Mişcarea de centralizare a anilor 1930
Henry C.K. Liu, analist independent din Asia, publică pe site-ul său o serie de articole sub titlul "The Socialist Revolution Started 90 Years Ago in China". Câteva paragrafe interesante mi-au atras atenţia deoarece nu m-am gândit până acum să privesc sistemele economice folosite de către S.U.A., Germania şi U.R.S.S. (principalii actori ai celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial) în anii '30 ai secolului trecut ca fiind foarte similare în anumite privinţe:
Starting from 1928, the Soviet economy was put under a system of central planning whereby all modes of production were socialized and foreign trade de-emphasized in favor of a largely autarkic system of domestic demand and supply. The success of the autarkic approach in the USSR induced the Third Reich to adopt it in 1933 for Germany.
The irony was that both Soviet and Nazi central planning adopted much of the effective techniques of successful US experience in corporate planning in the era of big trusts. By 1904, 318 trusts controlled about two-fifths of US manufacturing output, not counting powerful trusts in non-manufacturing sectors such as railroads, local transit, and banking [...][...]
The only difference between Soviet and Third Reich central planning and that in the US was that in the US it was a system of planning focused solely on unit end-results that would externalize social costs to society at large. Soviet comprehensive central planning of this period focused on optimizing socio-economic benefits. Such comprehensive approach received glowing praise from US planners of the New Deal. The key distinction between USSR, German and US planning was that the Soviets rejected and bypassed the corporate structure and replaced absentee shareholders with state or collective ownership, while the Third Reich merely imposed state control over the corporate sector to maximize benefit to the state, and the US instituted state support for the corporate sector. Stalin singularly brought about the principle of “revolution from above”.
The main features of top-down revolution were: strengthening of political dictatorship in the name of the proletariat (a revolutionary version of enhancing management authority in the US in the name of shareholders), collectivizing kulak peasants (equivalent to large scale agri-business development in the US), state emergency measure authority (equivalent to government bailouts and re-regulation in the US), introduction of a five-year plan structure (adopted from US corporate strategic planning) and rapid expansion of the urban labor force (equivalent to urbanization in the US that has reorganized the US geoeconomy into Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas - SMSA), and state intervention and control over agriculture (equivalent to farm subsidy programs in the US), over heavy industry (equivalent to defense contracts in the US) and over finance (equivalent to central banking in the US).
Between 1934 and 1936 the Soviet economy achieved spectacular economic growth rates that continued despite political purges of Trotskyites between 1936 and 1938. Economic growth was unfortunately interrupted by war in 1941. The German economy also grew spectacularly between 1933 and 1937. Under the Nazis, German decision to invade the USSR was not independent of fascist apprehension of continued Soviet socialist economic success. The US economy, with the New Deal hampered by the US Supreme Court, remained in depression until the start of WWII after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.