The Most Recent Socialist Doctrines and the Problem of Economic Calculation

This is part of a series on Ludwig von Mises 1920 essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”. I highly recommend that you read the full essay as I am just hitting the high points. Lela

 

Until socialists had some actual success in the world, they didn’t need to worry much about the problems of economic calculation without a price mechanism, so they didn’t. Really, what does it matter if your theory doesn’t work … until it becomes a reality.

In Mises’s era, socialist parties had obtained power in Russia, Hungary, Germany and Austria, which meant their theories now had to work in practice. So Marxist writers were beginning to actually look at the problems their theories walked hand-in-hand with. Mises had noted that they prefered to focus on drawing up programs for the path to socialism and not on addressing the problems of socialism itself.

The only possible conclusion from all these writings is that they are not even conscious of the larger problem of economic calculation in a socialist society.

Otto Bauer felt that the nationalization of the banks was the final and decisive step in the carrying through of the socialist nationalization program. If all banks are nationalized and united into a single central bank, then its administrative board becomes “the supreme economic authority, the chief administrative organ of the whole economy. Only by nationalization of the banks does society obtain the power to regulate its labor according to a plan, and to distribute its resources rationally among the various branches of production, so as to adapt them to the nation’s needs.” Bauer wasn’t discussing the monetary arrangements in the socialist commonwealth following nationalization of the banks. No, like other Marxists, he was merely suggestion how the future socialist order of society would evolve from the prevailing conditions in an established capitalist economy. He thought if you simply transferred the power now exercised by bank shareholders to government bureaucrats, socialism would flood in and transform society into a paradise.

Bauer leaves his readers completely ignorant of the fact that the nature of the banks is entirely changed in the process of nationalization and amalgamation into one central bank. Once the banks merge into a single bank, their essence is wholly transformed; they are then in a position to issue credit without any limitation. In this fashion the monetary system as we know it today disappears of itself. When in addition the single central bank is nationalized in a society, which is otherwise already completely socialized, market dealings disappear and all exchange transactions are abolished. At the same time the Bank ceases to be a bank, its specific functions are extinguished, for there is no longer any place for it in such a society. It may be that the name “Bank” is retained, that the Supreme Economic Council of the socialist community is called the Board of Directors of the Bank, and that they hold their meetings in a building formerly occupied by a bank. But it is no longer a bank, it fulfils none of those functions which a bank fulfils in an economic system resting on the private ownership of the means of production and the use of a general medium of exchange-money. It no longer distributes any credit, for a socialist society makes credit of necessity impossible. Bauer himself does not tell us what a bank is, but he begins his chapter on the nationalization of the banks with the sentence: “All disposable capital flows into a common pool in the banks.” As a Marxist must he not raise the question of what the banks’ activities will be after the abolition of capitalism?

Most other Marxist writers, even into the 21st century, don’t seem to realize that the bases of economic calculation are removed when you eliminate exchange and the price mechanism. That requires something be substituted in its place so as to avoid total chaos. There’s a fantasy belief that socialist institutions can easily replace those of a capitalist economy, but that has proven not to be the case. When the socialist markets in the USSR didn’t work, people turned to the black market. Mises was prescient in seeing that this would be the inevitable outcome.

Reference to the conditions that have developed in Russia and Hungary under Soviet rule proves nothing. What we have there is nothing but a picture of the destruction of an existing order of social production, for which a closed peasant household economy has been substituted. All branches of production depending on social division of labor are in a state of entire dissolution. What is happening under the rule of Lenin and Trotsky is merely destruction and annihilation. Whether, as the liberals hold, socialism must inevitably draw these consequences in its train, or whether, as the socialists retort, this is only a result of the fact that the Soviet Republic is attacked from without, is a question of no interest to us in this context. All that has to be established is the fact that the Soviet socialist commonwealth has not even begun to discuss the problem of economic calculation, nor has it any cause to do so. For where things are still produced for the market in Soviet Russia in spite of governmental prohibitions, they are valued in terms of money, for there exists to that extent private ownership of the means of production, and goods are sold against money. Even the Government cannot deny the necessity, which it confirms by increasing the amount of money in circulation, of retaining a monetary system for at least the transition period.

The USSR hadn’t really dealt with these failures in 1920. Lenin was popular at the time, but he “like a real politician, he does not bother with issues beyond his nose. He still finds himself surrounded by monetary transactions, and does not notice that with progressive socialization money also necessarily loses its function as the medium of exchange in general use, to the extent that private property and with it exchange disappear.” Mises found it humorous that Lenin wanted to re-introduce “bourgeois” bookkeeping carried on on a monetary basis and to install some “bourgeois experts” to some critical positions.

Lenin’s ideas on the socialist economic system, to which he is striving to lead his people, are generally obscure.

“The socialist state,” he says “can only arise as a net of producing and consuming communes, which conscientiously record their production and consumption, go about their labour economically, uninterruptedly raise their labour productivity and thus attain the possibility of lowering the working day to seven or six hours or even lower.”²⁶ “Every factor, every village appears as a production and consumption commune having the right and obligation to apply the general Soviet legislation in its own way (’in its own way’ not in the sense of its violation but in the sense of the variety of its forms of realisation), and to solve in its own way the problems of calculating the production and distribution of products.”²⁷

Lenin trusted that the communes would be so efficient that they would provide a model for the rest of the country. Not too long after this, millions of people died in the Ukraine (the USSR’s bread basket) because the commune system didn’t work. In Lenin’s theories, every large agricultural and industrial concern was a member of the great commonwealth of labor. Those who are active in the commonwealth had the right of self-government. He said they exercised a profound influence on the direction of production and again on the distribution of the goods they were assigned for consumption. To Lenin, labor is the property of the whole society, and as its product belongs to society, society has a right to control product distribution.

How, we must now ask, is calculation in the economy carried on in a socialist commonwealth which is so organized? Lenin gives us a most inadequate answer by referring us back to statistics. We must bring statistics to the masses, make it popular, so that the active population will gradually learn by themselves to understand and realize how much and what kind of work must be done, how much and what kind of recreation should be taken, so that the comparison of the economy’s industrial results in the case of individual communes becomes the object of general interest and education.

Mises thought these “scanty allusions” to be a sign that Lenin didn’t understand statistics or monetary computation … that he might in fact be math deficient. You still couldn’t figure out how well the economy was doing or what a “fair” price was of any given product because there was no means of economic calculation within a socialist society.