Technological advance

In the 1930s, when the economy was still quite primitive and the tasks related to the building up of heavy industry were relatively simple, the method of autocratic command from above could still get results, although at a terrible cost. Later, however, one million different commodities were produced in the USSR, with the sensitive interrelationships of a complex modern economy, the bludgeon of bureaucratic control, without the participation of the masses, led to absolute chaos.

The laws of motion of capitalism are fundamentally different to those of a nationalised planned economy. Under capitalism, at least in the past, the mechanism of the market served as a rough and ready check on inefficiency (although the big monopolies nowadays are able to manipulate the market, in their own interests, distorting the entire process). But in a society where the entire economy is in the hands of the state, the automatic mechanism of the market no longer applies. The only check possible is the conscious checking and control of the masses at every phase of the drawing up and implementation of the plan.

Trotsky explained that a nationalised planned economy requires democracy as the human body requires oxygen. Without workers’ control and management, without free trade unions and the right to discuss and criticise without fear, there had inevitably been rampant corruption, waste and nepotism. Theft and swindling flourished on an unimaginable scale. The Soviet Union was a subcontinent, with huge numbers of enterprises. Under Stalin, all economic decisions, from the most important to the most insignificant, were taken by 15 ministries in Moscow. Even if these ministries were staffed by geniuses, all kinds of bungling and mismanagement would be inevitable without the necessary check of workers’ democracy. While the economy was more or less primitive, the overheads caused by the bureaucracy, though still staggeringly wasteful, could be tolerated because the economy was going forward at a very fast rate.

A modern, sophisticated economy, such as Russia had become by this time, is a delicate mechanism. The precise relations between heavy industry, light industry, agriculture, science and technique, cannot be established by arbitrary administrative fiat. In the absence of competition, the only way to avoid colossal bungling and corruption is through the conscious control of society, by means of the democratic administration of the working class. The crisis in the USSR and Eastern Europe was not the same as the crisis of capitalism in the West, which is fundamentally a crisis of overproduction manifesting itself as a crisis of overcapacity, inherent in the capitalist system of production. The crisis of Stalinism was a crisis of the bureaucratic system of control and planning which was undermining the advantages of the planned economy. In the West, the productive forces have come up against the barrier of private ownership and the nation state, while in Russia and Eastern Europe, the productive forces were constricted by the straitjacket of the nation state plus bureaucratic control. This was starkly revealed in the crucial field of technology. Thus, for socialism, democracy is not an optional ‘extra’ but a fundamental precondition. The limits of bureaucratic planning had been reached. This fact manifested itself in a steady fall in the rate of growth, not only in the USSR but also in Eastern Europe.

In the 1970s, growth fell further, and by 1979 the economy of the USSR only grew by a mere 3.6 per cent. This meant that the relatively progressive role played by the bureaucracy in building up the productive forces of the Soviet Union had been exhausted. It had become an absolute fetter on the further development of the economy. The annual average increase in labour productivity was still rising in the 1960s and early 1970s. But from 1975 to 1980, this slumped to 3.4 per cent and by 1982 it was 2.5 per cent per year. In 1979, the Gross National Product grew by a mere 0.9 per cent and by 1980 by 1.5 per cent. The advances made on the basis of the nationalised economy and the plan were now being cancelled out by the bureaucratic stranglehold of Stalinism. The rate of growth – which was once the highest in the world – became hardly different to the sluggish growth rates of the capitalist West. The bureaucracy had now exhausted any progressive role it may have played in the past.

During the first Five-Year Plans, capitalism showed itself to be an absolute fetter on the productive forces, with mass unemployment and the great depression. The USSR was a beacon of hope for millions. Not only workers but the best of the intellectuals were attracted to the Soviet Union. By the 1970s this was no longer the case, at least as far as the advanced capitalist countries were concerned. The bureaucratic totalitarian system with its sclerotic economy was not attractive to the masses in Western Europe, America and Japan. How could it be, when they were developing the productive forces at a lower rate than capitalism in boom periods like the 1980s?

Nowadays it has become fashionable to deny that the Soviet Union achieved anything worthwhile in the field of technology. That is a lie. The scientists and engineers produced by the Soviet Union were as good as anything in the West, if not better. This was demonstrated, not only in the space programme and armaments, but in engineering, especially on difficult large-scale projects. More than ten years ago, the Financial Times (18/2/86) wrote that “the development of Siberia’s wasteland in an appalling climate over the past 15 years is an engineering achievement which matches the construction of the Panama Canal in scale and difficulty”. (My emphasis.) There were many such projects. An amazing number of inventions and discoveries were made by Soviet scientists and technicians, a field in which they had caught up with the USA, and actually outstripped Japan, Britain and France:

The Soviet Union and the US are neck and neck in the patenting of inventions, each registering about 80,000 a year, a long way ahead of Japan’s 50,000 registrations, and far ahead of the 10,000 of Britain and France. There are currently over 20,000 Soviet patents registered abroad, and the country earns about $100 million a year from foreign license fees. That figure is going to rise sharply as the new generation of Soviet inventions becomes available. This month, they seem to have perfected their 1,500-kilowatt electricity transmission line, the world’s most powerful. (The Guardian, 19/11/86.)

