This is a book that keeps score. Its title promises a reckoning — Socialism and Capitalism: Score and Prospects — and its dust jacket explains the commission: among the letters reaching Progress Publishers, "one recurring request" was for a book that would set out "the present balance of power in the world," "the sense and direction behind" the economic competition of the two systems, and "what has the future in store for mankind." This volume was "intended to fill that need." It is, in other words, a balance-sheet: a tally of the contest that Khrushchev had staked the Soviet future on when he told the West that the USSR would bury it — not in war but in output — and that the Party Programme of 1961 had pledged to win by overtaking the United States in production per head of population within two decades, by 1980. The question to put to a book that keeps score is not whether it scores points. It is whether it keeps honest score: whether the metrics it turns on capitalism are ever turned on itself, and whether the prospects it projects are stated as claims that could later be shown false.
First, what the book is. It carries no separate author on its title page — only "Edited by Yuri Sdobnikov," who edited the English translation, rendered by Jim Riordan. The authorship is disclosed at the back: the book "was compiled by the following staff members of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R." — Aboltin (named senior contributor), Pevsner, Salkovsky, Barabanov, Gantman, Zagladina, Lavrishchev, Orlik, Razmerov, Tomashevsky, Shapiro and Burdzhalov. This is IMEMO, the Academy's flagship institute for the study of the capitalist world and the great rival of the more dogmatic Party institutes — a collective of professional economists, not a single apparatus functionary. One name is worth flagging: D. Tomashevsky, who three years later would publish Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations (1974), a book whose handling of the "peaceful coexistence" doctrine this series has examined before. He is in this room too, and the same habit is present, as we shall see.
The date of the text is, unusually for this series, the date on the spine. There is no translation lag to unearth and no earlier edition hiding in the preface. The book argues from the 24th Congress of the CPSU, held in March–April 1971; it sets out the targets of the Ninth Five-Year Plan for 1971–75; its freshest citation is Pravda of April 1971, quoting Georges Marchais at that Congress. This is a book of 1971, written in the year it was published — which places it at a precise and revealing moment. The Kosygin economic reform of 1965 had been quietly gutted after 1968. The extraordinary post-war growth rates were beginning their long deceleration. And the 1961 Programme's promise to overtake the United States by 1980 was, at exactly this Congress, being allowed to lapse in favour of a vaguer formula. The book stands on that hinge, and its most telling decisions are the ones it makes about the deadline.
Begin with the falsifiable claim, because the genre is famous for it and because this book's treatment of it is the sharpest thing about it. The 1961 Programme had made a dated, checkable prediction: Soviet output per head would surpass the United States by 1980. A propagandist keeping honest score would either repeat that pledge (and be judged by it) or explain why it was being dropped. This book does neither. It simply does not make the claim. The word "overtake" occurs exactly once in ninety-nine thousand words, and it is inside a quotation from Lenin — "either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically as well" — a general exhortation from 1917, not a Soviet forecast with a year attached. The 1961 Programme itself is cited in the book, but not for its economics: it is quoted once, to supply the doctrine of "fraternal unity" that justifies the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The economic timetable has been left behind.
What the book offers in place of the deadline is instructive. In its own voice it states only that "the socialist countries have now set themselves the task of outstripping the capitalist system in the share of world production, and the most advanced capitalist countries in industrial and agricultural output per head and in productivity of social labour." A task, not a date. Elsewhere it gives the near-term, genuinely checkable targets of the 1971–75 plan — national income up 37–40 per cent, consumer goods up 44–48 per cent — the kind of five-year figure that is falsifiable but forgettable, and cannot become a historic embarrassment the way "by 1980" had. And it introduces, once, the phrase that would replace the promise: the socialist states are said to be "building a developed socialist society before starting on a gradual transition to communism." "Developed socialism" — the formula the Brezhnev leadership adopted precisely because it named an indefinite present rather than a dated future — appears here at its birth.
