The Future of Society is a book about broken promises that cannot see its own. It is a collective volume — twenty-odd hands, an editor, an "auxiliary" secretary keeping the team's papers in order — assembled by the Soviet Academy of Sciences establishment and put into English by Progress Publishers in 1973, under the editorship of Murad Saifulin. Its subject is the Western science of the future: the wave of "futurology," post-industrial theory and long-range forecasting that had crested in the capitalist world across the 1960s and was, in the very years this book was written, at its loudest. Its purpose is to demolish that literature and to set against it the one forecast the authors regard as scientific — the law-governed advance of all mankind to communism. It is, in other words, a Soviet entry in a global argument about who owned the future; and it is worth reading today precisely because the argument was settled, in a direction none of its authors foresaw, by history rather than by either side.
Establish the date first, because the spine misleads in the usual direction. The English is 1973; the Russian manuscript is a year or two older. Its 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 freshest word; nothing later intrudes. So the text belongs to 1971–72 — the Brezhnev high noon of détente and "developed socialism," after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and after the Kosygin economic reforms of 1965 had unsettled the question of what a socialist economy was supposed to look like. Both of those events press on the book, as we shall see, though only one of them is named.
The roster of contributors matters, and it carries an irony the book never registers. The lead hand — author of the opening historical chapter and of the long technical section on forecasting — is I. V. Bestuzhev-Lada, who was not a marginal figure but the founder and public face of Soviet prognostika (forecasting studies), the USSR's own professional futurologist. The seventh chapter of Part III, the assault on "bourgeois futurology" proper, is by Y. D. Modrzhinskaya, a hard-line ideologist who appears elsewhere on this list as the author of Leninism and the Battle of Ideas. This is the structure of the whole enterprise: a genuine forecasting specialist supplies the technical ballast; a Party ideologist supplies the verdict. The Soviet Union built its own futures institute in order to prove that only Marxism-Leninism could tell the future — and then, in the volume you hold, spent most of its energy proving that the Western version was a fraud. What the book was for is legible in that division of labour. It is export ammunition in the détente-era battle of ideas: a demonstration, for Western readers and for the Communist parties abroad, that the confident new Western science of tomorrow was capitalism's ideology in a lab coat.
The frame is announced on the first page and never loosened. "The emergence of the Marxist doctrine of society," the Introduction declares, "marked the change-over of socialism from a utopia into a science." The communist future "ceased to be a dream of a model society appealing to reason and became a scientifically based prospect, proceeding from a profound analysis of the objective laws of social development." This is the oldest and best distinction in the tradition — Engels's separation, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), of the socialism that is invented by a good heart from the socialism that is read out of the movement of real history. Everything the book does to Western futurology follows from it. The utopian, and by the book's account the bourgeois forecaster, thinks up a future and imposes it on the facts; the scientific socialist deduces the future from the laws of the present. Bourgeois thought, unable to grasp those laws, produces forecasts that are "one-sided" — singling out "say, technology, or the political superstructure, or moral consciousness, or human organisational activity, or biological instincts" and making one of them absolute. It is a real and usable criticism, and where the book applies it with discipline it draws blood.
It draws the most blood on the technocrats. The chapters on the "single industrial society," on W. W. Rostow's stages of growth, and on the technocratic idea of the future are the strongest thing here, and they should be credited plainly before anything else is said against the volume. On Rostow the book is simply right: The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) "compresses the whole history of economic development into five 'stages of growth' invented by him, ignoring the changes in socio-economic formations and the class struggle which is the real driving force of history." The device of abstracting a curve of growth from the class relations that produce it is, the book says, "a fine specimen of the anti-scientific methodology of modern bourgeois political economy," and the judgement holds up better than Rostow's own confidence that the socialist countries, on reaching his fifth stage, "will have no alternative but to return to the capitalist path." On the technocratic literature generally — the transfer of decision from citizens to "experts," rebranded as freedom — the authors are sharp in a way that anticipates the Western left's own later critique of Bell and Galbraith. When a futurology treats "the imperatives of technology and organisation, not the images of ideology" as the thing that decides everything, it is smuggling in a politics while claiming to have retired politics; the book sees this clearly. So too with its recurring target, the "end of ideology": the announcement that ideology is over is itself, and obviously, an ideological act. None of this needs a Marxist to be true, but a Marxist saw it early, and the book deserves the credit.
