Foundations 103- Division One
Tony Chu
Oct 2nd, 2003
http://foundations.arts.ubc.ca/fedoruk/101/
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Soviet Collectivization and Dreams
Greg - Soviet Collectivism
Greg's Adventure around Georgia and Burrard...

Standing at Georgia and Burrard, Greg strolls around a city block, counting the number of times the maple leaf symbol, the emblem of Canadian nationalism, appears.

53 times.

Greg's point?

The National identity is omnipresent, we have to deal with it all the time. Although sometimes it is not very evident when we are in the Canadian context, it becomes apparent when we are in an international context.

Tourist Shops - Where we market the Nation of Canada, the beaver, the geese, the RCMP. As well as making money, it is also very effective at producing and re-enforcing the category.

The idea of the sovereignty of the individual is at the heart of the modernity. Derived from it are three main themes upon which the modern state is built.

  • Each person is autonomous, are discrete individual who should be free to make decisions for themselves
  • The Importance of Technical Knowledge - the main commodity of trade/service/economy of the modern state. Specialists, Administrators, Doctors, etc.
  • The idea of a nation.

These three are the main ideas which James Scott brings up in Seeing like a State.
Management of Mass Society

Modern state-builders, whether American or Soviet, all looked for a method to manage the modern mass society. In the modern world where technology and manufacturing concentrate people in cites, the scale at which people needs to be managed continues to expand.

The idea of central planning is signature trademark of the USSR. In the soviet project, the goal was communism, a social organization where the state would "whither away". From the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets implemented a Socialist system, with highly centralized, high modernist planning in hopes of building a highly productive society.

The social evolution supposed upward trajectory was prevalent in both the East and the West.

The Bolsheviks uprooted the Czars with a working class movement, they created the USSR as a, supposed, worker's entity.

The Soviet Bloc was similar in a lot of ways to other 'idealized' ways to make the entire world better, doing a lot of de mage in the process.
The USSR as a state

The USSR was a federation of national republics. Each nation in the USSR, such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine are entities under the umbrella of the federation. Each of these nations are governed by their own nationals, who answers to the Soviet leaders in Moscow.

In the process of institutionalizing of these national entities, however, Stalin killed many of the national leaders that emerged in his purges. Life was not good for whose who spoke up.

The Soviets were not monsters who only destoried society, as sometimes they are portrayed; they encouraged national nationalistic artistic development and modernization within the less developed national socialist republics.
System Quirks - Difficulties of Implementation

The soviet system aimed to provided equal services and eqaul wages to everybody.

In order to do this they centralized all means of production and distribution. No one owned anything, everyone owned everything collectively. No one hired anyone else, only the state is allowed to pay out wages. This ensured that, 'technically', no one exploited anyone else.

  1. Modernist Method
    Technical central planning based on abstract scientific knowledge, often as the expense of local, indeginous knowledge.

To achieve its aims, the entire Soviet economy is planned out by a central committee, which would draft a plan for the entire USSR. The draft would be passed down, level by level (Soviet >Republics >Territories >Cities and Villages >Factory and Farms) for review and feed back.

A firm believe in Paternalism exists, "Someone up somewhere in the bureaucracy knows better."

In reality, all of the municiplities would over-estimate their needs, and underestimate their production. Local authorities always knew that the central plan wouldn't work, and they would attempt to horde supplies. They knew that they could never get enough material, nor meet the huge production quota that is expected of them. Factories would horde bolts or leather in hopes that they can be reused later.

Eventually this led to the development of local level black markets in which factory directors bartered with other directors to get what they need (leather for bolts, perhaps) so that they can keep up a acceptable level of production. Sometimes they are so short on raw material that most workers had nothing to work on. Other times they would be short on machinary so the workers would have nothing to work with. Small errors in the centres of management often compound to make huge mistakes at the local level. In short, there developed an economy of shortages.

"The workers would pretend to work, and the state would pretend to pay them."

The soviet system has always been well meaning. The state is trying to make life for the individual better. They try to take the stress of decision off the individual by being the provider of goods and services. The side-effect of the Paternal, Big-Brother police state is that the more power it has to protect, provide, and punish - the more insecure and paranoid the central power becomes.

Under the Heels of Big Brother
Big Brother's All seeing Eye
  1. Codependence
    Conforming action induced by immediate gratification of needs.

When the state holds the means of subsistence (the carrots), it is easy for the state to get the governed to cooperate. In the economy of shortage, everyone is in dire circumstances; people are put in a situation of dependency. The notorious spy networks (where every citizen may be the eye of big brother) exists not so much because the people were evil and manipulative, but because they are stuck in that circumstance.

Look at it circumstancially, not morally.

This is one of the reasons why the archives of the spy networks were not often reopened by the public to settle scores. Folks want to move on. Everyone were scarred by the system, no one was untainted. No one wants to find out the horrors in which everyone one, including oneself, was ugly.
Running behind Big Brother's Back

Under the Soviet system people often resorted to bribery, bartering and social networking to get what they needed. They run outside the provisions of the system to get what they need.

People are always clever in getting around the system.

Jeans were an example. Jeans were not easily come by in the soviet union, and the possesion of them was almost a social status which shows a quiet rebellion against the system. Jeans became a repectable possesion in the sense that it is accquired extra-system.

Potates provided another system. Official city potatoes were often rotten and stale, since they have gone through so much red tape. City dwellers eventually resorted to go directly to the villages to buy potatoes from the farmers themselves.

The point here is that there is always room under the heel of big brother. People under these systems still fell in love, told jokes, got married, raised children. They lived with the system's failures.

People were not just Soviet subjects, they were real people with real lives.

'The Good Soldier Svejk' was a hugely popular book which highlights the spirit of silent resistence and quiet mockery of the bureaucracy which all people shared in the Soviet Bloc.