But the enormous promise of Soviet science and technology was never allowed to materialise. Just as in agriculture, they could not get the same results as the West although investment was higher, so they could not make use of the inventions and technology at their disposal. The bureaucratic system acted as a gigantic brake at all levels. By the early 1980s, the Soviet economy was a highly complex organism, with 50,000 plants producing 20 million products. The old methods of bureaucratic control were now strangling production. In a 526-page study produced in 1982, prominent Soviet academics attempted to analyse the problems of the economy, based on case studies of eight Soviet industries, including chemicals, machine tools, industrial process control and branches of the defence industry:

They focus attention on over-rigid planning and management structures and procedures, and on problems caused by the separation of science from industry, its bureaucratisation and organisational fragmentation. They speak of widespread conservatism and inertia which sees innovation as more trouble than it’s worth, the absence of competitive elements, the existence of a ‘seller’s market’ and the lack of long-term relationships between producers and customers. (Morning Star, 5/8/82, my emphasis.)

Writing in Pravda, the Academician Vadim Trapeznikov, senior vice-chairman of the State Commission for Science and Technology, observed that:

Soviet plants can often do better by going on turning out outdated products on outdated machines than by installing new machines and launching new products. Innovation – the speedy application on the shop floor of the latest research achievements – is today a key issue confronting Soviet planners and managers and is widely discussed in the Soviet press. The Soviet Union has more scientists and engineers than any other country in the world, and is in the forefront in many fields of theoretical research, with achievements with regard to its practical application to its credit in a number of fields. But the general level of Soviet technology and the rate of absorption of new advances lags behind that of the most advanced capitalist countries, and most Soviet goods cannot yet compete in export markets with the best that capitalism can offer. (Quoted in the Morning Star, 5/8/82.)

The same was true of the other fields of advanced technology, such as industrial robots. In 1980, the Comecon was only operating 3.6 per cent of the world’s stock of 14,000 industrial robots compared to 9.3 per cent in West Germany and 43 per cent in Japan. However, Comecon then envisaged the installation of no fewer than 200,000 industrial robots in the Five-Year Period up to 1990, of which more than half were to be in the Soviet Union. Other plans were made to mass produce microprocessors, micro and macro computers as well as developing new fields of electronics, robotics, atomic power engineering and other areas of new technology.

There was no objective reason why these targets should not have been met. But they were not. Despite the enormous number of scientists and technicians in Russia and Eastern Europe, they could not get the same results as in the West. Throughout this entire period, in a whole series of fields like computers, the gap between East and West continued to grow. This fact alone indicated that, whereas in the past it had played a relatively progressive role in developing the means of production, the bureaucracy had now become an absolute barrier.

To these thoughts, it is necessary to add one more. The movement towards capitalism, far from aiding the development of science and technology in Russia has had the most ruinous effects. It suffices to give just one example from the jewel in the crown of Soviet technological achievement – the space programme. Here the superiority of the USSR was not in doubt. It led the world. But not anymore. Although the remarkable Mir programme with its space stations still bears eloquent testimony to the achievements of the past, the movement towards capitalism has meant deep cuts which shamefully undermined a great Soviet success story. For lack of funds, in 1996, out of 27 planned space launches, only 11 got off the ground. In the world ranking of expenditure on space programmes, Russia is now 19^th.

Lenin explained many times that the future of the Soviet Union could not be separated from the position of world capitalism, and particularly its most advanced countries, beginning with the USA. Despite the extraordinary advances, the USSR remained relatively backward in comparison with the US economy in a whole series of areas. For instance, the US railway network, despite a much smaller area, was two and a half times as great as in Russia. The USSR lagged further behind in relation to computers and automated equipment. A book published by Medvedev in 1972 pointed out that:

Electric power and production of electricity in the USA is still more than twice that of the USSR. The United States produces within its own borders almost one and a half times as much oil and three times as much natural gas as the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union manufactured a quarter of the number of trucks produced in the United States and Japan. We produce far fewer passenger cars than countries like Italy, France, Japan and West Germany. The United States manufactures almost 20 times as many as we.

We make half as many radios as the United States and one quarter as many as Japan. As to refrigerators we are about on the level of the US in 1950. In the production of synthetic resins and plastics we remain behind almost all the European countries including Italy; the US produces six times as much as we do. In 1970 Japan manufactured five times and the US ten times as much synthetic fibre as we did. (R. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy, pp. 5-6.)

The main weakness was the inability to raise the productivity of labour sufficiently. Marx pointed out that in the last analysis the success of a given economic system can be reduced to the productivity of labour, or economy of labour time. Productivity did increase, but the gap with the most advanced capitalist economy – the USA – remained great. The difference was narrowed considerably between the two countries as a result of the successes of the Five-Year Plans. It must be remembered that before the revolution, tsarist Russia was at the level of a third world economy today, and not one of the more developed ones. In 1913, the productivity of Russian industry was estimated at 25 per cent of the Americans. In 1937-39, it had closed to 40 per cent of the United States.

Although labour productivity increased in the post-war period its rate of increase slowed down: between 1956 and 1960, the average annual rate of growth of industrial productivity was 6.5 per cent; between 1961 and 1965 it had slowed to 4.6 per cent. In 1980, one American worker in industry produced as much as 2.8 Soviet workers, that is to say, the overall productivity of labour in the USSR was about one-third of the level in the USA. Far more than the volume of production, these figures show the actual difference between the level of economic development attained, and are therefore of crucial significance. For the bureaucracy, this lagging behind the West, especially in the vital field of the productivity of labour, remained the key question. With a larger working class, and over twice the number of technicians and engineers, the USSR produced only 65 per cent of American output in the mid-1960s. Two thirds of workers were not able to work efficiently, and one-third at least of production was wasted through mismanagement, swindling, sabotage and theft.