This is a real finding and it should be credited as caution rather than convicted as a lie. IMEMO's economists, in 1971, could see the growth curve bending. They declined to restate a prediction they had reason to doubt. But the discretion is itself the evidence: the one dated, falsifiable claim the whole "economic competition" project rested on is the one this book pointedly will not print. It keeps the direction — socialism advancing, capitalism in "general crisis" — and drops the milestone by which the direction could have been tested. History supplied the test anyway. The USSR never overtook the United States in output per head. Within a year of this book's appearance it became a systematic net importer of American grain. The deadline it declines to name was missed by a margin that would eventually help discredit the whole enterprise.
Now the scorekeeping proper, and here the book is far more one-sided than it is on the deadline. The vocabulary of economic failure — crisis, unemployment, inflation, shortage, poverty — is a vocabulary the book reserves entirely for the West. It quotes Brezhnev's report to the 24th Congress with evident approval: "The simultaneous growth of inflation and unemployment has become a permanent feature. There are now almost eight million unemployed in the developed capitalist countries." It tabulates Western cost-of-living increases country by country, tracks the "recurring economic crises" of the capitalist cycle through the 1950s and 1960s, and names the "chronic shortage of means for securing a living wage" under monopoly capitalism. The words shortage, queue and rationing never once attach to the Soviet economy. In a book published in the country of the food queue, "shortage" appears only as the West's "dollar shortage" and the West's shortage of a living wage.
The same asymmetry governs what is counted. On the socialist side the book counts the things the USSR was good at: shares of world output of steel, cement, coal, grain; tractors (more than 1,821,000), harvester-combines, chemical fertiliser by the ton; electric power per head of the Central Asian republics against their neighbours. These are real and in many cases impressive. What it does not count, except as a rising abstraction, is consumer supply. Soviet consumer goods appear only as a plan target and as the flat assurance that "the output of consumer goods has been greatly increased." There is no figure for meat, no figure for housing space per person set against a Western one, nothing on quality, nothing on availability. The ledger is kept in the columns where socialism led and left blank in the columns where it lagged.
To its credit — and the credit matters — the book is not the crude triumphalist tract the genre can produce. It is honest that the USSR still trailed. It states plainly that Soviet per-head social product had risen only "from 42 per cent to 52 per cent of the U.S. levels" between 1957 and 1967, and that "the level of Soviet farm output in 1966–67 was 85 per cent of the U.S. level, and 70 per cent per head." A book intent on deception would not print the fraction. It concedes the gap and casts the story as one of catching up. But the concession is confined to the aggregate indices — national income, gross farm output — and never reaches the shopper. The book will tell you the USSR produced 70 per cent as much food per head as America; it will not tell you what that felt like at the counter.
The book was written three years after Soviet tanks entered Prague, and its account of that event is the clearest place to correct its record. The Prague Spring is not described; it is erased and replaced. The reform is rendered as subversion: "hostile forces exploited the complex domestic political situation in Czechoslovakia and tried to take the country out of the socialist community." The invasion becomes rescue: the governments of the five Warsaw Pact states "took the necessary steps, including armed assistance to the Czechoslovak people, so as to safeguard the socialist gains." No reform leader is named — Dubček does not appear in the book, nor does Novotný; "socialism with a human face" and the Prague Spring are absent as phrases and as facts. In their place the book quotes a resolution of the Czechoslovak Central Committee from November 1968 endorsing the Moscow agreement, and adds that the measures "were also supported within Czechoslovakia" — without noting that the committee doing the endorsing was the post-invasion body installed under occupation, not the reform leadership the invasion removed.
And the book states the Brezhnev Doctrine openly, which at least has the merit of candour. Citing the Party Programme, it holds that "the independence of a socialist state does not imply any lack of responsibility for the fate of the whole socialist community": each governing party is "responsible for its policy not only to its own people, but to the world communist movement as a whole." This is the doctrine of limited sovereignty in as many words. The 1961 Programme, whose economic pledge the book will not repeat, is dusted off for exactly this purpose — to lend the invasion the authority of doctrine. The score, on Czechoslovakia, is not kept honestly at all; it is rewritten.
