Gorbachov's reforms the period January-June 1984 and 4.1% in the period January-June 1983. For the period January-April, the contrast was even more striking. The growth rate was 2.7% as against 4.9% and 4.4% respectively for the corresponding period in the two previous years. The denunciations of these problems are significant, but after all routine, except for the
THE INITIAL reforms of the new young leader of the Soviet bureaucracy were described in the first part of this article in the last issue of International Viewpoint - repressive measures against mass alcoholism and the kiss of the guillotine for a long list of particularly incompetent or unlucky officials. That article ended with an indictment of the present economic structures by the new ruler and his sounding of the alarm about the urgent need for changes. The following one takes up Gorbachov's program for reforming the economy, as well as the problems and contradictions he faces. The advent of a vital and intelligent general secretary of the Soviet Communist
Party, in particular following a series of No. One's who held the scepter of supreme power with a dying hand, two of them momified apparatchniks, have inspired heady speculation about a new spring in the USSR.
ERNEST MANDEL
The principal failings of the Soviet denounced by Gorbachov economy are as follows: He pointed to a techno logical lag the poor quality of and many industrial products, which together "undermine the competitivity of
Soviet products, including machinery, on the world market." (1) Then there the low productivity of investwas ments, which were to a large extent excessive and left unrealized (frozen)
time. Finally, he referred for a long to an unbalanced planning, becoming more and more incoherent, and to a followed up by a sensational decision.
The draft for the next five-year plan
(1986-1990) was sent back to Gosplan
(the state planning agency) for major modifications. Gorbachov an onslaught on the Ministry of Steel:
"Over 15 years, in investment have been alloted to the assigned to financing the construction of new capacity, which moreover has uncompleted, while been left the technical reequipping of the enterprises has been neglected. Because of the defective policy of the Ministry of
Steel, and of the minister, Comrade
Kazanets, this industry failed to meet the targets of either the tenth or the eleventh five-year plan. The situation
International Viewpoint 14 October 1985 that has developed requires radical changes." (2)
The fact that there is general cause for alarm is attested by the new decline in the rate of industrial growth this year, after a brief recovery
TABLE
A report drawn up by the Polish
Academy of Sciences cited in the
July 6 issue of The Economist estimates the expenditure of energy
(in terms of kilos of coal) and of steel produets (in terms of kilos of steel) for each 1,000 dollars
Gross National Product (at official exchange rates) for the years 1970-1980:
Country Energy Steel
Production
USSR 1,490 135
East Germany 1,356 88
Czechoslovakia 1,290 132
Hungary 1,058 88
Great Britain 820 38
West Germany 565 52
France *502 *42
Switzerland *371 *26
These figures are not entirely comparable. Manufacturing plays a smaller role in the formation of the GNP in these countries than in the others mentioned.
sense of urgency that surrounds them. They reflect general conditions whose structural character we have been pointing out for a long time.
The slowing of economic growth in the Soviet Union irdicates the failure of the bureaucratic dictatorship to make the transition from extensive development to intensive development of the economy. This is generating steadily growing tension in the allocation of supplementary resources.
Unlike the period 1953-1973, the Kremlin can no longer simultaneously raise productive investment, military spending, and the standard of living of the masses. Gorbachov's report explicitly recognizes this. The conclusion that follows from this is obvious. Growth has to be given a new impetus with smaller investment. Above all, investment itself must be "rationalized."
Stress is being put on two factors -modernization and discipline. Gorbachov is the herald of the "scientifictechnical revolution," the bureaucracy's term for the third technolocomputerize, robotize - these are the three themes that are being taken up in chorus by the official ideological apparatus. No doubt, they will be the leitmotiv in the "programatic" docu-
Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, which has been for February 1986. (Once again, this formulation is Gorbachov's
"Discipline" is supposed to mean greater economy in the use of energy rational use of equipment and labor power and a reduction of the demands additional investments to meet the targets of the quite traditional, abstract, and unrealistic, given the material interests of the bureaucracy, which more than
1. In his report to the Central Com. mittee, Gorbachou nonetheless called for a considerable increase in the production this "uncompetitive machinery. • The grow th of machine production is to be between 9% and 12% per year in the period 1986 1990, as against a growth of 6% in the period 1981-1984.
2. The full translation of Gorbachou's speech appeared, for example, in the June 29 and July 1, 1985, of the West German daily "Frankfurter Rundschau,
13
ever "rules the roost" in the economy.
The only concrete proposal is for a substantial reduction in construction of new plants for the sake of modernizing already existing plants and equipment. "Reconstruction" is now to absorb more than 50% of investment spending, whereas it now accounts for only 30%. The mountain and
How can this scheme, along with the related Gorbachov's report, be carried out? There are, course, the traditional, routine "material incentives" "mobilizing the workers." knows that this of the meager results that followed similar talk in the case of the LibermanKosygin reforms in the mid-1960s. The recourse left is changes, that is, readjustment of the bureaucracy. In fact, that is all that Gorbachov's proposals can lead to.
