A FEASIBLE VISION OF SOCIALISM
Heilbroner, Robert
Who does not know Marx's lovely vision of life in a "communist society" where it will be possible "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear...
...Marx's economics is almost exclusively concerned with the diagnosis of capitalism, a diagnosis that Nove accepts in large part...
...Indeed, after we have read his critique, those destinations may appear more distant and difficult of attainment than we had originally thought...
...This leads naturally to the problem of transition from actually existing economies of various sorts toward the general direction of a feasible socialism...
...Nove's sane, calm, practical, and, therefore, "disappointing" book tells us that the boundary between capitalism and socialism is not a line but a region, in which the old landscape changes only slowly into a new one...
...The chapter contains nothing that is new but a great deal that is fresh...
...Nove tells us, for instance, that the Soviet economy produces 12 million identifiably different products, disaggregating down to specific sizes of ball bearings, designs of cloth, and sizes of shoes...
...But Nove is essentially interested in the transition from democratic capitalism...
...Some cafes, a small rural bakery where there may be none, a hairdresser, a holiday home agency, a car repair shop...
...From the Soviet Union we travel east and south to Yugoslavia, Hungary, China—with a 474 few side glances at Poland and Chile...
...Here he has written a book directed mainly at the economic, sometimes technical problems of socialism, a book nonetheless sufficiently rich in anecdote and detail, clear in exposition, and warm in tone to be read with pleasure by someone who has never heard of Pareto optimality...
...Nove has very little to say about the social requirements for such a transition, much less the strategies required to mobilize the necessary political force...
...and he recognizes the limitations and tensions of the Hungarian model with its error-prone reliance on planning and its cautious acquiescence in limited private enterprise...
...ideas of socialism and his effort to sketch in the central ideas of a workable alternative...
...As Nove describes it, feasible socialism should be better functioning, more equitable and enjoyable than capitalism, but it will be, nonetheless, a socialism in which there are crime, tabloids, soap operas, corruption, nasty bosses, pockets of decay, class differences and antagonisms, and economic problems of a great 473 many kinds...
...Nove's choices are sure to dismay the advocates of rapid and radical change...
...It is obviously an eclectic system...
...His introductory chapter on the Marxian "legacy" of utopianism is therefore followed by a dissection of Soviet-style economies...
...This makes Nove's tasks at once simpler and more difficult than the very long-range visions of Rudolph Bahro, whose The Alternative is an effort to picture a socialism in which the most profound social and psychological changes have taken place, or Branko Horvat's The Political Economy of Socialism, which depicts in great detail a kind of middle-stage socialism where the apparatus of advanced capitalism has been largely dismantled and replaced by worker-directed enterprises and citizen-directed politics...
...Nove, now emeritus professor at Glasgow University, is a distinguished scholar and critic of the Soviet system, known for his ability to combine merciless criticism with a saving sense of sympathy...
...Feasible socialism is the socialism of tomorrow, long before ordinary people will have shed their acquisitive and hierarchical habits, before a supertechnology will have allowed us to make radical changes in our ways of organizing production and distribution...
...Nove makes us see something that standard textbooks often miss, namely, that markets are to be esteemed not so much for their capacity to organize production (after all, the Soviet Union also produces large amounts of goods), but to correct mistakes...
...Price controls can lead to shortages...
...Cooperative forms of economic organization are encouraged...
...Just the same, I suspect that many who do read Nove's book will be disappointed in it...
...Cloth, $29.50...
...Income dispersions persist, with efforts to reduce them to the Japanese rather 475 than the American scale—perhaps 4:1, comparing managerial to janitorial pay scales...
...The question is not whether such a transition will be "historically" possible but through what specific measures it can be realized, to whatever extent history allows...
...Who does not know Marx's lovely vision of life in a "communist society" where it will be possible "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic...
...Small entrepreneurship is welcomed and private individuals are free to conduct their own proprietary businesses...
...In such a society it is not difficult to issue orders such as "Produce 200,000 pairs of shoes...
...Winchester, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, 1983...
...I think Nove is right, in the time span with which he is concerned...
...paper, $9.95...
...This is the great wager—that the patience and understanding of ordinary people, and of the leaders of ordinary people, will resist the powerful idealized visions of the future...
...Nove examines these countries to discover what variants are possible on the centralized model...
...There is a core of nationalized industry and a conscious direction of major investment through parliamentary means...
...Nonetheless, Nove does not criticize to reject but to winnow out, and he rescues from these experimental systems, with all their onerous problems and uncertain prospects, the imperfect realities of some kind of workers' management and some mixture of central planning and private enterprises as elements that can be used in feasible socialism...
...But let us rewrite Marx's sentence as follows: "Men will freely decide to repair aero-engines in the morning, fill teeth in the early afternoon, drive a heavy lorry in the early evening, and then go cook dinners in a restaurant, without ever becoming an aeroengine maintenance artificer, dentist, lorry driver, or cook...
...As I have said, Nove is a great expert on the problems of such economies, above all an expert at ferreting out the internal "logic" that can be discerned within the web of their bureaucratic rules and the abysmal performance of their systems...
...Wage controls require the cooperation of unions, always an uncertain ally under feasible socialism...
...Yet mundane calculations are what feasible socialism is about...
...Should the cook be treated as a criminal exploiter if he goes so far as to employ a youth to wash the dishes...
...This is because it is very difficult to resist the utopian strain in socialist thought...
...Income redistribution must surely be on the agenda, but the possibilities of substantial social improvement by siphoning downward are disconcertingly limited and rapidly affect the upper reaches of the working class...
...The choice of economic policies is, therefore, not between black and white but among a spectrum of grays, any shade of which is sure to have its opponents...
