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first entered upon the building of communes has given way, according to their own reports, to much resentment and apathy. Besides these shifts, there are marked differences between regimes in this respect. The consensus is greater in the Soviet Union than in China, greater in Bulgaria than in Poland.
Indeed, consensus in some of the satellites is limited to very specific issues: Gomulka's nationalist posture presumably was applauded by most Poles, even those who were sharply opposed to his regime. Similarly, consensus in Yugoslavia clearly supports Tito's policy of national independence, but how far it extends beyond that is debatable. The fact that the regime considered it necessary to jail a dissenter and opponent, Djilas, because he took a critical view of its "class character" suggests that consensus cannot be very great. Generally speaking, consensus permits moderation and even tolerance. The great Balfour once put it very succinctly when he said of Britain: "We are so fundamentally at one, that we can safely afford to bicker." This saying applies equally to other mature democratic societies, but it does not mean that, when a political community is fundamentally at one, it will permit bickering; it means even less that the degree of actual dissent is roughly proportional to the degree of consensus or oneness. On the contrary, if the consensus is dogmatically based and ideologically rationalized, widespread consensus may manifest itself in popularly acclaimed witch hunts. The year of violence in Communist China (1952) was based upon a presumed widespread consensus, and this is as paradigmatic for such a situation as Hitler's "boiling folk soul," even though both may have been largely a figment of the leader's imagination. The kind of manipulated consensus that the totalitarians are able to create is a far cry from the sort of basic agreement that allowed Lincoln to counsel a friend to put his trust in the people.* But it is a useful means of ensuring support for the regime, enhances its legitimacy, and is apt to increase as long as the regime is successful in raising the standard of living. Indeed, the passion for unanimity discussed earlier is undoubtedly in part motivated by the desire to achieve a minimum of consensus. Purges, confessions, and camps are the tools of coercion by which the recalcitrant are brought into line and made to acknowledge the claims of the regime.
'"Remember, Dick, to keep close to the people — They are always right and will mislead no one." Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), III, 384.
16
TOTALITARIAN BUREAUCRATIZATION
Whether the battle cry is "expropriation of the exploiters" or "the common good before selfishness,"* the totalitarian dictatorships develop a centrally directed economy as the sixth feature in their syndrome of traits. This economy calls for an increasing number of public officials to attend to all the various functions which such an economy needs. But in addition to the appointment of all the actual public officials, there takes place a bureaucratization of large segments of organizational activity beyond the formal government system. The Germans proclaimed Gleichschaltung, that is to say, coordination and subordination of all organizations, as one of the goals of the regime. By this they meant that, in accordance with the leadership principle, the "leaders" of all organizations should be appointed by the government and these chosen leaders should then wield the same kind of absolute authority within their organization that the leadership principle called for all up and down the line of the official hierarchy. The idea of the corporative state served a similar purpose in Italy, as far as the economy was concerned; all organizations, whether business corporations or labor unions, were made part of one hierarchical structure with the Duce at the head. It is evident that by such a setup the functionaries of almost all organizations do in fact become public bureaucrats; the difference between them and government officials is not one of formal prerequisites, such as pension rights and status, but rather of actual political function. When looked at in this perspective, the functions of a business manager in a fascist-controlled corporation and a
* Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz is not, in its alliterations, readily translated; "common benefit goes before (precedes) individual benefit," though literal, is weak.
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factory manager in a Soviet trust are very similar. They are both dependent functionaries of a vast governmentally controlled apparatus. In short, we have before us what may be called total bureaucratization. (74c)
And yet there are conflicting trends. In terms of a dynamic concept of bureaucracy, such as is implicit in Max Weber's well-known analysis (308b; 274; 381; 244a), the conclusion is suggested that totalitariansim, while extending bureaucracy, also changes and perverts it. The six aspects or elements that recur in a developing bureaucracy of the modern Western type are centralization of control and supervision (hierarchical aspect), differentiation of functions, qualification for office, objectivity, precision and continuity, and secrecy (discretion). The first three are organizational aspects or criteria, the last three behavioral ones. We can speak of them as criteria when we employ them as measuring rods for determining the extent of bureaucratization; for all of them may exist to a greater or lesser degree, and it is this that determines the degree of bureaucratization. They are never fully attained, of course; in the nature of the case, in actual administration there could not be complete centralization, complete differentiation, and so forth.
What we find under totalitarian dictatorships is, however, a marked deviation and a retrogression where previously a higher degree of bureaucratization existed. Centralization of control and supervision yields to a conflict between the bureaucracies of party and government; centralization is superseded by local autocrats, like the Gauleiters; and party loyalty replaces professional qualification for office, though from the totalitarian regime's standpoint such ideological commitment constitutes a kind of qualification for office. (256a)
In terms of such a concept of developed bureaucracy, then, totalitarian systems do appear to be retrogressive. The subjection of the bureaucracy to party interference and controls, the insistence that not only those in key policy posts, but officials up and down the line, and in the fascist case those in the "coordinated organizations," be active members of the totalitarian party (see Part II and Chapter 24), all argue that totalitarian dictatorships are less rational and legal and hence less fully developed from a bureaucratic standpoint than, for example, the governmental services of some absolute monarchies in the eighteenth century.
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In the Soviet Union, the supremacy of the party, described earlier, had created parallel governmental and party bureaucracies. It has been succinctly stated that "the development of the Communist Party apparatus as an extension of the long arm of the dictator constitutes one of the most impressive and formidable organizational achievements of modern totalitarianism." (89i) Its members become the apparatchiki. Ever since Stalin's appointment as secretary of the party, its inner apparatus has expanded at a steady pace, so much so that today the Secretariat of the Central Committee constitutes an imposing superbureaucracy, with its tentacles reaching into every aspect of Soviet life. It was by skillfully manipulating the appointing organs of the Central Committee that Stalin succeeded in outmaneuvering his opponents and solidifying his hold on power. Under Stalin's management the apparat became the key instrument of political power in the USSR. It is indeed significant that the Soviet leaders, who have come into prominence since Stalin's death, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov, Brezhnev, Kosy-gin, all came up through the apparat. And, again, it was by virtue of his control of this apparat as party secretary that Khrushchev emerged after 1955 as the top man in the Soviet hierarchy.
The apparatchiki, then, are the important bureaucrats of the Communist Party. Their counterparts, more numerous as time goes on, exist also on the lower levels of the party bureaucracy. At the top there are the heads and workers of the various sections of the Central Committee that supervise the ministries and control the party operations; then there are the republic party secretaries with their staffs and workers; there are the secretaries of the provincial and regional partv committees and their staffs; there are the secretaries and staffs of hundreds of city party committees; there are the secretaries and staffs of thousands of district party committees (441h; 89j); there are finally the tens of thousands of party workers who head the primary oarty organizations on the collective farms, in rovernment institutions, and in military units. A calculation made in 1956 put the number of party secretaries on all levels (and it is to be remembered that each party committee above the primary level has more than one secretary) at about 327,000. (409c) This figure would have to be increased appreciably if the sizable number of committee members were added to it. They are all part of the web spun around the Soviet Union by the Secretariat in Moscow.
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The party bureaucracy operates parallel to, and also penetrates, the state bureaucracy, and its rapid extension has created the characteristic problems of bureaucratization, including status rigidity and privileges. Already by 1926 the Large Soviet Encyclopedia gave the total governmental service as 2,500,000 people. By 1939, it had grown to some 10,000,000. (252c) This process of expansion, however, was not without its growing pains, and the history of the Soviet bureaucracy is one of constant attempts to adjust to the theoretical and political requirements of the regime.
Prior to their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks proclaimed their violent determination to smash the existing state machinery. The state as an instrument of class oppression had to go, and the bureaucracy, being its most direct manifestation, bore the main brunt of the attack. Lenin soon found himself attempting to rationalize the need not only for a state (see Chapter 7), but also for a bureaucracy. He did so both by denying that the Bolsheviks had a bureaucracy and by admitting that they had bureaucrats but, of course, bureaucrats devoted to and recruited from the people: "Soviet power is a new type of state, in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army, and in which bourgeois democracy is replaced by a new democracy — a democracy which brings to the forefront the vanguard of the toiling masses, turning them into legislators, executives and a military guard, and which creates an apparatus capable of re-educating the masses." (205f) Trotsky was one of the first to attack this trend, but he did so without comprehending its long-range significance. He thought of it as a temporary development, something that was attributable to Stalin and other malefactors. Once they were removed, he said, the movement would return to its original spontaneity (357a; 312d). This analysis was mistaken; bureaucratization was inherent in the Communist totalitarian conception of party, government, and state. Indeed, as the Lenin quotation shows, it long antedated the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky and it outlived it.
The setting up of this Soviet bureaucracy created immediate problems. Personnel recruitment was the obvious one. A large number of tsarist civil servants had to be kept, lest the machinery crumble, until new cadres were trained. The commanding positions were, of course, taken over by party zealots, but the regime remained uneasy, and it was not until two decades later that the bureaucracy
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became fully sovietized. The second problem, at that time seemingly more urgent, was how to maintain the egalitarian facade, an intrinsic part of the doctrine, in the face of the requirements of bureaucratic organization and, more especially, of the hierarchical principle. Workers of the newly set-up People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs at first thought that now they would decide collectively on the conduct of foreign affairs. Such idle dreams, however, were soon dispelled. Lenin, using Engels as his authority, blandly stated that "any demand for equality which goes beyond the demand for abolition of classes is a stupid and absurd prejudice." (203a) Centralization of command and hierarchy, therefore, were not deemed to be incompatible with equality.
The problem inherent in these contradictions was not easily solved. Sizable segments of the party opposed the rapidly developing tendencies towardScentralization of power, and the early party congresses became forums for frequently violent discussions on the merits and theoretical orthodoxy of unity of command {edinona-chalstvo) versus collegiate management, the latter being a concession to the demands for collective decision making. Collegiate management, although the principle was disavowed at the Ninth Congress in 1920 and although the practice was dropped quite rapidly on the lower levels, persisted until the thirties, when the Stalinist drives made necessary the complete centralization of command. (88c) For two decades and a half after that, the Soviet bureaucracy operated in an atmosphere of strict discipline and as a highly stratified hierarchy. Only in the post-Stalin era, and more especially under Khrushchev, was the trend reversed and a deliberate effort made to decentralize; but the difficulties encountered have not allowed it to go very far. (89aa)
During the early years of Soviet power, the party bureaucracy remained suspicious of the state bureaucracy, particularly of its former tsarist civil servants. As a safeguard, the Party Control Commission, set up by the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 as a check on the operations of the party bureaucracy, began to look into the operations of the state bureaucracy too. Efforts were also made to promote into it, as rapidly as possible, loyal party members to replace the tsarist holdovers kept purely for expediency. For instance, in 1930, out of some 450,000 civil servants screened for security, about 30 percent were dismissed. (419b; 37h) As late as 1932,
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however, some Soviet administrations still had staffs about 50 percent of which were made up of former tsarist bureaucrats. (252d) It was not until the purges of the Yezhovshchina that this cleansing process could be considered complete. At that time, a large number (running into hundreds of thousands) of young technicians and students were promoted to responsible state posts. (325b)
Since that time the Soviet bureaucracy has been staffed essentially with loyal party members or individuals screened by the party and considered to be sympathizers. Yet even this "reliable" type of bureaucrat remains subject to intensive control. As one leading authority has described it: "The typical Soviet administrator functions in an environment in which every major decision is subject to the possibility of check, recheck, and countercheck." (89k) Whether it is planning, or staffing, or finance, there is a control body to supervise and control him. His efficiency, his legality, his loyalty are subject to constant surveillance.
Political loyalty is the primary criterion for assessing a governmental bureaucrat's competence. This is not to say that other more objective standards are entirely ignored, but the political assessment is the primary and fundamental prerequisite to a favorable report on the performance of such a bureaucrat. The fact that such assessments are made primarily by outside party organs necessitates constant readjustment between the party and the state bureaucracy. There has always been a tendency, which the party officially combats, for the government bureaucrats to "pass the buck" to party officials and thus avoid responsibility for decision making. (90c) The party organs as a result were swamped with minutiae. Some of the proceedings of party committees indicate that even the most obviously bureaucratic concerns were being usurped by party organs. Local party leaders, instead of attending to party affairs, found themselves involved in such matters as gasoline for tractors, leaves of absence for bureaucrats, and housing conditions. Party officials also decided on local bureaucratic appointments, which had to be cleared with the party committee. The party leadership, even in Stalin's day, could not help being concerned over this trend and made repeated efforts to minimize such tendencies. The party organizations were exhorted not to intervene directly in governmental operations, but merely to set an example by maintaining and insisting upon high standards of performance. Party functionaries were
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to lead and to check but not to usurp the functions of duly constituted governmental bodies. The problem continues to the present time. The increased role of the party under Khrushchev, in combination with the desire to decentralize and to buttress the autonomy of managers, intensified the issue. In a publication of the Central Committee a typical article demanded: "Raise the organizational role of the Party Apparatus." The article specifically attacked the tendency of some members "to work for others" and to turn party workers into office clerks, instead of keeping them on the level of organizers. (434c) The problem seems to be inherent in the system itself, and it is doubtful that it can ever be resolved by a totalitarian system, which puts a premium on a politicized bureaucracy. In 1961, the secretary of a district party committee published the following reflections: "Looking at it from the outside you would never make out what I am — the secretary of the party committee or the chairman of the Ispolkom [Soviet executive committee] or an employee of the Sovnarkhoz. Really, I am a kind of multiple tool! Of course one has to take part in economic affairs, but surely there ought to be a difference in the approach, in the style of work of a district committee and a factory, of a district committee and a sovnarkhoz? But somehow or other, the boundary lines have disappeared." (456b)
A further problem that besets the Soviet bureaucracy is the tremendous expansion of its functions and scope. Given the totalitarian nature of the system, the Soviet bureaucracy reaches every organization, every institution, every collective farm, and indeed anyone connected with any activity involving a group of people. As a result, there is an apparent tendency in the state apparatus to respond to every urgency by creating a new body to deal with it. This is as true of the lower levels as of the ministerial hierarchy, where the number of ministries currently is over fifty. From time to time, a drastic curtailment is made, as after the death of Stalin, but then a new expansion occurs. As a result, paperwork and division of responsibility continue to plague the Soviet bureaucracy. One regional agricultural administration, for instance, reported that during 1953 it received from the Ministry of Agriculture no less than 7,569 letters; in 1954, 8,459, and on the average about 30 instructions per day. (434d) The Ministry of Agriculture itself was, as of December 1954, organized into 422 administrations. (453) Determined
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efforts have been made in recent years to reduce this welter of administration, to rationalize as well as decentralize it, but the complexity is still formidable.
Such a situation affects the bureaucrats adversely. They are still expected "to deliver," but they can do so only by operating in a manner not prescribed by regulations. A complex system of evasion accordingly develops, Managers minimize in their reports the capacity of their organizations to produce so that the production plans will be set lower; they maximize their achievements by taking shortcuts on standards or by actually falsifying records; they organize informal arrangements among themselves, based partially on bribery, to avoid control and to exchange necessary items. (18c)
There was, accordingly, a continuing game of hide-and-seek played between Soviet bureaucrats and the Ministry of State Control, whose task it was to detect such happenings. To combat such procedures as described above, "the Ministry of State Control has been given the right to impose disciplinary penalties on officials guilty of not fulfilling the government's instructions and orders, of neglecting accounts, of wasteful management, wasteful spending of supplies and funds, and also of giving incorrect information to state control agencies." (453b) Power of removal and of turning over the guilty to prosecution was included in this grant. A series of decrees, beginning with one in 1957, have been issued to remedy this state of affairs (18a), but with limited success.
