The Scientific and Technological Revolution: Social Effects and Prospects is the Soviet Union announcing, in sixteen voices, that it had understood the future better than the country that was building it. The book is a collection, "prepared jointly by the Soviet Academy of Sciences Editorial Board of Social Sciences Today and Progress Publishers" and put into English under the editorship of Robert Daglish, and its contributors are not obscure. The opening chapter is by M. Millionshchikov, Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The chapter on planning is by N. Baibakov — the Chairman of the State Planning Committee itself, the man who actually ran the Soviet economy, writing in defence of the way he ran it. Between them come economists, philosophers and sociologists of rank, arguing a single thesis from a dozen angles. That thesis is the doctrine this book exists to broadcast: the scientific and technological revolution (in Russian nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolyutsiya, the NTR), the flagship concept of Soviet ideology in the 1970s, and the claim that its social benefits could be gathered in fully only under socialism.
Establish the date first, because for once the spine tells the truth. The English is 1972 and the Russian is barely older: the book's horizon closes at the 24th Congress of the CPSU (March–April 1971) and the Ninth Five-Year Plan the Congress adopted, both quoted as the newest word, together with the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow. Nothing later intrudes. This is a document of the Brezhnev high noon — after the tanks in Prague in 1968, in the first flush of détente, in the years when "developed socialism" was becoming the regime's name for its own indefinite present. And the book's animating formula is Brezhnev's own. Its authors quote, and build upon, the task he set the 24th Congress: one "of historical importance: organically to fuse the achievements of the scientific and technical revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system." That sentence is the commission. This book is its elaboration for export.
What the book was for is legible in that lineage. By 1971 the capitalist world had spent a decade talking about its own technological future in a confident new vocabulary — Daniel Bell's "post-industrial society," John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State, W. W. Rostow's stages of growth, the convergence theory of Jan Tinbergen and Raymond Aron, and, from the dissident wing, Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. All of it claimed that advanced technology was remaking industrial society according to imperatives that had nothing to do with whether the society called itself capitalist or socialist. This was, for Moscow, an intolerable claim, because it dissolved the one distinction on which Soviet legitimacy rested. The NTR doctrine was the answer: yes, there is a world-historical technological revolution; no, it does not make the two systems alike; it makes their difference sharper, and it is destined to be won by us. This volume is a Soviet entry in a global argument about who owned the future — the same argument its Progress siblings were fielding at the same moment. The Future of Society (1973) took on Western futurology and convergence directly; The American Utopia (1985) dissected the technocratic dream a decade on. Read the three together and you are watching one state try, book by book, to prove that only Marxism could see tomorrow.
The doctrine deserves to be stated precisely, because it is more coherent than the sneer it usually earns. The NTR, for these authors, is a real and objective process — "a natural outcome of the development of the productive forces" in the epoch of transition from capitalism to communism, not anyone's policy but a fact of history like the industrial revolution before it. Its social meaning, however, is not given by the technology. Here the book says something a Marxist can defend, and defends it well. Against "technological determinism" — the doctrine that a given technology produces the same social results everywhere — Chekharin puts the decisive objection plainly: "the application of a certain kind of technology under capitalism produces diametrically different social results from what the same technology produces under socialism." The same computer that plans production for use in one system rationalises the extraction of profit in another. Technology has no politics of its own; the social relations decide what it does. This is the genuine Marxist kernel of the whole book, and it is worth rescuing intact, because it remains true and because the Western literature the book attacks really did tend to hide a politics inside a machine and call the result inevitability.
From that true premise the book draws its triumphant conclusion. If social relations decide, then the socialist relations decide better. "Socialism alone provides the adequate social pattern for present-day technological advance," Chekharin writes; under capitalism the same advance breeds "a polarisation of society, intensification of the class struggle." Millionshchikov states the wager in its purest form, in the sentence the Foreword lifts to the front of the book: "in the final analysis, the scientific and technological revolution is incompatible with social injustice; it will emerge as the crucial test in the great school of human history which, in our profound belief, socialism alone is able to pass." The planned economy is the instrument that will pass it. Baibakov's chapter, and Bregel's and Sorokin's, all turn on the claim that only a plan can direct the NTR to human ends rather than private ones — that "state administration is a major condition of rapid scientific and technological progress in socialist society," indeed "one of the great advantages of the socialist system over capitalism."
