The Processes and Goals of Consumer Production
Increased availability of consumer goods was an important goal of perestroika. A premise of that program was that workers would raise their productivity in response to incentive wages only if their money could buy a greater variety of consumer products. This idea arose when the early use of incentive wages did not have the anticipated effect on labor productivity because purchasing power had not improved. According to the theory, all Soviet industry would benefit from diversification from Group A into Group B because incentives would have real meaning. Therefore, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan called for a 5.4% rise in nonfood consumer goods and a 5.4 to 7% rise in consumer services. Both figures were well above rates in the overall economic plan.
Consumer goods targeted included radios, televisions, sewing machines, washing machines, refrigerators, paper, and knitwear. The highest quotas were set for the first three categories. Although in 1987 refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, tape recorders, and furniture were the consumer categories making the greatest production gains compared with the previous year, only furniture met its yearly quota. Furthermore, industrial planners had tried to use light industries to raise the industrial contributions of such economic regions as the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, which had large populations but lacked the raw materials for heavy manufacturing.
Read more about this topic: Consumer Goods In The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the words processes, goals, consumer and/or production:
“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I think that any woman who sets goals for herself and takes her own life seriously and moves to achieve the goals that she wants as a person in her own right is a feminist.”
—Frances Kuehn (b. 1943)
“The misery of the middle-aged woman is a grey and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)