A second, quieter operation runs alongside. The book leans heavily on "the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence," invoking the phrase some three dozen times and tracing it to Lenin himself. Yet the one Lenin quotation it supplies in support says something narrower: that Soviet endeavours "were aimed at switching from our relations of war with the capitalist countries to relations of peace and trade." Peace and trade — not "peaceful coexistence." The doctrine is Lenin's by assertion; the words in the quotation marks are not the doctrine. This is the identical manoeuvre that this series has documented in Tomashevsky's own 1974 book and in the 1981 collection he co-edited — the pedigree asserted in the authors' voice and the actual phrase left unquoted — and here it recurs in a volume Tomashevsky helped write. It is a house habit, and he carried it into three books.
None of this means the book is worthless, and a serious reader is owed the parts that stand. IMEMO was a real research institute, and much of the analysis of Western capitalism is competent economics rather than incantation. The account of the 1970–71 American recession is accurate; that recession happened. The cost-of-living tables, the data on the rising rate of surplus value, the discussion of state-monopoly capitalism and of the strains inside the Common Market are the work of economists who read the Western sources and understood them. The critique of capitalist waste, cyclical crisis and inequality was not baseless, and the Western Marxist tradition made overlapping arguments in the same years.
More than that: on some of the metrics the book invokes, the socialist side had genuinely delivered. The mass unemployment the book throws at the West was real, and the USSR had in fact abolished it; when the book contrasts Soviet full employment with the interwar dole queues, it is not inventing the contrast. Free healthcare and education, rapid industrialisation from a desperately low base, the transformation of Central Asia — these were achievements, and the book is entitled to enter them in the ledger. Even the Fourth International's founder granted the core of it. Trotsky, no friend of the regime that had exiled and would murder him, wrote in 1936 that "socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's surface — not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity." The industrial achievement is not in dispute between the book and its critics. What is in dispute is how you keep score.
And here the reply was already written, thirty-five years before this book, by the same Trotsky — in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which remains the standard against which Soviet accounts of Soviet society must be read. Trotsky's quarrel was never with the fact of industrialisation. It was with the metric. A socialist economy, he argued, cannot be scored on gross tonnage, because "the strength of the Soviet structure is measured in the last analysis by the productivity of labor" — and on that measure "capitalism is still far ahead in the matter of technique, organization and labor skill." The right column of the ledger is output per worker and consumption per head, honestly stated; and there, Trotsky showed with the figures of his day, the Soviet masses stood "below the capitalist level." That is precisely the column this book fills in for capitalism and leaves blank for itself.
Trotsky also named the thing the book's silence on shortages is designed to hide. "The basis of bureaucratic rule," he wrote, "is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy." A book that counts tractors and cannot see the queue is not merely omitting an inconvenient fact; it is omitting the fact from which the whole apparatus that commissioned it drew its power. And Trotsky's verdict on the scorekeeping is one this book, with its dropped deadline, half-confirms in spite of itself: "socialism has not yet triumphed. It has shown that it can and should triumph. But it has not yet triumphed. All assertions to the contrary are the fruit of ignorance and charlatanism."
The Fourth International kept up the argument into the years this book was written. Ernest Mandel's "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution" (International Socialist Review, March–April 1970) is the full-length treatment, from the anti-Stalinist left, of exactly the coexistence doctrine the book's closing chapter rests on — the doctrine the book derives from a Lenin who is made to say "peace and trade." The reply to the balance-sheet, in other words, is not that socialism kept no score worth keeping. It is that the honest scorecard — productivity of labour, consumption per head, the length of the queue — had been drawn up long before, by a Marxist the book's authors were not permitted to cite, and that on that scorecard the contest was still open and, on the terms the 1961 Programme had set, already being lost.
That is the book's real subject, visible in what it will not say. It keeps meticulous score against capitalism and a generous, selective score for itself; it defends an invasion by rewriting it; it borrows Lenin's authority for a phrase Lenin is not shown using. But its most honest page is the one it never wrote — the page that would have restated the promise to overtake the United States by 1980. The economists of IMEMO left that page blank, and in doing so told the truth the rest of the book was commissioned to conceal.