Convergence is refused on the same ground, and refused hardest exactly where it is strongest — which is the first thing a modern reader should notice. Enokh Bregel's chapter, "Two Economic Systems: Theory of Convergence," concedes with real intellectual honesty that the theory "reflects some actual features of the modern capitalist economy," and even that "the capitalist system coming nearer to socialism" is, in a sense, true. What it will not concede is the reciprocal: that socialism might be acquiring features of the capitalist West. That door is bolted. Convergence, Bregel concludes, is "a smokescreen thrown up to conceal the intended absorption of socialism by capitalism," and "the future belongs not to any visionary mixed-type economic system but to socialism and communism." The book's entire case against convergence rests on the form of ownership: the West is private property, the East is public property, and no resemblance in planning technique, computer modelling or managerial hierarchy can bridge that gulf. But ownership on paper is a claim about title, not about control — about who commands the labour process and disposes of its surplus — and the serious version of the convergence question was always about control. Did a bureaucratically planned, hierarchical, expert-managed industrial order grow up in the East that shared real features with the managed capitalism of the West? The book cannot ask, because to ask would be to look at what the Soviet Union actually was. So convergence is refused where it names the resemblance, and the subject is changed to the title deeds.
Before pressing that point, credit what the book earns, because its best chapter is genuinely good. The closing essay, Y. Zamoshkin and N. Motroshilova on Marcuse — "Man in the 'Industrial Society'" — is not a folder of clippings. Its authors have read One-Dimensional Man in the original, cite it by page, and grant its force without flinching: "the criticism to which Marcuse has subjected the present-day forms of concrete social knowledge in the capitalist countries is relevant." They agree that Western social science often "serve[s] certain practical and pragmatically utilitarian aims of the predominant social organisation" — "Yes, it is," they answer their own question, twice. Their charge against Marcuse is a sharp Marxist one: that his critique is itself "one-dimensional," that in tracing everything to technology he "borrows most uncritically from, and reproduces in his conception, the logic of argument typical of Rostow." And they name the disease with a phrase worth holding onto: "any apology for present-day bureaucracy, conscious or unconscious, is usually based on the logic of technological determinism." The bureaucracy that presents its own rule as the necessary price of efficiency — that is the target, and it is well hit. Hold that sentence. We will need it.
There is a second point on which the book draws real blood, and it should be stated because it is the kind of thing a reader told everything here is worthless would miss. The Western "end of ideology" thesis — the announcement, fashionable from Bell and Aron through the 1960s, that the great political doctrines were spent and only technical management remained — the book treats, correctly, as an ideological act masquerading as the end of ideology. The convergence and "deideologisation" theories, Chekharin argues, use the neutral-sounding language of technique to "deny the necessity for revolutionary reorganisation of capitalist society," smuggling a defence of the existing order in under cover of having risen above all orders. That is a sound observation and an old one: to declare politics obsolete is itself a political move, and usually a conservative one. The Western left would arrive at the same criticism of the post-industrial literature within a few years. A Soviet economist saw it early, and the sight is not spoiled by the irony that a state whose every textbook proclaimed the science of history had its own overwhelming interest in which ideologies ended and which did not.
Because the trouble with this book is not that its arguments are stupid. It is that every one of them stops at a frontier and does not cross it, and in hindsight the frontier is always the same. The Marcuse chapter can anatomise "the state-monopoly bureaucracy," can show at length how a planning, administering, expert stratum stands above the producers and manages their consciousness — and can do all of it only about the United States. The word "bureaucracy" appears dozens of times in this collection as the characteristic pathology of the capitalist West. It is never once permitted to travel east. The effect is at its most acute where the book relays Marcuse approvingly. It endorses his showing that "present-day culture in the United States is in the hands of the bureaucracy, an 'instrument of social conformism' and manipulation of human lives," that culture there "has dissolved into mass propaganda" and become "one-dimensional." Read that description with no country attached and a Soviet citizen of 1972 would recognise it instantly — it is, almost word for word, the dissident's account of culture under Glavlit, the censorship office. The book prints the diagnosis and forbids the patient to look in the mirror. The identical administrative apparatus — a stratum standing above the producers, commanding the plan, disposing of the surplus — is, in Washington, the disease; in Moscow, it is "state administration," "one of the great advantages of the socialist system." Same organ, named as a tumour in the adversary and an advantage in the self. That asymmetry is the tell. This series has learned to apply a simple reflexivity test to the Soviet volumes: can the book's own central category ever be turned on the book's own side? Here the category is bureaucracy, and the answer is a flat no. The stratum that is convicted of everything in the West is, in the East, the hero of the plan.
