Word: communistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With their Five-Year Plans and all-embracing command of industry and agriculture, Communist states can point to many significant achievements. Especially dramatic have been the economic gains of the Soviet Union; in six decades a war-shattered society in the earliest stages of industrialization has been transformed into a military superpower that produces more steel, crude oil, manganese and honey than the U.S. Another Marxist-Leninist state, East Germany, now ranks as the world's 17th industrial power (measured by gross national product), while China's Communists seem to have banished the specter of recurring famine...
There are, however, serious flaws in the Marxist-Leninist economic system. Communist countries say they have abolished unemployment?but at the cost of heavily overstaffing every office and factory with workers who seldom can be fired for failing to produce. Bureaucratic controls further cripple efficiency, and managers have little leeway for innovation. Consumer goods are still shoddy and chronically scarce. Long lines form immediately in Warsaw, Prague, Havana, Moscow and other Communist cities at rumors that a shop is about to receive a shipment of such coveted goods as shoes, fresh fish or fruit. Communist leaders boast that their citizens...
...economy in Eastern Europe, although Hungary is also testing innovative ways. Much Yugoslav economic planning and management has been decentralized. Initiative, hard work and quality output have been rewarded with generous bonuses and wage hikes. As a result, Yugoslav plants vastly outperform the state-owned enterprises in most other Communist-ruled countries. They also turn out an abundance of consumer products that make Belgrade, Zagreb and other large Yugoslav cities look more West European than Balkan...
...true intentions of the so-called Eurocommunist parties of Italy, France and Spain: after decades of being apologists for totalitarianism, they now profess their commitments to democratic principles. Purged from their platforms is the once obligatory rhetoric calling for violent revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. Italian Communist Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer has said that under his party, "the system must remain that of liberty and individual rights, representative democracy that has its center in the parliament, pluralism of parties and alternating parties in the government...
...Bahro has dared to argue that a variety of Marxist groups be allowed to challenge the Communist Party's power monopoly. A similar kind of Marxist pluralism has also been advocated by Jacek Kuron, a leading member of Poland's Committee for the Self-Defense of Society. This dissident organization has successfully pressured...