Scientific and Technical Revolution: Economic Aspects is a book about efficiency, written by a man who had spent his working life inside the machinery of Soviet planning, at the moment that machinery began, unmistakably, to run down. Its author is S. A. Heinman — the Progress spelling of Kheinman — described on the back cover as "a professor and a leading researcher at the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences," and the description is exact: he was a specialist in the economics of technical progress, one of the technicians of growth rather than one of its priests. Where the series' other book on this theme spoke in sixteen voices, this one speaks in a single professional voice, and that is its interest. It is not the doctrine sung by a chorus of academicians; it is the doctrine as an economist tries to make it add up. The addition does not come out, and the most valuable thing about the book is how much of the shortfall Heinman is honest enough to record — in the very act of denying that it means what it means.
The date on the spine, for once, can be trusted. Progress often printed translations years behind their Russian originals; this one is close to current. Heinman quotes the 26th Congress of the Communist Party (February–March 1981) as the newest word, cites the completed results of the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976–1980), and reaches forward to the Guidelines for 1981–1985 and "the Period up to 1990." His statistical series mostly close in 1977, which fixes the drafting of the Russian book to about 1979–80, freshened for the English edition with the Congress just held. So this is a document of the last full Brezhnev year but one — after Afghanistan, before the succession, at the exact hinge that later Soviet writers would call zastoi (stagnation), a word the regime of 1981 would not permit itself. That silence is the frame the whole book must be read inside.
It helps to feel the texture of that year. By 1981 "developed socialism" had become the regime's official name for its own present — a formula that quietly replaced the promise of an imminent communism with the reassurance that the existing order was itself the destination, mature and in no hurry. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan the Congress adopted set the most modest growth targets of any Soviet plan to date, and would go on to miss even those. The reforms of the 1960s had been abandoned; the men who ran the economy were, like Heinman, in their sixties and seventies, defending arrangements they had built. Optimism in such a book is not a personal quirk but a period style — an official cheerfulness maintained over an accumulating unease that could be described in fragments but never as a whole. Heinman writes squarely inside that style, and against it, sometimes in the same paragraph.
What was the book for? It is the economist's brief in a long international argument, the same argument its 1972 predecessor in this series was fielding — see the introduction to The Scientific and Technological Revolution: Social Effects and Prospects, a collection built around the identical slogan. The slogan is Leonid Brezhnev's, set as a task to the 24th Congress in 1971 and quoted by Heinman as the organising purpose of everything that follows: "organically to fuse the achievements of the scientific and technical revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system." The scientific and technical revolution — the STR, the Russian nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolyutsiya or NTR, the wave of atomic energy, automation, synthetic materials and computers that both blocs agreed was remaking industrial life — was to be married to central planning, and the offspring was to be an efficiency the capitalist West could not match. The 1972 volume argued the case philosophically and sociologically. Heinman's job is narrower and harder: to show it in the numbers, in the language of inputs and outputs, capital-to-output ratios and the productivity of labour. He has picked the ground on which the doctrine is most exposed.
The doctrine deserves to be stated at its strongest, because Heinman states it well. Technology, for him, has no social meaning of its own; the relations of production decide what a machine does. From that genuinely Marxist premise — the same premise the 1972 sibling defended against Western "technological determinism," the belief that a given machine produces the same society everywhere — he draws the confident conclusion that "only the socialist relations of production make it possible fully to realise the STR's creative potential." Brezhnev supplies the wager in its purest form, quoted approvingly: the scientific and technical revolution "acquires a true orientation consistent with the interests of man and society only under socialism." And the plan is the instrument that will collect the winnings. The USSR economy, Heinman writes, has been "growing steadily, switching systematically to an ever more intensive" path of development — replacing the old growth-by-addition, more workers and more raw materials, with growth by rising productivity. That switch is the book's promise. It is also, read against the calendar, its confession.
