Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
We are playing as the USSR.the private sector is basically legalized black marketeers and thanks to godamn Stalinists every manager that lived through the Stalin era thinks that bribes and sycophants are better than actual competency or integrity.Voz is a prime example of this with his "Cadres" that are giant patronage/nepotism fests and he thinks things like actually allowing more people to vote are actually his political opponents increasing their own Cadres or fools trying to destroy the system.
- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
Its because Voz doesn't really care about them, its more of Kos' thing. They have apparently done pretty well, because during the whole private debt crisis, they were the least impacted by defaults and bad debt, and outperformed the rest of the private sector. It brought them into a degree of prominence that they still have. They have been screwed over by us in agriculture though, since we decided to consolidate the sector into SoE's.
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- Location
- A haze of forgetfulness
- Pronouns
- She/Her
One day we shall dismantle their power and work towards the Classless™️ society of Communism™️ that Voz wants to strive for.
That would require humans to stop acting like humans which you know is a hard thing to do...
This gets my vote.
Eh, I think this is an over-reaction. Yeah, there will be enormous corruption going on in the private sector. I mean, who did people think would have the connections and respectability to get loans to start private enterprises?
But we encouraged the private sector because it could meet needs that were politically too expensive for the ministry itself to directly address. Largely this is still the case. The ministry needs to meet the expectations of the Supreme Soviet, and the Supreme Soviet (and most of the ministry) drastically under-value services.
It isn't like other parts of the TTL Soviet system don't have their own corruption issues. And to an extent a limited cross section of the party being involved in business is a good thing because it diversifies perspectives in the Party and it diversifies the kinds of corruption going on (it's easier to strike against the corrupt SOE managers if the corrupt private enterprise managers occupy space that the SOE managers would otherwise occupy and if they formed a neutral or supportive block to such reforms - though of course it is possible that a broad-tent coalition of the corrupt also formed, so this isn't guaranteed goodness).
But we don't want the corrupt private sector pseudo-capitalists growing too strong. That's one reason why Fainburg appeals to me - not that he'd lead a charge to wrest control of the service sector back to the ministry - but that he'd help us diversify the service sector and keep the pseudo-capitalists from growing too much stronger.
Wait, Voz is against this sort of thing now?
Because the opposition was of similar quality. I can tell you that in the UK and the US, this kind of stupidity happened about as often. Really it is amazing what humans can do, when you consider just how dumb we all are.
Anyway, my vote:
[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X]Zakhar Ilyich Fainburg
Regards,
fasquardon
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
-[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
-[X] Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
-[X] Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
- Location
- The great frozen north
Aye. And the fact they we're running a centrally planned welfare state contributes a lot to allowing the energy of amoral Numbers Go Up-ists to be channeled to useful ends. Because we are running a government and at least some of our legitimacy comes from taking care of the people, externalities are not really a thing. Capitalists can pawn the cost of their contraptions off to the state, the people, or foreign countries. But for us? If we ever try to save money by not solving pollution or leaving some people in squalor or such, the medical bill for all the people fucked up by it ALSO lands on our desk. So better to just fix shit.
Of course the further down the command structure you go and more narrow the bureaucrats jobs get, the less this principle applies and the more rule from above they need, so it is FAR from great. The sooner that we can expand worker's councils and other bottom-up structures that can manage the managers, the better because right now our regulatory system is still quite top heavy.
VonVonson has it right about the reason we ever introduced profitability and manager powers in the first place. With central planning a total non-option with current tech, Malenkov gave the managers a lot of autonomy so that they could do basic expansions and changes themselves instead of the central bureaucracy having to come down to handle every little upgrade and overhaul themselves. Otherwise, it's been many IRL years since we did those reforms so I don't remember the details well. I know the player base quicky grew to hate the managers, especially after the time they forced us to scupper immigration reform because the other option was to accede to their desire to treat guest workers as wage slaves.
