The explanation you present (I know it's not yours) relies on a mechanism that either isn't present in the rest of the world and all other industries or doesn't work in the same way anywhere else. The absolute majority of laborers in the USSR and outside the USSR does not stand to gain from increasing their productivity. Yet productivity always increases a great part of that productivity increase stems from mechanization (which happened in the USSR and led to increased production) and education (which also took place in the USSR and increased production.). The USSR was marred with inefficiencies and it's comparable degree of industrialization should of course be reasoned to be the largest reason as to why productivity lagged behind, rather than the metaphysics of ideology.
Your examples are applicable during the 1920's and 1950's respectively after that collectivization had turned farmers into laborers in a mechanized industry.
Of course workers stand to gain from increasing their productivity. Do a better job, company does better, boss notices you do better, boss gives you a raise/promotion, or at least that's the theory.
Let's see if I can remember the Soviet model off the top of my head.
In the case of the Soviet worker, this was true as well. If he produced more, he did get more money, but the way this was handled was a major flaw. Dealing just with the issue of wages/motivation here, I'll explain how. From the top, a central plan was handed down to tell the enterprise in question what to produce for that period. This production figure would be a target, and would be phrased in certain variables (i.e., produce 5,000 units, or 10,000 tonnes of coal, or 17,000m of telephone wire). Once production for the period was complete, then the government purchased all the production and passed it on to the commercial sector who had to sell it. On the worker's end, he received reward in two ways. Firstly, he was paid a standard wage based on his skills, his level of responsibility, and any hazards (this was not a flat rate and so certain workers were paid more than others). Secondly, he received a share of the 'profits' of the enterprise. These were calculated by looking at the planning target and seeing how much the factory had produced; excess production received more money which was then split between the workers. Amongst the issues of this system were that there was the previously mentioned deception over targets (so that a factory could turn a sizable profit without working to its full potential), and that instead of selling the enterprise had to meet arbitrary production targets (with the obvious implication that quality was completely unimportant, and in many cases a loss of quality was beneficial to the factory because cheap garbage guaranteed the same results as excellent quality but with half the effort or cost). The Soviet worker was therefore incentivized in a different manner to his counterpart in the free world; the latter was incentivized to be useful to his company in the hopes that he might receive a promotion, the former was incentivized to be as corrupt as possible.
In agriculture, there was a similar issue. Depending on the type of farm in question things differed. However, in the state farm, which was the main element after the collectivization efforts, there were two types of land. On the one hand, each farmer had his own little private plot in his garden or the such; on this he could grow what he liked, and he could also sell his produce on the black market (with food prices sometimes 10x their 'actual' value). This, predictably, saw the most activity. The state land meanwhile he was to farm in exchange for payment from the state, it therefore didn't matter what he produced, and mattered little if he produced anything at all, because the prices for the goods were set so artificially low it simply wasn't worth his time. The time working on state land therefore had to be enforced legally. Note that this didn't always result in catastrophic under-production; shortages were the norm but famines were not, in part because the under-performing agricultural sector was compensated for by other parts of the economy.
The comparison between the Ural sea and the ongoing drought crisis in the Ogallalah, California are both the same, state subsidized use of inorganic fertilizers coupled with excessive water usage. Corollaries such as a failure to invest in an develop agriculture in more suitable regions are found in both cases, the cash crop blinds the eyes of both Western and Eastern politicians.
Different thing. What I'm talking about is worker motivation, not government intervention (though that can often be bad as well).
Moreover, I'd suggest you're misunderstanding me. Not all negative state intervention is Marxist in nature, but all Marxist regimes have intervened in their economies in a negative way. My point is not that Marxism is unique in this (though it does take it to an extreme), rather that it is a serial failure of Marxist government.
And in 2017?
Do you think South Korea would have become a developed nation had it remained under Japanese rule? I also have a difficult time seeing Ireland having the space to develop the economic strategy which made the country wealthier than the UK if it had remained in the union (see: the economic decline of Wales as shackled to London and the South East). Or indeed the problems Greece has had with its economy in the hands of a foreign power.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Alternative history is a fickle beast and of little value to academic analysis of the subject. As far as Wales goes however, that is very much a product of the Welsh economy being based on mining. It is very dubious a proposition to suggest that Wales would still be turning a profit if it had kept that up til today under an independent government.
