Trouble Brews in the USSR

by lan McLean IN RECENT weeks there has been a variety of tell-tale signs indicating that a power struggle has broken out at the top of the Soviet Communist Party involving a serious attempt to oust Brezhnev. Underlying this pewer struggle is a deep structural crisis which threatens to undermine the stability of the USSR.

Since the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union has secured the consent of the working class through ensuring rising standards of living made possible by fairly constant economic growth. This doesn’t mean that the Soviet working class is wildly enthusiastic about the government or the system but they have put up with it none the less. Now that economic growth has come to a standstill with many consumer goods in short supply, the passivity of the working class can no longer be assured.

The immediate causes of the USSR’s economic stagnation are the increased spending on defence and a series of bad harvests. The US war drive started by Carter and accelerated by Reagan has forced the Soviet leadership to build up its own military strength. Because the USSR has nothing like the productive capacity of the USA, jf it is just to maintain military parity it has to spend a far greater percentage of its gross national product on defence than America does. But neither bad weather nor US aggression can explain away the Soviet economic crisis. There are more long term and basic causes, The major problem with the Soviet economy is the enormous wastage that is endemic to every area of it. This itself is a symptom of the fundamental paradox of the Soviet social system: centralised planning is an economy where all major economic units are owned by the state combined with the rigid exclusion of the actual producers from real decision making. A planned economy can only function effectively if accurate information about all units of the economy are available and if all those involved in production cooperate to achieve agreed goals. This doesn’t happen in the Soviet Union or in any country of Eastern Europe. An official in the Soviet bureaucracy gains promotion by administering their unit as efficiently as possible. In this situation it simply isn’t in the interest of individual -factory directors to give correct information about the actual capacity of their factory. In making reports to the central planners they constantly overestimate their needs and underestimate: their existing stock and capacity. The planning officials at the centre used | to the wiles of their subordinates, the Soviet economy. knock at the door in the early morning. Besides even if the elite could restrict the use of mass terror to the working Class, and that is quite unlikely, repression simply cannot solve the problems which presently beset Up till now Soviet economic expansion could continue unabated because it could absorb a huge surplus labour force coming from agriculture and by exploiting Russia’s vast mineral resources. Both sources are now virtually dried up. For minerals and oil they are now compelled to undertake the much more costly enterprise of exploiting the frozen expanses of Siberia. Future economic growth depends upon technical innovation which would reduce the time needed to produce goods. The introduction of sophisticated machinery demands a more highly skilled and educated work force. Coercion is quite ineffecThe ruling elite in the Soviet Union is quite aware of these problems and they have searched for years for a solution to them. Brezhnev is for ever talking about the need for an “economic mechanism” to run the economy efficiently. The hope is that they could eliminate waste and rationalise the economy by giving factory directors the power to buy and sell goods with their own income depending on the profitability of their enterprise. This would force managers to operate according to the rules of the market and would pressurise them to rationalise their own factories. Given the huge levels of overmanning in Soviet industries, and the exercise of individual workers’ control of the labour process the implementation of these economic ‘reforms’ in the Soviet Union would inevitably create huge unemployment and would provoke a massive confrontation between the elite and the working class. Previous attempts to introduce factory reforms have encountered sufficient resistance to teach the bureauDuring the Seventies the USSR imported a great deal of western technological goods. !t was hoped that detente and closer economic links with the West would enable them to modernise Soviet industry. A sizable increase in the quantity of consumer goods and an improvement in their quality would compensate the working class for displacement from employment and for the imposition of labour Detente is now a dead letter and the whole idea of modernising Soviet industry through importing western technology is obviouslyunviable. For the Soviet bureaucracy there is no way out. The strains in the system are already apparent. It is only a matter of time