A Voice of Reform
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A Voice of Reform

Essays

Tatiana I. Zaslavskaia, Murray Yanowitch, A. Schultz

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eBook - ePub

A Voice of Reform

Essays

Tatiana I. Zaslavskaia, Murray Yanowitch, A. Schultz

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About This Book

First Published in 1989. It has become common, both in Soviet and in Western writings about the USSR, to characterize the early 1980s (the immediate pre-Gorbachev period) as years of stagnation or, at the very least, near stagnation in the Soviet system. Since the sudden outburst of reformist thinking since 1985 it is clear there is actually an elaboration and reinforcement of concepts and ideas that had already begun to emerge in the pre-Gorbachev years. The writings of Tat 'iana I. Zaslavskaia, trained as an economist and today one of the most influential and best known Soviet sociologists, provide an illustration of this proposition.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315492636
Edition
1

1 Economic Behavior and Economic Development

The director of one of the prosperous Western Siberian state farms, a public-minded man, a captain of rural industry, described the experience of mechanized teams that operate without work orders. This form of organization of work is unquestionably progressive and increases labor productivity dramatically because people show a greater degree of responsibility and initiative in their work. As a result, the average earnings (wages) of equipment operators on these teams, based on the results of the year, were 500-600 rubles a month.
But then the team disbands, a year or two after it is formed. ... In the director's opinion the reason is that people "fill their pockets," save enough money to buy a car, and, "having no other needs," go back to less intensive, less responsible work that pays 200-250 rubles a month. They do not see the need to work with maximum efficiency.
How different this situation is from the one that existed in the countryside in the postwar years! The leading category of personnel in the branch—agricultural equipment operators—today do not feel any particular need for an extra ruble, much less an extra kopeck.
This fact is by no means of local significance only. It is well known to management and markedly influences the work of enterprises. The interests of production frequently require special, emergency, unscheduled work that is not part of the direct duties of enterprise personnel. It would seem that the work is sufficiently well paid and that willing workers would be found to do it. However, many workers are not seriously interested in earning extra money, and the levers of material incentive are frequently powerless.
Does this mean that we have satisfied everyone's needs and that the further growth of production is unnecessary? No, it does not. Even though the present living standard of the Soviet people is incomparably higher than it was, we cannot speak of any kind of "oversaturation" of the requirements of the bulk of the people. What, then, is the matter?
The reason that the rapid growth of production and a further rise in the level of consumption of the working people bump into obstacles in the form of supposedly insufficiently developed mass needs is, of course, not that the cultural level of the Soviet people is low or that they are underdeveloped as consumers. The reason is the poverty of available goods and services capable of creating a sufficiently broad spectrum of powerful "temptations" for the customer. The population's personal savings in banks represent more than half of the annual turnover of state and cooperative trade. This means that even the visible part of cash accumulations would make it possible for people to preserve their customary level of consumption without working for half a year. This argument is, of course, distorted, but it does show how the imbalance in the market situation "undermines" planned management of the development of the national economy.
It is no accident that trends impeding the solution of economic and social problems have recently popped up. Chief among these trends are: the slackening of the growth rate of national income; the lowering of the output-capital ratio; the nonfulfillment of plans for the growth of labor productivity; the shortage of certain important foods and consumer goods in trade, and so on. Here, evidently, the system of "production-supply-consumption" relations has become closed into a circle. It is difficult but extremely necessary to break this circle and transform it into an ascending spiral. Unless this problem is solved, it will hardly be possible to reach high rates of economic development on the road to the intensification of the national economy.
Naturally, the task of coordinating the interests of people and society is not a matter of indifference to Soviet sociologists working at the interface of the economic and social problems of communist construction. The decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers "On Improving Planning and Strengthening the Influence of the Economic Mechanism on Increasing Production Efficiency and Work Quality" requires that scholars devote still more attention to the social, human factor in economic development.

