14.1. Alternative views on the economic system of "real socialism"

Where did our modern society come from? This is perhaps the most agonizing problem of the present day: of the economic, social, and cultural life of those countries which, until recently, we called countries of "real socialism," adding that this socialism was "developed," and promising that in the not-too-distant future it would become communism—a society of universal happiness and prosperity. What was it? Deception, cynical lies, illusions? Or genuine enthusiasm and a drive toward a new life shared by a significant part of our society? The answers to these questions are far from simple.

Moreover, they are extremely important for socioeconomic theory, for understanding how our society is moving, since society and the economy are, first and foremost, people. People who have interests, goals, ideas... Of course, the economy is not simply a collection of people—it is an objective system of relations that binds them together. And in order to understand what our society was like in the past, what it will become in the future, and how this transition will occur, it is necessary, above all, to pay attention to the real, objective socioeconomic relations that do not depend on our will and consciousness, in their dynamics, in their development from past to future through the present. Let us try to systematize the main variants of explanation of our past based on the method of dialectical unity of the historical and the logical, taking into account the international character of thinking about which "dead" is gripping the present-day "living"—gripping you and me—and dragging us backward, or perhaps, on the contrary, creating the preconditions for us to grow and move forward. Perhaps the first and simplest hypothesis explaining where we lived, how we lived, what the society of "real socialism" was, was the old dogma that in the countries of the "world socialist system" (WSS), nothing other than "developed socialism" had been built, which was described in the form of a fairly complex system of categories of the so-called "political economy of socialism."

The period of early perestroika, which proceeded under slogans of "improving" socialism, adjusted this approach, declaring that our society was socialism, but a socialism that had certain shortcomings. These shortcomings were explained in various ways. Some spoke merely of certain "deviations from the line" in the process of socialist and communist construction (this explanation is still alive among fundamentalists), some pointed to deformations, and some went so far as a harsher assessment, insisting on the degeneration of the socialist system—a system that nevertheless had begun to move and was moving along the path of "socialist choice." The latter version was in many ways similar to the assessments of theorists of foreign socialist and communist parties, which were quite widespread throughout the history of the WSS (within "Euromarxism," "Eurocommunism," and the like).

However, the experience of the crisis that began after the first euphoric years of perestroika revealed the limitations of this approach. The diversity of paths taken by reforms in the former "socialist" countries of Eastern Europe and Asia gave rise to the hypothesis of models of socialism: both a deformed state-bureaucratic (totalitarian, feudal—there were many variants of the name) socialism, and a socialism that would develop in some more adequate forms (most theorists who advanced the hypothesis of models of socialism leaned toward "market socialism" as the most effective variant of socialist development). These ideas, once again, were not a discovery of domestic socioeconomic theory (much less a discovery of domestic commentators).

Theories of "market socialism" had appeared long before this within the Yugoslav experiment, during the "Prague Spring" of 1968 (Ota Šik, for example), were widespread in Hungary, and were widely current in the West among economists and Sovietologists of a more or less left-leaning orientation—say, the left-Keynesian or left-institutionalist direction (Oskar Lange, Joan Robinson, Alec Nove, Steven Cohen). This hypothesis (models of socialism) explained reasonably well the multivariance, the diversity of reforms in Eastern Europe or in the Soviet Union (which had not yet been dismantled), in China or North Korea, in Cuba or Southeast Asia. Let us also recall that at present a huge part of humanity—more than 1 billion inhabitants of the Earth—lives under conditions of "socialism" with Chinese, Vietnamese, or Cuban specifics. Finally, the abandonment of "socialist construction" in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the countries of Eastern Europe, the global collapse of the Soviet Union and the idea of socialism that was upheld until the very end by Gorbachev (though not by his entire team)—these "authors" and "foremen" of perestroika—led to the widespread adoption of the view of socialism as a dead-end branch of history. The socialist idea seemed, it appears, finally buried under the ruins of the USSR and the "socialist camp" at the center of the Eurasian continent.

It was replaced by the idea of the "end of history": the triumph of the neoliberal order, the market, private property, and the political and ethical systems adequate to it, based on the principle of economic, egoistic man. All "socialist experiments" were explained as merely a "zigzag of history," as a "dead-end branch" which, if it arose at all, did so as a result of a conspiracy maliciously perpetrated by the Bolsheviks headed by the monstrous demon of modernity—Vladimir Ulyanov. This latter idea, again, has its own long history. Most adherents of the right-liberal market model, starting from 1917, criticized socialism as a fruitless utopia that had no right to exist, and if it did arise, did so exclusively as an accident, a "zigzag of history." The fact that a third of humanity developed along this path, more or less successfully, with tragic losses but also with certain achievements, over the course of long decades—is no argument for them: after all, socialism perished in the end! Let there remain, for now, a billion Chinese: they too are mistaken and will soon abandon this path (incidentally, on this last point we would not argue too strongly: we are by no means inclined to consider the Chinese variant of "socialism" as confirmation of the strength and validity of the future development of the socialist model). Having announced the main hypotheses explaining the essence of our past, let us now examine each of them more carefully.

