A review of Michael Lebowitz’s “Contradictions of Real Socialism”

Counterpunch, October 3 2012

Michael Lebowitz on the Human Being Under Socialism

The Contradictions of Real Socialism

by LOUIS PROYECT

Several months ago the Crooked Timber blog held a seminar on Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty”, a novel that was widely embraced as a kind of postmortem on the USSR. The title refers to the apparently foolish beliefs of Soviet leaders, scientists and economists in the 1950s and 60s that “plenty”—in other words, consumer goods—could be achieved through central planning based on advanced computing technology.

Using a cast of characters both fictional and real (including Khrushchev), Spufford tries to capture the heady optimism of the post-WWII period, when both the USA and the USSR were experiencing rapid economic growth. In the first chapter, the representative character is Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich, a real-life mathematician committed to introducing scientific methods into Soviet factories, in this instance a plywood factory to which he was attached:

The management wanted help tuning the orchestra up. To be honest, he couldn’t quite see what the machines were doing. He had only a vague idea of how plywood was actually manufactured. It somehow involved glue and sawdust, that was all he knew. It didn’t matter: for his purposes, he only needed to think of the machines as abstract propositions, each one effectively an equation in solid form, and immediately he read the letter he understood that the Plywood Trust, in its mathematical innocence, had sent him a classic example of a system of equations that was impossible to solve. There was a reason why factories around the world, capitalist or socialist, didn’t have a handy formula for these situations.

For Spufford, and for the social democrats and liberals who run Crooked Timber, economics is reduced to machinery and markets. The USSR failed because the bureaucracy rejected the advice of the mathematicians and computer scientists but more importantly because it relied on central planning in defiance of the wisdom of markets. As had supposedly been proven by Von Mises and Hayek, it was impossible for planning to work since it could not set prices accurately, nor could it provide resources—whether human, machine or raw material—to factories in a timely fashion. Of course, it would be unseemly for self-avowed leftists to openly pledge allegiance to the Austrian school. Instead they refer to Soviet and Eastern European economists who after becoming disillusioned with planning began to push for market solutions using language that could have been lifted out of a Von Mises or Hayek text, even though they had the supposed benediction of being a Marxist at some point in their career. While not quite nearly so bad as David Horowitz’s Front Page, the “god that failed” theme is fairly pervasive at Crooked Timber.

Sounding like someone who has joined Marxists Anonymous, John Quiggin, a member of the Crooked Timber moderation board and the author of the weak-tea Keynesian “Zombie Economics”, confesses at the start of his “Red Plenty or socialism without doctrines”: “I was once, like most of the characters in the book, a believer in central planning.

He is much wiser now, advising us: “Hayek and Mises had the better of the famous socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s.” In making his connection between the Austrians and Kornai, Quiggin writes:

In 1956, Kruschev [sic] makes his famous promise of overtaking the US, and it seems quite credible, but a decade later, all belief in the promise of plenty has been lost. As the book ends, the mathematical programmers charged with making the plan work are pushing the benefits of prices – some at least, like Janos Kornai, would complete the journey to the free-market right, and advocacy of the ‘shock therapy’ approach to post-Communist transition.

I doubt that Michael Lebowitz, the author of six books promoting the socialist alternative to capitalism, would have bothered taking part in Crooked Timber’s seminar even in the highly unlikely event that they would have invited someone to an event stacked even more in favor of bourgeois hegemony than a League of Women’s Voters presidential campaign debate. But if he had, I am sure that he would have come out on top.

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