Soviet Progress: A Debate by Eugene Lyons v.

Mr. Lyons: I am deeply puzzled by the article, “What Makes Ivan Run?,” by Roger A. Freeman (NR, March 7, 1967). The Soviet economic system, indivisible from its hideous political system, seems a strange model for comparison in assailing the fallacies of “progressive” taxation and the welfare state in the United States. In effect, Mr. Freeman seems to make a case for the superiority of a totalitarian economy in which “incentives” are provided by hunger, “enthusiasm” enforced by the police. The cure he celebrates is infinitely worse than the disease. His method is curious. He tells us what Soviet spokesmen claim, then fails to expose the falsity of the claim, thus appearing to agree by silence. For instance, Soviet economists hold, he writes, that under the free enterprise system American workers get “only crumbs,” whereas Soviet workers “know that they work for themselves and for their co-workers rather than for capitalist profits.” Surely he knows that the U.S. worker gets a larger slice of the economic product than the Soviet worker, yet he lets it go at that, disdaining to refute the . propaganda clichés. His Soviet sources cited relative rates of growth as proof of the superiority of “socialist” methods. Presumably Mr. Freeman knows that a fully developed nation neither needs nor can absorb excessively rapid rates of expansion. The test is not in -percentual growth, in which an economy starting at a low base scores easily, but in absolute terms of quantity and quality, including the quality of the life of the population. But he doesn’t challenge the Soviet claims. He records without contradiction the assertion of the Soviet rulers that they have “the loyalty and cooperation of their own citizens.” In that case, why have they needed the world’s largest and most ruthless secret police establishment, forced-labor camps through which (in the aggregate) at least 50 million people have passed, death penalties for an array of “economic crimes’? It is a strange kind of loyalty that must be maintained by firing squads and death camps.

With the same credulity Mr. Freeman credits the USSR with “an ingenious system of material as well as intangible incentives.” By his own account the ingenuity comes down to forcing millions to work at semi-starvation wages as the only alternative to full starvation. Other elements of the ingenuity, unmentioned in the article, are the prohibition of strikes and savage punishment for mistakes and failures. Mr. Freeman gathered his information, he reports, “largely by interviewing people in all walks of life.” From them he learned that the workers and managers “labor with dedication and enthusiasm.” That is not merely untrue but grotesque, and will be a surprise to the Kremlin bosses. Actually the Soviet press and leadership complain perpetually and bitterly that the people are apathetic. In recent years, indeed, the Kremlin has been trying to superimpose some free market devices, particularly profit motives, on their constipated command system, precisely in order to raise incentives, cut down spoilage and waste on a scale close to sabotage, and cure the built-in inefficiency of centralized planning. Mr. Freeman attests “the undeniable success” of Soviet economy. How would he square undeniable success with an unproductive state-feudal system of agriculture, tragically chronic scarcity of consumer goods, living standards that only since the mid-1950s have begun to rise marginally above pre-revolution levels, the admitted inability of Soviet industry to absorb the new technology, continuing inflation? Talk of undeniable success is especially startling at this time, when the Kremlin can no longer conceal its sharpening economic crises and has even shelved the slogans about overtaking and outdistancing America. Roger Freeman apparently accepts gross industrial product as the sole criterion of success, though all other aspects of economic and social health show undeniable failures. But other nations, starting at roughly comparable economic levels—the U.S. about 1870, Japan at the turn of the century, for example—grew as fast or faster, – not alone in heavy but in light industry and agriculture, without resort to mass terror and sacrifice of millions of lives. Russia itself, which was already — on the road to vigorous industrialization in 1914, would unquestionably have done as well or better under a relatively free economy.

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Eugene Lyons

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Roger Freeman

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Mr. Lyons: I am deeply puzzled by the article, “What Makes Ivan Run?,” by Roger A. Freeman (NR, March 7, 1967). The Soviet economic system, indivisible from its hideous political system, seems a strange model for comparison in assailing the fallacies of “progressive” taxation and the welfare state in the United States. In effect, Mr. Freeman seems to make a case for the superiority of a totalitarian economy in which “incentives” are provided by hunger, “enthusiasm” enforced by the police. The cure he celebrates is infinitely worse than the disease. His method is curious. He tells us what Soviet spokesmen claim, then fails to expose the falsity of the claim, thus appearing to agree by silence. For instance, Soviet economists hold, he writes, that under the free enterprise system American workers get “only crumbs,” whereas Soviet workers “know that they work for themselves and for their co-workers rather than for capitalist profits.” Surely he knows that the U.S. worker gets a larger slice of the economic product than the Soviet worker, yet he lets it go at that, disdaining to refute the . propaganda clichés. His Soviet sources cited relative rates of growth as proof of the superiority of “socialist” methods. Presumably Mr. Freeman knows that a fully developed nation neither needs nor can absorb excessively rapid rates of expansion. The test is not in -percentual growth, in which an economy starting at a low base scores easily, but in absolute terms of quantity and quality, including the quality of the life of the population. But he doesn’t challenge the Soviet claims. He records without contradiction the assertion of the Soviet rulers that they have “the loyalty and cooperation of their own citizens.” In that case, why have they needed the world’s largest and most ruthless secret police establishment, forced-labor camps through which (in the aggregate) at least 50 million people have passed, death penalties for an array of “economic crimes’? It is a strange kind of loyalty that must be maintained by firing squads and death camps.

With the same credulity Mr. Freeman credits the USSR with “an ingenious system of material as well as intangible incentives.” By his own account the ingenuity comes down to forcing millions to work at semi-starvation wages as the only alternative to full starvation. Other elements of the ingenuity, unmentioned in the article, are the prohibition of strikes and savage punishment for mistakes and failures. Mr. Freeman gathered his information, he reports, “largely by interviewing people in all walks of life.” From them he learned that the workers and managers “labor with dedication and enthusiasm.” That is not merely untrue but grotesque, and will be a surprise to the Kremlin bosses. Actually the Soviet press and leadership complain perpetually and bitterly that the people are apathetic. In recent years, indeed, the Kremlin has been trying to superimpose some free market devices, particularly profit motives, on their constipated command system, precisely in order to raise incentives, cut down spoilage and waste on a scale close to sabotage, and cure the built-in inefficiency of centralized planning. Mr. Freeman attests “the undeniable success” of Soviet economy. How would he square undeniable success with an unproductive state-feudal system of agriculture, tragically chronic scarcity of consumer goods, living standards that only since the mid-1950s have begun to rise marginally above pre-revolution levels, the admitted inability of Soviet industry to absorb the new technology, continuing inflation? Talk of undeniable success is especially startling at this time, when the Kremlin can no longer conceal its sharpening economic crises and has even shelved the slogans about overtaking and outdistancing America. Roger Freeman apparently accepts gross industrial product as the sole criterion of success, though all other aspects of economic and social health show undeniable failures. But other nations, starting at roughly comparable economic levels—the U.S. about 1870, Japan at the turn of the century, for example—grew as fast or faster, – not alone in heavy but in light industry and agriculture, without resort to mass terror and sacrifice of millions of lives. Russia itself, which was already — on the road to vigorous industrialization in 1914, would unquestionably have done as well or better under a relatively free economy.