
[2] http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/fulltext/gulag/23.pdf
[3] http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/row/t-34.htm
[4] http://home.ca.inter.net/~grantsky/collectivism.html
See also:
Reference