The book is also, in patches, honest about its opponents in a way the export list rarely is. It concedes, against its own polemical grain, that "an evolution in the concrete forms of capitalist ownership is taking place, and Marxist science has not the slightest inclination to deny it." It even lets a hostile witness testify for the defence: when the West Berlin anti-communist economist Karl Thalheim tears into Jan Tinbergen's convergence thesis at a 1965 conference, the book reports his five objections and admits, "leaving aside the vocabulary used by this reactionary ideologist, one is bound to admit that his objections to the convergence theory are not void of realism." A volume capable of that sentence is not a folder of clippings. It is an argument, and it can be argued with.
Which brings us to the argument it most wants to win, and the one on which it most revealingly loses: convergence. The theory that the two systems — capitalist West and socialist East — were, under the common pressure of modern industry and technology, growing alike and drifting toward some managed, planned, expert-run hybrid was for these authors not one error among many. It was, they write, the theory that "occupies a special place among the fashionable socio-political constructions of modern bourgeois ideology," and it earned that place because it was dangerous in a way the cruder Cold War theories were not. "A scientific analysis of the convergence theory shows its true colours as a form of anti-communism," the chapter runs, and "the special value of the convergence theory for imperialism lies in the fact that its anti-communist nature appears in disguised form." The formula it attacks is stated fairly: under the impact of the scientific-technological revolution, "capitalism is ostensibly changing its nature, becoming more like socialism, and socialism, in its turn, is evolving in the direction of capitalism." And the book's answer to it is a flat refusal: "Thus we see that capitalism remains capitalism, and socialism remains socialism. Socialism is not becoming less socialist, and capitalism is not becoming less capitalist."
Why the special vehemence? The book's stated reason is that convergence is a Trojan horse — a bait to lure the wavering intelligentsia and the "unstable, vacillating elements in the working-class and communist movement" away from revolution. That is part of it. But watch how the book rebuts convergence, because the manner of the refutation gives the game away. Its entire case rests on a single distinction: the form of ownership. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production; socialism is public ownership; and no amount of superficial resemblance in planning technique, computer modelling or managerial hierarchy can bridge that gulf. To clinch it the authors reach for Marx, on the union of workers with the means of production: "The specific manner in which this union is accomplished," he wrote, "distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another." Ownership is the specific manner; ownership settles everything; case closed.
But the Marx sentence proves less than they need, and it points at exactly the thing they will not look at. The "specific manner in which this union is accomplished" is a question about control — about who commands the labour process and disposes of its product — and ownership on paper does not answer it. A state can own an economy and still be administered by a stratum that stands above the producers and disposes of the surplus in its own interest. That possibility is the whole content of the convergence question worth taking seriously: not the silly claim that the USSR was becoming a market economy, but the serious observation that a bureaucratically planned, hierarchical, expert-managed industrial order had grown up in the East that shared real features with the managed capitalism of the West. The book cannot examine that possibility, because to examine it would be to ask what the Soviet Union actually was — and the answer the authors are permitted to give is fixed in advance: it is the realised first phase of the scientifically known communist future. So convergence must be refused not where it is weak but where it is strong. The refusal changes the subject from control to ownership, and having changed it, declares victory. Test the hypothesis on the text and it holds: in a long chapter the book never once asks who commands the Soviet plan. It asks only who holds the title deeds.
The anti-Stalinist left had asked the harder question forty years earlier, with the same instrument the book claims as its own. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is, among much else, the answer to convergence that this book mishandles — not because Trotsky thought the two systems were merging (he despised that idea too) but because he refused to let the ownership form close the inquiry. Nationalised property, he argued, was a conquest of the revolution and worth defending; but standing over that property was a bureaucratic caste that had "risen above a class which is hardly emerging from destitution," a caste that was, in the book's own words, "something more than a bureaucracy… the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." From this Trotsky drew the conclusion our authors cannot: "The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism," in which the nationalised economy and the privileged caste coexist in tension, and "a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism." That is a transitional form — neither the promised future nor a return to the past, but a contested, unstable thing that could go either way. It is the category The Future of Society needs and is forbidden. The convergence theorists were crude; Trotsky was not; and the difference is that he could name the bureaucracy while they could only gesture at "managerism," and the book could name neither.
