Zizek (Verso hardback, £20), the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is the latest in the spate of books unleashed by the Great Contraction of 2007-2009. It offers a reliable analysis of the crisis in a language, without the academic jargon, that the intelligent common reader can understand. Zizek has skillfully assembled all the elements of the crisis: its causes in financial deregulation and global imbalances, the pros and cons of amonetary versus fiscal stimulus and how difficult it is to design a system within the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism that wants material abundance without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”. Zizek, in short, has seen the future of the capitalist world, and it doesn’t work.
What Zizek says is much the same as he said in his hugely successful Indian tour earlier this year. Global capitalism is in a state of terminal decline. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions are all coming together to hasten its demise. But if the end of capitalism seems to many the end of the world, how is it possible for western society to face up to the end times? In his analysis of the “economic Armageddon”, as he puts it, Zizek borrows the model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Ross of the five stages of grief which follows upon learning that one has terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact); anger (which explodes when one can no longer deny the fact); bargaining (in the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact); depression; and finally acceptance (“If I can’t fight it, so I may as well accept it.”) The Swiss psychiatrist applied the same schema to any form of personal loss, emphasising that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order. Zizek adapts the model to explain the present state of play in the capitalist world: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and acceptance.
The five chapters follow the same scheme but are interspersed by Interludes which elaborate the cultural and political forms of these stages from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Zizek concludes his study with an argument for the return to a Marxian critique of political economy, though he detects the limitations of a potential communist culture after the failure of Soviet communism.
Zizek’s prognoses, which he has repeated in his lectures and his earlier two books — First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Object of Ideology —can’t be faulted because they are based on facts. What is new in the book is what Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. Zizek says these “are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as ‘the institutionalisation of envy’”.
Zizek has borrowed heavily from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Marx and others to elaborate his thesis on the inherent crisis of late capitalism. The contradictions which form the more interesting sections of the book are contained in the Interludes that take current cultural forms as examples of how consumerism, gone wild, is eating into the dynamics of capitalism. Take the opening chapter — Denial: The Liberal Utopia — where the Interlude deals with Hollywood films, the ultimate amnesia that makes you forget the world around you. Zizek takes Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) as a case study of Hollywood’s “ideological universe”. The film, which is an adapted version of a Tom Stoppard play, is centred round the code breakers who work day and night to crack the German “enigma” code in the Second World War. But this, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to attract audiences. So, a love story is put in which introduces two enigmas — the enigma of the German code and the enigma of love or the woman.
Zizek is saying that western audiences demand suspense and uncertainty till the play is over but there must be a happy ending to round it off. America as a social and political organisation was committed to a cheerful view of life; to be otherwise would be an invitation to commercial disaster. Zizek takes other films to substantiate his point that the Hollywood ideology is determined by what the market demands and not by the truth of the “situation” which encompasses everything, politics, economy, philosophy and so on.
The Interlude of the second section on Anger deals with the injustices of the new world order imposed by the capitalist world and is followed by the Interludes of Depression and Withdrawal. But Zizek believes that the crisis is so deep that it gives us a chance for a new beginning, and quotes Mao Zedong, “There is a great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” But he doesn’t elaborate the new directions that the West should take or even if it is politically feasible to do so.
There is a great deal with which you could agree (and disagree) with the book but all the same it will provoke you to take notice of Zizek, as the West is doing now.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Why Soviet planning collapsed
From Business Standard, September 4th 2010
Janous Kornai, the Hungarian economist, described centrally controlled economies in his classic work, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, as a system in which “to search, to wait, to queue, or to go for forced substitution” wasthe norm. This was translated into a Moscow joke in the late 50s as the Six Contradictions of Socialism: 1. Under socialism, everybody has a job but nobody works.
2. Nobody works but the plan was always fulfilled.
3. The plan was always fulfilled but there’s nothing in the shops.
4. There’s nothing in the shops but the table is always full.
5. The table is always full but everybody complains.
6. Everybody complains but nobody wants to change.
The subtext of the joke (there were many such) was simple: “Don’t believe a word of what you hear; trust your eyes only” because the reality of daily life in the Soviet Union was very different, as it was in other command economies. Francis Spufford, who is a noneconomist but a novelist with a penchant for storytelling, has spun out a series of short stories on what killed the Soviet economy which can be described as “faction” (part fact and part fiction) in Red Plenty: Industry!, Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (Faber, Special Indian Price £13).
Read them to be better informed and entertained at the same time — anchored in a mix of history and economics, the factual references never weigh too heavily or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In fact, some of the fiction is more true to life than the heavy academic tomes that have appeared in the What-Went-Wrong-With-Central-Planning books in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. But for all the literature that has appeared, none has been able to explain how such an all-embracing system died on its own when everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Spufford’s is an attempt using some fictional techniques to do so and it comes off brilliantly simply because at times truth can be stranger than fiction.
To begin with a comparison between an open market and a planned economy where bureaucrats, rather than the market forces, decided what goods and services would be supplied to whom and how much, what they would cost and hence priced. The pricing formula was also different. What was necessary first of all was to forget the way we do business; the Soviet system was the other with its own rules and regulations. It was the Gosplan (the state planning commission that made long-term economic plans) that decided consumption patterns. For example, how many summer dresses the women in the FarEast Vladivostok would be permitted to buy rather than what they could afford. The result was poor distribution that led to overstocking on the one hand and shortages on the other, leading to black marketing and/or wastage because no one was really responsible or accountable to anyone.