Before pressing the confession, credit what the book earns, because a reader told it is worthless would learn nothing and would be wrong. Heinman is a real economist, and large stretches of this book are real economics that survive the collapse of the state that commissioned them. His method for classifying technical progress — sorting every advance by whether it economises on labour, on materials, or on fixed assets, and tracing how each choice ripples through the proportions of the economy — is sound input–output analysis, and his insistence that reducing the material-intensiveness of production (the tonnage of steel and fuel sunk into each unit of output) was the central Soviet weakness was correct and, if anything, understated. His long chapter on ecology is neither complacent nor propagandistic; he treats pollution and the exhaustion of resources as real constraints, not as diseases confined to capitalism. His readings of Western futurology — Alvin Toffler's "eco-spasm," the Tinbergen group's report to the Club of Rome, John McHale's The Future of the Future — are done from the originals, cited by page, and argued with rather than sneered at. He is at his best on the "limits to growth" debate then convulsing the West: against the fashionable counsel that industrial civilisation should cap its own expansion, Heinman answers, correctly, that the "limit" being proposed was a limit on the poor, a way of freezing a grossly unequal world in place, and that the real question was not whether to grow but how — which resources to husband, which to substitute, how to lower the tonnage of materials and energy buried in each unit of output. That is a serious position, and it aged better than the Malthusian panics he was answering. Where he is describing what a machine does to a labour process, or how a new material changes the balance of an industry, he is worth reading still. The genuine Marxist analysis of technology and the economy is here, and it should be rescued intact.
It should be rescued, above all, because it is Heinman's own economics that names the disease his doctrine denies. This is the difference between the 1981 book and its 1972 sibling, and it is why the later, quieter volume is in some ways the more damning specimen. The collection of 1972 was pure confidence; its authors never let the doubt onto the page. Heinman lets it on, again and again, in the flattened idiom of the planning report, and then declines to read what he has written.
Take the problem of incentives — the question of what, under socialism, actually drives a manager to adopt a better technique. Heinman states it with disarming candour. The Soviet system had abolished unemployment and the fear of bankruptcy; those were real gains, and he is right to count them. But then, in a sentence that ought to have stopped him cold: "These obvious social advantages of the Soviet system also eliminate automatic incentives for speeding up technical progress like competition and the danger of going bankrupt." There it is — the admission that the planned economy had removed the goad that forces a capitalist firm to innovate or die, and had found nothing automatic to replace it. Heinman files this not as a contradiction but as "the complicated task of setting up an economic mechanism" to supply the missing spur. The task was real; it was the task Soviet reform economists had been failing to solve since Yevsei Liberman's proposals of the 1960s, and would go on failing to solve until the state expired. Heinman sees the hole in the floor and calls it an item of the agenda.
Take automation, the very heart of the STR he is celebrating. Heinman does not claim it is sweeping through Soviet industry. On the contrary, with the honesty of a man who has read the plan-fulfilment figures, he writes that "the experience of the 1960s and the 1970s does not suggest that even in the 1980s automated control systems will spread extensively beyond the framework of some lines of production." That is an extraordinary thing to find in a book whose thesis is that socialism is uniquely fitted to master automation: an admission, from the author, that two decades of trying had not made it spread, and that a third was unlikely to. The same restraint runs through his repeated return to what he calls the problem of "mechanising manual labour" — "a social problem of prime importance," he writes, and he is right that it was. In 1981 something on the order of two-fifths of Soviet industrial workers, and a majority in construction and agriculture, still did their work by hand; the "revolution" of the title had washed over a workforce large parts of which were using the tools of a much earlier century. Heinman names this. He simply does not draw from it the conclusion it forces — that an economy which cannot mechanise its own hand labour after sixty years is not the economy best placed to lead the world into automation.
And take his own decisive measure. Heinman does not choose some soft yardstick; he chooses the hardest one available, and quotes the 26th Congress choosing it for him: "The most concentrated indicator here is the productivity of labour. It rose during this period nearly 50 per cent." He means the boast to reassure. But fifty per cent across the whole Tenth Five-Year Plan is a compound rate in the low single figures — and it was, in fact, the weakest performance of any postwar Soviet plan. Growth in national income had fallen with almost every five-year plan since the late 1950s: from the confident seven and eight per cent of the 1960s to something the official series put near four and outside estimates put lower still. Heinman's own turn to "intensive" development is the tell. A country switches from growth-by-addition to growth-by-efficiency precisely when the additions run out — when there are no more idle workers to hire, no more virgin land to plough, no cheap way left to burn more fuel. He even names the wall: the demographic turn expected from the early 1980s, when the working-age population would grow more slowly than at any time since the war — the exhaustion, in the plainest terms, of the extensive path. The intensive turn was not a triumphant advance to a higher stage. It was a forced retreat from a growth model that had stopped working, dressed in the language of a plan.
So the reflexivity test this series applies to every Soviet volume — can the book's own central category ever be turned on the book's own side? — produces an unusually precise result here. Heinman's category is efficiency, the productivity of labour, and unlike most of his colleagues he half-turns it on himself. He lists the incentive gap, the automation that will not spread, the sea of unmechanised hand labour, the demographic wall. What he cannot do is assemble these into the single judgement they demand. Each defect is quarantined as a "task," a "problem," a "complicated" item for the mechanism; none is allowed to touch the thesis that socialism is the system that masters the STR. The confidence and the evidence sit on the same pages and are never introduced to each other. The word stagnation does not appear, because in 1981 it could not; the thing itself is scattered through the book in pieces, each labelled as its own opposite.
