Socialist Society

The central claim is stated in one line, and the six chapters are an elaboration of it: socialism, for the first time in history, creates the conditions for the scientific guidance of society's development. Grigory Glezerman means it literally. Where earlier societies grew the way weather happens - through the blind collision of private interests, the market settling by trial and catastrophe what nobody had decided - socialism is the first order that can be run the way an engineer runs a process: studied, forecast, planned, directed toward a chosen end.

The argument deserves to be met at its strongest, and Glezerman states it well. Objective laws do not depend on anyone's will; socialism does not abolish them but makes it possible to act on them deliberately instead of suffering them, and at that point the conscious activity of people, classes and parties takes the wheel.

It is worth knowing what the book is not. It is not a cybernetics book - the word does not occur in it. Glezerman's companion in the Progress list, V. Afanasyev, worked the technical seam of management science; Glezerman supplies the philosophy underneath, the historical-materialist case that society is the kind of object that can be scientifically directed at all. That is the more fundamental claim.

Its date explains its temperature. The Russian text is a book of 1967, published then as Historical Materialism and the Development of Socialist Society: written into the Kosygin reform, the Twenty-Third Congress, and the aftermath of Khrushchev's removal for "subjectivism and voluntarism" - a word that appears here two dozen times and is a verdict on a man the book will not name.

Translated by Leo Lempert. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.