Such a situation naturally affects not only efficiency but also morale. There seems to have been a steady decline in the ideological elan of Soviet bureaucrats. The party journals have become increasingly concerned with the low level of political consciousness among the Soviet civil servants, and examples of bureaucrats ignorant of the basic works of Marxism-Leninism have been reported. The party does not want the Soviet bureaucrats to develop an esprit de corps purely their own, with their own standards of efficiency and performance. The Soviet bureaucrats are exhorted to remember that "the Soviet executive is a representative of the socialist state, a leader in whom is invested the people's trust. He must approach problems politically and work creatively and with a purpose in view. A communist ideological outlook and the ability to organize in practice the carrying out of Party and government decisions and to create conditions for increasing the initiative and creative activity
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of the masses are inseparable features of a Soviet executive." (422b) In spite of these difficulties, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union continues to strive to create an ideologically conscious and politically loyal yet efficient state bureaucracy. All three qualities have, to some extent, been achieved. It is difficult, however, to reach and maintain all three at their optimum.
All in all, it is evident that the trend in the Soviet Union is a mixed one. We observe a rapid bureaucratization, if this term is taken to mean an increase in the role of the bureaucracy. But this bureaucratization has occurred in two distinct spheres: the government and the party. In a sense this trend may be compared to the dual development of bureaucracy in democratic capitalist countries, where we can observe a steady expansion of bureaucracy in both the government and nongovernmental spheres of group life, especially business and trade unions. But, whereas in these democratic countries the bureaucratization in both spheres continues to be subject to a variety of controls, such as elections, representative bodies, and the like, the rival bureaucracies of a totalitarian dictatorship, though they may to some extent check one another, are free from control from below. The bureaucracy of the democracies is responsible; the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is not. And the same is true, of course, with minor variations in the satellites and in China.
A similar trend could be observed in the Soviet zone of Germany after the war. It is particularly interesting from our viewpoint, because the bureaucratic developments there were superimposed upon the bureaucratization process built under the Nazi dictatorship. Because of this setting, it may be well to turn first to the problems that the bureaucracy encountered after Hitler took over the government.
Hitler's advent to power was soon followed by a law, rather oratorically described as intended to "cleanse the civil service of political favorites"; its official title was the Civil Service Restoration Act. Passed on April 7, 1933, it was followed by another act in June, which addressed itself to making sure that a civil servant "gives a guarantee that he will at all times fully identify himself with the state of national resurgence." (31b) These initial assaults upon the professional bureaucracy, which Max Weber had once believed "un-shatterable," were consolidated and extended in 1937 by a compre-
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hensive civil-service "reform." By this reform, the traditional standards of the governmental bureaucracy were perverted; the standards of the party bureaucracy, such as loyalty to the Führer and to Nazi ideology, were made the ultimate tests of official conduct. This process is the cue to that debureaucratization of which we spoke at the outset. (244b; 103b)
In terms of the concept of bureaucracy as defined above, we find developing under Hider a dualism of governmental and party bureaucracies, which found symbolic expression in the fact that Hitler was both chancellor and leader of the party. This is not an unfamiliar situation in constitutional systems, such as Britain and the United States. But since in these systems the party and its leader are only "in power" as long as the electorate supports them in free elections, the government functionaries are largely independent in their day-to-day operations; the party's control finds expression through the adoption of laws which the official is, of course, bound to obey, that is, to execute and to apply. Under Hitler, the party had come to stay. With its various branches and extensions, such as the Security Police, the Hitler Youth, the National Socialist Civil Servants' League, and others, it permeated and infiltrated the government service. This meant, as we have already said, that the governmental bureaucracy was debureaucratized in the following ways: the centralization of control (the hierarchy) was continually subject to challenge by party functionaries; the functions of various government officials were impinged upon by party offices (for example, the Foreign Office interferes with the Office for Foreign Policy Questions of the Party and with its branch dealing with Germans abroad, as well as with another such office in Himmler's SS — 31c); recruitment into and promotion in the government bureaucracy depended more and more upon positions in the party and its formations rather than upon qualification for office; objectivity was denounced in favor of ideological conformity; neither precision nor continuity was permitted when it conflicted with the exigencies of the moment, including the Fiihrer's whims; official secrets were continually leaked with impunity to party functionaries who made such use of them as they saw fit, including the publishing of articles in ideologically oriented publications.
Behind these disturbing influences we find, of course, the terror. Any attempts on the part of an official to maintain former stand-
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ards of legality and objectivity were seen as endangering the security of the people, its party, and its government, and correspondingly were punished by removal from office, concentration camp, and death. At first these cases were rare but, as the Hider regime became more totalitarian, such actions became more numerous, until after 1942 they were the order of the day. The result was, of course, that the average official adopted an attitude of ready compliance with party directives of the most arbitrary kind. (102c) It is easy to picture a government councilor — timid though devoted to his task, conventional though well educated and professionally competent, secure in his routine and trembling for his job, the security of which was in his youth one of the main reasons for becoming a government official — yielding to a party official strutting back and forth in the full battle regalia of, say, an SS major, demanding in the name of the party the alteration of a decision that the hapless official had made in accordance with existing law. One needs to recall in this connection that Hitler had, at the time of the blood purge of 1934, proclaimed himself the "supreme law lord" (oberster höchster Rechtsherr) of Germany.*
The position of the courts, traditionally considered separate from the executive and hence the bureaucracy, deserves further comment. Under Hitler, the judges were at first slow to yield to Nazi pressure. Having played a rather conservative, not to say reactionary, role under the Weimar Republic, they prided themselves on their independence from "democratic" influences. Like the army, they believed in thir "neutrality," that is to say, their remoteness from politics. But the National Socialists could not, of course, permit such an independent judiciary. They rapidly transformed the judiciary, and more especially the criminal bench, into organs of the terror. (31e; 34) By the beginning of the forties, when the regime had become thoroughly totalitarian, a prominent jurist could write: "In the field of crime prevention the judge no longer merely administers justice. His . . . activity approaches that of an administrative official. He no longer looks for justice alone, but also acts in accordance with expediency. Judge and administrator, judiciary and police, often meet ... in the pursuit of identical objectives. This change in the character of some judicial activity has led to a decline
•In his speech before the Reichstag, July 13, 1934; see also the detailed discussion in 3Id.
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1
1'4
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[in importance] of the judiciary." (232) The United States military tribunal at Nuremberg brought suit against one such set of judges in the case of US. v. Josef Altstotter et al., in which the whole range of the perversion of the judiciary was laid bare. It is clear from this record, as well as many records in German denazification courts, that the judiciary had essentially become a branch of the administrative service, subject to continuous interference by the party. But this was not enough. In order to handle certain kinds of criminal prosecutions, which even this kind of judiciary would not attend to, the Hitler regime organized the Volksgerichte, or people's courts, special tribunals resembling the revolutionary tribunals under the French terror as well as institutions in the USSR, in which only expediency in terms of National Socialist standards served as a basis for judgment. (147)
If we turn from these developments under the Hitler dictatorship to the East German regime (113), we find that basically the SED (Socialist Unity Party) has condnued, or revived after it turned totalitarian, the techniques and practices of the Nazis. The officialdom in the government offices is subservient to the party bureaucracy to an even greater degree, in accordance with Soviet practice. Administrative law provides for a strict subordination of the governmental to the party bureaucracy. One of the main agents of this ascendancy is the attorney general of state, who has become the whiphand of the secret police. Divorced from all court control, he operates on the basis of a vastly expanded concept of security, hunting down deviationists in the complex bureaucracy, not only in the government proper but in the network of enterprise of which the socialized economy is composed. The courts themselves have become appendages of the administration. In the statute establishing the new court system, the SED completed the process initiated by the Hitler regime of depriving the courts of their independence and of superimposing upon them the notion of administrative and political expediency, as contrasted with the constitutional principle of nulla poena sine lege. Indeed, the East German jurists have gone one step further, in keeping with Soviet conceptions of "law"; they have introduced the notion that decisions of courts which have already been pronounced with legally binding effect may be annulled by judicial decree within a year. It is by perversion of the French concept of cassation, or review, that the
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attorney general (as well as the president and vice-presidents of the Supreme Court) can request cassation if the decision "violates a law," if it is "decidedly in error" in the penalty it inflicts, or if it "decidedly contradicts justice." Clearly political considerations can be, and have in fact been, the basis of this cassation. (299; 364)
In Italy, the problem of bureaucratization presented itself in a somewhat different form. As we have seen, the Fascists proclaimed the doctrine of the strong state. Such ideologues of Fascism as Gentile insisted that the party was subordinate to the state and should serve as its conscience. Mussolini stressed the point when, in his article on Fascism (268b), he asserted that "everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people. Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes)." In terms of such a concept, the governmental bureaucracy, and more especially the high civil servant, assumes an independent role vis-a-vis the party and the corporate bureaucracy of business. In rejecting the view that Fascism was the arm of big business, one historian has written that there were no less than three bureaucracies: the officers of the regular army, the civil service, and the officials of the Fascist Party. He estimated that the members of these three bureaucracies constituted about one twelfth of Italy's adult males. (310a) He then proceeded to describe vividly the attitude of the civil-servant bureaucrat toward the big businessman who seeks government aid, and he added, "When a disagreement arises between a big business man and a high civil servant, Mussolini's immediate inclination is to favor the high civil servant. The person who repeats to him that the state must 'discipline' private initiative is sure of awakening a sympathetic echo in his soul. For what is the state if not Mussolini?" (310b)
When it came to clashes between the party and the governmental bureaucracy, Mussolini's inclination was likewise to favor "the state," but this might mean now the high civil servant, now the Fascist "spiritual conscience of the state." In any case, it is evident that the Fascist emphasis on the state tended to foster genuine bureaucratization. The symbolic expression of this was the "train
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on time" of which the Italian Fascists made so much in the early years. Yet, in spite of Mussolini's greater emphasis on the state, it would be a mistake to underestimate the continuous impact of the party bureaucracy on the governmental bureaucracy. Through its control of the associations of civil servants, and through the requirement of party membership for advancement in the governmental bureaucracy, the party wielded a powerful influence, reinforced by a system of spies. In 1932 it succeeded in effecting a purge of the entire top layer of officialdom in the Ministry of the Interior. It also managed to secure representation on the Consiglio di Stato (Council of State), which was not abolished by the Fascists and continued to adjudicate problems of administrative law involving the conduct of officials. (159) The corporate state, which extended the rule of officialdom or bureaucracy to all phases of economic life meant, therefore, total bureaucratization in the light of Mussolini's conception of the state as the all-engulfing guardian of the national life.
In conclusion, it might be said that whether in the name of the state, of the party, of the nation, or of the proletariat, the totalitarian dictatorship steadily expands the role of bureaucracy. Yet totalitarianism is not alone in this trend: it is paralleled by a steady expansion of bureaucracy and bureaucratization in all industrial nations. The trend appears to be connected with the growing size of organizations. It has found its ironic expression in "Parkinson's law," which suggests that the growth of bureaucracy is cancerous, unrelated to function. (271) What is distinctive in totalitarian dictatorship, apart from the lack of any institutional pattern of responsibility, is the sharp dualism of governmental and party bureaucracy. Hence, expansion creates serious problems of conflicting bureaucratic cadres fighting among themselves for supremacy and thereby debureaucratizing the governmental service in those countries where this service had already achieved a high degree of bureaucratization. The extension in size is bought at the price of a deterioration in quality, at least temporarily. What all this implies for the economic life of the country is the problem to which we must next turn.
17
PLANS AND PLANNING
A totalitarian economy is centrally directed and controlled. In order to execute such central direction and control, there must be a plan. Since the economy has become one gigantic business enterprise, and yet an enterprise that does not get its incentives from the desire to make a profit or from the consumers' needs and demands as expressed in the price system, its managers must be told what measuring rods to apply in determining what should be produced, and consequently how the scarce resources available for production should be distributed among the various branches of productive capacity. The slogan, "Guns rather than butter," is only a crude indication of the vast range of decisions that have to be made. The decisions involved in arriving at such a plan are the most basic ones a totalitarian regime has to make. Hence the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, the four-year plan of Hitler Germany, the two- and five-year plans of the Soviet zone, and so on, are focal points of political interest.
Characteristically, in a totalitarian dictatorship, the leader or leaders at the top, men like Stalin, Hitler, or the party Presidium, make the basic decision in terms of which the plan is organized. This basic decision was, in the case of the Soviet Union, originally that of industrializing the country; in the case of Nazi Germany, that of eliminating unemployment and preparing for war; in the case of China, again industrialization but combined with "land reform"; and in the case of the Soviet zone of Germany right after the war, that of providing the large-scale reparations the Soviet Union demanded. (88; 32; 113) These goals of planning are the most decisive issues to be settled in a totalitarian society. In the
220 The Directed Economy
Soviet Union, more particularly, in recent years there has been extended discussion in the top hierarchy over the question of mass consumption and consumer-goods production, as against heavy machinery, basic raw materials, and preparation for war, including nuclear arms and space control. Any such basic decision provides the starting point for a system of priorities which can be utilized in allocating raw materials to the different sectors of the producing economy.
It is the absence of such a basic decision, and indeed the impossibility of securing it, that has led many to conclude that constitutional democracy is incompatible with planning or, to put it in another way, that any attempt to enter upon planning constitutes in effect the "road to serfdom." (104f; 137) This is true if planning is understood in a total sense, and it is often so defined, especially by economists. Actually, the planning process in a democracy is very different; it is contingent upon the democratic process as a whole, whose outstanding characteristic is the continuous review of all decisions, including basic ones, by the people and their representatives. (109) In autocratic systems, and more especially in totalitarian dictatorships, the purpose of the plan is determined by the autocratic leader or ruler(s). The plan implements their basic decision. It is carried forward by a bureaucracy that has the full backing of the terrorist and propagandist apparatus of the totalitarian dictatorship. Consequently, little if anything can be learned from the planning procedures of totalitarian societies when one comes to assess the planning process in democratic societies. But an understanding of the process, of course, is essential for an understanding of totalitarian dictatorship. The great advantage that a fixed goal or purpose possesses from a technical standpoint is counterbalanced by the disadvantage of not having the planning respond to the reactions of those affected by it. Which is the greater disadvantage only experience can tell.
A comparison of the planning experience in totalitarian dictatorship brings to light some very striking contrasts, as well as similarities. In the Soviet Union, a number of years passed before the central importance of planning was fully realized. Prior to the revolution, Russia had been far behind Western Europe in industrial development. Marx and Engels, believing that the Commu-
Ch. ij Plans and Planning 221
nist revolution would take place in an advanced industrial society, had not been at all concerned with the problem of planning industrialization. They had stressed control of the economy rather than industrialization and an increase in production; indeed, the revolution was to be the culminating point of capitalist development, after the means of production had, through trusts and vast monopolies, become concentrated in "fewer and fewer hands," and this shrinking group of exploiters would be confronted by an ever larger proletariat. All that the proletariat would have to do, consequently, would be to take over and run this gigantic productive apparatus. But in Russia, over 80 percent of the population lived on farms at the time of the revolution, and a similar situation prevailed in China at the time of the Communist seizure of power. This fact was so completely at variance with Marxist anticipations that novel approaches had to be developed.
