74 Chapter 2
chemical complex of Shchenkino in Tula, Russia, “were trapped into being,
in fact, punished with an intensification of their work pace while firms
that had kept a steady, customary level of production were left alone in
their bureaucratic routine.”^41 This ratcheting effect, a kind of institutional-
ized variant of the tall poppy syndrome, has its corollaries in the mutu-
ally reinforcing relationship between demand and supply. In corporate and
command regimes, if the supply of one’s quality goods meets demand, one
must work harder to meet future elevated demand. If the supply of one’s
goods falls short of the need, the capitalist market actor will adjust or go
bankrupt, and the socialist administrative actor will be punished. So long
as labor is isolated from those who manage the means of production—Marx
himself railed against the doyens of exchange value (Tauschwert)—manage-
ment profits and alternately pays or punishes workers for past productivity.
Unlike market behavior, any deviations from the plan could send culpable
ripple effects down or up the chain, and the plan itself could be understood
in the context of its local knowledge. So the ideal standard of factory or
firm behavior is to fulfill the plan by “exactly 100 percent, or perhaps 101
or 102 percent.” The lively fitfulness of vertical bargaining disrupted and
distorted the representativeness of the economic statistics that the cyber-
neticists sought to input into the linear modeling and programming and
economic reform projects.
Shoehorned instead into numerical fit, the command economy plan
never fully reconciled in its manifold details, and the compounding compli-
cations and activities that organizational dissonance invited were anything
but planned. Administrative roles blurred as needed. One leader might find
himself playing the politician, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, and a manager
in different situations. To secure more input on the accounting sheets, a
leader might encourage workers on the factory floor to produce more out-
put in the name of the plan but, behind closed doors, might misrepresent
the numbers to undercut the same plan. Not at all the rigid hierarchy cari-
catured in modern memory, the everyday practices of Soviet economic life
abounded in pervasive informal forms of competition and caprice.
These early cybernetic economists faced an associated and monumental
challenge. In theory, their reforms would be approved to track the formal
(or white or first) economy, and any attempt to reform the distortions in
that formal economy would further incentivize more informal (or gray, sec-
ond, or shadow) economic activity. The reality of the latter half of Soviet
economic history reveals that private life increasingly depended on the
resilience and robustness of people’s connections to the informal economy.