Economic thought now developed dynamically in the Soviet Union and — most importantly — became for the first time for many years part of worldwide economic thought. It was not accidental that Lisichkin’s book Plan i rynok — which was not without defects and also included many ‘reticences’ due to the censors — was published in Prague, in Czech, on the eve of the ‘Prague spring’. An American economist who studied the problems of Soviet-type economies wrote later that in the USSR in the sixties ‘a real revolution in economics as a science had taken place.’17
The new economists came to the common conclusion that the chronic misfortunes of the Soviet economy — production of goods which found no buyers, shortages of many other goods, low quality, inefficiency of agriculture, and so on — prevented a move towards an intensive model of economic development and made the whole system rickety. All these shortcomings could be laid at the door of bureaucratic centralism. It was necessary to devise a programme for transforming this, because the difficulties that arose in the Soviet economy were due to the existing type of organization and could not be eliminated so long as that obtained. In its turn, the reform programme presupposed the granting to different groups in society of a high degree of social autonomy in relation to the ruling statocracy, and so — democratization. The reforms certainly affected people’s attitude to work, and even their psychology. Lisichkin referred to the celebrated ‘Shchekino experiment’, when an enterprise was given greater independence than usual in the sphere of wages policy, and so on. This decision ‘radically altered the logic of the conduct of the leaders of the enterprise and also the logic of the interest in their work taken by the whole production-collective.’18 Finally, consistent implementation of these reforms would have meant, sooner or later, the social decomposition of the statocracy itself and its elimination as a special corporation of the class type. The experience of the 1968 reforms in Czechoslovakia, where a similar programme was openly formulated and partly carried out, leaves no doubt of that.
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
lofty forms of abstract thought, of which are capable only men who stand in devastated places that have just been cleared of floods and who are discussing sagely: is it or is it not possible to assume, from theoretical starting points, that there could be cases of flooding in this place? It will be bad for the inhabitants of the place in question if it turns out that, theoretically, operations by the elements cannot happen there. As for the facts, meaning the broken branches of trees scattered here and there, the ruined crops, the demolished houses, and so on, well, what of it, this sort of theoretician replies, so much the worse for the facts.24
In opposition to the abstractions of the official political economy the new economists created their theory on the basis of reality, using the experience of NEP, of Yugoslavia and of the West and interpreting critically the experience of their own country. Their general conclusions can be summarized as: socialist enterprises can function successfully in a market-economy setting;25 effective planning is impossible in the absence of such a checking and regulating device as the market; the action of elemental market forces can be kept under control by the framework of the plan; transition to market socialism necessitates rejection of directive planning by means of indices and enlargement of the independence of enterprises — new methods of planning are needed: through taxes, price control, investment policy, defining the ‘macroeconomic limits’ of the development of an enterprise, and so forth. By decentralizing the management of the individual enterprises, ‘the central organizations would be able to concentrate on the overall problems which are really theirs.. ’26 Only given these conditions can a plan’s influence ‘become real and not imaginary’.27