He is proposing to beef up simultaneously the power of the central planning bodies and the powers of the plant managers and enterprise groups. It is, therefore, the intermediate authorities that are to have their prerogatives reduced - the especially the republic the local and regional the authorities for specific inspection bodies. They are to be cut back numerically and accorded less responsibility and weight. This bureaucratic rationalization will be accompanied by a simplification of the indices of the plan.
None of this is very radical or very convincing. It saying by the Latin poet Horace about the mountain in travail giving birth to a mouse. The gravity and the severity of the diagnosis are clearly out of all proportion to the hesitating and limited the remedies offered. This situation is strongly reminiscent in 1983 in which Tatyana Zaslavskaya made a critical analysis of the structural deficiencies of the Soviet reforms. (3)
The reference to Zaslavskaya is not at all a fortuitous one. Although she was publicly reprimanded, she was not removed from her position. Her ideas have by no means fallen into disrepute. They were raised again in an interview with her that she was able to get published in the June 1, 1985, issue of Izvestia. They seem, in fact, to be the inspiration for at least part of Gorbachov's economic reform, as they were for Andropov's 14
"experimental reform." (4)
In any case, you find in the Novosibirsk Report the same theme of a parallel strengthening of the powers reduction in those of the intermediate bureaucratic authorities, dominates the "Gorbachov reform."
But in Zaslavaskaya's report you find another reform proposal that has not yet been taken up officially by Gorbachov but which may before the CPSU congress in February 1986. It calls for an expansion of the economy in agriculture and in the
Zaslavskaya's interview in explicitly mentions the of doing this in agricullong as this "remains within the
In this connection, it should be seven years Mikhail Gorbachov was the boss of Committee of the CPSU. The least that can be said is that the record of his stewardship is hardly a brilliant is suffering from persistent stagnation. The deficit production livestock feeds has led to a flattening out of meat production at around 60 kilos per capita, as against more than 100 kilos in France and 92 in East Germany, the country increasingly an example by the Soviet (including Gorbachov) planning and economic management.
La slight upturn. be around tons. But this is still far from the target of 240-250 million tons that
There are many indications that Gorbachov wants to stimulate production on the private plots of kolkhoz (collective farm) members, and
Sovkhoz (state farm) workers, which fell into stagnation Brezhnev. This represents some 25% of total agricultural production, with a greater specific weight in livestock raising and the production of fruit and vegetables.(5)
In fact, stimulating private production while keeping it under the control report Tatyana Zaslavskaya article Marina Bek "International Viewpoint," No 73, April 8, 1985.
concerned a limited number of industries enterprises, prices been widened. assortment of products
For fruit and vegetables - except the gardens of city workers also play a not insignificant role.
book "Travail et travailleurs en URSS" (editions la De-
Mikhail Gorbachou's recent visit to France a new image for the young leader (DR) of the state and channelling it through the outlets of the state and cooperative distribution networks is one solutions advocated by the reformers. This recipe is close to the East German model, halfway between the present Soviet structure (inherited from the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras) and the Hungarian one, to say nothing of the Polish or Yugoslav one.
The most audacious aspect of this reform comes in the services. It has been applied experimentally Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia. According to an article in the August 19, 1985, issue of Izvestia the repair services industry is today one of those that offers the least satisfaction to the population. The "official" state and cooperative repair services have an to 7 billion "unofficial" sector of repair services industry similar volume of transactions. Unmet needs for repairs are estimated at a value of 5.5 to 6 billion roubles a year, that is, about a third of the total.
Moreover, some 17 to 20 million workers do moonlighting repairs in
"official job," which obviously suffers as a result. In particular, they may steal materials from their workplaces to do such couverte, Paris, 1984), Jacques Sapir notes that under Andropou, in order to combat absenteeism, is in part the result of moonlighting and statempt made to don aggravated Sending "hunt shirkers, but it fizzled the militia [police] at the begin. ning of 1983 to check whether the people in the cafes, movie houses, and theaters were absent workers could be an indication. But the way in which this campaign fell flat also shows the limits of coercive action. You behind everyone of 128 million workers. International Viewpoint 14 October 1985
was part of the attempt to create
In the Estonian SSR, the radio and TV repair firm Elektron in Tallin rented out one of its shops to a brigade of technicians for 650 roubles a month per worker. In addition, the technicians involved had to pay the costs of materials, electricity, heating, and so forth. In return, they could demand what they thought was a proper price for repairs from their customers.