This question preoccupied the Bolsheviks throughout the twenties and gave the post-Lenin struggles for power a marked theoretical flavor. A number of solutions were advocated, ranging from left-wing emphasis on immediate efforts to increase industrial output, even at high cost and considerable coercion (expounded most clearly by Preobrazhensky), to right-wing advocacy of adjustment to a temporary, transitional capitalist stage (as, for instance, voiced by Bukharin). The ensuing policy, based more on the requirements of the situation than on ideological dogma, was one of compromise and postponement of the radical solution. (88)
Planning, accordingly, developed slowly and modesdy. On February 22, 1921, the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) was set up. It was charged with the task of working out an over-all state economic plan and preparing the technical and managerial staffs and know-how necessary to its success. (438a) In fact, however, Gosplan's immediate tasks were more restricted and concentrated on developing the state plan for the electrification of Russia (Goepro), which had been prepared some time earlier and was to serve as the basis for further centralized planning. In addition, Gosplan assumed control over some sectors of the economy which were subject to crises and vital to economic survival, like the railroads. Thus, depite the very broad grant of planning and controlling power, Gosplan during the NEP period did not vitally
222
The Directed Economy
influence the Russian economy. It concerned itself rather with collecting statistics, studying existing economic trends, and laying the groundwork for an over-all plan.*
The big impetus to centralized state planning came with the political decision to launch a large-scale industrialization and agricultural collectivization program. The era of the five-year plans began in 1928. Since then Soviet economic life has been revolving around these broad, comprehensive schemes, developed in keeping with the policy decisions of the leadership by the planners of Gos-plan. Indeed, the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan can be described as the breakthrough of full-scale totalitarianism in Russia. Stalin's program, borrowed in many respects from the left-wing opposition, notably Preobrazensky, inevitably encountered resistance from the established peasantry and other groups. As resistance mounted, so did coercion. As pointed out earlier, the totalitarian regime matured in the struggle to put into practice what theory and ideology had preached. The launching of the plan, however, despite certain initial failures (camouflaged by scapegoat trials of engineers), fired to a great extent the imagination of the more youthful party members and raised the sagging morale of the whole party. Its results, therefore, were politically important.
From then on, the Gosplanners were in their element. The coercive powers of the government and party were put at their disposal, and the process of rapid industrial development, concomitant with the collectivization of agriculture, was pushed ahead at great speed. (For further treatment, see Chapter 20.) The planning apparatus expanded accordingly. By 1938 it had grown to a central staff of 1,000 planners organized in 54 departments of Gosplan. (21) Today planning officials are to be found on every subordinate level, from the republics down to the regions and even districts and towns. The plans that they prepare include not only the over-all five-year plan, but the economic plans for all levels of the Soviet economy, from that of the RSFSR to even a small plant in Yakutsk. (90d) Gosplan is organized into departments dealing with regional planning and finally into departments charged with integrating the work of the national and regional planning departments. Gosplan committees are also attached to regional executive committees, which in
* The first comprehensive plan, which was not implemented by the government, appeared in 1925 as Control Figures of National Economy for 1925-1926.
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223
their turn supervise the work of the district and town-city planning committees. Gosplan goals are worked out through lengthy processes of estimating requirements and needs; in the process, extended controversies with subordinate organs ensue.
There has, in fact, in recent years been a good deal of oscillation between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. Gosplan has been employed to counteract some of the excesses of localism (mestnich-estvo). The situation has been complicated by the conflicts between short-range and long-range planning, with Gosplan primarily now concerned with the long-range plans. Challenges have been heard, such as those of the economist Liberman and others, which would transfer managerial planning to the enterprise and re-establish a kind of market mechanism. (89cc; 267b) Basically, this would limit central direction to the broader aspects of over-all production planning and resource allocation. For Gosplan is concerned also with the problem of allocating resources. This is an important matter, since Soviet managers operate constantly in a situation of scarcity, and adequate allocation is the prerequisite to plan achievement and resulting bonuses. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for evasion is to be found in the unending competition among managers for scarce materials. In 1948 an effort was made to divest Gosplan of the allocating function and to assign it to a separate body. Apparently, the experiment was not successful, and in 1953 Gosplan again took over the allocation function.
Supervision of the execution of the plan is becoming an increasingly important aspect of Gosplan work. This supervision essentially involves the twin tasks of detecting failures and evasions and checking on the general development of the plan and analyzing the portents. A great deal in recent years has been said in the USSR on the urgent need to uncover the growing number of managers and officials who, having learned the game, have become skillful both in keeping their quotas down by underestimating the capacity of their plants and in lowering quality for the sake of achieving quantity. (891) However, equally important if not more so, is the task of keeping in touch with the development of the plan in order to make the necessary adjustments. Soviet leaders were at first unwilling or unable to perceive the necessity of elasticity, and many of the failures of the earlier periods can be ascribed to a rigid insistence on plan fulfillment. In 1955 measures were taken to give lower eche-
224 The Directed Economy
Ions a greater say in planning and to make a meaningful distinction between long-range and short-range planning, but these were revised in 1957, 1960, and 1962. The party program of 1961 suggested a bare outline of a twenty-year "plan" for economic as well as social progress. The pretense, however, that this plan was democratic because of its wide discussion — 500,000 meetings involving some 70 million people — was idle. It represented the conceptions of Khrushchev and his immediate entourage. (296b) It is conceived in terms of rapid further progress in industrialization, with an annual growth rate of 10 percent confidently envisaged. The goal of overtaking the industrial West, and more particularly the United States, is already proving Utopian in the mid-sixties, not to mention the agricultural debacle. (355a) Decentralization and the separation of agricultural from industrial planning did not work out as well as was hoped, although some improvement seems to have been achieved. Since then, a vigorous debate has been going on over the issue of centralization and related issues. There are those engineers and technocrats who would intensify centralization by means of computers and other advanced technical methods, and, in their view, "ultimately, the computers are to take over more than just the planning near the top: the lower echelon of the economy is to get dehumanized as well." (442f) As against them, economists like Liberman would leave only the decision on production goals, such as the composition and volume of output, to the central planners, while each manager would maximize his own plant's "profitability," computed on the basis of the capital he works with. "Profits would become the sole success indicator." (442f) Even more radical voices have been heard from time to time, and one may begin to wonder at what point decentralization will go beyond the limits set by a totalitarian dictatorship.
The principles of Soviet economic planning have also been adopted by the Communist nations of Central Europe. The satellite parties did not go through the preliminary stage of controversy that the fight between Preobrazhensky and Bukharin had highlighted in Russia, but as soon as the consolidation of power was completed, they proceeded to launch economic planning on the Soviet model. In Poland the State Commission for Economic Planning (PKPG) operates as a superministry which supervises and coordinates the economic life of the country, with the right to issue directives to
Ch. iy
Plans and Planning
225
individual ministries. It has been charged with nationalization of private enterprise. The PKPG is also in charge of the Main Statistical Administration, the Central Administration of Professional Training, the Patent Office, and the Main Administration of Measures. (413; 429) Polish planning, on Soviet insistence, has been coordinated in recent years with that of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and industrial development in these countries is to result in complementary and mutually dependent economies. In particular, the development of the Silesian basin in terms of electric energy and coal output has been made subject to close Polish-Czech cooperation. Also, as a reaction to the Marshall Plan, the so-called Molotov Plan resulted in a coordinating committee, made up of the heads of the planning boards of all the satellite regimes and of the USSR for the purpose of working out joint plans. That such plans are not devoid of political significance is seen, for instance, in the development of a new industrial town in Poland, Nowa Huta, constructed next to the old and highly conservative city of Cracow, to a great extent according to Soviet plans. Later, the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (CEMA) was formed, which sought to coordinate bloc members in a pattern of specialization in particular fields of production. "Integration, involving greater technical specialization, offered opportunities for more rapid development of technological skills"; at the same time, the dependence on the Soviet Union was increased. (38c) As a consequence, there has been a growing inclination to secure trade ties with other countries.
The Communist Party of China faced, upon its seizure of power, an economic situation less favorable than that of the USSR in 1928 or of any of the satellites in 1946-1949. However, after totalitarian control of the regime was firmly established, a decision to industrialize rapidly followed, and a somewhat vague five-year plan was announced in 1953. Apparently a series of regional plans was gradually evolved into an over-all national plan, with the aim of rapid industrialization at all costs. That there might have been some opposition within the party to such a drastic collectivist solution is indicated by the virulence of Liu Shao-chao's attack, in February 1954, on party factionalism. (300a) Unlike the situation in the USSR in the twenties, however, no open voice has been heard in China urging a go-slow policy. In the words of Hsiueh Mu-chiao, a member of the State Planning Committee, the party must "suppress
r
226
The Directed Economy
all intrigues of imperialists and class enemies within the country. Only in this way can we successfully accomplish the task of socialist industrialization in China." (441i) Communist China tried to speed this process of industrialization with what has come to be known as "the great leap forward," undertaken in connection with the Second Five-Year Plan. The plan, like the first one, gave priority to the development of heavy industry, especially steel, but there was also involved a huge water-conservation project in the agricultural communes. The core of the plan was a drive "to build small factories and open small mines using available means of production." Some sixty million persons were thrown into this "backyard blast furnaces' drive." (54a) Along with the "furnaces," hundreds of thousands of other kinds of plants were set up. After initial claims of success, the leaders had to admit that the "leap forward" had landed them in a ditch, and the entire approach has by now been abandoned. Chaotic conditions were created by the misuse of manpower and a misdirection of scarce resources. The great leap forward also had serious emotional aftereffects, comparable to those of Stalin's great purges. (415)
The situation was very different in Nazi Germany. In keeping with what we have already said, one commentator wrote in 1942: "National Socialism has coordinated the diversified and contradictory state interferences into one system having but one aim: the preparation of imperialist war." (263c) The documentary evidence that has come to light since 1945 amply supports this statement. As it has been summed up more recently: "First [there was] establishment of absolute rule internally and the building up of a sufficient military fighting apparatus, protected by a defensive and cautiously maneuvering foreign policy; then violent expansion with concentrated power" (31f) For after his protestations during the early days of his regime, Hitler soon made it clear that he intended a policy of preparation for large-scale war. It has been authoritatively described how very definitely Hitler planned the war that by 1937 he considered "inevitable." (46c) The entire Four-Year Plan, so-called, initiated in 1936, was geared to this objective. In a council of ministers, Hermann Goering, whom Hider had put in charge of the plan, declared in 1938 that the plans and planning "start from the basic thought that the showdown with Russia is inevitable — all
Ch. iy
Plans and Planning
227
measures have to be taken just as if we were actually in a state of imminent danger of war." (46d)
It was essentially a matter of shifting production to war needs, and doing this not by throttling the consumption and standard of living of the masses, but by increasing production. At the same time, the memory of the blockade of 1916-1918 was sdll vivid enough to make it seem desirable to have Germany become as independent as possible from outside supply sources. This objective was highlighted in the slogan of "autarky," which in turn was reinforced by the nodon of "living space." Such living space, related as it was to aggressive designs against Germany's eastern neighbors, was to round out the Greater German Reich into a self-supporting and independent polity. It had been a key idea, amounting to an obsession of Hitler's even when he wrote Mein Kampf, (148d) The course of the war showed that this objective not only was not obtained, but was indeed unattainable. The preparation for war under the Four-Year Plan was quite inadequate (46e; 162); after a transitional period Hitler, in 1942, made Albert Speer the key planner, but it was too late for "planning." All in all, one is obliged to conclude that, owing to the incompetence of Goering and to Hitler's lack of understanding of economic problems * the planning of the Nazi dictatorship never became effective. But to argue that for this reason the Hitler regime was not a totalitarian dictatorship (260; 112f) is going too far; the measures it took in subordinating business and labor to the Fiihrer's war policy were decidedly totalitarian, and the failure of the central plan was a result of lack of time. It is well known that the five-year plans of the Soviet Union also involved great failures at the outset.
It is interesting to see how planning developed in the Soviet zone of Germany after the war. We find here, in contrast to the Hitler regime, a plan originally directed toward a predominantly economic objective — securing reparations for the Soviet Union. This objective was supplanted by the goal of fitting the economy of the GDR into the Soviet bloc. (38d) Of course, in a way the entire enterprise of the military occupation of Germany was one gigantic "plan," a plan
* It has been argued convincingly that it was not simply a matter of lack of understanding, but that Hitler disregarded economic arguments because he considered them superficial in relation to his deeper aims. (31g)
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The Directed Economy
for the demilitarization, deindustrialization, and democratization of Germany, (135) But this plan remained in a very primitive state, as far as the effective planning procedures were concerned, and it soon broke apart as the policies of the Allies began to diverge. Eventually it was made obsolete by the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany as a self-directing policy. Here the liberal, free-enterprise policy of Adenauer and Erhard developed in sharp hostility toward all forms of planning, except for the purpose of freeing the economy from wartime and postwar restraints.
In East Germany, the development has taken the opposite course. Here the entire economy is subject to planning, As mentioned, the central Planning Commission was directly coordinated by Gosplan in Moscow until 1955. It is clear that the state's Planning Commission operates directly under the Presidium of the Council of Ministers and is therefore in a position to give orders to all ministries and other administrative organs of the government. (377; 341a) Actually not only the Planning Commission itself, but the Presidium and the so-called Coordination and Control Offices direcdy attached to it are involved in the planning process. On the whole, this process follows Soviet precedents and practice. The orders, ordinances, and regulations of the commission have, after approval by the respective control office, the "force of law." Failure to obey these orders constitutes an "economic crime," punishable by such penalties as long prison sentences. The control office has a right to demand arrests and therefore works closely with the Security Office (secret police).
In connection with this control, statistics become an instrument, since they are based upon an elaborate system of reporting all up and down the line. But the work proper of the Planning Commission, like that of Gosplan, is surrounded by secrecy; only top-level personnel have access to its findings; the statistical information furnished, usually in terms of percentages, is misleading, to say the least, since the basis of comparison is continually shifted. The middle and upper personnel staff is entirely composed of members of the SED and systematically trained along party and ideological lines. It runs into many hundreds, in large part very young men and women who have been specially indoctrinated and who are better paid than personnel in industry.
In summary, then, we may observe that totalitarian planning is
Ch. 17
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formulated on the basis of ideologically determined goals; that its scope, in the final analysis, is total; and that effective time limits are absent, the usual four- or five-year periods being mere accounting devices. Totalitarian planning is a necessary concomitant of the total revolution that these regimes set in motion — without it they would easily degenerate into anarchy — and it is this political quality that sets it apart from democratic economic planning.
18
THE BATTLE FOR PRODUCTION AND INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION
Within the context of a total bureaucracy and of total plans, the battle for production has so far been seen as the decisive test of the totalitarian economy. If the plans call for conquest and war, the pre-existing system of production for peacetime consumption must be revamped to provide the essential transformation. If the plans call for industrialization, controls must be set up and maintained for forcing a substantial part of the social product into capital goods, even when the standard of living and level of consumption of the people are quite low. In either case, we have what has been apdy called a "command economy." In the case of the Soviet Union and its satellites (267a), this command economy consists of a vast combine of state enterprises, each competing with the others to some extent, but devoid of the profit motive as known in other economies. Lately there has been reported an experiment to take a few plants out of this set-up and to give them the autonomy of independent, or at least quasi-independent, enterprises — a situation which would resemble that under Fascism (see also below). In Fascist countries, and more especially in Germany, industry was largely cartellized and subject to much monopolistic or oligopolistic control. The achievements of the command economy under either of these arrangements have been impressive, as far as the realization of the announced goal is concerned. The failure to satisfy consumer needs and demands cannot, strictly speaking, be held against these systems, since they have not operated with the purpose of satisfying the consumer.
