I think we are getting at the same thing here, although I don’t think it’s correct to put subtracting exchange value but rather failing to minimise opportunity cost. With a single command economy factory buying inputs on a free market, or able to sell them there rather than working with them, that would be correct and in fact the best way to assess costs. However, with those inputs themselves coming from sources under the same system with their own non-signalling prices and not materially connected to outside economies, it becomes meaningless – the way the Trabant made sense for drivers, with cheap fuel and limited maintenance, or the way Russians fed bread rather than slops or even grain to their pigs. The assessment can no longer be made on a factory by factory basis but only at a system level – and that shows it up as deficient.

‘There’s no necessary reason a land to the tiller program should destroy agricultural productivity along the lines of Mugabe’s “land reform” in Zimbabwe, or that mines couldn’t be transformed into stakeholder cooperatives while providing some continuity of existing management’.

Well… there is, if there is also a (perhaps unstated or unexamined) requirement to do it abruptly. Just as with the privatisation method cited, or with the U.S. allotment movement parcelling out Indian lands to individuals, it can lead to a stage in which people can’t yet cope and are set up to be ripped off – and are. For this reason I prefer handing immediate ownership over to current managers, however undeserving, but also placing encumbrances on them (bonds, say) to pay stake holders over the medium term, also giving the latter buy out options they could take up gradually as things came right. You couldn’t simply reverse the enclosures (say) by giving people (rights over) their ancestors’ lands without preparing them.

Soviet manufacturing was a process of subtracting exchange value, to the extent that its outputs and their prices were not determined by autonomous market demand or a market pricing system. But its outputs did have some use-value: the refrigerators were useful to some extent for cooling food, etc., and better than having nothing at all. The lack of a market price system simply rendered unknowable the question of whether any particular good was the most efficient use of resources. In any case, the producer goods in the factories–lathes, stamping presses, etc.–were capable of changing their output in response to consumer demand.

“Privatization” programs based on issuing shares in everything to everyone meant that the shares quickly disappeared down kleptocratic ratholes, concentrated in the hands of whoever–for whatever reasons–had the liquid wealth to soak them up.

I fail to see the practical benefits of framing the workers’ opposition in Marxist terms, if they were using Marxist language to denounce the Party leadership as a new bureaucratic ruling class that should be overthrown. I can just see some guy standing in front of a Soviet tank in Budapest saying “But we used Marxist language and everything!”

There’s no necessary reason a land to the tiller program should destroy agricultural productivity along the lines of Mugabe’s “land reform” in Zimbabwe, or that mines couldn’t be transformed into stakeholder cooperatives while providing some continuity of existing management.

There are some misreadings here:-

- it was not a value-subtracting process, except in the sense that buying food and eating it is. It was a conversion process, to get to specific products on the back of cheap inputs. That could have been done far more cost effectively with other methods, but that was not the object of the exercise or the test of the system. For the system, it was not required that those be profit centres.

- Shovels do not require hard wearing materials of that sort, as they only have a scooping action. They were almost certainly making spades, not shovels.

- You do not work titanium by melting it down (I understand that this is a metaphor). It is heated, rolled, forged, machined, etc. – but melting isn’t the way to go.

‘Land was already owned by the “tiller” in Poland’.

This is not precisely the case. It had been, unlike other Soviet Bloc countries where large estates had been more common. This presented a difficulty for collectivisation there, as doing that simplistically would have involved seizing land from peasants rather than landlords (which presented fewer political obstacles). But the rulers still found a way to do it: they “bought” peasants out, turning them into urban workers who “owned” their flats. This gave them nominal compensation but tied it up, since the flats were deliberately given a high nominal value and they weren’t allowed to realise it by selling those until they got official permission in the controlled housing market, e.g. to tie it up all over again if they moved elsewhere. This meant that a lot of Polish land was indeed collectivised, although it was done gradually and it never got as far along as elsewhere.

2) Soviet factories weren’t economically viable, no matter who owned them. Soviet manufacturing was a value-subtracting process. Thomas Reed tells the story of one such factory that tried to convert from military production (tanks) to commercial. It had a big supply of titanium which it had previously used for tank armor. They decided to make them into shovels for export to the West. They were very popular in the West, where they were snapped up immediately, then melted down to be made into things that were actually worth having titanium in them.

3) Land was already owned by the “tiller” in Poland, which had been feeding Russia since WWII.

4) Shares in state-owned corporations were issued to all citizens in many of the former Warsaw Pact countries as part of their privatization. Most were quickly sold to foreign investors.

5) The anti-Soviet protests were only “socialist” in the sense of having to challenge Soviet socialism on its own terms, as the only freedom of expression allowed was within the Party oligarchies ruling those countries.

5) South Africa should be thankful that it didn’t follow in Mugabe’s footsteps, as you advocate, with land reform destroying its agricultural productivity. South Africa’s mining industry could have been destroyed just as easily by “reparations” to the “slaves” that built it (many of which “slaves” moved to South Africa from other countries to work in the mines – including the blacks). That industry was far more valuable to the average South African person as a profitable going concern than as compensation.

I think the corporate walls are less bad than Bolshevik walls though. Certainly the East Germans are better off at least. I don’t see where state communism was any gentler in foreign expansion than the corporate types either.