...Competition and market incentives guide and deter the activities of the private sector...
...That is another question...
...Yet, in feasible socialism there will remain a need for a division of labor, a reliance on market forces, a cash nexus, and a competitive mechanism...
...One does not commit oneself to the idea of socialism on the basis of a balancing of pluses and minuses that shows a marginal credit in favor of socialism...
...Nove begins his discussion of feasible socialism with a measured onslaught against the utopian residue of Marx's thought, exemplified in the quotation with which I began...
...A wealth tax is admirable in intent but may lead to unintended consequences in which the very rich escape taxation by capital flight, leaving the upper middle class to feel the full brunt of the policy —an all too prescient prediction in view of Mitterrand's problems...
...And whereas advocates of a more transformative image of socialism, such as Sweezy or Bettelheim, would agree reluctantly that many of these attributes of the capitalist would be acceptable for a while, Nove accepts them without constraints of time as the only— and, therefore, the necessary—forms of social organization that will allow us to avoid the sclerosis and repression of centrally planned monolithic economies...
...Will it be feasible in political terms...
...Feasible socialism will continue to be buffeted by international currents and by internally generated pressures, but no more so than existing capitalism, and Nove hopes that federations of feasible socialisms can overcome the weaknesses that might be insuperable if the system were to be tried in one country alone...
...It is simpler, because Nove is relieved of the necessity to speculate on the possibility, much less to suggest the means, of accomplishing these tasks of reconstruction...
...Nationalization is essential in certain areas but leads easily to inefficient state monopolies...
...To traverse this region depends on the triumph of good sense, modest hopes, clear memories, and some small measure of social gratitude over illogic, millennial hopes, social amnesia, and collective impatience...
...Protectionism safeguards jobs but may invite retaliation, with unemployment as a consequence...
...All these tasks [he writes] are solitary, some could be hobbies...
...What is difficult is to say: "Produce 200,000 pairs of good shoes that fit customers' feet...
...Perhaps I should rather say Nove's tacit assumption is that the stage is set by the democratic victory of a Mitterrand or a Gonzalez...
...For feasible socialism would not only have to surmount the resistance from displaced elites, but it would also have to maintain the morale and the support of its own citizens, the largely unchanged electorate of today that we will still have around us within the time span of Nove's project...
...For instance, in discussing the transition from the marketless monoliths of centralized planning, he writes: It appears to me that the creation of small autonomous units, especially cooperatives, would be the most urgent and the most acceptable first step...
...Most labor is social labor in the sense that each contributes to joint endeavor which would be disrupted if someone freely chose to go fishing instead...
...The example illustrates very well the tone and intent of Alec Nove's critique of existing * The Economics of Feasible Socialism, by Alec Nove...
...I can see no reason why not, speaking with respect to its objectives of assuring a high, steady level of output and employment, and an acceptable mix of equity and efficiency...
...But it is more difficult, because he must convince his readers, above all those on the left, that his deliberately modest and unutopianindeed, openly antiutopian—stance is to be accepted gladly as the first stage of a journey whose possible later destinations lie entirely outside Nove's concern...
...Will it be feasible in economic terms...
...Most of these would be in the area of consumers' goods and services and would cover the notorious gaps in the sort of "minor" items Brezhnev recently listed as in short supply: toothbrushes, needles, thread, babies' diapers...
...I think it can be demonstrated," he writes, "that Marx's economics is either irrelevant, or misleading [his italics], or both, in respect of the problems that must be faced by any socialist economy which could exist...
...It is the wager on whose outcome the prospects for democratic socialism depend...
...The active engagement of workers in the determination and direction of their enterprises is actively sought, especially in those small-scale plants where it becomes socially manageable...
...He dwells at some length on the perplexities of workers' management (example: should a truck driver in a successful worker-owned enterprise earn more than a truck driver in an unsuccessful one...
...244 pp...
...But Marx's diagnosis introduces difficulties for the attainment of feasible socialism because of its animus against the detailed division of labor, the impersonal authority exercised by market relations over human activity, the dehumanizing aspects of money, the role of competition as a destructive rather than disciplinary force...
...This is precisely the image of the future from which Alec Nove seeks to disenthrall us in his discussion of "feasible socialism"— a state of affairs which could exist in some major part of the developed world within the lifetime of a child already conceived, without our having to make or accept implausible or farfetched assumptions about society, human beings, and the economy.* For the example that Marx has chosen, Nove tells us, is singularly misleading...
...In the excerpt that follows, the reader can catch some flavor of his intellectual and literary style...
...This is why Nove insists that the market, with all its ancillary subordination of life to anonymous pressures, must be accepted as an integral part of feasible socialism...
...Then the question is what policies to pursue, what policies to avoid...
...Adroitly or otherwise, the choices will be made, and we finally reach feasible socialism...
...And if a good cook and his wife wish to open a small restaurant in Tomsk, might not the citizens benefit...
...Socialism is a matter of ideals and convictions that coexist uneasily with mundane calculations...
...He is interested mainly in the economic bridges that can be used to go from where we are to where we wish to be...
...Then it does look a trifle nonsensical, does it not...
...The discussion is therefore at a more concrete level of policy than usually attends this crucial issue...
...Feasible socialism aims to be better than the best of capitalisms—better than Austria or Sweden, for example—but it does not expect to be altogether different from them, rior as markedly different as advanced capitalism is from backward capitalism...
...large-scale objectives and a solicitous recognition of "externalities" guide the public sector...
...The missing element in the great creaking mechanism of the Soviet system is, of course, the market with its feedbacks, its "signals," its constant pressures on suppliers to supply acceptable products...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
