ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests broad relationships between innovation, competition and socialism. Rapid innovation is incompatible with idealised socialism; such innovation not only sustains high inequality and competition by constantly supplying many new products for few, but it also requires high inequality and competition as incentives. The subject of Research and development (R&D) and innovative activity in the USSR and Eastern Europe — its organisation, size, and performance — has been studied particularly intensively since the late 1960s. An aspect of the Soviet strategy of growth has been a limited use of foreign trade as an instrument of transferring Western technology. The present Soviet economic system shares some of the features of what Marx called crude or primitive communism. The chapter ends with a section on the Soviet growth strategy, the present slowdown and the prospects for economic reform.
