The central claim of this book is stated on a single line, and everything else in its six chapters is an elaboration of it: "Socialism for the first time in history creates conditions for the scientific guidance of society's development." G. Glezerman means this literally. Where earlier societies grew the way weather happens — through the blind collision of private interests, the market settling by trial and catastrophe what no one had decided — socialism, he argues, is the first social order that can be run the way an engineer runs a process: studied, forecast, planned, and consciously directed toward a chosen end. "Communism," he writes, "is the first society in history which is being built consciously." The book's task is to supply the philosophical warrant for that sentence, and to name the agent that does the directing.
Read the copyright page and the book's own first pages before dating the argument. The English Socialist Society: The Scientific Principles of Development carries Progress Publishers' 1971 imprint, but Glezerman tells you plainly where it comes from: "This book was published in Russian in 1967 under the title Historical Materialism and the Development of Socialist Society." The retitling is worth pausing over. A treatise in historical materialism — a philosophy book — was reissued in English under a title promising "scientific principles," in the register of management and control. That is not an accident of translation; it is the register of the moment. The Russian text is a book of 1967, and 1967 in Soviet doctrine has a very specific temperature.
Three things were happening at once. The Kosygin economic reform of September 1965 — the "new economic management system" that Glezerman salutes repeatedly — had just introduced profit indicators, enterprise autonomy and cost accounting, and with it a wave of official enthusiasm for nauchnoe upravlenie obshchestvom, the scientific management of society. The 23rd Congress of the CPSU (spring 1966), which Glezerman cites as his authority, had declared the social sciences "no less important than the use of the achievements of the natural sciences." And Nikita Khrushchev had been removed from power in October 1964, denounced in the internal language of the apparatus for "subjectivism and voluntarism" — for hare-brained schemes launched against the advice of the specialists. All three currents run through this book. It is at once a manifesto for scientific direction and a disciplinary tract against the recent leader who had directed unscientifically; the word "subjectivism" appears in it two dozen times, and each appearance is a coded verdict on the man the book will not name. Glezerman himself was no outsider to this: he was one of the senior professional philosophers of Soviet historical materialism, a co-author of its standard textbooks and a fixture of the Party's own teaching apparatus. The theory of scientific direction is being written, that is, by one of the directors.
One clarification, because the book invites a misreading. This is not a cybernetics book. The word "cybernetics" does not occur in it, and the reader who comes expecting flow-charts, input-output tables and the systems-theory vocabulary that filled Soviet management journals of the period will not find them. Glezerman's companion in Progress's list, V. Afanasyev — whose Scientific Communism (1967) this series also reissues, and who would go on to write The Scientific Management of Society outright — worked that technical seam. Glezerman supplies the philosophy underneath it: the historical-materialist argument that society is the kind of object that can be scientifically directed at all. That is the more fundamental claim, and the more revealing one.
State the doctrine precisely, because it is a serious position and deserves to be met at its strongest. Glezerman's argument runs like this. Every society is governed by objective laws that "do not depend on the will and consciousness of people." In all previous societies those laws operated behind people's backs, "spontaneously" — the market, in particular, is the great engine of spontaneity, coordinating millions of separate decisions after the fact and at ruinous cost. Socialism does not abolish objective laws; it does something subtler. By placing the means of production in common hands, it makes it possible for society, "cognising the laws of its development and mastering the necessary instruments for their conscious use," to act on those laws deliberately instead of suffering them. "Socialist society," he writes, "based on social property and a high degree of socialisation of the productive forces, cannot develop spontaneously; it demands the planned administration of social affairs." At that point the human "subjective factor" — "the conscious activity of people, classes and parties" — takes the wheel. "Society is freed from spontaneous forces and begins to guide the processes of its life and development in a conscious way."
And who, concretely, is this "society" that guides? Glezerman is not coy. "Unity of action of the overwhelming majority of society's members," he writes, "and the scientifically based tasks set by the Party which they work to accomplish create the objective possibility for the coincidence of the aims and intentions of people with the results obtained." The Party sets the tasks; the people accomplish them; and the closing sentence of the book's first chapter states the identification without residue: "The leadership of the Communist Party imparts to the entire work of building communism an organised, planned and scientifically-based character." The subject of the science is the Party. Communist society, he adds, "will be the most highly organised society in man's history."
The doctrine reaches into the human material as well as the economy. A full chapter is given to "the new man" — to "the role of objective conditions and the subjective factor in changing human consciousness," to converting "the rules of communist behaviour into a habit." Here the directional logic is unmistakable: consciousness is an object to be moulded, and the moulding is a task of guidance like any other. It is telling that when a hostile Western reviewer — Glezerman quotes the Labour weekly New Statesman — objected that under the new Party programme "all the apparatus of the Soviet system is to be used to educate its citizens to live by a new code," Glezerman treats the phrase as slander rather than as description. But the structure of his own argument concedes the point: consciousness figures throughout as something the directing centre acts upon, never as the independent tribunal that might act upon the centre. The population is the clay of the science; it is not among its authors.