14.2. The Soviet system from the standpoint of the political economy of socialism: theory and reality

The so-called "political economy of socialism," over the several decades of its existence, built a fairly coherent, though in many of its parts incomplete, edifice of categories and laws intended to reflect scientifically (i.e., truthfully) the economic system of socialism. In order to move from the recently fashionable disparagement of this science (in which its former high priests were quite diligently engaged) to a critical analysis separating the wheat from the chaff of the political economy of socialism, it is necessary to understand the specifics of its methodology. From a methodological point of view, two tendencies stand out fairly clearly in the past: the apologetic (vulgar) and the utopian (scholastic). The first uncritically described the external—ideologically attributive—side of the practice of a society in which power and ideology were concentrated predominantly in the hands of the bureaucracy. The second, without fully abstracting from real economic life, attempted to combine it with an ideal picture of the future socialist society, deriving its regularities from the generalizations made by Marx on the basis of his analysis of the bourgeois system, and passing off this ideal picture as the realities of the economic life of the WSS. In the works of specific scholarly schools and individual scholars, these two lines intertwined in curious ways, reproducing each other.

At the same time, however, the first or second line predominated in the works of different schools. Thus, the university school of political economy (we mean the school of Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov), to the analysis of whose results this section will primarily be devoted, was based mainly on a utopian-romantic methodology and thus constructed, perhaps, the most "advanced" ideal picture of the socialist economy, while remaining apologetic on one, but fundamentally important, point: its representatives were unable to honestly say that their "picture" resembled the realities of the WSS to about the same degree that the Christian idea resembles the dungeons of the Inquisition. What, then, did the economic system of socialism (which the political economy of the 1950s–1980s considered our economic system to be) look like to the scholars of Moscow University some twenty years ago? (see Table 14.1).

Table 14.1. Comparison of theoretical views on the economic system of the USSR and the actual realization of the theoretical premises¹

¹ The main propositions given in the table were first presented in the work: Kolganov A. I., Buzgalin A. V. Economic Comparative Studies: A Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems: Textbook. Moscow: Infra-M, 2005. Pp. 188-189.

Its generalized characteristic was public ownership of the means of production, which was modeled as the joint and equal appropriation and disposal of common wealth by all members of society (the so-called "free association"). Its forms were nationwide (state) and cooperative property. The necessity of the dominance of public property was justified by references to the processes of socialization occurring in modern society.

Public property—a form of property providing every member of society equal opportunities for appropriation (productive and personal) of social wealth.

Free association—a socioeconomic form of connection among people, based on their voluntary union for the realization of common goals in the process of free activity.

The category of socialization, which played one of the key roles in Marxist theory in general, turned out to be even more significant for the theory of socialism.

Socialization of production—growth in the mutual dependence and interconnection of economic units of industrial production under conditions of an increasingly complex division of labor.

Specialization, concentration, and combination of production, the development of flexible production systems, and the growing significance and role of the cooperation and integration of individual enterprises into complex production complexes were singled out as the most important forms of manifestation of socialization. On the basis of this material tendency, the conclusion was drawn that social production increasingly needed interconnected, unified management and coordinated reproduction, which public ownership was supposed, in theory, to ensure. On the other hand, theorists of socialism emphasized the process of socialization—the growing role of interests common to all members of society (nationwide interests). In the most "advanced" works, these interests were tied to the development of post-industrial

spheres—culture, the maintenance of ecological balance, and the like—an interest in the development of which is inherent in every member of society. Accordingly, the attainment of full well-being and the free, all-round development of all members of society was regarded as the most important of the nationwide interests. Free association of citizens was considered the subject of ownership, represented by a state that withers away as self-government develops. How was this public property supposed to be economically realized, to "work"? Methodologically, the answer was simple: its economic content (its "filling") is the system of production relations of socialism. Which ones exactly? As the initial relation of the system, representatives of the university school of the political economy of socialism considered the so-called "planned regularity" (the planned organization of social production). Theoretically, this relation was supposed to ensure the conscious regulation and planning of social production. Planned regularity was viewed as an economic relation more developed than the market, "superseding" (i.e., negating and developing) commodity mechanisms of self-regulation.

