The Political and Social Prerequisites for a Soviet-Type Economy

Very many will be rendered obsolete, and knowledge shall be multiple. Now while the first part of this is a cliche it is less common, in the deplorably specialised state of the social sciences, that any contribution should be multiple. For what I have to say this afternoon belongs to no particular discipline as the learned world defines them, but lies upon the borderlines of many. It is not so located for fun or for display, but in order to answer the question posed. It is methodologically very backward since it contains no algebraical symbols and probably could not have contained any, even had a more skilled hand than mine been at work. Suitable stuff, then, for an inaugural, and moreover doubly apposite, since my appointment is joint between a school of humanities and a school of social science, and since it concerns the Soviet Five Year Plans, and like them is delivered twelve months late. Practising politicians are by definition political economists, and political sociologists too. Them apart, almost the only modern students of this art are Marxists. Marx's own interest in it was no greater than, say, Mill's, for political economy was a central part of 19th century thought. But notoriously Mill left no successors,2 and the art degenerated in the West from, as it were, the Royal Academy portrait to the political poster. In reviving political economy, then, we have to take a stance vis-a-vis the only modern school of it, the Marxist school. It is not particularly appropriate, it may indeed be merely confusing, that I should be forced by my specialised ignorance to do so in the context of the Soviet-type economy. For Marxists know little about that type of economy, and have contributed almost nothing to its elucidation

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