Industrial progress in the Soviet Union since 1927-28, the date of
Ch. 18      Production and Industrial Expansion 231
the First Five-Year Plan, is indicated by the accompanying table. (156; 441t)
Soviet Industrial Development since 1927-28
1. Coal (1,000 m.t.)
2. Electric power output (mil. kwh.)
3. Steel (ingots, castings) (1,000 m.t.)
4. Aluminum (m.t.)
5. Crude   oil extracted (excl. natural gas) (1,000 m.t.)
6. Passenger cars, half-ton trucks
1927-28 35,510 5,007
4,250
0
11,472
1932
64,664 13,540
5,927
855 21,413
1937 127,000 36,400
1941 171,160 53,957
1963 532,000 412,000
17,729     22,400 80,200
46,800 28,501
34,602 206,000
580
7,511      137,016 131,000
The war, of course, resulted in a considerable retardation of Soviet industrial development. Destruction was particularly heavy in the industrial areas occupied by the Germans, which were subjected, first, to Soviet scorched-earth policies and then to German looting and destruction prior to evacuation. After the war, the Stalin regime made rapid industrial recovery its priority goal and, despite its many sacrifices and sufferings, the Soviet population was called upon to devote all its energy to new industrial drives. The figures of the second table, covering the same items as those of the first, testify eloquently to the scale of these efforts and to their undeniable impressiveness. (404b; 44lj; 409b; 167a) Thus, in six years of admittedly intensive efforts, Soviet producdon, in terms of the items cited, not only made up for the war losses, but in some cases even doubled the top output of 1941.
Item 1945
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
148,000 44,900 12,200
19,500 83,000
1951
282,000 102,900 31,400
42,300 364,000 (in 1950)
1953
320,000 133,000 38,300
52,000
1955
390,000 166,000 45,000
70,000 445,000
1958
496,000 233,000 54,900
113,000
232
The Directed Economy
Since then Soviet industrial expansion, especially in heavy industry and weapons, has continued unabated, despite the temporary consideration given in 1953 to the increase in output o£ consumer goods. (441k) Such concern for the consumer has been a recurrent theme with Soviet leaders, but over the years producer goods have retained their primacy. Steel, a good indicator, has remained at the center of attention, although speeches by Khrushchev and the party program have given almost equal attention to "overtaking" the capitalist countries — also a Stalinist theme, as has been pointed out. (36a) Industrial expansion, but more particularly producer-good production, remains the dominant goal of the Soviet system and as such has great appeal to the underdeveloped countries of the world.
Soviet industrial achievements, as seen above, are indeed imposing. From an industrially backward country, the Soviet Union has, through unprecedented deprivation and terror, pushed itself to the forefront of the world's industrial powers. It did so by sacrificing the human freedoms to which it allegedly aspired. It did so also without foreign capital and, after the mid-thirties, with relatively little outside technical assistance. Soviet capital investment has been largely supported by the nadonal budget (the average ranging from about two thirds to three fourths of the funds for capital construction). This "enforced" saving is continuing. It is estimated that the volume of state investment under the present seven-year plan is substantially higher than in the previous septennium. (36a) The resulting rate of industrial growth — a decisive figure for advanced industrial systems—has been very high, more than 10 percent in some years though now leveling off. Capital investment has been significantly higher than in the United States and Western Europe. This higher rate of investment has been made possible by various forms of enforced savings that cut down consumer purchasing power, most important among them low wages and high taxes.
The turnover tax has been the most important source of revenue, accounting on the average for somewhat more than half of the budget receipts in the USSR. The turnover tax is borne largely by the consumer, since each commodity price has an unspecified turnover tax included in it, and the tax is particularly high on consumer goods, for some items amounting to 75 percent or more of the sale price. The second, but much less important, source is the profit tax
Ch. 18      Production and Industrial Expansion 233
levied on those enterprises which actually make a profit in excess of their quotas.
Soviet industrial output is still lagging far behind that of the United States, but the swift increases in the volume of production and the general emphasis of the regime on technical achievement are accompanied by a vast and intensive training program for young engineering talent. From a meager 26 higher educational establishments offering engineering training in 1928, Soviet training facilities had expanded by 1955 to 175 with some 300,000 students, as compared to the former 52,000. (The United States at that time had about 194,000 students taking engineering in 210 colleges.) Between the years 1928 and 1955 the Soviet Union produced 630,000 engineers of all types, or the equivalent of 25 percent of the graduates of its higher institutions. (406) In the sequel the trend has condnued. There were 191 institutes for training engineers by 1959, and the number of graduates has been expanding rapidly since. Such figures indicate a great capacity for further industrial expansion.
Soviet industrial expansion has, as suggested earlier, important political and social consequences. It destroys traditional bonds, creates a situation of great social mobility, and results in population shifts and the weakening of nationality lines. An important aspect of industrial development has been the deliberate effort, motivated partially by geopolitical considerations, to shift the industrial concentration from the regions of the Donbas and Moscow to other areas, relatively untouched by industrialization. A close observer of Soviet economic developments a decade ago summed up the situation thus:
The Russians in their current plans are still pursuing a policy of differential economic development, strongly favoring the central regions (Central Russia, Ukraine, Volga and Urals). Within this industrial heartland, hydroelectric power and water transportation would reduce the need for close conjunction between industry and mining. The decision to emphasize the central regions is clearly based on political and strategic considerations, rather than purely economic; for both the western regions of European Russia and Soviet Asia afford major opportunities for industrial growth. (417)
The thousands of novice workers who come to the newly constructed factories, torn from their traditional moorings and thrown
234 The Directed Economy
into the mass barracks of the new construction sites, find themselves in an environment of strict discipline and centralization of command. Since all the factories are state-owned, the managers who run them are state officials, long subordinate to the ministry controlling their particular branch of industry. With the expansion of the Soviet industrial machine, there occurred a great proliferation of such ministries; as early as 1940 there were the following People's Commissariats dealing with industry: Heavy Industry, Oil, Coal, Power Stations, Electrical Engineering, Shipbuilding, Heavy Metallurgy, Nonferrous Metallurgy, Chemical, Building Materials, Heavy Engineering, Medium Engineering, General Engineering, Defense, Aviation, Armaments, Munitions, Food, Meat and Dairy, Fisheries, Light Industry, Textiles, Timber, Cellulose and Paper. In 1953 a drastic reorganization reduced the number of economic ministries, but by 1955 the number had again grown to about thirty. A radical change was effected by Khrushchev in 1957, which was linked to his defeat of the "antiparty group" (see Chapter 6). The reform of the economy was, as a matter of surmise, itself a major bone of contention between the rivals. In any case most of the industrial enterprises passed from the control of the central ministries to newly created regional economic councils (sovnar\hozy) dominated by party functionaries. The Soviet Union was divided into 105 regions. In each, a regional council was set up to plan and to operate all industrial enterprises and construction within the region; it was made subject to the council of ministers of the particular republic — this meant 70 economic councils for the RSFSR and 11 for the Ukraine —with central coordination secured by the party and Gosplan. Much more effective supervision, improved cooperation between plants in each locality, and deployment of specialists from the center to the local councils were the three desired improvements. "It is not easy to measure the degree to which these hoped-for benefits have been realized," is the recent judgment of a leading authority. (89r) Another account tells us: "the history of the reform since 1957 is one of a steady increase in the powers of the central coordinators and a decline in the effective importance of the sovnarkhozes, since the government and Party strive to implement the central plan and to combat such regionalist tendencies as obstruct the uninterrupted functioning of at least the priority sectors of the economy." (36b) Indeed, the sovnarkhozes
Ch. 18      Production and Industrial Expansion 235
themselves have been recentralized. Their number was first reduced by combining several into one, and finally, in November 1962, their number was reduced to about forty by the Central Committee and some of their important powers were transferred to state committees, all of them also being reintegrated through the establishment of some nineteen "natural" regions (in 1961), thereby checking the localism that had sprung up under the original reform. (89s) In the last analysis, whatever the over-all structure, the operational effectiveness of the economy as a modern industrial system depends upon the work of the enterprises it comprises.
These enterprises, or factories, are run by government-appointed directors. The director is responsible to the regional council. The various shop heads and foremen are subordinated in turn to the factory director. The principle of edinonachalstvo (unity of command) is thus firmly followed, and the director is fully responsible for his factory. This, in cases of accident, failure to achieve quotas, or technical inefficiency, can have rather serious consequences for a director. Indeed, the practice has been to consider serious accidents as evidence of failure or sabotage, and cases of directors going to trial have been frequent, particularly during the purge periods. In recent years, there has been a tendency toward less stringent punishments (financial penalties, restitution of damage, demotion), but the director still remains liable whenever anything unforeseen happens. This broad responsibility is hard, since the director is hamstrung by control from above. As one highly placed manager put it: "Now about the powers of the directors. Formally they are very broad, but on many questions, even minor ones, the manager of an enterprise is under petty tutelage. Can I, the director of an enterprise, hire even one economist , . . ? Can I hire one engineer for the mechanization of production ... ? To all these and tens of similar questions there is one answer: I cannot. AH this prescribed for the plant from above." (89r)
The director, however, is not only driven by fear. Productive success has very tangible attractions for him, for he is given a sizable share in the profits that follow from an overfulfillment of quotas. Large bonuses are given to those directors who have been successful, and interviews with former Soviet managers indicate that they attach the greatest importance to such premiums: "the difference between 99 per cent of plan fulfillment and 100 per cent
236 The Directed Economy
means a difference of up to 30 per cent in income." (444b) The workers also share in these premiums, but the percentage is considerably scaled down on their level. Such incentives, however, result in a phenomenon known as shturmovshchina — a last-minute attempt at breakneck speed to meet the quota and share in the dividend. In the 1954 annual report on Soviet industry, we read
One of the chief shortcomings in industry was that, as a result of unsatisfactory management, many industrial enterprises were not working rhythmically. They were turning out much of their production at the end of the month and permitting a fall-off in activity at the beginning of the following month. The absence of a rhythmic work schedule led to workers and machinery being idle at certain times, to an increase in personnel beyond the planned number of employees, nonproductive expense on overtime work, overexpenditure of the wage fund, a higher percentage of scrapped production, and an increase in cost of goods. (4411)
The temptation to share in the premiums has led those directors whose plants failed to meet their quotas to falsify results, or even to bribe state control officials. A number of incidents of this type have appeared in the Soviet press and have been confirmed by interviews with former Soviet officials. (419d) Whether the decentralized system has ended such practices is hard to say, but it seems rather doubtful in the light of some recent cases. Instead of corrupting central ministry officials, the manager now will seek to do so on a local basis. If it were not for the ideological zeal of party men, this might be even easier, if past political experience is any guide.
In his efforts to maximize production, the factory director is assisted by the factory party organization, by the secret police (the Special Section), and by the local trade union (see Chapter 19). The party organization, encompassing all the party workers in the factory, holds regular meetings at which production levels are discussed, encourages self-critique on the part of the workers and the administration, attacks laggards, watches the political morale of the personnel, and supervises the director himself. The Special Section makes certain that sabotage is prevented, that disloyal elements are ferreted out, and that enemies of the people are exposed. It organizes regular networks of informers among both the workers and the managerial staff. Occasionally it may serve as a stimulant to increased efforts by arresting known slackers or those expressing anti-
Ch. 18       Production and Industrial Expansion 237
party opinions. In its combination of autocratic control from above, party stimulation and police informers, acclamatory participation and popular ritual, the factory in a sense is a small-scale replica of the pattern of controls and of the hierarchy of decision making characteristic of the Soviet Union in general.
The rise of Communist regimes in Central Europe and China has resulted in similarly drastic efforts to push industrial expansion. This was as true of the relatively advanced economies of Czechoslovakia and Poland as of the less advanced ones of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (in 1946). It was only as a result of the marked failures of such programs in the more backward states of Central Europe that the Soviets decided in 1947-48 to encourage a slower industrial development in such places as Bulgaria and Yugoslavia — this was one of the reasons for the Tito-Cominform tension, since Tito was quite anxious to industrialize rapidly — and a closer cooperation of these states with the more advanced areas in the bloc. Industrialization, however, has been pushed very forcefully in Poland, where the natural wealth of the Silesian basin makes it an ideal site for the creation of a second Ruhr, Steel production and coal output, which had tripled by 1955, have vastly and steadily increased. Since 1956-57, the East European economies have been advancing, with Soviet assistance and under Soviet direction. The Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA) was reactivated and provided with administrative secretariats. A comprehensive plan was worked out in 1958, covering the sixteen years to 1975, and a program for specialization of the several countries was put forward. Even at the risk of further dependence on the Soviet Union, this plan opened up new directions for rapid economic development. (38e)
The problems of increasing industrial production are even more complicated in the case of Communist China. Starting from a very low level of industrialization, the first goal was to reach, by 1957, the 1927 level of Soviet production. Since then, Chinese progress, while rapid, has been hampered by several false starts, including the disastrous attempt to increase steel production in small units. Between 1952 and 1959, steel output increased about tenfold, electric power almost sixfold, coal fivefold, and cement fourfold. Manufactured consumer goods grew at a less dramatic but still substantial rate: for instance, cotton-yard production increased two to two and a half times. In short, during its first decade or so, the Communist
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regime in China was quite successful in increasing industrial production. (415; 54b)
As far as the Fascist and National Socialist systems are concerned, the record is somewhat less easy to analyze. For one thing, in Germany foreign trade, essential to the well-being of this overpopulated country, rapidly declined. In 1933 exports still exceeded imports by almost 700 million marks, but by 1935 the surplus had shrunk to 100 million marks, and this trend continued. The situation was to some extent the natural consequence of the National Socialist government's policy of autarky, for it meant that the country's economic resources, limited as they were, had to be organized in such a way as to render the country independent of foreign supplies. Since the ulterior goal was readiness for war, this policy was carried out whatever the intrinsic viability of the activities was when measured by standards derived from the world market. Mining operations for low-grade ore were extended, and oil borings carried through. The synthetic production of such materials as rubber and fibers was vigorously pursued. As a result, a good deal of additional work was provided for the Germans, who were now producing these goods instead of importing them from abroad. Of course, self-sufficiency was never fully achieved, but it did increase considerably. Hitler once admitted Germany's limitations: "We know that the geographical situation of Germany, a country poor in raw materials, does not permit of autarky. It must be emphasized again and again that the government is anything but hostile towards exports." (79) Nonetheless, the policy was pushed as hard as circumstances would allow in order to make Germany ready for war, when imports might be cut off. Wehrwirtschaft, or an economy for defense, was the euphemistic expression employed to describe this military economy, which was based on the subordination of commercial motives to national military needs. In light of this objective, it is extraordinary how little Germany was prepared for the world war into which Hitler's policies eventually plunged the country. The only explanation is that the regime, in view of Hitler's conception of a lightning war, did not expect it to last very long or, even less, to turn into a world war.
As an illustration of what this search for war materials, combined with the policy of self-sufficiency, meant, one might cite the Goer-ing Works —plants intended to exploit low-grade iron ores found in
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central Germany that were not economical in the usual sense. These works were part of the rapidly increasing business activity of the party and its agencies. Publishing, printing, and real estate had, of course, been important party activities even in the days of the Weimar Republic, but to these were added in the thirties a considerable number of other fields. Among these, the Goering Works, or more fully the Reichswer\e, A.G. für Erzbergbau Und Eisenhütten, Hermann Göring, with a capital of 75 million marks, was the most important. From its original mining and steelmaking, it soon branched out in many other directions. It has been called a gangster organization, designed to steal from as many other businesses as possible, especially in such conquered and occupied territories as Austria and Czechoslovakia. (263e) Originally the capital for this enterprise was gathered by Goering, who used every means at the disposal of a totalitarian dictator, especially intimidation. Since the venture had no capitalist appeal and hence could not command credit, Goering intimidated bankers and industrialists into contributing their share (155 million marks out of 400 million in 1939). This brings us to one of the key aspects of the National Socialist economy.