As mechanisms for putting the planned organization into practice, it was generally proposed to ensure a dialectical combination of centralized management and the independence of enterprises (in the area of concluding contracts with suppliers and consumers, and other steps detailing the plan, in which only the most important final results were defined). The methods of management were supposed to be both direct (specific targeted assignments-orders to enterprises from the state) and indirect (tax, credit, price, and similar forms of regulation). The basic relation of socialism was supposed, in theory, to be the direct social union of associated producers with socialized means of production. Behind this convoluted phrase lay the following meaning: all members of society have equal rights to the appropriation of nationwide means of production and product. The first is achieved on the basis of universal employment (absence of unemployment) and the possibility of free choice of place of work under conditions of a relative shortage of labor. The second—on the basis of the distribution of the necessary product "according to labor," and of the surplus product partly for consumption (equally or according to need: equally accessible and free housing, education, health care, social security, and so on), and partly for accumulation in the interests of the future growth of well-being and free time. Accordingly, the basic law (and the highest goal) of such an economic system was supposed to be nothing other than the growth of well-being and the free, all-round development of all members of society.

The reproduction of this well-being was in turn subject to the so-called "law of socialist accumulation," according to which the growth of quality of life leads to an increase in the quality of the labor force, growth of labor productivity and material wealth, and consequently to a new rise in the quality of life, provided that the economy works for the person from whom labor and the means of production are not alienated. Incentives to labor and innovation in this society were supposed to be created by distribution according to labor, the essence of which was reward for individual and collective labor results and innovations. Finally, under socialism it was recognized as necessary to also use commodity-money relations, which were meant, first, to supplement planned regularity, ensuring greater flexibility of the economy by increasing the independence of enterprises operating within the framework of the plan but on the basis of self-financing and independence ("cost accounting" [khozraschet]); and second, to create additional incentives for entrepreneurial activity at the enterprise level.

Such, in general terms, was the scheme of the "socialist" system of production relations as depicted by the university school of political economy, to whose students the authors count themselves. Incidentally, virtually all schools of the political economy of socialism recognized the law of planned regularity, the subordination of the economy to the growth of well-being, distribution according to labor, the necessity of using commodity-money relations, and, of course, public property as a generalized expression of the essence of the "socialist" economy. Undoubtedly, the scheme outlined above was extremely far from the reality of "real socialism." Let us examine this fundamentally important question in more detail. Was public property a reality for the WSS? As far as the real equality of citizens with respect to the means of production is concerned—certainly not. The main part of the "bundle" of property rights (above all in the area of disposing of public wealth) was concentrated in the hands of the bureaucracy (the nomenklatura), with a greater or lesser degree (in different countries and regions and at different periods) of dispersion of these rights and responsibilities among local, departmental, or grassroots (enterprise directors, etc.) bureaucracy. As the former centralized system decayed, property that was bureaucratic in content and state in form increasingly became "ownerless," giving rise on a mass scale to the phenomenon of mismanagement.

At the same time, the shoots of public property were present in reality not only in forms of bureaucratic disposal and appropriation of public wealth deformed to the point of their opposite, but also in more adequate forms. Why, for example, did the word "ours" in practice mean more than "mine" for most inhabitants of the USSR in the 1960s? Why did young people go to plow the virgin lands, to build new cities in Siberia, strive for space, and feel embarrassed to talk about private business? Apparently because there were elements of nationwide appropriation of benefits not only in ideology but also in the economy, elements that gave the citizens of the USSR guarantees of employment and education, and the assurance that in a year their overall standard of living would increase by 3-5%, and in five years by 15-20%, and so on. In other words, in real life there existed, albeit deformed and limited, nonetheless real, practice-confirmed forms of the economic realization of public property. At the same time, we must constantly bear in mind that these shoots were subordinated to the prevailing bureaucratic alienation of the working person from property. Ultimately, it was precisely this alienation, which suppressed the motivation of ownership and entrepreneurship, that led to the fading of economic growth, general inefficiency, and the crisis of the former system. This same contradiction was fully characteristic of the other relations that economically realized public property.

Thus, in actual life, planned regularity manifested itself not so much in forms of an optimal combination of centralism and independence, of direct and indirect methods of management (as the theory declared), but rather in the form of a curious combination of two contradictorily interrelated principles. First, bureaucratic administration "from above" (not always economically justified, often voluntaristic "commands" prescribing, in aggregated form, certain assignments for the output of specific product lines and gross value indicators of production). Second, the so-called "planning deal"—informal bargaining between ministries and enterprise administrations over the stringency of planned targets, the prices of output, and the volume of allocated resources. The real regulating role of plans was much lower than official theorists and ideologists supposed, although they did of course play a significant administrative-directive and command-mobilizing role. The "basic production relation of socialism" was likewise present in real life only in elements and in mutant form. Guarantees of employment did not in reality extend to all members of society and had as their reverse side "unemployment while employed" (the artificial maintenance of employment with incomplete use of working time) and a shortage of unskilled labor. "Equality" with respect to social consumption funds, equal accessibility of social guarantees (housing, medicine, pensions, etc.)