For the refusal to name the bureaucracy is of a piece with the book's deepest silence, and here the volume convicts itself out of its own mouth. Its charge against bourgeois futurology is that it postulates an arbitrary ideal, at variance with the objective trends of development, and dresses up a wish as a science. Turn that charge around. This book was written and published by the state that had made the most spectacular arbitrary forecast of the century. In October 1961 the 22nd Congress of the CPSU had adopted a Party Programme pledging to lay the material and technical base of communism "in the main" by 1980, and had told a whole generation, in a sentence every Soviet citizen knew, that it would live under communism. By 1971, when this book was drafted, that clock was running out and the goods were not going to be delivered. And the book responds exactly as a regime manages an unkeepable promise — not by renouncing it, but by stretching it past the horizon. The 24th Congress's new formula, "developed socialist society," moves through these pages as the resting stage the earlier Programme had not mentioned; and the authors quietly rule that "the socialist phase… will take a relatively longer time than the transition period," that "the transition to communism requires lengthy and serious preparation, definite material and spiritual prerequisites." The 1980 deadline is never mentioned. It is simply dissolved into "developed socialism," an indefinitely extendable waiting room, while the book's Part V still proclaims "world communism is the splendid future of the whole of mankind" and pronounces, with no sense of the mirror it is holding, that "modern bourgeois ideologists insist that communism is an impossible Utopia."
By the book's own test — Engels's test — the 1961 Programme was utopian in the strict sense: an ideal thought up at the top, proclaimed as the society's "necessary state," and contradicted by the society's own development. The authors had the definition in their hands and the specimen in their passports, and the entire architecture of the book exists to keep the two apart. This is not a personal failing of any one contributor; it is the structural signature of the series. The instruments are precise and they are built to point in one direction only. A companion volume on the other side of the list makes the pattern unmistakable: Eduard Batalov's The American Utopia (Progress, 1985), from Arbatov's Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, applies the identical utopian/scientific distinction to American social dreaming with real skill — and never once completes the circuit back to the Soviet utopia its own theory describes. Two institutes, a decade apart, the same tool, the same exemption. The reflexivity test — can the category the book wields ever be turned on the author's own side? — returns the same answer both times: no.
The record needs correcting on one further point, because the book does not merely stay silent; at one moment it lies with confidence, and the lie has a body count behind it. The convergence chapter reaches, in passing, for the events of 1968, when Czechoslovakia "with the connivance of Right-wing opportunist, revisionist elements in the leadership of the Party and the country, counter-revolutionary, reactionary forces reared their heads with the aim of forcing the country out of the socialist community and restoring a capitalist order." That is the official justification for the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968, printed as fact. Elsewhere the book names the reform slogan of that Prague spring — "socialism with a human face" — and files it among the imperialist devices for "ideological subversion." The Prague reformers were Communists attempting to democratise a Communist state; the tanks that stopped them were the answer the book endorses; and a volume that spends three hundred pages accusing others of fearing the future might have paused over a socialism whose response to the demand for a human face was armour. It does not pause. The silence about 1980 and the falsehood about 1968 are the same reflex: the future is guaranteed, the present is not to be examined, and anything that examines it is an enemy.
None of this makes the book worthless, and the lazy conclusion — that a Soviet polemic can be discarded unread — would waste what is genuinely here. Read for what it says about the West, The Future of Society is a competent and sometimes bracing critique of a body of thought that deserved criticism: Rostow's evasion of class, the technocrats' laundering of power as expertise, the self-serving announcement that ideology had ended. Those chapters can still be read with profit, and a reader coming to Bell, Aron and Galbraith would not be wasting an afternoon on the Soviet cross-examination of them. Read for what it cannot say about the East, the book becomes a more interesting document than its authors intended: an involuntary self-portrait of a state that had learned to describe, with real acuity, the machinery by which a ruling order manufactures dreams it cannot keep, and that could not, on pain of the whole enterprise, look in the mirror it was holding.
The reader who wants the mirror should go to the two texts the book keeps just out of frame. Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is the short classic statement of the distinction that governs everything here, and it is worth reading beside this volume to watch how faithfully the authors apply its outward edge and suppress its reflexive one. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed is the book that finishes the argument — that names the Soviet bureaucracy the convergence chapter cannot name, that supplies the category of a "contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism" which alone makes sense of the thing this volume was written to defend, and that, against every cynic then and since, refused to hand the future back to the utopians. Trotsky did not think the promise of abundance was a fairy tale; he called real communism "a really modest perspective" and thought it "pretty dull-witted" to call it utopian. The fraud, he insisted, was never the goal. The fraud was proclaiming the goal reached — announcing the paradise in order to sanctify the inequalities that proved it had not come. He had already given that fraud its Soviet name, writing of the 1936 Constitution as "the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued," and he had already given the doctrine of a completed socialism inside a single backward country its correct label: "the utopian idea of an isolated socialist society." The revolutionary Marxist tradition did not lack the concept of a Soviet utopia. It coined it — and then spent its life insisting that the genuine future was worth fighting for precisely because it had not yet arrived.