Now the deeper irony, the one the passage of fifty years makes unbearable. This is a book, published in 1972, whose organising claim is that socialism is uniquely fitted to master the scientific and technological revolution — appearing at the precise historical moment when the Soviet economy began to fall irreversibly behind in the revolution's own core domains. The book knows what those domains are. It says so, in one of its most confident sentences: "Today no country can successfully develop its economy, technology or science unless it possesses up-to-date computers for purposes of management, information, and so on." Read that sentence with the calendar open. In 1969 the Soviet leadership had taken the decision that would define its computing future: to abandon its own original machine designs and reverse-engineer the IBM System/360, producing the ES EVM (Ryad) series whose first models were rolling out in the very year this book appeared. The choice guaranteed that Soviet computing would spend the rest of the state's life a generation behind the West by design — copying yesterday's Western machines while the microelectronics revolution, the true heart of the NTR, accelerated out of reach. Automation, microelectronics, computing power at the point of production: these were exactly the arenas the doctrine named as decisive, and exactly the arenas in which the planned economy proved least able to compete. The book's confidence is not merely wrong in retrospect. It is wrong about the specific thing it was most confident about.
And nowhere in ninety thousand words is that confidence examined. There is no chapter, no paragraph, no aside that asks whether the Soviet plan might be worse at absorbing rapid technological change than the market it despised — whether the very "state administration" praised as an advantage might be the thing that could not keep up, because a plan drawn a year in advance cannot chase an innovation that arrives in a quarter. The one man in the book with the standing to raise the question is Baibakov, who ran Gosplan for twenty years; his chapter instead supplies the reassurance. When the book does discuss productivity, it is disarmingly frank about the stakes without ever suspecting they might be lost: "Higher labour productivity is, in the final analysis, the crucial source of the growth of accumulation and the national product at large." That is written of the developing countries. It is never turned into a question about the USSR, whose own rate of productivity growth was, in these very years, beginning the long deceleration that would end in stagnation and then in collapse. The book stakes everything on a race it is certain of winning, in the years it started to lose it.
Which is why the answer to this book was written thirty-six years before it, and could not be improved on. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky made productivity of labour the whole test of the Soviet regime's fate — the same test this book invokes and then declines to apply to itself. "These two problems, state and money," he wrote, "reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of problems: productivity of labor" (ch. 4, "Productivity of Labor"). The idiom is worth pausing on. The Soviet book reaches, again and again, for the phrase "in the final analysis" — Millionshchikov's test that socialism "in the final analysis" must pass, Kollontai's productivity that is "in the final analysis" the source of all growth. It is Trotsky's phrase, "in the last analysis," turned to the opposite purpose: he used it to convict the regime by the very measure the regime's economists used to acquit it. Marx's oldest definition of history — that all economy "comes down in the last analysis to an economy of time" — becomes, in Trotsky's hands, the criterion by which socialism must be judged and by which it had not yet passed. Socialism, he wrote, "could not be justified by the abolition of exploitation alone; it must guarantee to society a higher economy of time than is guaranteed by capitalism… In that sense, decisive for all civilization, 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." Set that beside Millionshchikov's serene certainty that socialism "alone is able to pass" the test, and the distance between the tradition and its Stalinised offspring is the whole distance of this series. Trotsky held that Soviet forms of property resting on a low productivity of labour "mean only a transitional regime whose destiny history has not yet finally weighed" (ch. 3). The 1972 volume declares the weighing already done, in socialism's favour, and calls the verdict a law of history.
Trotsky also named the mechanism this book cannot see. The bureaucracy that the Marcuse chapter can only find in America was, for the Fourth International's tradition, the specific brake on the Soviet productive forces — a privileged stratum whose "autocratic rule is coming into greater and greater contradiction with the development of the productive forces of the country," as The Revolution Betrayed puts it (ch. 11), "just as absolute monarchy became in its time irreconcilable with the development of the bourgeois market." That is the analysis the NTR doctrine was built to forestall. Where the Soviet economists saw the plan as the frictionless conductor of technological advance, the anti-Stalinist left saw a caste that guarded its own position against the disruptions any real technological revolution demands — and that would, in the end, rather import yesterday's machines than risk the upheaval of building tomorrow's. The productivity race the book was so sure of was lost in exactly the way Trotsky's category predicted: not for want of Soviet science, which was formidable, but because the social relations the book called an advantage were in fact the fetter.
None of this makes the volume worthless — the opposite. Its genuine argument against technological determinism survives; its reading of Marcuse is serious; Bregel's honesty about what convergence gets right is more than the export list usually allowed. And as a historical specimen it is close to perfect: here is the Soviet order at the summit of its self-belief, its most senior economic and scientific officials setting their names to the promise that the machine age belonged to them, in the year the machine age began to leave them behind. The tragedy is not that they lied. Much of what they wrote they plainly believed, and some of it was true. The tragedy is in the one question a book about the future of technology under socialism never thought to ask about itself — and in the fact that the answer was already lying, in print, in a book its authors were forbidden to open.