were quite relative, concealing elements—though considerably less pronounced than under capitalism—of the exploitation of workers who were, in essence, not so much "associated masters and workers" as hired employees of the state. And the upper stratum of state officials (the "nomenklatura") had the opportunity to appropriate part of the surplus product in the form of service benefits and privileges (which, however, were on a ridiculously incomparable scale with the rampant parasitic consumption of not only today's oligarchs but even of mid-level management). No less contradictory was the picture with respect to the economy's orientation toward the person. Proclaimed as the "basic law," in practice it turned into the so-called "residual principle of distribution" for socio-cultural sectors and the domination of goals of economic development adequate to the bureaucracy: militarism and the extensive expansion of production for the sake of production. A logical continuation of these mutations was found in the relations of distribution. For workers, a system of distribution very close to the traditionally capitalist one was used (piece-rate bonus pay),

with real wage differentiation of 1:6 (in rare cases, 1:10), while for employees a bureaucratic model of distribution "according to position" was used. Both mechanisms were deformed by a contradictory combination of tendencies toward equalization and the universal spread of bureaucratic privileges and the model of closed distribution outlets. Finally, the sum of these mutations was a specific mechanism for the reproduction of this economy. Instead of the constantly proclaimed and consciously maintained proportionality, a model of the "economy of shortage" prevailed, presupposing rigid resource constraints, "investment hunger," soft financial constraints, and demand constraints, and the like. As a result, an extensive type of reproduction dominated the economy, giving rise to low product quality and weak receptivity of the economy to scientific and technological progress. As for commodity-money relations, they actually existed in the economy of the WSS in three forms: as a subordinated mechanism of "cost accounting" [khozraschet] deformed by mutant planning (more real in Poland and Hungary, more formal in the USSR and the GDR),

as a system of trade in consumer goods at stable state prices, and as an underground market (a "shadow economy") that progressed as the mutant "socialism" self-destructed. In terms of content, the socioeconomic system of "socialism" that took shape in our countries (let us for now set aside the categorical definition of this system) can be described as a set of contradictory features, combining socioeconomic elements adequate to the objective tendency toward the formation of a post-capitalist society, with elements deviating from this tendency. The latter do not belong to non-socialist modes of production but were generated by the very attempt to eliminate these modes of production in the absence of sufficient socioeconomic preconditions for doing so (see Table 14.2).

Table 14.2. The system of socioeconomic relations of "real socialism"

Thus, the contradiction between the real shoots of socialism and their mutations was one of the key contradictions in the economy of our recent past. The political economy of "socialism" (as well as all "official" science and ideology) of course ignored this contradiction, and, "failing to notice" the glaring contrasts between theory and life, continued to construct abstract schemes based on the foresight of K. Marx and the idealization of the manifestations of the really existing shoots of socialism. Of course, not all scholars of that era were blind. In the 1960s-70s two oppositional tendencies appeared: the so-called "marketeers" and (somewhat later) the "romantics." The former tried to combine elements of the former socialist concept with the development of a market economy (in practice, this model, in a somewhat caricatured form—owing to the persistence of the authoritarian socio-political system—was realized in Yugoslavia and partly in Hungary). The latter cautiously hinted, tried to show, that the reality of "real socialism" had little in common either with real worldwide processes of socialization or with world socialist theory. However, an unenviable fate awaited both. Only with the beginning of "perestroika," when life itself cried out that "we cannot go on living like this," that the system was not merely decaying but stood on the brink of complete self-disintegration, did new approaches to understanding the essence of "real socialism" begin to appear in our homeland.

14.3. Deformed socialism?

The most widespread of these approaches at the beginning of "perestroika" was the hypothesis of "deformations of socialism." According to this hypothesis, we lived under socialism, but a socialism that had been deformed. The depth of this deformation is assessed differently. Some believe that only certain aspects and features of socialist production relations and the economic mechanism were deformed. The cause—the development of elements of bureaucratism (this approach is closest to the official point of view of the early years of perestroika). Others—that the entire system was deformed (a view characteristic of socialist scholars of the late 1980s). Still others—that socialism was deformed to the point of degeneration (the same socialist scholars, but already in the 1990s). Before beginning our explanation, let us consider some definitions of such concepts as transformed form, deformation, degeneration, and so on.

Let us arrange the characterization of these categories according to the degree of deepening of "revolutionary character" with respect to a critical assessment of socialism. First step: the economy has socialist content, but transformed forms of socialist production relations dominate. This variant requires an understanding that a "transformed form" is a form that "renounces" (in K. Marx's figurative expression) its content; a form that creates the objective appearance that behind it is hidden something opposite, something other than the actual content. Why do we say that transformed forms are in some way connected with our crisis? Say, for the capitalist system of production relations, the presence of transformed forms is a natural situation. But for socialism? The authors of the hypothesis under consideration (in this chapter and further on, you will be offered quite a few hypotheses) believe that communist society and socialism (as its first phase) are in principle not characterized by relations of transformation, of the "turning inside out" of forms—that is, relations in which the objective world appears to a person as alien, distorted. This "transformation," the appearance of transformed forms (for example, bureaucratism as a distorted form of social administration, state alienation of workers from the means of production as a distorted form of nationwide property, and so on) serves as the starting point of the deformation of socialist production relations.

