Perestroika and the future of socialism - part 2

Monthly Review, April, 1990

How can the latest technology contribute to solving these problems? How can computers that make possible the exploration of space be adapted to the equally complex and challenging problems of national economic planning? How can modern industry and technology be reconciled with and harnessed to the task of saving the environment? How convert the monstrous engine of death and destruction that is the legacy of the cold war to satisfying the urgent needs of liberated humanity? These are just examples of the infinite number of problems science and technology can help to solve.

But there is another way of taking part in the high-tech culture, and that is to become dazzled by the fads and fashions of upper class Western consumerism; to see the accumulation of computers, automobiles, and gadgets of all kinds as the purpose of life; to elevate the quantity and style of personal possessions over the quality of life for society as the criterion for development and progress. These are the hallmarks of late capitalism and the frightening symptoms of its degradation and decay. There are unfortunately all too many indications that the Soviet reformers share the same values and aspirations and hope to see their own society join the club.

So far in our discussion of perestroika we have been dealing mostly with theories and blueprints. Apart from the very positive moves toward openness and democracy discussed above, very little changed. Five years into perestroika, the structure of the economy and its working principles remain as they were. All the talk about marketization and what is supposed to go with it is just that--talk. Attempts to introduce private enterprise under the guise of cooperatives have yielded meager results and by all accounts have aroused more negative than positive feelings among the public. Meanwhile, the poor performance of the economy is not very different from the conditions that gave rise to perestroika in the first place.

There is nothing surprising in all this. Up to now the reformers have had little to offer except their marketization panacea. Their message seems to be: take from capitalism what has worked and hope that somehow the bad side effects will be absent or manageable. The trouble is that this is utopian thinking in the worst sense of the term. The conditions for a functioning market economy in the capitalist world quite literally took centuries to evolve, and in some parts of it are still far from fully developed. Not only were suitable property relations necessary but so was a sophisticated legal system to regulate and enforce them. Perhaps even more important was the shaping of a "human nature" fit to operate such a system. The possessive individuals of classical political economy did not just appear one fine day to run the new economy. It took generations to create them. A similar process was under way in Tsarist Russia, but it was cut short by the Revolution. Neither the institutional framework nor the human material needed for a functioning market system exists in today's Soviet Union, and bringing them into being can only be the work of decades, not months or even years. This is what we mean when we say that the idea of comprehensive marketization as a way of combatting the present Soviet economic crisis is hopelessly utopian.