How the System Worked, or: The Herring Barrel Metaphor

Abstract

A metaphor is presented, illustrating the mechanism of functioning of the communist system. The metaphor, which is called the herring barrel metaphor, and is developed on the basis of very few initial presuppositions, provides a very detailed image of the way the communist system worked, along with a number of characteristic and unique side-effects, like quasi-non-existent unemployment, low wages, shortages, etc. It can therefore be treated as a verbal model, which might in at least some of its aspects turned into a quantitative model. Most importantly, the model shows that shortage was the driving force and the basis of functioning of the system, the main consequence being that the shortage-based exchange power rather than income or any other status indicator decided of people ‘s positions and capacities.

The Herring Barrel Metaphor was published in its initial version as a paper in the journal Control & Cybernetics in 1992 under the title A metaphonc system of economy: the Herring Barrel Metaphor (Owsiński, 1992). The present paper extends significantly the explanations linking the metaphor with its real-world counterpart and the final part devoted to the post-change behaviour.