The substitution of fear for confidence fundamentally alters the nature of an economy. It ceases to be "capitalist." Credit derives from the Latin word credo or "I believe"; since here we find substituted "I fear," such a system might well be called a timet system. (290a) Such a system did, in fact, constitute the basis of government finance under the Nazis. Not only industrial enterprise, but the whole field of public borrowing came to depend upon the intimidation of the public. The consequent vast increase in Germany's public debt, eventually reaching nearly 500 billion marks (100 billion dollars), was the consequence. It raised, of course, a serious question of how to go on. One ingenious professor, presumably with tongue in cheek, suggested just before the war that this was Hitler's great invention in the field of public finance, offering an opportunity for every German to help the Führer achieve the goals that his genius sought to realize. (352) The question of ultimate limits to such a system of forced borrowing he answered by saying that at some point there must be a "creative sacrifice." This sacrifice would consist of every loyal German's accepting the cancellation of the Reich's indebtedness, so as to free the Führer's hands for further
40
75
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ventures. It was a neat, sycophantic way of describing state bankruptcy, but it turned out that the sacrifice was quite uncreative and resulted from the collapse of the Hitler regime. While the system lasted, though, it gave the government a good deal of capital it might not otherwise have been able to secure. In a sense, the fiscal operation of a totalitarian economy may thus be compared to that of a constitutional system at war, when large-scale financing of the government is carried out on the basis of patriotic appeals, backed by a good deal of pressure from various sources.
Under this timet system there was, obviously, no natural limit to an increase in the government's indebtedness, and the result was a rapidly mounting debt. It rose on an ascending scale as shown by the following figures (in rounded billion marks) : 1932, 11; 1933, 12; 1936, 15; 1938, 20; 1939, 30. (340) It was the application of the timet system to foreign-trade negotiations that really constituted the essence of Hjalmar Schacht's dealings with the smaller countries, especially the Balkans. Here, too, threats were employed to extract goods and loans in connection with their delivery, which could not have been secured on the basis of free bargaining. (263d) The threats were primarily in the field of foreign trade itself, such as stopping all imports from a particular country, but at times they went a good deal further. "The aim of Germany's trade policy thus became exceedingly simple: to buy from a country as much as you can . . . but without paying." (263m) Thus Germany became more and more of a debtor nation under a clearing system that concentrated all control over foreign-trade balances in the hands of the government. (250)
Franz Neumann made this point as part of his detailed analysis of the National Socialist economy. (263) His central concern was to show that this economy was neither socialist nor state capitalist. To be sure, the law gave the government unlimited power; it could do almost anything and could expropriate anybody, but this law, he thought, in fact hid the reality, and the economy remained "capitalist." He minimized the role of planning and depicted the economy as compounded of two parts: the "monopolistic economy" and the "command economy." The monopolistic economy he interpreted as characterized by a great increase in cartels and monopolies which, aided and abetted by the government and the party, maximized profits. "The structure of [this part of] the German economy is one
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of a fully monopolized and cartellized economy," in which the small businessman and the worker are at the mercy of the big tycoons. (218) The second part, the command economy, is that section where the interfering and regimenting "state" is at work. Yet he felt that neither direct economic activities of the party and state, in the nationalized sector, nor the control of prices, of investments and profits, of foreign trade, and of labor constituted state capitalism, "in spite of the fundamental changes that are the inevitable consequence of regimentation." Leaving aside the largely semantic question of whether to call the National Socialist economy "state capitalism," it is evident from Neumann's facts, as well as from much evidence that has come to light since (115; 218), that the regime definitely held the central control and direction of the entire economy through the bureaucratic co-ordination of its formerly independent corporate entities, including typically most other associations and group activities. (263n) That key figures in the control set-up were party members as well as businessmen clinches the argument. The key posts in many directorates of banks and industrial combines were also occupied by men who at the same time were powerful figures in the Nazi hierarchy, just as they are in the Communist regimes. If we disregard the Hegelian and Marxist concern with the state, what remains is the central direction and control of the entire economy.
European countries have traditionally let certain sectors of the economy be operated by the government. Democratic Switzerland no less than autocratic Prussia have run their railroads and telephone and telegraph services as government monopolies. This is the monarchical mercantilist tradition developed first of all in France, where it continues strong to this day. The policy of letting the government participate in the economy, especially where natural monopolies present the problem of effective control in the public interest, has been greatly expanded since the war. In Britain, France, and elsewhere, banking, mining, and other basic economic activities have been placed under government control. These economies are, therefore, neither capitalist nor socialist in any strict sense, though they are obviously less socialist than the Soviet Union. The term "mixed economy" has been suggested for them. The Fascist regimes, in a sense, also operated such mixed economies. But under such regimes no part of the economy is free from government
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interference. Central direction and control is concentrated in the hands of the party and its ruler-dictator, and no popularly elected parliament or other representative body exists to interpose its views between the government and the economy. The government is consequently not subject to extended criticism and the rival proposals of alternating party majorities. This does not by any means preclude the influence of businessmen who are members of the party and its ruling groups; quite the contrary. In the case of the Hitler regime, such businessmen were able to manipulate the corporate system, with its cartels and trusts, as well as the control of prices, investments, profits, and foreign trade, to their personal advantage on a large scale. The careers of men like Frick, who was brought to trial at Nuremberg, show how extensive were the possibilities for personal enrichment by these practices. (162b) Such personal careers, however, are incidental to the over-all pattern; they correspond to the careers of skilled managers in the Soviet Union — men like Saburov or Malyshev or the fallen-from-grace Voznesensky. The pattern is one of central control and direction; it came to full fruition in Hitler Germany only during the war, when Albert Speer was invested with dictatorial powers of direction.
The focus of this central direction and control went through three different stages. There was the stage of work-creation programs, the stage of preparation for war under the Four-Year Plan, and the attempt at total mobilization during the war. At each of these stages, various decisions were taken which constituted intervention in the operations of a free market economy and deflected economic development into the channels desired by the totalitarian rulers. It is true that some nontotalitarian countries have, within the context of constitutional democracy, attempted similar central direction — subject to extended public criticism and, therefore, to party competition and rivalry leading to substantial alterations and even abandonment — but this does not alter the fact that interference by central control, combined with the other typical features discussed, is characteristic of totalitarian dictatorship and would not be possible in a freer economy. Such central control operates differently (but not necessarily better) when accompanied by ideological and one-party leadership, by secret-police terror, and by government monopoly of mass communications and weapons. For the inherent potentialities of corruption that such a system entails by its
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large-scale bureaucratization are greatly enhanced by these totalitarian features. The detailed record now available shows that this corruption was in fact at work in both Fascist systems. Therefore, such data as the increase in undistributed profits, consequent share values, and dividends (on the basis of statistical averages) show that they were what has been rather imaginatively dubbed "vampire" economies. Bogged down in a morass of special favors, which are the very opposite of the workings of the price mechanism of the competitive market economy (290b), they were centrally planned and directed to the pursuit of aggressive and expansive war.
The situation in Fascist Italy under the corporate system is revealing. The essential effect of this system was to put all of Italian industry into one big pool, to make the government assume responsibility for a minimum profit and to grant it in return the power to direct all investment and hence the future development of industry. (310c) That such an arrangement, based as it is upon guaranteed profits, does not constitute a competitive market economy is evident. That there existed differential rewards is not decisive, for they also prevail in Communist countries.
In conclusion, it is readily conceded that the differences between the fascist type of industrial arrangement and the communist one are many and obvious. In one case, the totalitarian system is superimposed on an established industrial structure; in the other, the industrial structure is built almost from scratch. In the fascist economies, the ownership of the means of production is formally left intact and the same "tycoons" continue to preside at board meetings (with the exception of government-sponsored enterprises such as the Goering Works); in the communist economies, industry is state-owned and the managers are state-appointed officials (or, as in some earlier cases, former owners are temporarily kept as state managers). But these do not appear to be really fundamental differences. One needs to go below the surface and ask: who controls the industrial development, who sets its quotas and allocates resources, who determines the ultimate objectives of industrial production, who regulates awards, who controls the personnel, who establishes political standards of loyalty for all those involved ?
The answers to these questions suggest that the modern totalitarian regimes are basically alike in recognizing the vitality of the
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industrial process and in considering it the key to political success, domestic or external. As a result they have made the "battle for production" a central theme of their action programs, and to achieve it they have subordinated the industrial machine to the requirements of the regime. Such questions as who holds formal title to property, how "profits," that is to say, rewards, are determined, and whether former owners and decision makers continue to hold positions, provided they conform to the regime's commands, are of relatively minor significance. What is decisive is the overpowering reality of totalitarian central control by the dictator and his party.
19
LABOR: BOND OR FREE?
The centrally directed economy, and the bureaucratic coordination of all associations and corporate entities that possess a degree of autonomy and self-government under a constitutional democracy, engulf the organizations of labor. This fact is, in a sense, the most disillusioning aspect of communism from the viewpoint of the laboring man. Labor has been told and is still being told that socialism as envisaged in Marxism, that is to say, socialism based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, means the liberation of labor from capitalist oppression and exploitation. What labor finds, however, is that in reality the all-powerful party through its government, which acts on behalf of the proletariat and presumably embodies its "dictatorship," deprives the organizations of labor, the unions, of their former independent status and transforms them into adjuncts of the governmental bureaucracy. The same thing happens under fascism; here too the "socialist" dictatorship is prepared to coordinate the unions and to synchronize their actions with the policies of the government.
Over the last hundred years, trade unions became important organizations in those countries in which industrialism and capitalism developed. As successors to the guilds of medieval craftsmen, they were built upon the common workmanship and the common interest of workers in a particular "trade." The many highly specialized unions of the American Federation of Labor are typical of this early unionism. Later, as industries grew and plants became larger and larger, there also developed more inclusive unions, less concerned with workmanship and more with the common interests of all the workers in a particular industry, of which the Congress of
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Industrial Organizations is typical. The merger of the AFL and the CIO is based upon the recognition that all workers, no matter how organized, have certain common interests and tasks. (104h)
In the earlier period and down to the end of the nineteenth century, employers resented and opposed the free labor unions, and in some countries they do to this day. It has, however, become increasingly clear to management in all advanced countries that labor is not only theoretically entitled to form its own free associations if it chooses to do so — that, in a constitutional democracy, labor has the right to be organized — but that it is actually of great advantage to management in industry to have unions to deal with. Modern labor relations are based upon the freely negotiated contractual relationship between "capital" and "labor," which collective bargaining has brought into being. The idea of a company union, organized and dominated by the employer and management, has been superseded by the free union because the paternalistic conception of the former proved inadequate to the task of representing the worker as a full-fledged citizen in a democratic society.
Among the most important, and for a long time the most hotly contested, weapons of the organized worker was his right to strike, collectively to refuse to continue working until a bargain had been arrived at between his representatives, typically the officers of his union or unions, and the employer. This right to strike, while not found in the constitutions of eighteenth-century vintage, has made its way into more recent constitutional documents, for instance, a number of the American states, France, Italy, and the Federal Republic of Germany. It is also contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations. However, the assent of the Soviet Union and the satellites could be secured only because this declaration lacks all enforcement machinery; no such right is recognized in the USSR. On the other hand, the Soviet Union's constitution leads off its tenth chapter, dealing with fundamental rights and duties, by article 118 guaranteeing the right to work, adding that this right is "ensured by the socialist organization of the national economy" and that the growth of productive forces, the elimination of economic crises, and the abolition of unemployment— presumably consequences of this socialist organization — contribute to such guarantee. In short, the right is not secured by
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juridical means, by sanctions and procedures for enforcing them, but by social forces.
Strange as it may seem from an ideological viewpoint, the USSR, the country in which the worker is supposed to be in effective control of the government, rejects the right to strike, along with the idea of free and independent unions. The argument advanced for this policy is basically very simple. Why, it is asked, should one group of workers be able to force its demand upon the rest of the workers, when all of them together control the means of production ? The argument would be unanswerable if the workers' control were effective, from a democratic standpoint, instead of being embodied in the monolithic power of the Communist Party, which monopolizes the repesentation of the whole proletariat, including even the farm workers. As a matter of fact, this problem of workers' participation in the control of industry first presented itself in the Soviet Union in simple syndicalist form. Soviets were formed in each plant, and the management of the plant was entrusted to these councils. But the efforts at building a comprehensive structure from the ground up soon ran into snags. The position of the unions and the form of their effective participation proved, in the twenties, to be the real touchstone of Soviet organization.
As early as 1920, at the Tenth Party Congress, strong opposition developed among some trade unionists against the centralizing, statist tendencies of the newly established dictatorship of the proletariat. Led by Shliapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, the so-called Workers' Opposition came out strongly for a syndicalist Utopia in which economic enterprises were to be run by workers organized into trade unions. (312e) At the other extreme, they were opposed by the "statists," led by Trotsky and Bukharin, who urged immediate absorption of the trade unions by the state, on the ground that no conflict was possible between a state of the workers and the workers themselves. Lenin, after briskly attacking the Workers' Opposition for engaging in anarchistic, syndicalist, and non-Marxist agitation, responded with the transmission-belt theory, according to which the trade unions were to act as intermediaries between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the working masses: "Trade Unions are the reservoirs of state power, a school of Communism, a school of management. In this sphere the specific and main thing is not
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administration, but 'contacts' between the central state administration, national economy and the broad masses of the toilers." (205g) Such a definition obviously changed entirely the nature of the trade union from an institution of workers into an agency of the party and its government. The history of the Soviet trade unions from this moment on is one of steady decline in independence and of their transformation into a bureaucratic institution for dealing with labor problems.
For a while, during the NEP period, the unions remained active on behalf of the working masses, but on the eve of the Sixteenth Party Congress the trade-union leadership was accused of Menshe-vism and purged. The congress proclaimed the no-conflict theory previously postulated by Trotsky, and rapid development of industry was declared to be the workers' primary interest. The trade unions were told to help the party increase labor productivity, and the process of trade-union submission to the political requirements of the regime was, broadly speaking, put in final form. At the same time, the newly launched policy of industrialization resulted in a rapid expansion in the number of industrial workers, giving rise to numerous problems of administration, organization, welfare, and so on. From 14.5 million industrial workers in 1930, the total grew by 1940 to 30.4 million and by 1948 to 33.4 million. (372) This trend has continued. Statistics since 1948 do not separate the industrial labor force from the white-collar workers. Including these under the heading of "nonagricultural labor," the figures are as follows: 1930 — 18.1 million, 1940 — 40.8 million, 1950 — 43 million, 1959 — 56.2 million. (17a) It became the function of the trade unions to give these masses an organizational framework and leadership. (312f)
In the words of a Soviet student of constitutional law, "The Soviet trade unions are not a formal party organization but, in fact, they are carrying out the directives of the party. All leading organs of the trade unions consist primarily of communists who execute the party line in the entire work of the trade unions." (68) This frank comment, written in 1940, is orthodox doctrine to this day. The constitution provides that citizens "have the right to unite in public organizations" (art. 126), but this right is really a duty; for it is explained that it serves the purpose of developing "the organizational initiative and political activity of the masses."
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This conception is elaborated in the party program of 1961 as follows: "The Trade Unions acquire particular importance as schools of administration and economic management, as schools of communism. The Party shall help the trade unions to take a growing share." There then follows a list of the unions' tasks: to increase communist consciousness, to work for technical progress, higher productivity, fulfillment and overfulfillment of state plans and assignments, to improve the skill of workers and their working and living conditions, to protect the material interests and rights of the workers, to ensure that housing and cultural development plans are fulfilled and that other social services (health, social insurance) are improved, to control consumption funds and the work done in the factories. (355b; 89t) Clearly, the activities of the unions are far-flung, multifarious, and important; yet they do not alter, but rather confirm, the fact that the Soviet trade unions are agencies of the party.