There is one point that Spufford is at pains to point out: there were plenty of Soviet economists beginning with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour, that is the costs, to make them. But they were overruled by the Party bureaucracy.
Later, as the economy grew in size and complexity in the 60s, economists wanted to bring computers into the system knowing that “rules like the tonne-kilometre target — whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance — made no sense”. If some noises were made, they became muted with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in Siberia that assured a safe future and ruled out the need to be more productive.
Given this background, Spufford provides apiquant series of short stories to show how the system worked in practice and the colossal waste it generated. No one was really bothered and why should they have been because they were all in it for the good life. So, here is just a sample of the short stories that, taken together, give a vivid picture of how the system actually worked.
Maksim Mokhov is a laid-back bureaucrat in Gosplan. He is assigned to help out arayon fabric factory where one of its machines had been destroyed in an accident. A replacement has been ordered from its Urals factory but it has refused to give an updated version without which the production quota allotted to it couldn’t be fulfilled. Enter a middleman working outside the official channels to fix the bureaucratic tangle but it transpires that there is a whole web of conspiracy surrounding the accident and the delay in supplying the replacement machine. The story illustrates how a parallel universe of criminals, Spufford calls them “lawful thieves”, ran the Soviet economy.
Spufford has a string of stories how “lawful thieves” infiltrated every nook and corner of Soviet society and why it was necessary to have Party contacts to get even the simplest things like painkillers, contraceptives, soap and toothpaste — let alone bigger things like a flat or medical care. Spufford’s fictional Khrushchev understood that things had to be ordered differently and the command economy had to go if ordinary people had to live well.
Janous Kornai, the Hungarian economist, described centrally controlled economies in his classic work, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, as a system in which “to search, to wait, to queue, or to go for forced substitution” wasthe norm. This was translated into a Moscow joke in the late 50s as the Six Contradictions of Socialism: 1. Under socialism, everybody has a job but nobody works.
2. Nobody works but the plan was always fulfilled.
3. The plan was always fulfilled but there’s nothing in the shops.
4. There’s nothing in the shops but the table is always full.
5. The table is always full but everybody complains.
6. Everybody complains but nobody wants to change.
The subtext of the joke (there were many such) was simple: “Don’t believe a word of what you hear; trust your eyes only” because the reality of daily life in the Soviet Union was very different, as it was in other command economies. Francis Spufford, who is a noneconomist but a novelist with a penchant for storytelling, has spun out a series of short stories on what killed the Soviet economy which can be described as “faction” (part fact and part fiction) in Red Plenty: Industry!, Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (Faber, Special Indian Price £13).
Read them to be better informed and entertained at the same time — anchored in a mix of history and economics, the factual references never weigh too heavily or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In fact, some of the fiction is more true to life than the heavy academic tomes that have appeared in the What-Went-Wrong-With-Central-Planning books in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. But for all the literature that has appeared, none has been able to explain how such an all-embracing system died on its own when everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Spufford’s is an attempt using some fictional techniques to do so and it comes off brilliantly simply because at times truth can be stranger than fiction.
To begin with a comparison between an open market and a planned economy where bureaucrats, rather than the market forces, decided what goods and services would be supplied to whom and how much, what they would cost and hence priced. The pricing formula was also different. What was necessary first of all was to forget the way we do business; the Soviet system was the other with its own rules and regulations. It was the Gosplan (the state planning commission that made long-term economic plans) that decided consumption patterns. For example, how many summer dresses the women in the FarEast Vladivostok would be permitted to buy rather than what they could afford. The result was poor distribution that led to overstocking on the one hand and shortages on the other, leading to black marketing and/or wastage because no one was really responsible or accountable to anyone.
There is one point that Spufford is at pains to point out: there were plenty of Soviet economists beginning with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour, that is the costs, to make them. But they were overruled by the Party bureaucracy.
Later, as the economy grew in size and complexity in the 60s, economists wanted to bring computers into the system knowing that “rules like the tonne-kilometre target — whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance — made no sense”. If some noises were made, they became muted with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in Siberia that assured a safe future and ruled out the need to be more productive.
Given this background, Spufford provides apiquant series of short stories to show how the system worked in practice and the colossal waste it generated. No one was really bothered and why should they have been because they were all in it for the good life. So, here is just a sample of the short stories that, taken together, give a vivid picture of how the system actually worked.
Maksim Mokhov is a laid-back bureaucrat in Gosplan. He is assigned to help out arayon fabric factory where one of its machines had been destroyed in an accident. A replacement has been ordered from its Urals factory but it has refused to give an updated version without which the production quota allotted to it couldn’t be fulfilled. Enter a middleman working outside the official channels to fix the bureaucratic tangle but it transpires that there is a whole web of conspiracy surrounding the accident and the delay in supplying the replacement machine. The story illustrates how a parallel universe of criminals, Spufford calls them “lawful thieves”, ran the Soviet economy.
Spufford has a string of stories how “lawful thieves” infiltrated every nook and corner of Soviet society and why it was necessary to have Party contacts to get even the simplest things like painkillers, contraceptives, soap and toothpaste — let alone bigger things like a flat or medical care. Spufford’s fictional Khrushchev understood that things had to be ordered differently and the command economy had to go if ordinary people had to live well.
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