But that's not the private sector- the Enterprises are government-owned, and at least in principle the MNKh still has power over them and (very) theoretically they are still accountable to the workers. Of course we've learnt that in practice they just behave like the capitalists if allowed and they have too much political power for my liking, but we at least have nominal authority to reign them in. With the actual private sector, IIRC for a long time capitalist companies were limited to 100 people- this being even before manager autonomy, so that we didn't need to centrally plan toothbrushes and street food. I have no idea where we set ground to remove the limit, and I don't get how Kosygin got away with that. Raising the limit would be one thing, but outright abolishing it basically lets capitalism roam the country with no restrictions aside from the lack of stock market nitrous.
Also we have the occasional worker's cooperative, IIRC those had no limit to number of people? I think there was mulling about a large credit union at one point. I really hope they're still around and haven't been squashed out by the enterprises and capitalists.
Again it's been a damn long time. Feel free to point me at the relevant turn where things happened if I have something wrong.
I don't think the deputy can become The Voz's successor. Voz will retire before the current new Service minister does. Aside from that, the big question is what our enterprise system will look like by them. As it is right now I don't want to turn them lose, they're little better than the capitalists. But who knows, there might be some reform over the next 10 years.
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- Viewer
From my searching I believed we removed the limit in turn 60.1 Troika.
Specifically, when we had to pass this reform:
So, we didn't remove the limit, we replaced the hard limit with a soft one and was one of Kosygin's reforms we had to pass, or the troika would have blown up.
From my understanding, this works by the private enterprise having to experience ever increasing taxation if they go above a certain number of employers. This means if the commodity is in severe shortage or is highly profitable they can eat the tax but if they are not they eventually get restrained by the taxation.
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- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This Quest is 890,000+ words long and 2.5 years old. It's difficult to keep track of all the relevant details even at the best of times.
- Location
- Italy
and just think there's far longer quests around. some are in the millions of words range, and that's not counting side-content
- Location
- Britain
[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think Voz is generically against "backwardness." I doubt that someone who, say, reuses glass bottles rather than throwing them out actually bothers him, but someone who's wasting tremendous amounts of labor darning socks when it would be more efficient to just buy another pack of them might.
- Location
- Italy
Funny enough, I could see Voz being in favor of Universal Basic Income as a way to combat unemployment from a lot of automation.
Sure, he'd rather the unemployed people went back to school/uni and learned to do a job that can't be automated that easily, or even went into the social sciences or humanities, but I think he'd still prefer paying UBI and doing automation then just keeping at it with inefficient work. Especially if there's incentives to use the UBI money for more education
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X]Zakhar Ilyich Fainburg
[X]Zakhar Ilyich Fainburg
- Pronouns
- He
[X] Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X] Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
[X] Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
He isn't, but it's hard to calculate how often should the garbage trucks arrive and how many of them when you have two different behaviors going on.
- Location
- A haze of forgetfulness
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Nonesense, humans act like they do under Capitalism™️ because of the reward incentives of Capitalism™️, if we simply fulfil Voz's vision of Communism™️it will all work out.
Stellarengine676
To eternity we shall ride
- Pronouns
- He
[X]Igor Alexandrovich Skachkov
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
[X]Lydia Vasilievna Sokhan
- Location
- The great frozen north
Thanks for pointing that out. I see it's not as bad as I thought, and some flexibility in the system is good I guess. Basically turns the employee hard-cap into a soft cap.
True. And surprising amount of the quest is far in the past because of how frighteningly quickly it updated in the early days. It started september 2020 and Stalin's 1947 death came up in March of the next year.
UBI is a really hard sell for the USSR. Current ideology, while sympathetic to workers who have things go wrong, utterly detests "parasites". We don't have an unemployment stipend, we have the Labor Reserve: If you can't find a job nearby than the state keeps you alive on the understanding that, when they need someone to do grunt work in the ass-end of Siberia, you will answer.
The questions of "what do we do if/when automation causes the reserve to drain slower than it grows" is one of the great unknowns of this quest. If we're lucky we actually will be able to leverage that into UBI or at least much shorter weekly hours.