Their organization, like that of the party, is hierarchical and centralized. Real power lies not with the nominally all-powerful congress, but with a much smaller body, the presidium of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. All unions are in the end subordinate to this body and subject to its instructions. The tasks of the Soviet trade unions, apart from that o£ raising productivity and struggling relentlessly "for complete elimination of the rotten practice of equal wages" (189b), include the administration of the state program of social insurance, sanatoria, and workers' rest homes, supervision of food served at work and of factory housing conditions, control of the level of political consciousness, participation in planning, and limited grievance intervention on behalf of the workers. Thus, with the exception of the last item, the broad pattern of trade-union functions indicates clearly the extent to which the union has become absorbed into the workings of the totalitarian system.
Worker-management grievances are adjudicated by Norms and Conflicts Commissions (RKK). The majority of such cases arise either because of alleged management injustices or as a result of varying interpretations of existing labor regulations. According to one authority:
To the extent that the existing procedures provide an outlet for the ventilation and adjustment of certain types of grievances, they serve the Party
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leadership well. The much-publicized cases in which workers' complaints lead to corrective action have important symbolic significance. They help to renew faith in the regime's sense of equity, and they appear to validate the paternal concern of the Soviet rulers for the condition of the masses. Even though the grievance machinery is restricted in scope, such relief as it affords commands popular support and makes a positive contribution to the strength and productive efficiency of the regime. (89n)
Since 1947 the trade unions have been empowered to negotiate collective agreements with management, but here again the right is rather unreal. Such agreements must follow the standard form prescribed by the governmental authorities, while the broad pattern of wages and salaries is centrally determined and decreed. The so-called collective agreements, therefore, tend to become little more than a repetition of the existing prescriptions for the given industrial branch, to which is added a specific statement, incorporated in the agreement, as to the quotas and production goals to be achieved by the workers and management. The agreement becomes a reminder to the workers of what is expected of them rather than a protection of their interests. Soviet workers are not allowed to forget the fact that the Code of Labor Legislation states explicitly that "when a worker fails to fulfill by his own fault the established norm, his wages are paid according to the quantity and quality of his actual output without a guarantee to him of any minimum wages whatsoever" (art. 57). Unlike his capitalist counterpart, according to Soviet legislation "an employer is not obliged to support the worker." (189c)
The Soviet worker evidently toils under severe restrictions imposed upon him by the state. For many years, his eight-hour work day explicitly made no allowance for time off for meals — hence the actual time spent at work is longer — and he worked six days a week. There has been considerable improvement since 1956. Wages and pensions have risen, and the work week has been reduced, now approaching the forty-hour week. But work discipline is harsh in Communist countries. According to Soviet legislation, a worker is subject to severe penalties for late arrival at work. During the war and after, tardiness of even twenty minutes could result in imprisonment. This was modified after Stalin died. Another severe limitation on a Soviet worker's freedom is the legal authority of the government to determine his place of work. The Ministry of Labor
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Reserves, set up in 1947, was given the right to assign workers to priority industries. Workers could be frozen in the jobs and denied the right to quit. Noncompliance could result in prosecution by the state. Since December 1938, Soviet workers have been obliged to carry with them special labor books that include, apart from their personal data, a brief statement of their background, employment record, transfers, and the reasons for them. No one can be hired without such a book. Managers, furthermore, retain the labor books during the workers' employment, and a worker who quits without authorization is thus deprived of this vital document. In more vital industries the worker is also obliged to hand over his passport — a document that every Soviet citizen must have for internal travel and identification. He has, however, the right to give two weeks' notice, but too many job changes are risky. Many social-security benefits are tied to a single enterprise.
There also exists a system of labor conscription. A special government body may assign workers to an enterprise with a manpower problem. Workers must sign long-term contracts and may be transferred long distances, especially to those northern and eastern regions for which labor camps at one time supplied the needed workers.
While at work, the workers are constantly exhorted by their party organizations and by the trade unions to engage in "socialist competition" among themselves, and collectively with the workers of other factories, trusts, or institutions. Special rewards are given to those who excel in overfulfilling their norms, the so-called shock workers; since the thirties the successful shock workers have been known as Stakhanovites, after Stakhanov, a coalminer. The Sta-khanovites receive special medals and badges, as well as financial rewards. They are entitled to certain privileges, such as free railroad travel, while in some cases their children are entitled to free education. It was estimated that in 1948 some 87 percent of the labor force in the USSR was engaged in "socialist competition." (461) Labor-class solidarity under such circumstances is difficult to maintain. Presumably, one of the reasons for Khrushchev's concern for enlisting popular participation and enthusiasm was to be found in this need for identification and the corresponding sense of solidarity with the regime — it was a matter of the productivity of labor.
No account of Soviet labor would be complete without at least a
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Labor
brief reference to the State Labor Reserves. They give training, under a draft system, to youths over fourteen who arc not continuing their studies. After completion of such training, they are assigned by the government to specific occupations where they are needed most. Evaders are prosecuted. The system, apart from its important disdnction between those who condnue higher education, either through scholarship or, until 1956, by paying the fees, and those who do not, gives the government a cheap and steady supply of manpower to be used for urgently needed projects. Furthermore, the system serves to break the youth away from their rustic environment and to transform them into an urban proletariat.
In all this the Soviet trade unions tend to play a role similar to that of the government under radical laissez faire — the role, that is, of a policeman stepping in only in the case of extreme abuse but not positively striving to help the cause of the working man. The trade unions admittedly render some important services to the labor masses, particularly in terms of health and leisure facilities and in helping out on the lowest levels of labor disputes, although the total regimentation of leisure time is irritadng and, in some ways for the average man, perhaps the most obnoxious aspect of totalitarianism. Summing up the role of the trade unions, it is clear that their function is to serve the economic objectives of the system and the political requirements of the regime. To repeat, they are not agencies of Soviet labor, but bureaucratic institutions of the Soviet government and the Communist Party for labor matters.
Beyond this general subjugation of labor in the Soviet totalitarian system, there existed for many years the outright slavery of the labor camps. It is perhaps the most paradoxical feature of a political system erected in the name of Karl Marx that these labor camps should have existed and in an attenuated form still do. For had it not been the most bitter reproach of Karl Marx to the capitalist system that under its so-called "iron law of wages" there was kept in existence a large pool of the unemployed, the "reserve army of industry," who, because they were eager for jobs, kept the wage level down near the minimum of existence? The labor camps that at one time contained millions of people were the communist totalitarian equivalent of the reserve army of industry. They were composed of all kinds of people whom the regime for one reason
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or another did not like, including so-called slackers — men and women who did not slave hard enough for the low wages that the regime paid to many of its workers, though some favored classes of workers were quite well paid. The labor camps provided workers for projects which were run so uneconomically that even the minimum wages of the Soviet Union did not provide an economic basis for their operation.
Conditions in these labor camps were so appalling that their existence became a concern of the United Nations. An ad hoc committee, constituted by UNESCO and the International Labor Organization, was set up in 1952 and, after hearings and presentations by such interested organizations as the Mid-European Study Center, published a report condemning the system. (11a) While the system originated in the Soviet Union, where, in conjunction with a crime wave in the mid-twenties and the later collectivization, an ever larger group of people was incarcerated by the regime, it gradually spread over the entire span of the Soviet bloc. All the satellites, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, and East Germany came to employ the system; it is found in Yugoslavia and China, too. In Russia it was in full swing by 1928, when the peasant resistance to forced collectivization in connection with the First Five-Year Plan produced millions of "criminals." The secret "State Plan for the Development of the National Economy of the USSR in 1941" shows that a substantial portion of Soviet output was produced by slave labor.
What was the size and importance of this slave labor in the Soviet economy, and what can be credited to it? In 1941 slave labor produced 5,325,000 metric tons of coal; 34,730,000 cubic meters of commercial timber and firewood, or 11.9 percent of Soviet production; 14.49 percent of all furniture; 22.58 percent of railroad ties; 40.5 percent of chrome ore; and so on. (lib) Road building, rail construction, and mining in remote regions, like Siberia, have been carried through by this slave labor. The estimates of the number of persons involved in this gigantic "industrial reserve army" varies between 8 and 14 million. To these must be added the satellite labor camps, but no reliable estimates have been made. (11c; 63) If we accept a figure of 10 million for the USSR alone as a broad estimate for the Stalinist period, we must conclude that about 5 percent of the Soviet population was thus "employed," a figure that just about
254 The Directed 'Economy
corresponds to Marx's industrial reserve army. It is in the light of these facts that the Soviet claim for "labor peace" and their proud boast that no unemployment exists in the Soviet Union must be seen and evaluated. The contrast between an unemployed man in the West, eking out a meager existence on the basis of his unemployment-insurance payments, and an inmate of a Soviet labor camp, systematically starved and brutalized, shows the full measure of difference between democracy and totalitarianism. This difference may be vicariously experienced by any reader of Solzhenitsyn's remarkable One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovkh. (333) However, lest he feel too superior, a Westerner ought to compare this account with some realistic appraisals of prisons in the West or chain gangs in the southern United States.
The Fascist dictatorships did not go the whole length of this development before the war, but the Nazi system of slave labor evolved during the war was essentially the same kind of totalitarian reserve army. And all these dictatorships arrived at the subjugation of free trade unions to the party and government. The only difference was in ideological motivation. The Fascists, of course, did not claim that the elimination of the class struggle was the result of its consummation, as is the case in the Soviet Union; rather, they insisted that it be suppressed. The class-struggle doctrine of orthodox Marxism was, in fact, one of the key points of the Fascist attack. The bitterly denounced division of the nation into classes was alleged to be the result of Marxist-Socialist-Communist agitation; hence, after the liquidation of these disturbers of the social peace, a new organization of industrial and labor relations would reunite the nation. The Fascist solution was essentially part of the corporative organization; the National Socialist solution was the Labor Front. In each, the conflict of interest between labor and management-capital was "resolved" by making the assumption that the plant, factory, or industry was a "community" and then to apply the pattern of community organization typical for the regime's own kind of totalitarianism. In Italy this was a matter of subjecting both management and labor to the controlling direction of the "state," while in Germany the employer was made the fiihrer of his workers.
The National Socialist policy of establishing a labor front, which would transform the contractual relations of labor and management
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into communal relations, cannot be said to have been a success. Yet it completely destroyed the freedom of the unions. (263g; 439) It must be seen in conjunction with related policies of declaring the plant a community in the so-called Charter of Labor of January 20, 1934, (263h) of organizing leisure time in "strength through joy" activities, and of compulsory work assignments. The Labor Front was a party "formation," which included virtually every gainfully employed person, management as well as employees, 25 million in all. It was led by Dr. Ley, one of the early leaders of the Nazi Party. At the outset, it took over the entire trade-union structure, including all of its property. The utter failure of the unions to fight back has been attributed to their bureaucratization under the Weimar Republic, which transformed their leadership into an unenterprising officialdom. Whether they actually could have accomplished much may be doubted. In the Soviet Union, as we have seen, the attempt to maintain some measure of independence, even under Communist leadership, proved unsuccessful. (263i) The same may be said of the small units or cells the National Socialists had organized originally to infiltrate the unions. They too would not maintain the independence of the unions. Instead, the Labor Front assumed the task of indoctrinating labor in National Socialist ideology. These plant communities were grouped according to industries into national communities (Reichsbetriebsgemeinschaften), each of which was subject to an office of the National Labor Front. Since the Fuhrerprinzip was applied throughout, it is clear that in a sense every worker in every plant in Hitler's Reich was a cog in the vast bureaucratic hierarchy. The union dues the Labor Front continued to collect were in fact taxes, considering that the Front did not represent the workers but the party bureaucracy. (263j)
It might be well to say a word more, therefore, about the "plant community" of the Charter of Labor. It states the concept as follows: "In the plant, the enterpriser as leader and the employees and workers as followers work together for the accomplishment of the objectives of the plant and for the common good of the nation and the state." In the light of this general concept, it further provided that "the leader of the plant decides all matters concerning the plant, as regulated by statute," and that the leader "shall look after the welfare of the followers, while the latter shall place full confidence in him." The paternalistic notion that the employer is
256 The Directed Economy
responsible for the welfare of his workers was traditional in Germany. (55) It used to be based on the fact that as owner of the plant he must look after those who worked in it, much as a house-owner is responsible for those who enter his house. It had been somewhat shaken by the development of the Works Councils (in the Weimar Republic), which the courts considered ground for asserting that the responsibility was now a joint one. They were a feeble beginning of democracy in industry—the councils now set up under the Codetermination Law in the Federal Republic constitute a further extension of it — and hence the National Socialists immediately transformed them in accordance with their totalitarian leadership notions. Renamed Confidence Councils (Ver-trautnsrdte), members were nominated by the manager and the leader of the party cell in the factory and approved by acclamation of the followers.
One cannot but agree with the conclusion that the Nazi innovations in the labor field, as we have sketched them here, were "devices for the manipulation of the working class." (263k) The system was rounded out by two other features, already mentioned: leisure-time activities and the compulsory assignment to a particular workplace. The latter began under the Four-Year Plan in 1938 and became more onerous, as the country faced war and defeat. The contractual relationship as the basis of work became a mockery under these assignments: when a worker was assigned to a plant, he was assumed to have entered into a contract, subject of course to the general labor law. Workers became tied to their place of work, for they were forbidden to leave without permission from the government's Labor Exchange. Firing was likewise made subject to government veto. In short, the freedom of both employer and employee to choose was almost completely destroyed; as in the USSR, the workers constituted a vast reserve army to be assigned at pleasure to the managers of plants operating within the context of the government's plans and directions. Since the government also assumed the right to fix both minimum and maximum wages at the outset of the war, and to regulate all other conditions of work, it is evident that to speak of this economy as "capitalist" in the sense of a free, competitive market economy is untenable: the labor market was neither free nor competitive. It is therefore not surprising that the efforts of the Hitler regime to increase productivity and self-
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sufficiency failed. While labor productivity rose steadily in the United States between 1933 and 1939, no such development took place in Germany. Instead of increasing productivity, the businessmen exploited labor ruthlessly with the aid and encouragement of the Hitler regime.
To draw a veil over this sordid drama, the Nazi Party developed the "strength through joy" program of organized leisure time. It was actually patterned on the Italian Dopolavoro program, but carried to greater length and surrounded with a great halo of innovation. It is perhaps too much to say that leisure time was regimented, because workers were free to participate or not to some extent, but it certainly was a palliative to sugarcoat the loss of the genuine rights that German labor had possessed as a result of the efforts of its free unions over many decades. Claiming that labor too was a community, a Nazi official put it thus: "to win strength for daily work was therefore the final goal which the new creation sought to achieve." Thus the Italian leisure organization "After Work" became the National Socialist community, "Strength through Joy." (2631)
In Italy, the workers were organized as one of the "pillars" of the corporative organization. Indeed, the organization evolved out of the peculiar Fascist "syndicates," unions that were actually developed in competition with the free unions and gained ascendancy, under the skillful leadership of Edmondo Rossoni, after the Fascists had seized power. The original radical notion, derived from older syndicalist thought, that the union would take over the plants by absorbing management, was in typical Fascist fashion superseded by the idea that "corporations" composed of both employers and employees would accept direction and control of the state. The thought underlying the Fascist corporative set-up was in fact to some extent akin to older conservative and Catholic thought; but whereas the papal encyclical Rerum No-varum (1891) had put forward the idea of a corporative structure along medieval lines, that is to say, decentralized and localized in authority, the Fascist conception was "hierarchical" and all authority was derived from the head of the corporate state, the minister of corporations, Benito Mussolini. It was the Italian version of "coordination" under which all associations became Fascist. (310) As one student put it many years ago: "The dictatorship is the neces-
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sary rack and screw of the Corporate system." (95h; 220d) The corporative system was initiated by the Charter of Labor of April 21, 1927, which the Grand Council of Fascism adopted as a party measure (it was then a party organ). It was, of course, soon transformed into a governmental policy by statutory enactment and judicial decision. Under it, Italian workers lost all the rights and privileges which their unions had fought for and won. A paternalistic governmental control and direction was substituted for it, closely resembling the Soviet Union's trade-union program, except that in Italy (and in Germany) the nation served as the ideological excuse instead of the proletariat. As a consequence, in Italy the state rather than the party was predominant. Throughout the charter and in its subsequent implementation the government was supreme. The key passages assert that "since the private organization of producdon is a function of national concern, the organizer of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction of production . . . The employed ... is an active collaborator in the economic enterprise, the direction of which belongs to the employer, who bears the responsibility for it" (95i) Measures of social welfare, such as health protection, scholarships for children, and insurance against disability, illness, and old age, as well as governmental control of minimum wages, holidays, and vocational education, ought not to deceive anyone about the basic political change: both workers and management lost their autonomy, but, in view of labor's weak position, this loss of freedom was for them much more serious; it made this "charter" a solemn mockery. Proclaiming the "freedom of the syndicates," the charter asserted that "only the legally recognized syndicate, subjected to the control of the State, has the right to represent legally all the employers and employed." (95j) It comes almost as an anticlimax when one learns that "strikes are criminal offenses." Only some of the workers participated in this sham organization at first; but under Fascist pressure, it ran as high as 87 percent in industry. (95k) Leaving aside the employers, one can readily see that the unions had ceased to be representative and militant organs of the workers and had become instruments for the disciplining of labor, run by thousands of Fascist officials completely subservient to the government.
