4. The Struggle for Productivity of Labour¶
Core Argument¶
The Soviet regime’s fundamental problems of state and money converge on a single axis: the productivity of labour. Money cannot be arbitrarily abolished; it must exhaust its historic mission. Nationalisation sets limits on money’s conversion into private capital, yet money’s elementary functions are preserved and extended. Administrative planning is a rough hypothesis, not a fixed gospel; it requires both Soviet democracy and a stable money system for verification. The transitional epoch extends trade, not cuts it. Successful construction requires money to harness personal self-interest. The only authentic money is gold-based; the rouble lacks this, giving it a shut-in character. The Soviet economy needs a stable measure of value more than any other. Inflation under the first five-year plan corroded the planned economy, disguised failures, and taxed the masses. Stalin’s “six conditions” of 1931 aimed to lower costs but were undermined by continued inflation. In agriculture, violent collectivisation destroyed livestock and incentives, forcing a retreat to private plots and markets. The 1935 abolition of ration cards and return to money-based relations was not a departure from socialism but a rejection of fictions, acknowledging the need to create socialist premises through bourgeois methods of distribution.
The Soviet rouble’s claimed stability is undermined by the intolerably high cost of production; it will become truly stable only when Soviet productivity exceeds that of the rest of the world. With a gold reserve of over a billion roubles covering only 12.5 percent of the eight billion banknotes in circulation, the currency cannot claim technical superiority. A shift to the gold standard is not an immediate prospect, though relative stability is achievable if inflation is firmly rejected.
All economy reduces to an economy of time; socialism must guarantee higher time-economy than capitalism. Soviet productivity remains three to ten times lower than in Europe and America, with correspondingly higher costs. The Stakhanov movement, which replaced shock-brigade methods after the abolition of rationing, amounts to an intensification of labour and a de facto lengthening of the working day. Piecework payment, which Marx deemed most suited to capitalism, is applied in cruder forms than in bourgeois countries. Declaring it a socialist principle cynically tramples the idea of a higher culture. The bureaucracy, which holds back all other guilds, cannot surmount the difficulties it creates; the movement’s heroic period is past, and everyday grind has begun.