Moreover, this is perhaps somewhat facetious. I'm not suggesting that colonial rule should have continued until 2017 (indeed far from it, I feel it far more profitable to trade with independent nations, though I will admit to being appalled by some of the local practices in these countries), rather I'm suggesting that within their time the great colonial empires were not particularly unusual, nor were they the out and out negative they are so often taken as. In regards to industrial development my point is that the colonial powers built a great many things the locals were unable or unlikely to have built themselves.
If we look at how this development might have been faster, and ask why it was not, we can make some interesting points.
Firstly, taxation; colonial regimes were bound to a policy of low taxation in order to insure the cooperation of the locals, on which they depended (indeed, consciously so) for the maintenance of power, they therefore were unable to undertake a mass government stimulus of the kind independent governments could.
Secondly, domestic private investment; again we meet the problem of under-development, near universally the countries colonized had not progressed to a point where the industrial revolution had begun, in many cases they had not even formed credible nation states, so the investment burden fell overseas.
This leads to the third point, overseas investment; this had to carry the majority of the burden of development, but as mentioned earlier, it was only a drop in the ocean. Take the British Empire for example. Here you had an economy that was not yet fully developed to the standard it is today (i.e., there was still plenty of agricultural slack to take up in factories), and although the shift to service sector began in the late 1800s this was still a growing industrial nation. You therefore had a strong motivation to invest at home (where your investment was safer, in a more lucrative market place, accessible to skilled labour, and you didn't have to die of malaria), which detracted from investment overseas. At the same time however, even if everything had been invested overseas, you would still have had an unobtainable goal. Britain in 1914 had a population of around 46,000,000, whilst the British Empire as a whole numbered some 412,000,000; in other words, Britain was a tiny fraction of the Empire. You therefore had a (in population terms) relatively tiny and as of yet not wholly developed nation attempting to drag everyone else in the world up by their bootstraps. Obviously the idea was never going to work, because Britain simply didn't have the resources to develop the entire world to its own standard, even if it had given up on itself (indeed, even today, if one evenly distributed the world's GDP one would find a figure of only $15,000 a head, and that is with more development in the West, and the rest of the world becoming far less of a dead weight). Interestingly however, we can look to colonies that did become industrialized (namely the White Dominions) as part of this idea; namely, their lower population numbers and origin in the home country (bringing the pre-requisites for an industrial economy with them) helped to create advanced nations.
Finally, the fourth point regards the global economic climate; in the world post-1950, you had a situation were Western industry was in decline, partly because of a shift to the service sector, partly due to general economic development, and partly because Western government policies made places like Taiwan a far more attractive proposition (after all, who doesn't like paying their non-striking "Yessir" workers a penny a day). You therefore had far more potential for international investment, and indeed you also had loans from institutions like the IMF, plus the existing colonial era infrastructure to base development on.
Really my point as regards economic development is that the world simply was not advanced enough for the colonial project to ever hope to work in this way. And indeed, this flawed and wholly unobtainable vision is, I think, in itself, fundamentally and quintessentially Victorian. This was an age in which human development really took off, in which the great empires and nations of the world reached heights of which no previous people could have dreamed, and in which great feats like journeying across Africa, subduing an army ten times your own number with ease, or talking to someone on the other side of the world became possible, when 100 years earlier they would have been fantasy. In other words, it was an era in which the West believed it could and would achieve anything it wanted, if only it put its back into it. In this case, the idea was unrealistic from the start.
no surprise, colonialism back then and now was to exploit the resources of the colonies for the colonizer's benefit. They didn't care about anything that didn't affect significantly them making money.
This is outright untrue. A massive part of the colonial project involved educating the natives, building up the country to a European standard, and insuring modern institutions were in place. Even the Belgians, famed for their under-handed offhand cruelty, improved the Congo in ways; the literacy rate was one of the highest in Africa when independence came. Now, one could argue about the righteousness of turning up in someone else's house and telling them how to live, and one can certainly question the method of beating them with a stick everytime they failed to learn (personally, I liken this to Victorian parenting techniques; there is I believe more than a coincidental connection between the idea that children should be kept silent and caned for bad behaviour and the treatment of colonial people's looked on in a paternalistic manner).