It is within this context that Dopolavoro must be seen. It amounted in fact to transforming the rich free associations of the
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Italian people, in all the various spheres of cultural and social life, into bureaucratically controlled appendages of the government. Music and art, literary and social leisure activities, including mandolin societies and the like, became Fascist by being absorbed into the huge network of Dopolavoro. In his wonderfully sardonic portrayal of all this humbug, Salvemini, after reporting that exactly 1,155,365 excursions, musical performances, sports exercises, and so on had been taking place under Dopolavoro in 1934, concludes: "The Fascists have not yet come to the point of publishing statistics on the number of kisses exchanged under the auspices of Dopolavoro, but these will soon be counted, and the staggering total will be attributed to the genius of Mussolini." (310)
In conclusion, it seems very clear that under totalitarian dictatorship, in spite of its "popular" participation, labor has lost its freedom and independence, that its organizations have become bureaucratic agencies of the government, and that not only in his working hours, but in his leisure time as well, the worker has become a cog in the totalitarian centrally directed economy. To complete the paradox of his "workers' paradise," any worker who fails to live up to the standards set by the regime is in danger of being made a slave in one of the many labor camps of the regime. Thus the industrial reserve army of capitalism that aroused Marx's indignation has been transformed into an army of "men in bond."
20
AGRICULTURE: ORGANIZING THE PEASANTRY
Agricultural production has been as central a concern of the totali-tarians as industrial production. But the problems to be faced and the policies adopted have been quite different between the regimes and within them. The Communists, first in the USSR, afterwards in Germany, and throughout Eastern Europe as well as in China, started with an appeal based on treating the peasants as brothers of the workers; the Fascists and National Socialists did the same. Yet for the Communists this was a concession based upon a sharp differentiation between the poor peasants, who were part of the toiling masses, and the more well-to-do ones, who were soon denounced as kulaks and lumped together with capitalists. But the Fascists, and even more the Nazis, idealized the peasantry under such slogans as "blood and soil." The concrete situation with which different totalitarian regimes were confronted also played a role: in the Soviet Union more than 80 percent of the population were peasants in 1917, while in other countries at the time of the totalitarian takeover, the percentage was lower (except in China of course). In Italy the peasants were around 60 percent of the population, and in Germany perhaps 30 percent. The situation in the satellite countries — Poland, Hungary, Rumania — resembled that in Italy, while in Czechoslovakia the peasantry constituted about 55 percent. In China, finally, the population was so very largely of the peasant type that the Communist leadership there actually found it necessary to alter the ideology of communism somewhat to take account of the situation, at least in the revolutionary stage. (320b)
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The policies pursued by the totalitarian regimes in the field of agriculture cannot be understood unless one appreciates fully the role of the peasantry in the countries concerned. The related issue of the need for "land reform" must also be considered at the start. Only after these two topics have been dealt with can agricultural operations of the totalitarian regimes be adequately analyzed by comparative evaluation. Before we turn to the peasantry, the problem of land reform needs to be briefly sketched. Throughout the world, the problem of large-scale landed estates, in many instances the result of preceding feudal conditions of land ownership (85), has become a focal point of attack for widely demanded reforms. Throughout Asia, "landlordism" has become a batde cry of the embittered peasant masses, who have been kept in conditions of abject poverty. The same may be said of considerable areas of Europe, especially in the east and south. Land reform, meaning essentially the distribution of great estates among independent farmers each receiving a parcel sufficient for effective operation (varying from 20 to 100 acres, depending on conditions of climate, soil, and marketing) and thus obtaining the necessary "means of production," should have been the policy of those regimes aspiring to democratic rule. Unfortunately, time and again, landed proprietors have employed their vested wealth and entrenched social position to thwart the reform efforts of progressive democratic elements. Thereby they prepared the ground for totalitarian movements, both communist and fascist. The communists adopted the land-reform slogan — distribution of land to the peasants — as their most potent weapon in building effective mass support, while the fascists, both in Italy and Germany, not to speak of Rumania, Hungary, and the rest, though in fact allied with the big landholders, talked much of their interest in the peasantry and its rights. Everywhere it is the same story: a land-hungry peasantry, deeply disappointed at the failure of presumably democratic regimes to provide them with the means for making a living, turn to the totalitarians in the hope of a solution and eventually find themselves trapped and transformed into pawns of the totalitarian party and government. For the latter control the means of production and more especially the land, either through outright proprietorship or indirectly by means of an elaborate pattern of bureaucratic techniques.
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The peasants, then, demand land reform. What actually is this peasantry? As a human type, the peasant is preindustrialist and precapitalist. Americans are apt to see him in comic-opera perspective, clad in quaint costumes, singing old folk songs and dancing folk dances. This image is not wholly in error; throughout Europe and Asia the peasantry has been the guardian of older, more earthy traditions, habits, and beliefs. But, politically speaking, the most significant feature of the peasant is his attitude toward the land and toward the methods of production he employs in tilling it. Typically the peasant is not market-oriented, but tradition-oriented. The focal point of his outlook is not what brings the best results in terms of market requirements, but what does so in terms of ancestral practices. Frequently the peasant is decidedly fixed, indeed immobile, in his attitude toward the land. Unlike the American or Australian farmer, or even the Danish or Swiss farmer, the peasant thinks of his land not as "capital" of a certain value, but rather as a heritage handed down by his forebears and to be handed on to future generations.
This rootedness, this attachment to the land as a timeless possession, makes the peasant a misfit in modern industrial society, rejected and despised by its protagonists, idolized by romantic adversaries of industrial society. (158; 336) Political parties have had difficulties in assimilating him — the rightist ones because of their tie-up with big landowners, the leftist ones because of their hosdlity to property, the liberal and middle-of-the-road ones because of their friendliness to industrial capitalism. As a result, the peasant has been the stepchild of democratic parliamentary politics. From time to time, he has formed his own party; peasant parties had come to play a significant role, particularly in the Slavic countries now overrun by the USSR, such as Poland, But these were, of course, minority parties, and since they were led by responsible agrarian leaders they were no match for the demagoguery of the totalitarian movements— both the Bolsheviks and the Fascists made the peasant a major focus of their mass propaganda and continue to do so* Indeed, Mao has made the role of the peasant the main point of his
* Strange as it may seem, peasant parties carry on even after emigrating and have formed an International Union, which publishes a monthly bulletin very representative of the democratic peasants' viewpoint. They speak of themselves, in contrast to the Red International of the workers, as the Green International.
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adaptation of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy to the Chinese situation. (320c) In Yugoslavia, there has been a growing recognition of peasant farm property, and the new constitution recognizes it as a form of private ownership compatible with socialism. Collectivization of agriculture is handled administratively. And in Poland, the re-establishment of a measure of autonomy by Gomulka was soon followed by the dissolution of collective farms and the restoration of peasant proprietorship. The Russian Communists, by contrast, have continued to maintain collective agriculture, even though many changes have been made over the years.
At the start, the Bolsheviks appealed to the peasants as well as to the workers, and in the early years of the regime, the Soviets were workers' and peasants' councils. All this soon proved a hollow sham. The peasants, who had been happy to distribute the land of the big estate owners among themselves, were decidedly hostile to the Soviet government's coercive policy of regimenting food deliveries. After the failure of an initial effort at conciliation — the New Economic Policy of Lenin (1922-1928) —Stalin turned against the peasantry (89u) and under the First Five-Year Plan undertook the wholesale liquidation of this class. The process was ideologically rationalized by dividing the peasantry into rich and poor peasants and by claiming that the fight was only directed against the former. Actually, they were only the first line of attack and, in developing the collectivist forms of agriculture, the independent peasant was largely eliminated from the Soviet scene (233); the same process is at present being repeated in the European satellites.
The collectivization in the Soviet Union was largely a forcible one. The peasants were pressed into collective farms by open coercion, and flying squads of party activists, Komsomol and secret-police detachments, and even army units roamed through the countryside to subdue the recalcitrant ones. The kulaks, or richer peasants, were rounded up and deported in great numbers to outlying districts of the USSR, where they were settled on barren land and forced to farm collectively. Some were sent directly into labor camps, and the history of the forced-labor camps really begins in this period. Resistance and oppression were particularly severe in the Ukraine, where the soil is rich and the peasants had the greatest vested interest in their landholdings. The regime utilized large-scale deportation here, in an effort to coerce the peasants to accept collec-
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tive farming; the notorious Ukrainian famine of the early thirties was at least in part the result. Literally hundreds of thousands died of starvation, and the general decline in food production affected the entire Soviet Union. Starving peasants, long queues, beggars — these were common on the Soviet scene at that time. The violence went so far that Stalin was persuaded to apply remedial measures; by his "Dizzy with Success" speech he put a halt to the rapidly deteriorating situation. The broad pattern of collective agriculture had been established, however, and the next few years saw the gradual elimination of the remaining farmers. By 1934, 84.5 percent of agriculture had been collectivized; by 1939, the figure was 93.5 percent. (324; 325c)
World War II and the collapse of Soviet power in the Ukraine and Byelorussia resulted in the destruction of the collective-farm system in the most important agricultural areas. At the same time, the exigencies of the war effort forced the party to ignore some serious abuses of the collective system which were developing in other areas of the USSR. Private garden plots (which collective farmers are allowed to retain on a very small scale) tended to be enlarged by stealth and the livestock of the collective farms was frequently and illegally divided by the peasants. In addition, rumors were circulating that the party was planning to abandon the collective system altogether and to restore land to the peasants. The party, however, had no such intention. As early as 1943 a decree was issued outlining the measures to be followed in the reconstruction of the collective-farm system in the newly reoccupied areas. (183a) As the Germans retreated, the returning Soviet administration immediately set itself the task of recapturing any land taken over by the peasants. After the conclusion of the hostilities, an all-out campaign was launched to invigorate collectivized agriculture, and in a very much publicized decree of 1946, "On Measures to Liquidate the Violations of the Regulations of Agricultural Artels in Collective Farms" (183b), the party charted the struggle for discipline, intensified production, and full collectivization.
The prewar pattern of agricultural organization was thus reestablished. It consisted of some 250,000 collective farms (the kolkhozes), where the workers allegedly owned the land in common, were paid by labor-days (by amount of work they actually
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performed), and shared the profits and losses of the collective farm, depending on the harvest; there was a smaller number of state-owned farms (the sovkhozes), where the farmers were paid normal wages irrespective of the harvest; and there were some 8,000 machine-tractor stations (MTS), which served the various farms with their machinery, tractors, and technical assistance on a contractual basis. The party leadership, however, was still plagued by the fact that the large number of collective farms made central political direction difficult and resulted in tremendous administrative inefficiency and overlapping. Accordingly, in the early fifties a policy of farm amalgamation was launched, and in four years the number of collective farms was reduced to some 95,000 superfarms, serviced by about 9,000 MTS. Since that time, the MTS, for many years the spearheads of Communism on the collective farms, have been abolished and their equipment "sold" to the farms. With the party much stronger on the farms, the conflicts between farms and MTS increasingly bothersome, and collective farms increased in size — all general consequences of Khrushchev's policies — this change was indicated. But it has in turn caused new problems, especially as far as repair services are concerned. (89v)
In spite of all these efforts, Soviet agriculture has lagged far behind industrial development. This fact has become a source of major worry to Soviet leaders who cannot fail to note that, while industrial production had doubled since 1940, agricultural output is only 10 percent higher at most. The situation appears even more catastrophic when Soviet agricultural statistics for 1954 are compared to 1928, the last precollectivization year. Cattle is 15 percent down, cows 27 percent, while the population has grown from some 150 million to 215 million. Agricultural production standards were and are also extremely low when compared to Western norms; for example, average milk yield per cow in 1954 in the USSR was 1,100 litres as compared to 2,865 in West Germany and 2,531 as early as 1937 in Sweden. (245) Similarly, corn yield by bushel per acre was 17.8 in the USSR; in the United States, 37.1. (430b) Furthermore, in the period 1955-1959 the comparative crop yields for the USA and the USSR in centners (hundred pounds) per hectare were: grain —USSR 9.7, USA 21; potatoes — USSR 91, USA 194. (17b) Many other statistics could be cited, but these are sufficient to illus-
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trate the gravity of the situation, particularly if one also considers the rapid growth of the urban population in the USSR. No wonder that the party and its leadership remain concerned.
Under the aegis of Khrushchev, a vast project for cultivating underdeveloped or entirely virgin lands was launched. (89w) It was made necessary not only by the considerations sketched above, but also by the fact that agriculture in the USSR is concentrated in regions subject to great weather hazards. The need to spread the risks had become apparent to the Central Committee. Kazakhstan in particular and Central Asia in general became the foci for this new push for which the energies of the youth were to be mobilized. Thousands of young Komsomolites left the cities, some willingly, others pressured into volunteering, to work on the virgin soil. They were to live on newly set-up state farms, a development suggesting a further extension of the factory-production system into agriculture. (441n) The project for various reasons fell short of expectations. Indeed, Kazakhstan has become a major headache for the regime. Even so, "the gamble on the new lands appears to have paid off," according to one authority. (89w)
The scope of this new program was huge. It envisaged a tremendous "young man, go west" movement, which within a few years might have resulted in a republic like Kazakhstan becoming a predominantly Slavic-populated region. Such a development would have had important political repercussions in breaking down the resistance of these regions to centrally directed innovations. In the years 1954-1956, the Soviet regime hoped to bring under cultivation some 28-30 million acres of virgin land, some 19 million of which were in Kazakhstan alone. The area under cultivation in Kazakhstan would then have increased from about 10 million to 28.5. By 1960, the program called for over 100 million acres. (17b) This project naturally has created a great need for outside settlers, who can come only from the overpopulated regions and urban centers in Russia and the Ukraine.
