>>>For one, the workers had the incentive, would come up with an idea, and there was a good chance the idea would be given a fair try. It largely depended on people, but then not just the narrow bunch on top, but rather on those who were involved at the practical level where it happened.
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>That used to be and still is common in industry. The person with the idea generally gets a monetary reward in the Capitalist version ;-)

Specially if he convinces the boss that it was the boss's idea...

This was better - the guys would really get a share in the profits; in some cases the calculation of salaries was more complicated than American tax, it went into such detail, the goal being to reward the diligent and inventive, and to provide the mere safety net for the opposite. Of course, it was often turned into its opposite, a very complicated way to enforce "uravnilovka" ("flat leveler", the word sounds quite Soviet to me).

>>>Such initiatives existed everywhere - and as long as what you wanted to do wasn't against some Party bighead's convictions, you could get away with a lot. And you didn't have to wait for orders to come from anywhere...
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>Do I hear the faint stirrings of nostalgia? ;-)

Temporal, not spacial. But as usual, the problem with good old times is that they inevitably produced a today.

>The problem with anarchy, excluding the sensationalist depiction it often receives, is that nature, and organized selfish people, abhor a vacuum. It gets filled. Which is why democracy survives as it does.

Did I mention that this was a democracy? You got direct elections on several levels - including your CEO. CEO was elected, and so was the Board. Now if you were smart, you had a chance to put the right guys into right places and hit it rich. Or you could listen to gossip (often launched by The Party) and take the candidate by face value... which ended with your enterprise going deep into red, and him going to a higher duty.

On some other levels you didn't really vote directly, not in the last incarnation of the system. But then you didn't vote for parties, you voted for people. With parties, it's quite often that if you have three crucial issues over which you decide for whom to vote, the two major parties agree on one (but not the way you'd like), and on the other two each one is about to do one right and one wrong. But you can't tell them what you want, you have to take them as a package.

Mmmmm... maybe that's the reason you can't subscribe for cable a la carte... everyone's already used to this idea of packages and can't imagine it could ever be any different :).

And, I did not mention anarchy. Another misconception, that people without leaders would inevitably end up in chaos. In the case of my country, it was the leaders that had the chaos ordered, organized, packed and delivered. I know of several cases where the people just got (self-)organized with their neighbors across the line to fake war, shoot randomly at certain times of day, exhchange drinks and roast mutton during other hours, and report to their superiors that they're both fighting. The guys from top often had to send real warmongering commandos to shoot one side from the other's positions to get these guys to really start fighting. Happened in Croatia, happened in Bosnia, first-hand refugee account.

>It celebrates the reality, requiring regular inconvenient, inefficient elections to prevent predictable efforts to screw it up completely.

Are you really sure it works? :)
Or you mean the present screwup is incomplete?