Other Planners As we have seen, many socialists saw a planned economy as a means for the economic organization of a classless society. Everyone would be of the same class -- government employees. One of the clearest and most complete proposals along these lines came from the Fabian Socialist Society in Great Britain, under the leadership of Sidney Webb, in the first half of the twentieth century. Webb envisioned a socialist country with a democratic parliament, much like the British one in his time. Once the government had taken over the control of production, the management of enterprises would become part of the civil service. The various branches of production would be organized as "ministries of production," alongside the ministries of education, health, war and so on. For example, there might be a ministry of agriculture, a ministry of mining, a ministry of heavy industry, of computer hardware, of computer software, and so on. The planning bureau would then work rather like a cabinet committee, coordinating the plans of the different ministries of production.
That sort of "democratic socialism" has never been tried in an industrialized country. Perhaps, if it had been tried, it might have worked -- though, as we have seen, the obstacles are pretty discouraging, and no doubt that is one reason why it has never been tried.
However, the Soviet Union adopted a system based on it, roughly from 1930 to 1989. The Soviet Union had come into existence in the Revolution of 1917 that destroyed the Russian Empire. Nicolai Lenin (aka Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov) made himself its dictator and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. Under Lenin's government there were a series of experiments in economic organization; but Stalin adopted something like the system Webb had proposed.
The Soviet legislature was not the democratic parliament that Webb had in mind -- although at one point Webb managed to persuade himself that it was close enough. However, in the context of a dictatorial political system, the Soviet Union did organize its different branches of production into ministries, making the managers part of the governmental "apparatus." They did also adopt a system of planning that involved tentative plans and repeated iterations, along the lines described in the last system. (In fact, that discussion was suggested partly by the historical Soviet planning system.) However, they never really tried to get to an optimal plan. Indeed, they don't even seem to have tried to make the plan efficient. In terms of Figure 3, if they got to a feasible plan -- something like point C -- there was little effort to move to an efficient point like D, and no effort to get to an optimal plan like *. It is not clear that the Soviet planners even understood the concept.
We should keep in mind that, at the beginning of the Soviet planning system, there were no computers. The Soviet civil service and business management were backward, even by noncomputerized standards. In its earlier period, the Soviet government was quite terroristic, and in the later period corruption became the major factor in the economy. For these reasons, some may judge that the Soviet experiment was not a fair trial of the ideal of economic planning. Some very fine American neoclassical economists have believed that a highly computerized late twentieth century industrialized economy could make planning work, even though the Soviet Union could not. All the same, it has yet to be demonstrated.
Other Planners 