It would be easy, and wrong, to treat all this as mere apologetics. A responsible reader should first say what is genuinely good in the book, because there is a good deal, and because the credibility of the criticism to follow depends on the honesty of the credit. Glezerman is, first, a real materialist against the voluntarism he was commissioned to bury, and he means it. His insistence that "the subjective factor can gain decisive importance not of itself but only on the basis of the existing objective conditions," that plans which ignore real possibilities are punished — "the laws always take 'revenge', dooming subjectivist actions to failure" — is sober Marxism, and it is a genuine repudiation of the adventurism that had marked both the Stalin and Khrushchev periods, even if it can only name the latter and cannot name the former at all. His treatment of the difference between socialism and communism — the "birthmarks" of capitalism that the first phase cannot shed, the necessity of distribution according to work, the persistence of commodity and money relations under socialism against those who would abolish them "by decree" — is orthodox, careful, and correct against the utopian egalitarianism it criticises. When he quotes Marx to the effect that under associated production economic law appears "not as a blind law which is imposed on the people taking part in production, but as a 'law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind, brings the productive process under their joint control'," he quotes accurately and to the point. The underlying idea — that humanity can cease to be the plaything of its own social products and take conscious, collective mastery of its development — is not Glezerman's invention and not a fraud. It is Marx's and Engels's: the ascent, in Engels's image, from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. It is the beating heart of the whole socialist project, and this book states it clearly. The question the book raises is not whether the idea is real. It is who does the mastering, and whether anyone may check them.
Which brings us to the tell — and it is a structural one, visible in the architecture of the book rather than in any single false sentence. Glezerman's science takes as its objects everything in Soviet society except the thing that directs it. It studies classes, interests, the economy, social consciousness, "the new man," the withering of the state. It never once takes as its object the directing apparatus itself. The Party is always the subject that studies and never the object studied; it is the eye that surveys society, and an eye cannot see itself. Apply to the book the test this series applies to all of them: can the central category — here, the charge of "spontaneity" or "subjectivism," of drifting instead of consciously directing — ever be turned back on the directors? The book's whole structure makes it impossible. When ordinary Soviet life goes wrong it is "spontaneity," a survival of capitalism to be mastered. When the leadership goes wrong it is "subjectivism," the error of individuals, curable by "collective leadership." Never is unaccountable direction itself named as a structural cause of anything.
Glezerman comes within one paragraph of naming it, and the paragraph is the most honest and the most evasive in the book. Discussing the state, he concedes: "since the civil servants engaged in the work of administration also have their own interests, instances are possible when some of them may place their own interests above those of the entire people." He goes further: "it is impossible to rule out the possibility of their becoming divorced from the people, especially when socialist democracy is violated or is not adequately developed." For one sentence the suppressed truth of the entire doctrine is on the page — that the managers of the managed society might be a distinct social interest, unaccountable to those they manage. And then it is buried, at once, under a formula: "a possibility is not an inevitability. The tendency toward a divorce from the masses is not inherent in the socialist state." The safeguards he offers are that "government officials are accountable to the people and can be replaced" and that there is a "systematic struggle against bureaucracy." He does not ask the only question that matters: who holds the officials accountable, who replaces them, who conducts the struggle against bureaucracy — when the same apparatus, as this series' companion volumes document, nominates the candidates, owns the press, appoints the judges and defines the permissible limits of "socialist democracy." The science that could dissect every stratum of Soviet society declares its own directing stratum exempt by definition. The "scientific" claim does not merely describe the managers; it immunises them.