The next, more decisive step is the recognition of immanent deformations of the socialist economy. In this case the content of the production relation itself begins to "break down" (and from within!); antagonistic elements appear within it that negate and destroy its content. Close to deformation, apparently, is the phenomenon of state exploitation of hired workers, when a special privileged social stratum takes the place of the working people as masters. This is no longer simply a "transformation" of form; it is already an undermining, a destruction of the substantive, essential features of the socialist economy—of nationwide property. The deformation of the production relations of socialism—the formation, owing to insufficient socioeconomic preconditions, of such forms of movement of socialist production relations as are inadequate to their content. Owing to reverse influence, such forms also distort

the content of these relations themselves. Finally, degeneration is a situation in which deformations begin to dominate over that which is deformed, when they become the dominant phenomenon in the economy (roughly speaking, when there are many deformations and little of what they deform; but the matter is, of course, not one of quantity but of content, of the essence of the matter).

The degeneration of the production relations of socialism—a change, resulting from insufficient socioeconomic preconditions, in the content of socialist production relations, up to and including their transformation into their own opposite. Thus, for supporters of the idea of "deformed socialism," the following picture emerges: we had socialism, but a socialism in which economic relations, first, took transformed forms, second, were deformed, and third (in the opinion of the most radical theorists), began to degenerate into something completely opposite to socialism. If we speak of the Stalinist system, the discussion, as a rule, concerns the degeneration of socialism into a totalitarian socioeconomic (and not merely political) system. There are, in fact, plenty of grounds for this harsh assessment. Among them are the suppression of a person's economic freedom and the broad development of non-economic compulsion to work, the state exploitation of the worker alienated from property, and the universal nationalization and ideologization of economic life.

Finally, if one recalls how many people were destroyed over the decades of "victorious socialism," the idea of a degenerated socialism will, it seems, begin to acquire clear features. But if, on the contrary, one recalls what a level of social protection, collectivism, and enthusiasm was characteristic of the USSR of the 1930s-50s, how boys and girls ran off to Spain to help fight fascism and to win universal happiness and freedom, then this assessment will seem, at least in part, doubtful: the relations of the past are far from as simple as they might seem. The hypothesis of transformed forms, deformations, and degeneration is the first of those that allows us to somehow really explain what we were dealing with in our past. In a certain sense, supporters of this hypothesis during the years of "perestroika" comprised perhaps the majority of political economists who came out of the Tsagolov school (the university school), the Kuzminov school (this is the school of the Academy of Social Sciences), and the Yaroslavl and Odessa schools of political economy. Part of the new generation of representatives of these schools is now trying to develop the thesis that our past is a socialism that was deformed from birth, had a mutant appearance (more on this below), reached the stage of degeneration, and plunged society into global crisis. As a rule, two causes are cited for this.

The first—an insufficiently high level of development of the objective preconditions, above all of the productive forces (including man as the main productive force) and the culture of society. The second cause is fairly closely linked to and conditioned by the first: the anti-socialist policy and ideology of the ruling circles, which gradually became detached from the interests of the people. Let us note in passing: socialism differs from past societies above all in that it is characterized by a qualitative increase in the influence of politics on the economy, by a growth of the so-called "reverse influence." In a certain sense, the rather sharp assertion is justified: without consistent democracy in politics, the development of the production relations of socialism is altogether impossible, or if possible, only in deformed form. Such is the hypothesis of deformations of socialism. What are its heuristic merits and shortcomings?

Let us begin with the merits. It explains the crisis in which the WSS found itself. Deformations are, above all, genuinely hard-to-recognize production relations of socialism: bureaucratism instead of planned regularity and public property; shortage instead of universal well-being; universal passivity and alcoholism instead of all-round development of the personality; leveling and unearned incomes instead of distribution according to labor—all this and much more is nothing other than easily recognizable features of the recent past. It is also "good" (from the authors' point of view) in that it allows one, in certain respects, to preserve the idea of society's historical development along the path of socialization, asserting that the scientific foresight of Marxism was justified insofar as we did have some fragments of socialism, albeit mutilated beyond recognition. A movement began in the direction predicted by Marxism, but at the same time, owing to the aforementioned conditions, the emerging socialism was deformed from the moment of its birth, and its shoots turned out to be twisted into a spiral and tied into a sailor's knot; the conditions from which socialism should and could have been born were broken. What is "bad" about this idea? First, it suffers from idealism, proceeding from the assumption that there exists some wonderful model of socialism, worked out by the classics of Marxism and then by their critically-minded followers, which people began to put into practice but, owing to a number of conditions, were never able to "finish," even though no one anywhere has ever seen this model in realized form.

