The Thinking Reed

We discover that the factory is in constant conflict with the whole economic system, to which it cannot adjust. We see with our own eyes the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production. This is no longer an abstract notion, but a concrete reality. Owing to defects in supply and organization the conveyor belt keeps having to stop, but competent technocrats always find a solution: they wage a ceaseless battle and invariably triumph. The factory on the Volga is the weather for tomorrow — it and similar enterprises will force a change in the system of management. The technocratic revolution will itself inevitably lead to democratization: techniques, as such, can free us.

There is, of course, no social struggle here, and Shatrov’s technocrats are in no way social fighters. They have to change society not through their protest but through their own activity. Workers and engineers appear only as extras. On the whole, this has a depressing effect on audiences of the 1980s.

We must look more closely at the question of Soviet ‘technocracy’. In practice it is closely connected with the problem of experts, which has become very acute in the USSR (although not all experts are technocrats). In a work by a group of Western Sovietologists we read:

Social scientists and other experts could easily adjust to a rationalized authoritarian environment where decisions were reached solely on a national-technical basis divorced from the influence of bureaucratic interests and other political considerations.8

This argument is astonishingly feeble. In the first place, the very idea that an authoritarian society can exist in which decisions are taken without regard to political considerations is absurd. In general, the very idea of pure ‘rationality’, when applied to the contemporary world, sounds like a joke. All decisions in society are taken in somebody’s interests. It is impossible to rule without a purpose, different people have different purposes, and for almost any of them one could find rational means.9 In any case, a ruling class nowhere and never allows ‘rational-technical management’ in any interests but its own. If we assume that society has already overcome the narrowness of class interests, and that bureaucratic limitations no longer affect decision-making, then such a society will inevitably be not authoritarian but democratic and socialist.

In short, technocracy and bureaucracy are incompatible for a number of reasons. The tragedy of the Soviet technocrats is that they are compelled to place their rationalism at the service of bureaucratic irrationality. But the bureaucracy itself is guided by its own laws, which do not coincide with those of technical rationality and have little need of technocrats for attaining their ends. The bureaucracy strives to keep as much power as possible in its own hands, and an increased role for experts would restrict its power. Consequently, although many experts belong to the statocratic corporation of the class type, they feel that they are pariahs. ‘Increased professional autonomy’, writes Rakovski, ‘encourages this or that expert to try and influence social decisions which concern his own speciality.’ However, this attempt always fails:

The post-Stalinist system produces but does not tolerate the type of expert who is well known in Western society, who — conscious of his own scientific competence — intervenes in social questions with a great deal of naivety but also with a great deal of courage.10

An example of an unsuccessful expert-technocrat is the sociologist F. Burlatsky, who made a rapid advance in his career under Khrushchev but later lost his position.

To begin with, the experts had to fight for the mere right to exist of such sciences as sociology, social psychology and political science.11