Man and his work

Modern production is more keenly aware than ever before of the significance and complexity of the human factor. Now as never before it senses its dependence on the qualities of the worker, who on the one hand is capable of making highly effective use of the colossal production apparatus that he has created but who on the other hand—by virtue of negligence or low skill level—is capable of working to the serious detriment of the national economy.
The man-machine technological systems born of the scientific and technological revolution make ever greater demands on the education, skill level, and reliability of the work force. In our day the ideal worker at, e.g., a large animal husbandry complex, is more than a graduate of even a vocational technical school, i.e., is a graduate of an animal husbandry technicum. And this is understandable: many people's performance depends on the know-how of such a worker, on his ability to maintain a herd with the help of a system of machinery and equipment.
Not only the work of the individual worker but also the performance of many allied collectives depends on whether a worker shows up for work and whether good or bad decisions are made. However, human reliability and responsibility are phenomena of a different order than machine reliability. A great deal depends on the worker's recognition of his involvement in the common cause, on the degree of his subjective "involvement" in the production process, on the level of his identification with the collective and with the content of his job. Hence the need for a stable work force: workers, specialists, and especially enterprise managerial personnel.
The nation's economy has developed a stable cadre of specialists, managers, and production organizers. They are the "yeast," the "leaven" that makes the economy rise. If management is highly qualified, stable, and full of initiative, enterprises will develop in accordance with long-range objectives, and economic practice will be free of unexpected zigzags and will not fall into the trap of expediency. Unless managers and specialists are involved in the life of the enterprises, unless they link their destiny to the fate of the collectives, there can be no discussion of long-range programs for the improvement of production. Instead we find low and slow-growing results of production activity, workers' lack of hope for better working conditions and wages and their indifference to their work, and a high degree of personnel turnover. The circle closes.
I emphasize: the point is not only that today's worker controls complex and costly systems of machinery and equipment, that he determines their effectiveness and their actual integrity through his attitude toward labor. The objective trend of the scientific and technological revolution lies in the gradual liberation of man from the direct servicing of production processes, from routine, uncreative operations. The worker increasingly concentrates on the performance of purely human functions: on making nontrivial decisions, on the search for optimal technological variants, and on the development of new ideas. The worker himself changes in the process: universal secondary education, higher vocational education, the intensification of all forms of communication, and the fact that people are better informed on the multitude of subjects shape an individual who is self-confident and who has a deep need for self-expression and self-affirmation.
Such a person is capable of doing many things, but he cannot, and indeed does not want to, function as even the most sophisticated kind of servomechanism. Therefore a balance between the creative abilities of today's worker and the potential that production bestows on him is vitally important. In the complex, ambiguous process of development of society's productive forces, the disruption of this balance in one direction or another is fraught with serious consequences.
In the national economic system of "nature-technology-man," the key role belongs to man. And if the human factor proves to be less reliable than the machine, the system is forced to plug in its reserves and backup units in order to offset inevitable losses. According to specialists at the Slavgorod plant, which repairs K-7Q0 tractors in the Altai, 80-85% of the breakdowns are the result of the ineptness of operators and mechanics rather than defective design and manufacture. And just one of these giants costs 18,000 rubles; it outproduces the old DT-54 tractor several times over in the performance of heavy agricultural operations. The statistics on job-related accidents signal the disparity between the sophistication of the worker and the rigorous demands of industrial production.

Reference point: social factors of growth

The history of the development of productive forces has known two powerful "drives" that have forced the worker to adapt to the changing demands of production: unemployment and hunger. Socialist society has freed man from these severe reins. Nonetheless, the problem of coordinating the human and technical factors of production objectively exists. Moreover, this problem becomes more acute with the development of technology, with the growth of self-awareness, and as people make greater demands on the environment and on themselves. The motivation for and specific modes of human behavior in social production, the labor process, the framework of distribution relations, and subsequently the sphere of getting income and consumption currently form a kind of "solar plexus," the center of our society's socioeconomic problems. Essentially it is a question of ways of making the human worker more active, mobilizing social factors underlying the growth of production efficiency; hence scholars' attention is riveted on this question.
The system of socioeconomic relations functions successfully only when all its components interact harmoniously. Sociological science has discovered several points that can be influenced to ensure the development of the system in the direction required by society. Specifically, it indicates three types of social factors that significantly influence the efficiency of production from various aspects: the size, quality, and territorial location of the work force; the complex of living conditions; and the system of socioeconomic relations in social production.
Obviously, modern technological systems can function effectively only if production is supplied with the necessary quantity of personnel with the appropriate skill levels, i.e., if personnel are distributed by branch and region corresponding to the distribution of employment positions. However, this condition is frequently violated, which is one reason for the insufficient effectiveness of scientific and technical progress. The inability to fill high-paying jobs, deficiencies in the education and vocational training of personnel using sophisticated equipment, irrational migratory flows of the population, and high manpower turnover are phenomena that grab society's unflagging attention, are investigated by scholars, and are monitored by planning and administrative organizations.
The second group of factors is the standard, mode, and quality of the population's living. While the size, quality, and location of the work force exert a direct impact on production performance, the living conditions complex plays the role of a feedback mechanism: from the results of production to the work force. The more efficient production is, the more net output created, the higher is the workers' consumption fund, and the more rapid is the growth of nonproductive capital and the social infrastructure. And correspondingly, the smaller the migratory outflow of cadres, the more numerous and better qualified the work force, the more favorable is the dynamics of the efficiency of production.
This is one possible variant of the impact of the aforementioned interrelationships. There is also an opposite variant in which inefficiency of production causes low income and the slow development of the social infrastructure. Hence the migration of personnel, the reduction of the size of the work force, the deterioration of the composition of the work force, and the slow growth of production efficiency. Unfortunately, such a variant happens quite frequently. The modification of the population's living conditions is a unique lever in controlling the movement of the work force. Is it sufficient to regulate the efficiency of production? From our point of view this question should be answered in the negative.
The fact of the matter is that radical change in the living conditions complex of the various groups of personnel is required in order to alter the existing irrational directions of labor mobility and redistribution of personnel between various regions, branches, and occupations. It is sufficient to refer to the need to overcome social distinctions between town and country or the need to improve the living conditions of the population of the eastern regions. Since the deterioration of the living conditions of even individual groups of population contradicts socialist principles, the necessary redistribution of goods can be achieved only by improving the living conditions of disadvantaged groups of workers, i.e., at the price of large additional outlays. Where is the necessary money to come from? When the development of production is efficient, society has at its disposal sufficient reserves for transforming distributive relationships. However, during periods of waning production efficiency, these programs encounter great economic difficulty. This is why the improvement of distribution, while important, is by no means the decisive way to increase production efficiency.
Under these conditions more attention is drawn to the third group of social factors underlying increases in the efficiency of production, which is associated with methods of managing the production activity of people, of "involving" them in economic development processes, and coordinating the personal interests of personnel with the interests of labor collectives and society.