The price was established by the operation of the law of supply and demand. The repair workers could keep 70% of their net income. They had to pay 30% to the state enterprise as a sort of profits tax. TV repair expenment
The results seem to have been sensational. waiting time for repairs, which had been two weeks -and in that respect Tallin is fortunate by comparison Moscow and Leningrad, where longer — was reduced to one or two days. A radio or TV set taken to the shop in the morning was often returned in the evening.
The quality of the work improved considerably. Bribes were eliminated, and prices stabilized rapidly. In fact, the supply and demand were brought into balance so quickly that the brigade is now looking for new clients in the countryside, since the market for its services in Tallin was rapidly saturated.
The fact that articles about such cases can be published in the Soviet press seems to indicate that Gorbachov and his team want to expand this sort of experiment. The example in
International View point 14 October 1985 the service industries is already closer to the Hungarian model. But as the case of Hungary itself indicates, it is by no means easy to apply this sort of reform in large-scale industry, and there is no assurance that it will be successful in either economic or social terms.
The Soviet lag in the dissemination and use of computers in a way sums up the scientific, technical, economic, social, political problems confronting the "Gorbachov reform."
In the field of pure scientific research, one can hardly talk about a clear lag of the Soviet Union behind the United States, Europe, or Japan.
The Soviet mathematicians are among the best in the world. Speaking over
Radio Moscow on January 20, 1985,
Vladimir Gurevich said that the Soviet
Union is building the most advanced supercomputer in the world in Severodonetsk. We have no way of telling
Whether this was a boast, but in itself such a claim does not seem hard to believe.
There is, however, a long road between undertaking such a project, building prototypes, and testing them, and then putting such devices into mass production, let alone into general use. In the latter respect, the Soviet Union's lag is undeniable, striking, and very grave. The only computers available in practice to plants, administrations and schools is still of the so-called Third Generation.
Production of the Fourth Generation, which has already been generalized in the West, has hardly begun. Only 35% of the big Soviet enterprises (i.e., those that employ more than 500 workers) have a computer, while in the United States and Japan close to 100% do. Although current five-year plan annual production of 2.5 to 3 billion roubles worth of software, production in 1983 and 1984 barely amounted to 1% of this figure. Moreover, on the average computers are used only 12 hours a day, even though the plan projected a daily use of 18 to twenty hours.
Massive introduction of computers into the schools is an urgent need to in the Soviet Union for general use of this new tool for work and research. Given the inadequate production in the Soviet Union itself and East Germany's limited capacity for export, the Soviet authorities have turned to British and American firms in an attempt to import on a large scale "personal" computers of the AppleMacintosh, or IBM PC-AT type. But the lag remains. It is estimated that the Soviet Union is ten to 15 years behind the United States, and five to ten behind Japan and Great Britain as regards the quantity and quality of
The lag is still more pronounced in the utilization of computers. At the start of the 1970s, the idea was widespread in the Soviet Union and the planned economy would lend itself better than the capitalist one to the use of computers for planning and managing production, investment, and the economic life as a whole. Schemes for a unified bank for the entire national economy of the Soviet Union were the Soviet philosophers, and apparatchiks have to sing a different tune. Rational generalized use of computers management of enterprises and of the national economy is runinnumerable difficulties, which seem in fact to be growing. Data and dictatorship
Some of these problems are technical in nature but hard to eliminate in the short or medium term - an inade. quate infrastructure (in particular a deficient system of telephones and of telecommunications in general). a scarcity of electronics technicians and especially of software specialists, and difficulties in justifying computer technology in financial or productivity terms (the introduction of computers not having led to the departments the main difficulties are supposes the free and open circulation information, which within capitalist enterprises by their private ownership. Such unimpeded circulation of information throughout the national economy is not essential for the functioning of a market economy. (7)
Within the Soviet economy, given the material interest the bureaucrats have in getting the maximum resources minimal planning targets as possible, free circulation of information among enterprises and authorities is not only assured, it is in practice out of the question. within individual enterprises, the circulation of information is limited.
bureaucratic management functions to a large degree on the basis of false information, known to be so by all the interested parties. This is what the former
The growing concern of the bo geoisie and its state about "computer crim reflects this contradiction. The rela easy access of people outside the information concerning it with competition.
Communist premier of Hungary, Andras Hegedus, once called "generalized irresponsibility." (8) In such conditions, how can you "rationally" utilize unified data bank? The bureaucratic system of management itself seems to be an obstacle. (9)
Alongside the socio economic problems, there are the sociopolitical ones. Personal computers are generally equipped with printers, that is, with a printing apparatus that can function like a small offset press or a photocopier. Millions of personal computers spread through the schools, the universities, the enterprises would be millions of potential sources of samizdat, of a flood of uncensored publications.
