The expression ‘technocratic humanism’ sounds so unusual that it calls for examination. In The Weather for Tomorrow we see depicted one day in the life of a Volga motorcar factory. Before us are up-to-date production methods, Western technology. The heroes of the play are ideally Europeanized technocrats. They are shown with great sympathy, but for some reason they all seem the same. If what interests you is individual characterization, you will not find it in this play.
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
Soviet sociologists appealed to the writings of Lenin, and it was with the study of Lenin’s works that these sciences began their development here. One may laugh as much as one likes at this ‘quotation-digging’, but without it no sociological research would have been possible in the USSR. Lenin included in his articles a great number of valuable ideas which made even the first Soviet sociological writings extremely interesting. Burlatsky tried to counterpose modern sociological science to the schemas of the official textbooks, but without engaging in a direct polemic with the official dogmas. He drew attention to the absence in the Soviet Union of any serious works on the political life of our own country:
It must be said that there exists an immense amount of information describing the political process, accumulated in state, Party and other organizations, which has hardly yet been generalized and studied. Groups of sociologists working in some committees, ministries and departments are only beginning to get to work. But they, too, hardly concern themselves with the political aspect of the work of these organizations.12
He tried in his own writings to formulate in a more or less clear-cut way the ideas of rationalizing the system and introducing liberal reforms. In particular he spoke up for democracy at the point of production, urging study of various forms of worker participation in the management of enterprises, and ‘publicity for the most effective of these’.13 He also recalled Lenin’s saying that the Soviet trade unions must wage ‘economic struggle’ against the bureaucratic apparatus, ‘safeguarding the working people’s material and spiritual interests in ways and means inaccessible to this apparatus’.14 In his books we find sharp criticism of the bureaucracy, based on the ideas of the young Marx and having much in common with the ideas of E. Gnedin:
As Marx observed long ago, it is always a characteristic of bureaucracy that it identifies the processes of society and even those of the class whose interests it represents with its own specific interests and that it tries to ignore society’s requirements. As the functions and scope of action of the bureaucratic apparatus expand, so these tendencies become all-embracing. The danger of bureaucratic dictatorship arises: there appears and becomes dominant a striving to break free from all control. The bureaucratic apparatus retires into itself, so to speak, and begins to develop according to its own laws. And, correspondingly, the bureaucratic caste becomes exclusive.
From this Burlatsky concludes:
The basic evil in the inflation of the bureaucratic apparatus is not that it is very expensive to maintain, even though that is also hard to put up with. The worst aspect lies elsewhere. Being constructed on purely official-hierarchical principles, the bureaucratic mechanism soon ceases to perform the social functions for which it was actually created.15
Burlatsky’s ideas are thus radical enough, but he does not contemplate their fulfilment otherwise than through a rationalization of the existing statocratic system; and, consequently, he accepts all the rules of the game. In his books every original and fresh idea appears like a gold coin in a heap of rubbish; every scientific conclusion is situated amid a mess of lying ideological verbiage, whose emptiness the author appreciates even better than the reader.16 He is obliged not only to put up with the usual restrictions imposed by the censorship but also to talk in bureaucratic language; this means that his ideas cannot be expressed plainly. Burlatsky’s practical work in the state apparatus was no more successful than his theoretical work; he remained a reformist without reforms. This tragedy of technocratic reformism he tried to describe in a book with the expressive title The Riddle and Lesson of Niccold Machiavelli. In writing about the great Florentine, the author essentially drew a psychological portrait of himself.