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35 tweets - 13 Aug 2018
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A Wonderful Socialist Life - Part V

Socialist Planned Economy

For links to previous Parts I through Part IV please go to Moments tab on my homepage

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In every societal and economic aspect socialism always was and continue to be about quantity, not quality. A
couple of examples: in socialist Romania, the Party leadership wasn't interested about the quality of a
manufactured product or how was the product going to perform
against similar products made competitors. They were not interested if the product was going to sell or not, or if
the product was going to satisfy the buyer's needs - the most important criteria of economic success of a State run
company was how many of the manufactured products

they were capable of sending out the gates of the factory and report the record numbers to the Party leaders. Take
for example Semanatoarea, a company manufacturing harvesting combines where my father worked 40 years (and
I worked 2 years after being discharged from the Navy)
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My father was the QC manager of the machining department of the Semanatoarea factory. How did he get there?
After my grandfather was arrested by the secret police for being a "chiabur" (small business owner) my father ran
away, changed his identity, worked different jobs,
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got himself into college, was kicked out of school when the authorities finally found out who his father was, took a
job as a apprentice machinist at Semanatoarea and through his skill and hard work he advanced over the years to
the position he had as head of QC.

After being discharged from the Navy my father insisted I come and join him at the factory. I reluctantly accepted
and moved from my hometown Constanta to the capital Bucharest where the factory was located.
The first striking thing I've seen when I arrived there was the sheer number of finished harvesting combines sitting
in the parking lots and lined in on the street in the front of the factory and continuing for a couple of blocks.
Thousands of them, manufactured but unsold

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because there were no buyers. Not sold on the domestic market because the collectivized agriculture was in free
fall with millions of peasants fleeing to cities, and not sold on the export market because quality of these machines
sucked and their technology was woefully outdated

As the head of the machining department QC my father was probably one of the most hated men in the factory and
under a lot of political pressure. The factory management had to report every semester record numbers of
combines produced to keep their jobs. However, my dad had this
strange habit of rejecting mechanical components that didn't meet the technical
specifications which was an obstacle in the way of accomplishing production plans ordered by the Party. From the
other side, the Union was unhappy because every part rejected by QC could not be
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counted toward workers required number of parts they had to fabricate meaning a cut in their salaries. So I've seen
him many going to the office of the company manager and coming back from there fuming as well as going to the
Workers Union meetings and getting hit over there too

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People who never lived in socialism have to understand the difference between the socialist economy which is
planned by the Party/State in advance (usually in 5 year increments) and the capitalist economic system which is
flexible, based on free initiative and market conditions
In the West nobody in the Government tells any company CEO or business owner you must manufacture this many
items, which you must sell at this price for the next 5 years. Here in capitalism it's the market which dictates a
business if the item will sell or not, how many
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and at what price. If there is a demand for the product, the product will sell. If the product is in very high demand
and there is a limited number available, the product price will be driven up, meaning more profits for the company
and usually increased salaries for the best

workers. If the product doesn't sell, the company can improve it or come with a different product serving the same
purpose at a lower price or something more efficient. Capitalism means initiative and flexibility. Decisions are
made at the company level. and sometimes workers
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come with the best solutions. If a company doesn't find those solutions it will eventually shut its doors. This
doesn't happen in socialism. In socialism all economy is planned. This means that regardless if the manufactured
product meets the required quality standards or not,

if there is a demand for the product or not, if the product is outdated or if other manufacturers can make a better
product and selling it for less, the State run company will still manufacture the product until the production plan is
met.
It just doesn't matter if a company doesn't sell what it makes; it will keep on cranking up the product for the rest of
the remaining years of the 5 year plan filling the store warehouse shelves to the brim with products that expire or
parking lots overflowing with rusty machines
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The production plans are reported as achieved or even surpassed, the workers are kept employed and paid from the
State budget; they have no incentive to make quality products because their jobs are secure and they rarely get
fired. In fact since in socialism unemployment is
officially nonexistent. The Party says everyone must have a job, and indeed everyone had a job - or else. Just to be
clear: or else meant police arrest for truancy, which applied to both students and workers. In socialism, everyone
has a job, even the ones who don't want one.

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You often hear some surviving old nostalgics of socialism saying "It was better back then than it is now, because
everyone had a job and people had more security". What they forgot to tell you is how the socialist State was
forcing people take jobs they didn't want, often tearing

families apart. This applied to college graduates in particular. Yes, college was free. But once you graduated, you
were required to fill the position you were told in the "repartition" paper they handed you, and go wherever they
told you to go.
Say you graduated engineering college in Bucharest and you were from Constanta. The "repartition" paper they
handed you with the graduation diploma required you to work in a factory in village near the mining town of
Petrosani,
850 kilometers away for 5 years. Didn't mattered you never been there, you didn't had any friends or family there,
didn't mattered you may have had a girlfriend or wife you had to leave behind because she had a job where you
two lived all your lives and she couldn't quit it.

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Nothing mattered to the socialist State. The State gave you free college education, the State owned you. You had to
leave you family, wife or even child behind and do your patriotic duty to work in a village in the middle of
nowhere, often moving in an dilapidated studio
apartment with no heat and no running water, where you had to survive for the next 5 years of your life for a
meager salary.
Such was the "everybody had a job before so it was better in socialism" claim you hear from those nostalgics

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Furthermore: in socialism you can be the best at your job, you can innovate, you can revolutionize a manufacturing
process, you can create a better more efficient product, can be the genius who saves the company millions in
materials and energy, you can design in your free time a
completely new product that will be an instant hit; by law, the company you work for cannot pay you more than 4
time your base salary, once. There is no option to start your own company, or get royalties from the product you
improved of developed. Considering the average salary
at the time was the equivalent of $75 all you get from the State for your time and effort is $300 and in exceptional
cases a tin medal.
So you brain dead socialist Bernie supporters, stop clutching or tapping on your precious IPhones for a second and
tell me: if Steve Jobs would

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have lived in socialism and not in capitalism, what incentives would he had to develop your precious smartphone?
Do you really believe he would have worked his ass for years and all the reward he could get was 4 times his
salary, would he bothered to develop products

like the Iphones, tablets, computers and music players while working for a company named Hammer & Sickle
Computers State Corp? I already mentioned in socialism companies are controlled by the State and told what to
produce and how much.
So no socialist Iphones for you my dear leftists, only
capitalist ones. Yet, you yearn for socialism forgetting the fact that if the smartphone would have been invented not
in capitalism but in socialism by an underpaid inventor, it would probably looked something like this
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Stay tuned for more chapters of A Wonderful Socialist Life. And if you missed the previous ones, you can find
them on my homepage under the Moments tab

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