Then read the book for what it cannot say, because the silences are as exact as a fingerprint. This is a treatise on the planned, conscious, scientific direction of Soviet society, and Stalin's name appears in it zero times. The single greatest fact about the actual direction of Soviet society within its author's own adult memory — that in 1937–38 the directing apparatus arrested and shot its own citizens by the hundreds of thousands — is present only as a euphemism, "wherever... socialist legality is ignored," the official post-1956 code, offered in the same breath as ordinary managerial error. The book about how society is scientifically guided cannot report the largest thing the guides ever did. Nor can it report the debate that actually founded Soviet planning. The whole question of planned industrialisation was fought out in the Soviet 1920s, and the champions of rapid planned industrialisation were the Left Opposition — Trotsky, and the economist Preobrazhensky, whose analysis of "primitive socialist accumulation" set the terms of the argument the Kosygin reformers were still worrying at. "Left Opposition" appears zero times; "Preobrazhensky" zero times. Trotsky appears twice, both times as "the Trotskyites," named only to record an error Lenin corrected. A book on scientific planning that erases the men who first fought for planning, and reduces the most formidable of them to a footnote of deviation, is not conducting a science. It is administering a lineage. The same discretion governs the peasantry. Collectivisation is present only as an abstract triumph, the source of the "two forms of socialist property"; the forced collectivisation of 1929–33 and the famine that killed several million people appear nowhere — "famine" does not occur in the book — and the nearest the text comes to the violence done to the village is a delicate note that "attempts to reduce to nil the personal subsidiary farming of the collective farmers... were condemned in the Soviet Union," a sentence that files a catastrophe under the heading of an administrative excess later corrected.
The reply to Glezerman was written before Glezerman wrote, and it went straight to the mechanism. In The Soviet Economy in Danger (October 1932), Trotsky set out the three instruments through which "the correct direction of the economy of the transitional epoch" could actually be attained: "state planning, the market and Soviet democracy" — plan commissions to project, the market to test the projections against real supply and demand, and the democratic pressure of "the innumerable living participants in the economy" to correct both. The plan, he insisted, "is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market" and through "the direct pressure of supply and demand." And he named precisely the illusion that Glezerman's book would later systematise into a doctrine:
If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace — a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions — such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan... The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.
That is the exact object Glezerman defends. "Scientific guidance of society's development," the belief that a cognising centre can direct a whole society a priori — this is the Laplacean fancy named as such, thirty-five years before the book that celebrates it. And Trotsky's point is not that planning is impossible; it is that a plan which frees itself from the two correctives — the market's verdict and the population's — is not more scientific but less, because its author, the apparatus, "has fenced itself off from intervention by concerned millions" and so must plan blind. Glezerman's answer to bureaucratic self-interest was "a possibility is not an inevitability." Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had already recorded the possibility as an accomplished fact: the bureaucracy "has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses" (ch. 3), and under the very Constitution Glezerman's generation praised, "politics is thus once for all declared the monopoly of an uncontrolled bureaucracy" (ch. 10). The word Glezerman could not apply to the directors — uncontrolled — is the word Trotsky fixed to them and could not be argued off.
There is a deep irony here that Glezerman half-registers and cannot follow through. He is, within the narrow band the times allowed, a reformer. He warns repeatedly against "excessive centralisation in planning, which aims to provide 'from above' for everything down to the minutest detail"; he grants that the socialist economy is deformed by "an unorganised market in which prices fluctuate," yet insists that "socialist planning excludes anarchy and spontaneity, but it does not at all rule out the use of the interests of people"; he defends the Kosygin reform's grant of "operational independence" to enterprises against the centralisers. In all this he is groping toward exactly the correctives Trotsky named — that a plan must be tested against the pressure of real interests and cannot be spun a priori from a directing centre. The 1965 reform he salutes was, in its modest way, a partial rehabilitation of the market-checking that Trotsky had demanded in 1932 and that the apparatus had liquidated along with him. But Glezerman can take the insight only as a matter of managerial technique — the right "measure for blending centralisation with independence" — never as a matter of power. The market may be readmitted as an instrument the directors wield; the second corrective, Soviet democracy, the pressure of the governed upon the governors, is precisely what cannot be readmitted, because it would make the directors accountable. He will restore one of Trotsky's two levers and must suppress the other, and the one he suppresses is the one that bears on himself.
This does not make Glezerman a liar. It makes him the theorist of a system that had solved, in its own favour, the problem he treats as still open. He is honest enough to admit that officials may develop their own interests, and doctrinally obliged to deny that they had. The gap between the admission and the denial is the whole distance between a science of society and the ideology of an administration. Read this book, then, for what it is: the philosophical charter of the managed society — lucid, orthodox, at moments genuinely acute about the difference between conscious mastery and voluntarist bluff — written by one of the managers, and constitutionally unable to make the managers an object of the mastery it preaches. Its companions in this catalogue do the same work in the neighbouring rooms: Afanasyev's Scientific Communism maps the destination, Osipov's Sociology builds the survey instruments, Fundamentals of Political Science draws the constitutional diagram, the collective Scientific and Technological Revolution supplies the futurology — and in every one of them the apparatus that commissioned the volume is the single social fact the volume cannot study. The idea at the centre of Glezerman's book is true and worth defending: that human beings can consciously master their own social development instead of being mastered by it. What his book cannot concede, and what the tradition it erased insisted on, is that mastery without accountability is not science. It is only rule, wearing the white coat.