Something like an idealistic "imposition" on life of what was supposed to have been, but did not turn out, occurs. But why, exactly, was it supposed to?! Where did you get that idea?! A reasonable objection, is it not? Second, it is not entirely clear how the hypothesis of deformations of socialism can be used to explain the presence of significantly differing economic structures in the former "socialist" countries. (We have in mind the Yugoslav, Hungarian, and Chinese models, and, as the extreme variant of an administrative system, North Korea.) Finally, third, this hypothesis practically fails to explain why, starting in 1989 in Eastern Europe, and in 1991 in the former USSR, an abandonment of the socialist perspective of social development began.

14.4. A zigzag of history?

The theory according to which seventy years of development of the World System of Socialism (WSS) amount to no more than a zigzag, a historical error — this, the most radical version of the explanation of our past — has today become almost universally accepted, although lately the ruling circles have begun to soften their assessments, having recognized the need to rely on some kind of historical continuity with the past. Nevertheless, the October Revolution of 1917 is still frequently declared not a popular uprising but a coup maliciously staged by the Bolsheviks; a violent, forced disruption of the bourgeois evolutionary development that had been heralded by the February Revolution. As a result, the 70 years of "socialist" development are classified as a dead-end social experiment. This position is held not only by contemporary domestic right-liberal theorists. Almost immediately after October 1917 it was formulated by critics of Soviet power, and later developed by right-wing Sovietologists. The latter, paradoxically, converged with domestic apologists of "real socialism" in classifying our past as socialism. But being themselves apologists (only of a different, bourgeois system), they produced an equally non-dialectical and dogmatic picture of socialism, only with a minus sign. If for the adherents of the "collective wisdom of the CPSU" socialism was a symbol of "good" (planned order, prosperity, social justice), then for the adherents of liberalism socialism became a symbol of "evil" (command economy, shortages, militarism, suppression of freedom, and so on). And yet it must be admitted that the hypothesis of socialism as an "empire of evil," a dead end, has a number of merits. It is "good," above all, for its radicalism and a certain empirical plausibility. The 70 years of so-called "socialism" showed that the "socialism" we built and constructed was by no means capable of solving the tasks it took on and proclaimed. Read the second program of the RCP(b), adopted at its 8th Congress; read the third program of the CPSU, which promised to create the material and technical base of communism by 1980.

Compare the standard of living typical of the USSR and of the developed capitalist countries, look at the level of scientific and technological progress (setting aside space exploration and the military-industrial complex) — life tells us: theirs was better. Therefore, our history was a mistake. A mistake? Yes, such a radically negative view of our history is very easily, but superficially, paired with the thesis that socialism was a failed experiment, a "zigzag" of history. Are there any "downsides" to the idea that the socialist revolution was a "zigzag" of history? Let us try to look at this theory from an objectivist standpoint. From this standpoint it has two shortcomings (we have already shown you its "pluses"). The first shortcoming is ahistoricism, which reproduces the theoretical errors (rather than the merits) of, one might say, none other than Adam Smith, for whom the bourgeois economic system was the first and last — more precisely, the only — stage of social development.

There was, is, and will be a market with capital, shares, in which the capitalist receives a "fair" reward as the owner of capital, the worker for his labor, the landowner for owning land, and, in general, everyone for himself, one God for all (or, in the American version, "everyone for himself, and the devil take the rest"). Such an understanding of bourgeois reality as the crowning point of history, as the "golden age" that was, is, and always will be — this is the chief vice of bourgeois (forgive the old-fashioned terminology) methodology, one that persists in this hypothesis.

Indeed, its authors are in effect saying that socialism was no more than a violation of the traditional norms of human civilization. The essence of a historical understanding of reality, however, is that this reality is viewed as a system of relations that are born, develop, and pass away (die), where one thing departs and another appears; one economic order gives way to another, and every existing order deserves its own demise. This methodology was first substantiated not by Marxism at all; it was developed by dialecticians of all times and peoples, beginning with Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus and including, probably, the strongest representative of classical dialectics — Hegel. From this standpoint, the idea of socialism as a "zigzag" of history turns out to be poorly grounded. One might say that the particular variant of "socialism" characteristic of our case was a zigzag. But the notion that capitalism must be succeeded by a new society with different institutions and different principles of economic and social organization — this, generally speaking, follows directly from the basics of the historical approach to the development of socioeconomic systems.

14.5. Explaining "real socialism" as a special stage of the world-historical process of transition from the "realm of necessity" to the "realm of freedom"

What would we propose to you as our own version of an explanation for the nature of Soviet society? Allow us to sketch an attempt at a critical synthesis of the versions of such an explanation named above. To do this we must try to take the best of what exists in the various versions and somehow dialectically synthesize all of it, showing at once the product of the crisis of the former system — a transformational economy — but only from one side: as a "sublated" result, and hence as the "truth" of the genesis, functioning, and self-decomposition of the former order. The objective preconditions and the first steps of the socialist transformations, connected with the undermining of relations of alienation at the end of the second millennium, turned out to be substantially altered by a profound internal crisis, and then by the collapse of the initial sprouts of socialism in the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe.

