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The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited
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The word ‘socialism’ is apt to produce strong feelings, of enthusiasm, cynicism, hostility. It is the road to a future just society, or to serfdom. It is the next stage of an ineluctable historical process, or a tragic aberration, a cul-de-sac, into which the deluded masses are drawn by power-hungry agitator-intellectuals. My own attitude will emerge in the pages that follow. Let me make it clear that my object is not propagandist, in either direction. It is to explore what could be a workable, feasible sort of socialism, which might be achieved within the lifetime of a child already conceived. I have spent the last quarter- century studying and trying to understand the ‘socialist’ countries of Eastern Europe. Brought up in a social-democratic environment, son of a Menshevik who was arrested by the Bolsheviks, I inherited a somewhat critical view of Soviet reality: if this really was socialism, I would prefer to be elsewhere. (Luckily, I was elsewhere!) Of course the Soviet system did not take the shape it did because of ‘betrayal’, or the accident of Stalin’s personality. I have tried to describe the way in which the system developed, paying particular attention to the economic aspect. I have listened to critics who have contrasted the Soviet variety of socialism with the vision of Marx. That there are differences is obvious, but plainly it is not enough to note them, and then to criticise the reality of the USSR because it does not conform to the vision of Marx, or indeed of Lenin. What if the vision is unrealisable, contradictory? Does it make sense to ‘blame’ Stalin and his successors for not having achieved what cannot be achieved in the real world? Can the excesses and crimes which they did commit in the real world have been due in some part to the doctrines they espoused? (If a loyal Marxist protests that these doctrines were humanist, that they did not envisage a despotic society or mass repression, one can remind him or her of what happened in other countries with a Christian doctrine—and that fellow-Christians were the most numerous victims!) As an economist, I have been struck by the fact that the functional logic of centralised planning ‘fits’ far too easily into the practice of centralised despotism