What a nightmare for the KGB, and what a windfall for the so-called "organs of anti-Soviet which in fact is only the natural and normal exercise of the right of the working people to express their views about the whole range of social reality in the workers state, a right that Marx and Lenin expected that the workers would, and should,
These two difficulties have given rise to much hesitation and debate in the Soviet establishment about the aturized computers widely in admintechnical progress is irresistible in the in in particular because of the pressure of competition between the two systems - computers will eventually make a massive breakthrough in the USSR as well.
bureaucrats will try to come up all sorts of compromises to "limit the damage." So, they are talking about decentralidisseminate personal computers erally but to mutilat separating them from their means of printing.
So, Gorbachov's problem is essentially social in nature. He is confronted with a choice between contradictory social interests that come into conflict from the outset of the and which will collide explosively if certain developments to the end. (10)
Clearly, bureaucratic "rationaliza tion of bureaucratic management" involves increasing the rights of managers, which will undermine the right of workers to a job, the main gain of the October revolution left for the Soviet workers. All attempts to get around this problem up to now, for example by means of self-discipline and self-layoffs by teams of workers, or through the brigade system, and by holding out the lure of substantial bonuses (for a minority), have come up short against the class 16 solidarity and instinctive egalitarianism of the workers. (11)
very likely that mere pressure can break down this Stepped-up economic pressure will be necessary, that is, introduction massive unemployment. But in the present relationship of forces, this cannot be done without provoking enormous and explosive
However, if this barrier of working-class resistance is not broken down, the increase in the rights of managers will remain limited, confined essentialcracy. Correspondingly, the positive growth and the speed of technological innovation (12) will be of limited duration even if they may be real, Khrushchev reforms and the LibermanKosygin reforms after them. After a tew years, the same causes again produce the same effects. The problem is a structural and not a conjunctural one.
Everything indicates that by his his social nature, cast of mind, Gorbachov is incapable disentangling himself bureaucratic octopus, which through a thousand of obstruction defends the status quo, that is, its privileges. The of the Soviet economy and society, as even the very
Report and in Gorbachov's report makes clear requires a radical cratically centralized management of the economy by the workers selves, organized by their democratically elected councils, debating and making decisions openly. This involves motivating the producers fundamentally by energetic action to reduce social inequality and a clear and share for all in the social dividends.
creative potential of the working masses.
Such a turn is impossible without abolishing the nomeklatura, elimina-
The Novosibirsk Report stressed as well, a decade later, the fact that the Syster economic management and "political and social" added to this) in force Soviet Union generates dishonesty. and a low moral level throughout the entire population. " It might have added that the example 15 pet at the top Pesh Stach to go rotten "Der Fisch beginnt am Kopf zu from the head down.")
9. In this respect, see the important considerations contained in doctoral thesis by William K. McHenry, an American specialist (very hostile to communism on Soviet Computer science.
10. The Novosibirsk Report explicitly mentioned the contradictory interests various social layers as one of the causes of the delay of a radical economic reform in the USSR. Gorbachou himself alluded ting the political monopoly of the bureaucracy throughout the USSR, the introduction of political pluralism, and legalization of the political parties and formations that respect in practice the Soviet constitution. All of this requires a full-fledged political revolu-
Gorbachov sometimes speaks in tones that even through the traditional verbiage and wooden jargon reflect an awareness of the gravity of what is at stake. In an interview published in Time of September 9, 1985, he said, for example:
"The need for a drastic change and the need for a radical improvement of performance are not only supported by the people; they are becoming its demand, the real imperative time." [Retranslation from French]
These words "drastic change" and "radical improvement" have a definite such thing will be achieved by the sort of bureaucratic this same Gorbachov is
When the Soviet chief cites the great advances the Soviet Union has made thanks to the structures created by the October Revolution, he a point. If the imperialist propagandists make fun of the USSR, which accounts for a quarter of all scientific degrees in the world and the engineers and still suffers from a marked technological lag behind the imperialist countries, they are a bit too quick to sneer.
scholars, these the skills and culture of the Soviet working people are facts, and impressive facts. Anyone who does understand this, does not have a full understanding of today's world.
It is the immobility and the grip of the Soviet bureaucracy that is this enormous potential from producing the benefits it could for the Soviet peoples, for the cause of international socialism, and for all of humanity. (13) If the Soviet will be changed as dramatically as it the ten days that shook the world in October 1917. to the same phenomenon, albeit in a toned.
On the debate unleashed in the Bek in IV, No. 72, April 8, 1985 the USSR reported interesting details about May 24, 1985, issue of the French business magazine "l'Expansion."
Gorbachou promised to increase the salaries of engineers and technicians and to increase bonuses for "innovators. recently analyzed the causes of this contradiction in the American magazine and dictatorship production or to economic planning. International Viewpoint 14 October 1985