Where the earlier sibling failed on the future of computing — the 1969 decision to abandon original Soviet designs and clone the IBM System/360, which fixed Soviet machines a generation behind by policy, a story told in that introduction — Heinman's book records the same defeat from the other end, in the ledger rather than the laboratory. He can see that computer output had grown enormously from a base of almost nothing, and that its rate of growth was already falling; he can see that automated control was not spreading; he can see the manual labour it was supposed to abolish still there. The convergence question the 1972 collection refused — whether a hierarchical, expert-managed, bureaucratically planned industrial order in the East had come to share the real features of managed capitalism in the West, a question its companion volumes The Future of Society and The American Utopia also bolted shut — Heinman does not raise either. But his economics keeps supplying the evidence that the plan, praised as the frictionless conductor of technical advance, was in fact its slow and clogged one.
Which is why the answer to this book was in print forty-five years before it, and was addressed to precisely Heinman's chosen ground. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky made the productivity of labour the whole test of the Soviet regime's fate — the same test Heinman invokes and then flinches from. "These two problems, state and money," Trotsky wrote, "reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of problems: productivity of labor" (ch. 4, "The Struggle for Productivity"). It is not a slogan but a criterion, and he took it from Marx, for whom "all economy … comes down in the last analysis to an economy of time." By that measure Trotsky refused the very verdict Heinman's book exists to pronounce. Socialism, he insisted, "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." Until it did, the case was open: "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." Heinman's whole book is one long assertion to the contrary — but assembled, to his credit, out of materials that keep proving Trotsky's point.
Trotsky had also refused, in advance, the move by which the doctrine substituted forms of ownership for achieved results. "It is exactly for the Marxist," he wrote, "that this question is not exhausted by a consideration of forms of property regardless of the achieved productivity of labor." State ownership resting on a low productivity of labour "mean only a transitional regime whose destiny history has not yet finally weighed" (ch. 3). That is the exact ground Heinman occupies and cannot hold: he wants the public ownership to guarantee the efficiency, and his own figures show the efficiency arriving late, thin, and slowing.
And Trotsky named the mechanism Heinman's economics gestures at but is forbidden to identify. The missing incentive, the innovation that would not spread, the hand labour that would not mechanise — for the Fourth International's tradition these were not separate "tasks" but symptoms of one thing: a privileged administrative caste whose interest in its own security had become a brake on the productive forces it managed. The bureaucracy's "autocratic rule," Trotsky wrote, "is coming into greater and greater contradiction with the development of the productive forces of the country — just as absolute monarchy became in its time irreconcilable with the development of the bourgeois market" (ch. 11). This is the analysis the "organic fusion" doctrine was built to forestall, and it explains the exact pattern of Heinman's honest defects. A stratum that fears disruption will not build the automatic penalty for failing to innovate, because that penalty would fall on itself; it will keep the manual labour rather than risk the upheaval of abolishing it; it will import yesterday's Western machine rather than gamble on tomorrow's untried one. The productivity race Heinman was so sure of was lost, as Trotsky's category predicts, not for want of Soviet science, which was formidable, but because the social relations he called an advantage were the fetter. Trotsky had put the same failure in a single sentence about the Soviet workplace of the 1930s: the bureaucracy "spurs on the workers with all its might, but is unable to make a proper use of labor power" (ch. 1). Fifty years on, in Heinman's careful modern prose about incentives and control systems, it is still true, and still unnamed.
None of this makes the volume worthless — the reverse. As economics it holds where it describes; as a historical document it is close to irreplaceable. Here is one of the ablest technicians of Soviet growth, at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences, setting his professional name to the promise that the machine age belonged to central planning — in the very year the planned economy's own reports made the promise impossible to keep, and writing enough of the counter-evidence into his own chapters that a reader with the calendar open can watch him lose the argument to himself. The tragedy is not that he lied; much of what he wrote he plainly believed, and some of it was true. The tragedy is the one question a book about the economics of the scientific revolution under socialism never turned on its own subject — whether the plan it praised might be the thing that could not keep up — and the fact that the answer, stated in his own chosen terms, the productivity of labour "in the last analysis," had been sitting in print since 1936, in a book he was not permitted to open.