A knot of problems

Sociologists draw a distinction between the direct and indirect regulation of human behavior. Let us illustrate the difference on the basis of the regulation of street traffic. Thousands of motor vehicles travel a complex network of streets, thoroughfares, and crossroads to their destination. How can the control center ensure the prompt and safe arrival of all vehicles at their destination without traffic "tieups," without collisions and accidents, without transport flows being shunted from major arteries to impassable roads? Clearly it can be done in various ways.
The first method requires that the control center have information on the movement of each vehicle, that it regularly update this information, that it analyze and plot an optimal trajectory for the next part of the route (taking the general flow of traffic into account), that it convey to the driver (e.g., by radio) the speed that is to be maintained, where to turn, when to yield, when to pass, etc. Given the slow movement of a few vehicles, such a method would probably be acceptable. However, with the increase in transport flow, the control functions in such an approach would become impracticable.
The other method involves the development of general traffic rules that the drivers themselves must observe. This leaves the control center free to concentrate on monitoring observance of the rules and analyzing their effectiveness and their further improvement. The drivers' status also changes: while in the first instance they primarily follow someone else's bidding, in the latter instance they make their own evaluation of road situations and of routes within the framework permitted by traffic rules, and they select optimum routes. Their labor becomes more creative, and their occupational knowledge, skills, and volitional qualities are mobilized. And what is the general result of the system's operation? In which instance can we expect higher speed, greater safety, and the prompt attainment of the objective? Obviously in the latter instance, in which optimal decisions are sought not only by a single "control center" but by thousands of minds that are well informed about a specific, rapidly changing situation.
The economic system combines two methods of controlling the activity of personnel and collectives. They are centralized planning and the administrative management of production, on the one hand, and the indirect regulation of production activity by means of a collection of rules that predetermine the conditions of economic and social interaction of personnel, labor collectives, and the state, on the other. Plan targets on output, the development of new products, the economical use of supplies, etc., are obligatory and must be met without fail. The area of independent search for an optimal decision is limited here, since the primary function of personnel and collectives is to achieve these targets.
The economic mechanism plays a different kind of a role in the regulation of production activity. The prices on individual types of products, tax rates, the level of payments for capital, norms governing material expenditures, deductions from profits, and basic wage scales act as "red and green lights" indicating the types of economic behavior that are stimulated and approved by the state, the types of behavior that are permissible, and the types that are prohibited and punishable. Every production collective must resolve two related problems: fulfilling the compulsory plan and attaining the best economic results using the full range of possibilities offered by the economic mechanism.
The fundamental significance of centralized planning in socialist economic development is understandable. Its role is analogous to the determination of traffic objectives, to filling out the itinerary that is handed to the driver before he sets out on his run. At the same time, we should like to emphasize the no lesser role that is played by proper economic "signaling." We can easily imagine what would happen if the regulator mixed up the street traffic signals. Wide streets would be empty while alleys and cul de sacs were filled to overflowing with vehicles. . . . One might ask whether something similar does not occasionally happen in the economy. Do the elements of the economic mechanism always stimulate modes of human work behavior that are necessary and advantageous to society?
Unfortunately, not always. Numerous examples of disagreement between local and national economic interests are cited in the press almost daily. Let us take the example of profitability norms in product prices. It would seem that the profitability of producing a product would increase in proportion to its scarcity and the urgency of society's need for it. The scarcest agricultural products today are meat and milk. However, the production of meat and milk is relatively unprofitable for most enterprises and totally unprofitable for a considerable percentage of these enterprises. The additional production of these products is made the responsibility of enterprises by centralized planning, on the one hand, while on the other hand, this additional production is not rewarded, since an increase in the deliveries of meat and milk reduces the enterprises' profits at the same time that it increases their losses.
Difficulties in the specialization of production can serve as another example of the disagreement between economic signals and society's real interests. The national economy is interested in a development of the division of labor that opens the door to more sophisticated technologies and higher product quality. Ministries, agencies, and associations do take certain measures to specialize enterprises; but on the whole this specialization is slow in coming, as if it were encountering a certain degree of resistance. Is the reason the shortsightedness of enterprise management that does not understand the advantages of specialization? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that as a result of differences in the profitability of the production of various products, increased emphasis on specialization is somewhat reminiscent of the story about the cunning peasant and the simple-minded bear who divided up the turnip and cabbage they had jointly grown. Some enterprises are assigned profitable types of products...

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