In the 1990s a new reality appeared in the world — a post-"socialist" one. It is precisely in this global context that we can and must consider the question of the nature of the system that took shape in the countries of "real socialism" in the 20th century. A necessary step toward explaining the nature of "real socialism" is the hypothesis of a general historical tendency toward a nonlinear decline of the "realm of necessity" and the genesis of the "realm of freedom" as a general meta-foundation for all the concrete changes characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries. This hypothesis rests on the following premise: the contradictions of the second millennium gave sufficient social impetus to the genesis of the "realm of freedom," but did not yet lead to the formation of an adequate material base for such a genesis. In a situation of such incomplete maturity of the preconditions for the withering-away of relations of alienation, this process cannot help but be a prolonged, nonlinear, international one. It is precisely this process that we denote by the word "socialism." The whole question, however, is how to critically develop the traditional linear understanding of socialism as merely the first stage of the communist socioeconomic formation (orthodox "Marxism-Leninism"), or as no more than a system of values that can be partially realized within the framework of "post-classical" bourgeois society through reforms (social democracy).

If we rise to a view of the birth of the new society as an international, global shift in the history of humankind, then the process of transformation of "a planned economy into a market economy" or of "socialism into capitalism" itself acquires new characteristics. With such an approach, socialism can be characterized not so much as the first stage of a new social formation, but rather as the process of transition from the epoch of alienation to the "realm of freedom" (communism). This transition will include revolutions and counterrevolutions; the first sprouts of the new society in individual countries and regions, their withering and reappearance; social reforms and counter-reforms in capitalist countries; waves of advance and retreat of various social and specifically socialist movements. The nonlinearity, the contradictoriness, and the international character of these shifts constitute the specific nature of socialism as the process by which a new society is born on a world scale. Initially, the sprouts of the new society will necessarily bear a deformed character from birth, owing to the dominance of a hostile environment — the alienation characteristic of classical capitalism (and taking on even more pronounced forms under conditions of "post-classical" capitalism) — and the absence of the material preconditions necessary for them. Hence, periods of crisis, and even the death, of these first sprouts become equally inevitable. Evidence of the all-round crisis of "real socialism" was, as already noted, not only the disintegration of this order in the countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR (at the root of which lay the fundamental inability of this system — but not of socialism in the scientific sense of the word — to ensure higher labor productivity than capitalism, and greater scope for the free, all-round development of the individual), but also the strengthening of capital, the advance of "market fundamentalism," and so on.

The cause of all this lies, above all (though not exclusively — let us not forget the global hegemony of capital), in the very nature of "socialism" itself. Attention should be drawn to the fact that "real socialism" combined not only these adequate and inadequate features of movement toward a post-capitalist society, but also the presence of more or less substantial elements of properly non-socialist modes of production. A combination of elements of the "new" and the "old" modes of production is inevitable in any transformational socioeconomic order. In this case, however, we are more interested in the specific combination of adequate and inadequate elements within the formation of relations belonging to the "new" mode of production. Let us recall the principal contradictions of this order examined in the preceding sections of this chapter. As regards relations of coordination (the allocation of resources, the form of connection between production and consumption, the maintenance of proportionality), the inadequate socioeconomic form (the "mutation") here was the dominance of bureaucratic centralized planning (which made it possible to effectively redistribute resources and ensure high growth rates in heavy industry and the military-industrial complex, but which was inadequate for achieving competitiveness on the world market for consumer goods and for responding to the "challenges" of the second and third waves of the technological revolution).

This mechanism was inherently constrained by the phenomena of the "planned deal," "pseudo-administrative prices," and was eaten away by departmentalism, parochialism, and corruption, functioning under conditions of a more or less formal market (recall that under conditions of "market socialism" — for example, in Hungary in the 1970s-80s — most prices were not centrally set, and enterprise autonomy was quite high). At the same time, at various periods in various countries of the WSS, sprouts developed of grassroots accounting and control, self-management, counter-planning, direct production cooperation among enterprises, and other sprouts of "pure" forms of post-market coordination. In the sphere of property relations, the state and cooperative forms predominated (though there were exceptions — the dominance of private property in agriculture in Poland, for example).

Their content consisted, on the one hand, of corporate-bureaucratic alienation of the worker from the means of production and state-capitalist exploitation, and, on the other, of social guarantees (of employment, housing, an average level of consumption, medical care and education) and stability. In the sphere of social orientation, motivation of labor, and distributive relations, the situation was likewise contradictory: on one pole — leveling, bureaucratic privileges, suppression of innovative potential; on the other — sprouts of associated social creativity (genuine enthusiasm, collectivism). The relations of reproduction of this system can be described as an "economy of shortage," emphasizing not only the significance of resource constraints (as opposed to demand constraints), but also the presence of chronic, deep-seated disproportions, weak motivation for scientific and technological progress, and the existence of "unemployment on the job."

