The Thinking Reed

The central point of the reformers’ programme was therefore that no improvement in the economic situation was possible without democratization. This idea was later formulated thus by Euro-communists: ‘The maximum development of the personality and abilities of man are becoming a necessity of production, an economic necessity.’19

In the sixties the first symptoms were noticed of the general economic crisis which was to strike Eastern Europe in the eighties: a fall in the growth rate of production and inability by the state to overcome disproportions between branches of production. ‘It would be harmful complacency’, wrote Lisichkin,

to explain the falling-off in the rates of growth of our economy merely by saying that the way is easier from the lowest level to the highest, that every percentage increase now means a bigger mass of income than before. All that is true, but disproportionality in the development of the separate branches of the economy is hindering the general progress of development. Each time that some rupture becomes particularly obvious, this is usually levelled out by adoption of the appropriate emergency measures. But frequently, this happens after the event, that is, when the economy has already suffered enormous damage.20

All the new economists concurred in the view that the centralized system of management of the economy was not capable of ‘improvement’. Through the reforms they advocated it would be possible to replace this system by ‘market socialism’. Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921 could serve as prototype, provided it was interpreted quite differently from the version given in the official textbooks. Lisichkin said that Soviet industry in the NEP period ‘consisted already for the most part of socialist state enterprises.’21 NEP proved, above all, the need for market relations in the course of socialist construction or, more precisely, it proved that state enterprises need the market. That experience was valuable for the sixties as well. Planning could be based on the market and state enterprises could compete among themselves within certain limits, working efficiently in the setting of a market economy.

But a still greater influence on our theoreticians was the experience of self-management and market economy in Yugoslavia. The NEP experience was reappraised in the light of the Yugoslav experiment. This, however, could not be said openly, so an idealized picture of NEP had to be presented as the sole practical experience, to date, of market socialism. Nevertheless, the story of NEP could display the necessary elements: independence of state enterprises, use of the market as checking device, and so on. After 1928 the Stalinist bureaucracy rejected Lenin’s economic principles: ‘economic methods were gradually ousted by administrative regulation and the market mechanism was increasingly switched off.’ Later, Stalin ‘provided a theoretical basis’ for this practice.22 These theoretical constructions by the Stalinists had to be criticized and their unsoundness demonstrated.

Lisichkin directed his readers’ attention to the fact that official theory and practice ignored an elementary truth of Marxism: the law of value. The experience of the Soviet economy showed

the bankruptcy, the lack of economic sense, of any principle of distribution other than one based on commensurability of what is contributed to society and what is received from it, that is, on buying and selling. This basic feature of the law of value is ignored, and it takes its revenge in the low level of efficiency in our use of technology and the high cost of what we produce.23

Lisichkin gave a deadly definition of the theorizing of the creators of the so-called ‘political economy of socialism’ as