Having first learned about the existence of this book through discussions between the sorts of people given to uttering fallacies like "True Communism has never been tried yet", I was expecting a work of science-fiction, one in which the incentives and innovation problems afflicting even market-socialism would simply be wished away through "better computers". Instead, what I found was something more akin to a cross between history, economics and sociology, a clear-eyed vivification of the aspirations of the Soviet leadership, how these were sold to the masses, how the reality increasingly fell short of these lofty goals, and how a few intellectuals thought they found a way to bring the dream back on track, before the personal incentives of party bosses and plant-managers laid waste to all the elegant mathematical dreams for surpassing the capitalists.
Spufford, though "merely" a writer, truly gets why the Soviet system was doomed to fail in a manner that many supposed experts have long proven incapable of grasping: given the unwillingness of Stalin's successors to replace personal incentives with the Gulag and the NKVD operative's truncheon (or bullet) as motivation, it was inevitable that the Soviet system would gradually come to a crawl as citizens pretended to work at jobs where they were given wages they couldn't use to actually buy much of value.
The arguments Spufford gives life to in this book are not new, and have been made over the decades by voices as varied as Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Stieglitz. What is genuinely innovative here is that said arguments aren't put across in the dry, technical language of economists addressing each other in peer-reviewed journals, nor even in the factual but jargon-free tone one might expect of an Economist survey article; instead Spufford uses the lives and frustrations of ordinary people to get the message across, showing how the perversities of the Soviet system manifested themselves in how one worked, how one interacted with colleagues, how one did business (or the Soviet Union's closest approximation to business) and how one dealt with officialdom, especially when what one might need to say was not what they wished to hear. The book succeeds in showing that the inhumanity and wastefulness of the Soviet economy wasn't some incidental aspect of the system but intrinsic to it, just as the perverse workarounds and sordid compromises it forced on the citizenry was an intrinsic flaw in the weave. Communism simply doesn't work on anything larger than the scale of a few hunter-gatherers, no matter the virtues of those who try to establish it as the basis of a state, or the amount of intellectual firepower they try to throw at it.
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