BOOKS OF THE WEEK
The Soviet Economy
The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 2. By E. H. Carr. (Macmillan. 30s.) THE second volume of Mr. E. H. Carr's history of Soviet Russia— for The Bolshevik Revolution is only the first part of this larger project —is designed to do for the economic aspects of the Soviet system what its predecessor did for its political institutions, namely to show their roots in the theoretical inheritance of Lenin and his associates, and in the set of circumstances which conditioned the early years of their revolution. It is not, therefore, a narrative history, nor even in the conventional sense an economic history, since Mr. Carr is less interested in the actual economic results achieved than in the per- manent set of relationships which emerged from them. It should be unnecessary to add that Mr. Carr brings to this second volume, as to the first, an unrivalled mastery of the voluminous and difficult source materials and a rigid adherence to standards of historical scholarship, all too rare in a field which he has few equals and no superiors. The production of a book of this kind, at this time, is a matter for genuine rejoicing ; it serves to show that, granted an interest in the truth, rather than in immediately useful aspects of the truth, there is no subject in contemporary history too difficult for the techniques of historical scholarship to tackle.
It is indeed noteworthy that the points upon which Mr. Carr most obviously lays himself open to criticism are ones which are incidental. to his main purpose. I am inclined to think that he exaggerates the lateness of Russia's general economic development, and that to ignore its earlier eighteenth-century phase, and the role of serf- labour therein, is to miss an important clue to some more modern phenomena. It is possible that Mr. Carr exaggerates the importance to nineteenth-century developments of the Altai region, the exploita- tion of whose mineral resources on any considerable scale he seems to antedate. Much more important is a proneness to fall into the Marxist fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc—a fallacy often disguised by the ambiguities of Marxist terminology.
He writes, for example, of the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II that " the historical function of the reform, as of the enclosures in English history, was to drive from the land, into the towns and factories, the labour necessary for the industrialisation of the national economy." If by " historical function " were meant " result," this would be acceptable ; but another passage shows that Mr. Carr means by this that the purpose of the enclosures and of the abolition of serfdom was the creation of this labour force ; and there he is on very dangerous ground, and one which is par- ticularly dangerous when applied to the interpretation of Soviet economic conditions, not in the period of which he writes in this volume but in later years. It will be of the greatest interest to see how he handles both the question of agricultural collectivisation and that of the expansion of the labour-camp system, with its economic as well as penological aspects.
Finally, there is the usual danger for a historian of an economic phenomenon of an inadequate appreciation of the relevance of specific knowledge of the technological issues involved. When Mr. Carr says of the drive for large-scale agriculture (in the early period) that " the arguments in its favour, whether from the stand- point of theoretical socialism or of practical efficiency, were irrefut- able," he is no doubt right on the first point. But it is by no means self-evident that economic efficiency is served in agriculture by increasing the size of the unit beyond a certain point ; and it is more than probable (as indeed the recovery of the N.E.P. period showed) that a modified form of peasant agriculture is more efficient, particularly in a community with a relatively low standard of techno- logical achievement, than any possible alternative.
In studying the economic aspects of the Soviet regime, it is essential to bear in mind two points which are apt to be overlooked when the historian relies, as indeed he must and should, so largely upon Soviet materials. In the first place, Lenin and his associates were not interested primarily in economic objectives or in testing their achieve- ments by economic criteria ; the political object to retain power was from the beginning all-important. In the second place, even had the economic criteria bulked larger in their thinking, they were essentially unsuited to applying them. Having taken power with the naive assumption that the capitalist masters of the industrial and financial system and the whole of its technical intelligentsia would co-operate' fully"with them in the working of the new system, allow- ing the Bolsheviks to choose their own time for cutting their throats, Lenin and his friends had clearly made no real attempt to under- stand the complexities of a modern industrial economy, and were largely incapable of administering it. Nor could they permit the alternative of some form of syndicalism or "workers' control" to grow up, since that would have contravened the principle of central authority upon which they believed their own power to rest.
In each of the three sections—the impact of the revolution, war Communism and the N.E.P.—Mr. Carr divides his subject-matter under the five sub-heads : agriculture, industry, labour, trade unions and finance. It is therefore possible to follow, by re-arranging the order of one's reading, the consecutive story of each separate element in the economy. But ingenious as the device is, and despite the fact that it assists one to appreciate how experimental and unformed were the early policies, the whole is greater than the parts. Substanti- ally, it is the interlocking of the various elements that matters.
Trotsky put the point best in words that Mr. Can does well to quote : " We know that air labour is socially compulsory labour. Man must work in order not to die. He does not want to work. But the social organisation compels and whips him in that direction." He may be willing to work for a direct pdrsonal return—and the startling success of the N.E.P. showed how true this was. Successful experiments may be made with incentives even for the wage-earner ; piece-rates were accepted as early as April, 1918. But some methods of securing good results are politically unacceptable to a regime of the Soviet type.
N.E.P. or anything like it meant fortifying the peasant element, still regarded by Gorki in 1922 as the great and possibly mortal menace to the regime. For the peasant would be concerned with raising consumption, and this involved an inadequate creation of new capital—once the hopes of an immediate world revolution had vanished. There is thus a permanent antithesis between the interest of the peasant and the interest of the worker, as the latter's was represented by the self-appointed proletarian vanguard. (The worker's own real share in the system was shown in the early bring- ing to heel of trade unionism.) Very rapidly indeed, through all its early twists and turns, the Soviet system took on its definitive form in which, in Marxist terms, it can best be described as an instrument of coercion for the extraction of surplus value from the labouring classes and-for its utilisation for the accumulation of capital. There can be no greater tribute to Mr. Carr, and to his book, than to say that this essential element in Soviet history has never been mue clearer—although one suspects that Mr. ‘Carr himself would not be happy about this formulation, nor share in the moral repugnance for the system which it should induce. MAX BELOFF.
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