SIR,—My attention has just been drawn to a 'review' by
Mr. P. Wiles of my Some Problems of Incentives and Labour Productivity in Soviet Industry in your issue of May 4, under the heading 'The Very Devil.' I beg the courtesy of space in your columns, excep- tionally as' an author, to reply to what I can only regard as a deliberate and purposeful attack, in the guise of a review, on myself—on my personal integrity—and, through me, on the department in which I have the privilege of working.
Mr. Wiles castigates my study as 'un- scholarly,' describing it as 'a mediocre party tract.' It is not for me to give any opinion of the scholarliness of my work; that I leave to its readers and to those who have reviewed it As a writer, I should have welcomed a serious examination of the merits and demerits of my essay, however critical and astringent it might be; as a man, I must protest at the abuse of your columns by Mr. Wiles for the purpose of denigrating my intellectual honesty and the competence of my editors. Let the readers of what we have written judge between our capacities for scrupulousness and objectivity.
[Mr. Wiles writes: `Mr. Barker's book could not of course be seriously examined in the space available to me. But naturally I did not make so serious a charge without being very willing indeed to substantiate it.
'I. On pp. 59-61 and 67 figures of annual output per worker are given. It is not made clear that these rest on the official index of industrial production, which was notoriously quite false until after the war. The reasons for this have been lengthily set out in many West- ern publications, which derive all their basic material and criticisms from the Soviet techni- cal press. Mr. Barker has thus not only con- fined himself to Communist sources but to a heavily weighted selection from them.
'This matter of productivity is absolutely vital for Mr. Barker: it is the subject of his book. Did industrial productivity in fact rise at all during the period he lauds to the skies? At first the famine and the planning chaos actually reduced it, so that only by 1932 was it back to the 1928 level. In 1937-40 the re- newed fall in the standard of living and the Great Purge again prevented it from rising. Only, then, from 1932 to 1937 was Soviet in- dustry as successful as it has recently been. And that, of course, is very successful. Why not say so, then? Why, with so much genuine achievement to be proud of, conceal horrors long past? The fact is that Mr. Barker wrote before Stalin was denounced: his critical faculty had not yet thawed out.
'2. Turn from statistical Stalinism to politi- cal. The most important social phenomenon with which Mr. Barker must deal is the social pressures for greater productivity in Soviet in- dustry. Here is how he describes the birth of Stakhanovism (p. 77): "In the course of a few weeks in the summer of 1935, unexpected manifestations of the initiative of a few indi- vidual workers in smashing the existing tech- nological standards of Russian industry and raising the productivity of their labour many times over burst forth almost instantaneously all over the country. These achievements, which were seized upon by numerous followers and imitators, rapidly became a mass move- ment." Let the reader judge for himself, then, if my words "mediocre party tract" were not justified.
'In fact of course Stakhanovism was as highly organised as a show trial, and was due to neither workers nor management but the Party. As Mr. Barker himself puts it (p. 80), "The weight of the Communist Party was, how- ever, thrown behind such innovators, and in a short space of time disapproval or even vio- lence, which had met the first Stakhanovites in some places, ceased to be heard of." No doubt, however, his irony is unconscious.
'3. Then there is doctrinal Stalinism. Lenin and Marx, and virtually every socialist of every kind in the world, wanted more equality, even
between wage-earners. Stalin decided other- wise, and little doubt he was right. But his decision was the deepest of all the shocks he gave to his own party until the show trials: the literature of the early Thirties is full of this "scandalous betrayal of socialism." It was the main count of Left-wing anti-Stalinism. It meant the virtually total abandonment of the ideal of a specifically socialist labour morale, free of materialist dross. The theme of Stalin- ist inequality is absolutely central to Mr. Barker's book. Its step-by-step introduction makes a fascinating history: first shock fac- tories and shock shifts, only later shock workers, and Stakhanovites later still; first bigger rations and priority in housing queues, only later more money. Of all this increased inequality, and the intensely bitter controversy it caused, I find no word. The practices that gave rise to it are of course enumerated, but the unwary reader is left with the scattered bricks to make his own building. In this matter Mr. Barker goes even further than Stalin : he does not even denounce "petty-bourgeois level- ling," he does not even give the official line.
'38. Petty Stalinism. Might not the fact that late arrival at work could lead to a sentence of up to six months' "corrective," labour at place of work, with 25 per cent, deduction from wages, have merited a place in the text? The consignment of this tremendous fact—for years the fact in the life of a Soviet worker—to a footnote (p. 98) again amply justifies my phrase "party tract." And the qualification "mediocre" follows from Mr. Barker's omission of the date and circumstances of this enactment—during the pre-war rearmament drive. Soviet atrocities have a history, they have reasons and excuses: surely he should have given those.
'Even more petty is Mr. Barker's treatment of the only good book on his subject : Solomon Schwarz's Labor in the Soviet Union. This is too violently anti-Soviet to be perfect; but it is well documented and uses all sources avail- able. If not "definitive" it is certainly "basic." It receives one reference: to a single miscalcu- lation of labour turnover. Why has not the author looked this book in the face?
'Why is the suppression of the Labour Ex- changes mentioned nowhere, and that of the Commissariat of Labour only in a footnote?
'Is "poor harvests and the hurried collectiv- isation of agriculture" an adequate substitute for the word "famine" (p. 59)74—Editor, Spectator.]
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