The virgin-lands policy was only a part, though a dramatic one, of Khrushchev's new approach to the problems of agricultural production. Himself a farmboy, he brought to these problems a measure of realism that many of the highly urbanized Communists lacked. His policies evolved rapidly, and almost every year brought new changes. (459a; 442g, h) It is beyond the present task to review
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this development in any detail. However, certain major features deserve brief presentation. The changes were, of course, tied in with the over-all evolution of the USSR, and more particularly with the revitalization of the party. Whereas under Stalin the party was weak in the rural areas of the Soviet Union, with decidedly less than a majority even of the leadership on the farms committed to the party, now the vast majority of farm managers and other high officials are party members, and the local party leaders are held responsible for producdon on the farms. At the same time, the consolidation of farms has gone forward in two directions, through the joining together of a number of collective farms and through the extension of the state farms. Indeed, in the virgin lands almost all farms are of this latter type. In the opinion of experts, the difference between the two types is gradually disappearing. Originally, the collective farms were supposed to be the collective property of the kolkhozniks, who shared in the produce on the basis of work-day units. These units were credited to each collective-farm member on the basis of his work, with tractor and other machine operators, managers, and the like, receiving a multiple credit. Considering that these shares were only what was left over after the government and various other claimants had been satisfied, the share on the weaker farms was often way below that of unskilled workers in factories and on state farms; the result was a flight from the farms. Even the grant of garden plots, a few animals, and other bits of "private" property rarely helped much; at the same time, it invited kolkhozniks to skip the collective work in favor of their personal plots, which in some years accounted for almost 40 percent of their real income. This remarkable diversion of energy to private activities resulted in the fact, reported for 1959, that almost 40 percent of all meat and milk in the Soviet Union came from the garden plots, as well as 60 percent of the eggs, 45 percent of the potatoes, and approximately 35 percent of the green vegetables. (370a) In view of this situation, it is not surprising that the Soviet leadership has sought to regulate it by various restrictions; none has proved too successful. Even so, the abolition of private plots has not thus far been envisaged, although the increase in the number of state farms (from 8.7 percent to 32 percent in some key products) on which workers are paid wages as in a factory may eventually lead to it. These state farms are really vast; by 1960 the average
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Ch. 20
sown area of such farms was 22,000 acres, as against 6,800 acres for the collective farms. This figure indicates the trend toward gigantism, which has given rise to the suggestion that rural Soviet citizens are living in a sort of "neo-serfdom," where the former landed proprietor is replaced by the central bureaucracy and its local helpmates.
There have been great changes in the central bureaucracy as well. The Ministry of Agriculture, a huge apparatus under Stalin, has been reduced to a research and extension body, while other entities, notably Gosplan and the All-Union Economic Council have become responsible for planning, and the All-Union Farm Machinery Association (successor to the MTS set-up, though no longer the "owner" of farm machinery) responsible for the supply of new farm machinery, spare parts, fuel, and fertilizer. These organizations function within the context of an administration that is concerned with the production and procurement (sale) of all agricultural products (89y) and is closely tied in with party leadership. In the course of this evolution, the production and procurement of agricultural produce has become very sharply separated from the industrial sector, so that at present the two are treated almost as two distinct economies. At the same time, this administration has been freed from some of the complications that the former organization produced. Yet party guidance is firmly maintained through committees up and down the line, and "party and Komsomol members are expected to take a leading role in the life of the collective and state farms." That this expectation is not always fulfilled, Khrushchev himself repeatedly recognized. But with the great majority of collective-farm chairmen and state-farm directors being party members, party guidance cannot fail to be decisive. As a result, the secret police plays a greatly reduced role in Soviet farm life, while prosecutors and courts, including the comrades' courts, are more in evidence. Yet, despite the party's hard work, agriculture "continues to present the Soviet leadership with its most serious problems." (89z) Continuous denunciations of the "backward" collective farmers highlight the fact that the peasant is the "evil genius" of communist as of fascist totalitarian dictatorship. All the details add up to the conclusion that collectivized agriculture, because of the very nature of the farmer's work, does not produce the results that a self-reliant and independent farm life will produce. Even so, the
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results are not wholly negative. As a recent report noted: "Agricultural production in the USSR has been characterized during the last decade by noticeable, but spotty, progress." (459b) There is, however, litde likelihood that production levels will become equal to those in the United States or other Western nations. Unlike Poland, the USSR seems disinclined to accept the proposition that a "family farm system is not only much more efficient than the Soviet System, it is much more dynamic." (459b) Instead, the solution is sought, as has been shown, in expanding the large agricultural enterprise, the state farm.
There is no apparent intention on the part of the Soviet regime to abandon its commitment to a policy of collectivization, and the Soviet pattern has become the model for satellite development, albeit a somewhat more moderate one. The excesses and brutality of the early thirties have not been repeated by the satellite regimes, where subder methods of coercion, such as excessive taxation, discrimination, and occasional show trials, have been adopted. As a result, progress in collectivizing has been slow. According to one study of the Polish economy, "the share of socialized agriculture in the total areas in agricultural use . . . increased from about 8 percent in 1947, nearly all in state farms, to about 20 percent in 1953, of which about 12.8 percent was in state farms and the remainder in producer cooperative farms." (3) By 1955 the percentage had grown to only 27. The figures for the other satellites were higher, although still below the comparable Soviet rate of collectivization by the end of 1955 : 45 percent of the arable land was collectivized in Czechoslovakia, 35 percent in Rumania, 33 percent in Hungary and East Germany. The most "advanced" was Bulgaria: by May 1956 some 75 percent of the arable land was collectivized. Still the Soviet pattern and regulations are followed closely and have been made the basis for satellite agricultural policies, except in Poland where, as mentioned above, the Gomulka regime re-established peasant proprietorship.
In China, by contrast, the peasantry has undergone a fate very similar to that in the USSR under Stalin. Great pressure has been put on the peasants to enter into the agricultural producers' cooperatives, with a duplication of the Soviet practices of coercion, economic dislocation, and suffering. (376) When in the mid-fifties the cooperatives broke down, partly as a result of the displacement of
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agricultural labor that was intensified by the "great leap forward" in 1956-57, Mao plunged forward on this front also, suggesting first the combining of cooperatives into larger units and finally into "communes." There were 26,425 communes by September 30, 1958, replacing roughly twenty times that number of cooperatives and ranging in size from 1,413 households to 11,841; their number has since been further reduced. (54c; 346b) Their organization is military, indeed Spartan, with common mess halls, a militia, and a hierarchical structure by which communes divide into production brigades and these in turn divide into teams. There are said to be about 500,000 brigades. The core purpose of the communes was and is the break-up of the family and its household; children are raised in common nurseries and kindergartens so that three quarters of the women are freed for "productive" labor, that is to say, absorbed into the work force. By this means the manpower shortages that the mass industrialization and water-conservation movements had created might be met. This communalization was proclaimed as constituting socialism and the decisive step toward the realization of communism. While earlier enthusiastic estimates have been revised, and the program of radical collectivization of all property toned down, communalization has greatly enhanced the party's role by putting most peasants and workers into party-controlled units. "The commune system is the best possible means for solidifying and strengthening the power of the Communist Party in China," a qualified observer wrote in 1960. (346c) On the other hand, a later commentator suggests that "the evolution of the rural communes has been a process of continuous retreat from communist policies." (54d) The fact that communalization has become associated with disastrous crop failures has persuaded the leadership (as in the Soviet Union) that full scope must be given to personal initiative, according to the principle "to each according to his work" (1962 editorial in Jen-min Jik-pao [People's Daily]). Thus, the commune system as originally conceived has become a hollow shell, hiding a return to the pattern of cooperatives. This return seems to be fairly permanent and parallels the development in the Soviet Union. It is therefore not too much to say that, as an economic measure, communalization is a failure because it causes a decline in agricultural production. Whether it has also been a failure as a political measure and a social reform seems more doubtful. The communes continue
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as an organizational device to facilitate party control; they also provide a continuing challenge to family concerns. (237b)
The Fascists and National Socialists repeated the demagoguery of the Bolsheviks on a grander scale, as far as the peasants were concerned. They too, of course, proclaimed themselves workers' parties, but among the workers the peasants were considered to hold a special place. There is a sound psychological and sociological reason for this: the peasants have, through their attachment to the land, a peculiar affinity to nationalism. To be sure, theirs is a defensive nationalism, and when the dictatorship launches forth into foreign wars, the peasantry becomes restive and abandons the regime (470) — though there may be occasional exceptions like the Ethiopian war that the Italian peasants are said to have supported. This was also the case at the time of the French Revolution. It was the peasantry that turned from the radicalism of the revolutionaries to Napoleon and deserted him when he set out to conquer Europe. But after all is said and done, it still remains a crucial factor in the fascist movements of our time that the peasantry, hostile to both the internationalism and the industrialism of the socialists, inclines toward supporting fascist movements because they claim to oppose industrialism (anticapitalist) and internationalism (nationalist). The peasantry feels strongly about its possession of the land and about the defense of the homeland, the fatherland. It has been claimed by peasant leaders in Italy that the peasantry did not really support fascism. In a deeper sense this is true, for the aggressive imperialism and big-business monopolism with which Italian Fascism developed was deeply antagonistic to peasant interests and peasant views. But in the early stages, the peasants provided substantial support to the Fascists. Mussolini always claimed that the peasants were his staunchest supporters. (235b) In the case of Hitler, we can even prove the proposition statistically. The largest part of Hitler's electoral support came from the peasantry in the early days. Curiously enough, the very regions in which the democratic movement had been strongest among the peasants, Holstein and Baden, were the ones that turned toward Hitler, whereas in the staunchly conservative and Catholic regions of upper Bavaria the peasantry remained hostile. (140; 443) A similar phenomenon can be observed in Italy in the contrast between Tuscany and southern Italy, which is now being repeated in the struggle between Communism and
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Christian Democracy. (310e) This peasant support is frequently overlooked in analyses that stress the "middle class" support of fascism, which, while undoubtedly a fact, would not have provided the necessary votes for Hitler's building of an electoral following of nearly 40 percent.
But if the peasants were wholly deceived by the Bolsheviks and by their support decreed their own death warrant, they were nearly as much disillusioned by the Nationalist Socialist regime. To be sure, the regime protested its love for the peasants throughout. It developed a special facet in its official ideology, the "blood and soil" line. Under this banner the racial purity of the peasants was linked to their attachment to the land (Boden) as proof of their high value in the folk community. National festivals were held, with a sumptuous display of costumes and folk dances, and at the great party rallies, or Parteitage, the peasants were conspicuous participants. But behind this facade of make-believe, the reality of Nazi agrarian policy turned out to be decidedly contrary to the peasants' interest, and not only in terms of international adventures. It has been righdy observed that agriculture was more strictly regimented than any other field of economic activity. The party organization invaded the villages and bestowed leadership upon the most loyal party members rather than upon the most respected tillers of the soil. Since farming is a very exacting business, the best farmers resented the extent to which the Nazis placed a premium upon political activity. The Nazi frontal attack upon the churches (see Chapter 23) added fuel to the fire. In the end, peasant support for the regime almost completely disappeared.
It may be well to sketch briefly the agrarian policy of the Hider regime. At the center we find the organization of the Reich Food Estate (Reichnahrstand). This term, derived from older romantic and feudal views about the revival of a medieval corporate order, did in fact designate a complete bureaucratization of the agrarian sector of the economy. The formerly autonomous "chambers of agriculture" were transformed into dependent arms of the government and its ministry of agriculture and of the party and its corresponding organs. Walter Darre, the architect of this Reich Food Estate and its effective leader under Hitler, professed the official peasant ideology of blood and soil. But, in fact, he attempted to convert all agricultural producers into National Socialists who
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would help to win the "battle for food." His policy toward the peasantry had three major features: the control of prices, the control of inheritance, and the control of planting. In all of them, the technique employed was that of bureaucratic coercion and terrorist police and party work rather than economic incentives. As far as prices were concerned, both direct and indirect fixing were practiced, making farm operations dependent on government fiat rather than on the free market. Since the peasant had never really accepted the free market, this change seemed at first a gain for the peasantry, but since the price fixing soon proved to be motivated by the military and industrial needs of the regime, rather than the interests of the farmer, it resulted in noncooperation and eventually even sabotage. Its potentialities for large-scale corruption discredited the regime.
More extraordinary than the price fixing, though perhaps economically less significant, was the forcible entailing of farm property. Cast in terms of protecting the peasant against losing his farm since bankruptcies had, as in the United States during the Great Depression, caused widespread agrarian unrest, this legislation had an initial appeal. (307) But it soon turned out to be another link in the chain by which the peasantry was subordinated to the party and the government. The laws provided that a farmer could not sell or pass on his farm without securing the assent of the local government and party officials. He could also lose his farm if the local party boss was not satisfied with the way he was operating it. In short, proprietary rights were made dependent upon bureaucratic discretion. An incidental result was that farmers could no longer get credit; the government stepped into the breach and provided credit facilities, thereby welding another link in the chain. Finally, the government could take over the farm, if in the judgment of the local Nazi farm leader the property was not being administered "in conformity with demands which must be made on farming in the interest of the feeding of the people." The Nazis developed legislation concerning the planting of certain crops, often in disregard of local climatic and soil conditions, thereby also arrogating to themselves this crucial function of farm management. Now some of these policies will be recognized as fairly common in democratic countries, including the United States, but the decisive difference is, as always, one of method. In democratic countries, such policies result from extended
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debates in representative assemblies in which all relevant interests are fully represented; they are subject to continuous revision, and they typically rely upon such economic incentives as subsidies to accomplish results. The agricultural policies of the Nazi regime were, on the other hand, decreed by government and party bureaucrats in accordance with the leader's over-all policy decisions. While the outward forms of peasant proprietorship remained, at least within the narrow limits left by the legislation we have just described, the actual substance of an independent peasantry completely disappeared. But the peasants were not liquidated, as in the Soviet Union, with the very significant result that, after the defeat of the Nazis, the peasantry could re-emerge as a significant factor in the German social structure. As a result the Communist rulers of East Germany have had to undertake the task of liquidation, as they have in the other satellites. The process of collectivization has gone steadily forward; collective farms have come into existence and are becoming the predominant form of agricultural enterprise, as in the Soviet Union. But the very fact that they had to be instituted shows that the Nazi policy had not destroyed the peasantry.
In Italy the process was not carried as far as in Hitler Germany. Italian Fascists failed to tackle the task of land reform. Since Italy was a country of large agricultural estates {latifundia), its true need was land reform on a considerable scale, such as is now being undertaken at last. The Fascists, though well aware of the problem, substituted a program of reclamation, such as that in the Pontine marshes, which the previous democratic regime had initiated. The total effect upon the position of the Italian peasantry was minimal, but it lent itself to dramatic proclamations on the part of Mussolini. (310e)
In conclusion, it is fairly clear that the agricultural sector of the totalitarian economy presents peculiar difficulties to the rulers of these regimes. The nature of agricultural production is such that it is unsuited to large-scale organization and control; but, at the same time, its product, food, is vital, for even totalitarians have to eat. The drive for additional land presents itself as a way out of the difficulties involved in making the available land more productive. This drive, epitomized in the German "living space" (hebensraum) ideology, reinforces the totalitarians' propensity to foreign conquest.
Considering the disastrous consequences of such expansion, as far as the support of the peasantry is concerned, the peasantry may well in fact have been the Achilles' heel of the Fascist regimes. Whether the lag in agricultural production by which the Soviet Union is afflicted will serve to play a similar role there — leading either to the collapse or to the radical modification of totalitarianism — remains to be seen. In any case, the natural requirements of agricultural production, namely, many small-scale independent proprietors working the soil on their own responsibility, seem to present a major obstacle to totalitarian rule. It is no accident that, as Jefferson among others insisted, such a population of farmers is the best foundation for a free and democratic society. Recent trends in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, notably Yugoslavia, suggest that Communist regimes are aware of the problem. A noncollective system of agriculture would constitute a very serious infringement of the collective directed economy. Maybe methods can be evolved, such as those being tried in Poland and Yugoslavia, for directing agricultural producers without depriving them of a measure of personal ownership of their farms. National Socialist precedents are not without significance here. When one considers other recent indications that a search is on for modifying comprehensive central planning, he cannot exclude the chance that collective farming may be attenuated in an effort to win the "battle for bread and butter."