At the same time, these relations of reproduction made it possible to ensure radical structural shifts while preserving the stability of the system as a whole ("confidence in tomorrow"), and, in certain periods (the 1920s, the 1950s-60s), the highest achievements in science, advanced technology, art, and education. The essence of the "real socialism" order can be defined as a historically dead-end variant of a social system that stood at the beginning of a worldwide transitional period from capitalism to communism. It is a transitional social order that goes beyond the bounds of capitalism, but does not constitute a stable model serving as a foundation for the subsequent movement toward communism. Apparently, these theses require some clarification. Let us note that a researcher writing about socialism at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries finds it difficult to answer a strong objection of critics, the essence of which lies in stating a seemingly obvious position: humanity knows no other socialism than the one that existed in the countries of the world socialist system. Consequently, we have no grounds for regarding this order as some kind of "deformation" (or "mutation"). This apparent obviousness, however, is nothing other than one of the classic converted forms in which alone the deep-seated regularities of the world of alienation can manifest themselves. The mind (or, more precisely, the "common sense" of the ordinary person and his scholarly fellows) wants to and can see only these forms, but not the essence. Meanwhile, our study cannot dispense with identifying essential tendencies. We have tried above to show these essential tendencies of the birth of the "realm of freedom," as well as the sprouts of socialism as an international process of transition to a new society (the birth of post-industrial technologies and creative labor, of post-market regulation, of the liberation of labor).

The fact that these essential features of the emerging new society (let us repeat: they are identified on the basis of an analysis of the objective processes of the decline of the "realm of necessity" and of late capitalism) did not acquire adequate forms and were unable to develop the potential for progress inherent in them (of the productive forces, of the individual as a person) is what allows us to classify the past of our countries as a particular type of transitional society, one that did not develop into a socialist system. We may therefore conclude that in the countries of the "world socialist system" it was not some "ideal" of socialism that was distorted. Rather, the point is that the real general-historical tendency of transition to the "realm of freedom," and the real sprouts of socialism adequate to it (elements of post-market coordination, in particular successful planning of the economy, the associated appropriation of social wealth, social equality, a new motivation for labor), developed in a form deformed from birth.

At the moment of its genesis, beginning with the revolution of 1917, the emerging new society possessed the potential to evolve along different trajectories (including ones significantly deviating from the path of transformation of the "realm of necessity" into the "realm of freedom"). Peculiarities of the "environment" — the level of development of the productive forces, the social base of the socialist transformations, the culture of Russia's population, and the international situation — led to the gradual predominance and entrenchment, among these trajectories, of the processes of bureaucratization, the development of state capitalism, and other features that gave rise to a stable system — at a certain stage a rather successful one, but extremely rigid and ill-suited to further radical change. Thus arose an organism which, precisely because of its features inadequate to socialism, was, on the one hand, well adapted to the "environment" of Russia and the world capitalist system of the first half and middle of the 20th century, but, on the other hand (for the very same reasons), far removed from the trajectory of movement toward communism dictated by the regularities and contradictions of the nonlinear process of the withering-away, the passing, of the world of alienation. As a result, an order took shape in the USSR that could live, grow, and even fight under the conditions of an agrarian-industrial Russia surrounded by colonial empires and fascist powers (the victory in the Great Patriotic War is the mightiest example of this), and so on.

But for these same reasons, this "species" was not adequate to the new conditions of the genesis of the scientific-technological revolution, of post-industrial, information society; it could not give an adequate response to the challenge of the intensifying global problems, or to the new processes of growth in prosperity, socialization, and democratization unfolding in the developed capitalist countries in the second half of the 20th century.1 Because of its bureaucratic rigidity, the order that took shape within the "socialist system" was left with an extremely narrow range of possibilities for adapting to further changes in the "external environment." This order was characterized by powerful (though deep-seated, latent) contradictions: on one pole — the cancerous tumor of bureaucratism; on the other — properly socialist elements (sprouts of the "living creativity of the people"), containing the potential to evolve in a direction capable of giving an adequate response to the challenge of the new problems of the late 20th century.

But gradually the latter came to be smothered by the cancer of bureaucracy. As a result, it was precisely under these conditions — more favorable for the genesis of the sprouts of the "realm of freedom" (let us recall, this was the period of the unfolding of the scientific-technological revolution, of intensifying global problems, and so on, posing an

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Часть 1 Chapter 14. The Socioeconomic System of the USSR: Nature, Causes of Emergence, and Crisis
Часть 2 Thesaurus for Chapter 14 - Chapter 14. The Socioeconomic System