Red Plenty

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A beautiful paper at the end of last year had skewered Academician Glushkov’s hypercentralized rival scheme for an all-seeing, all-knowing computer which would rule the physical economy directly, with no need for money. The author had simply calculated how long it would take the best machine presently available to execute the needful program, if the Soviet economy were taken tobe a system of equations with fifty million variables and five million constraints. Round about a hundred million years, was the answer. Beautiful.So the only game in town, now, was their own civilised, decentralized idea for optimal pricing, in which shadow prices calculated from opportunity costs would harmonise the plan without anyone needing to possess impossibly complete information. [V.2]

Not everyone in the non-communist world felt disquiet, of course – socialists in the west took inspiration from what seemed to be a working alternative to capitalism. In the middle years of the cold war, the Khrushchev-Eisenhower-Kennedy era, competition on the economic front between the superpowers was as intense as on the military. As Spufford puts it in the voice of Khrushchev, one of his characters, it was "a race to see who could do the best job at supplying the ordinary fellow on the beach with his cold drink". Department of English & Comparative Literature: Francis Spufford". Goldsmiths College . Retrieved 4 December 2010. It’s worth mentioning that this is a point which Trotsky got right.(I should perhaps write that “ even Trotsky sometimes got right”.)To repeat a quotation:Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne. We move to the bosses of the viscose factory, who secretly got their engineer to arrange the accident, as the original machine couldn't make enough viscose to fulfil the plan they'd been given. There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming. Following Stalin's death and the slow thaw, initiated by Khrushchev, that lasted from the mid-1950s to the mid-60s, Soviet planners, economists, physicists and mathematicians flourished. They persuaded the Soviet leadership that, using cybernetic principles and the newly developed computers, the centralised, planned Soviet economy could at last be made efficient. By 1980, Khrushchev claimed, the Soviet Union would overtake America; communism would have defeated capitalism. For a while, in the aftermath of Sputnik and Gagarin's space flight, it looked as if he might be just be right.

But could it have worked? Can we ever once more believe that we, the people, could create a just, equal and abundant society? Red Plenty ends with the question that must carry all our hopes and fears, as Khrushchev, the deposed pensioner, broods: "Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?"There is a passage in Red Plenty which is central to describing both the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, and vision we are trying to awake into. Henry has quoted it already, but it bears repeating. Well, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that it didn’t work out quite like that. Red Plenty recounts the rise and fall of that tide: from the elation of discovery and the hope of a better world, to frustration, cynicism, and the ultimate tragedy of failure. This is bad news for the planners, because there are no general-purpose algorithms for optimizing under non-convex constraints. Non-convex programming isn’t roughly as tractable as linear programming, it’s generally quite intractable. Again, the kinds of non-convexity which economic planners would confront might, conceivably, universally turn out to be especially benign, soeverything becomes tractable again, but why should we think that? It was going to make first Russians and then all their friends the richest people in the world. Naturally this would involve zooming past the United States. "Today you are richer than us," Khrushchev had told a bemused dinner-party in the White House. "But tomorrow we will be as rich as you. The day after? Even richer!" Now, in 1961, he laid it all out, hour after hour, to an auditorium stuffed with delegates from all over Moscow's half of the cold-war globe. Soon, he told the assembled Cubans and Egyptians and East Germans and Mongolians and Vietnamese, Soviet citizens would enjoy products "considerably higher in quality than the best productions of capitalism". Pause a moment, and consider the promise being made there. Not products that were adequate or sufficient or OK; not products a little bit better than capitalism's. Better than the best. Considerably better. Ladas quieter than any Rolls-Royce. Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame. Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that made Mercedes engineers munch their moustaches in envy. For the question arises: in the absence of a market to balance supply and demand, how should the central planners set about their work? How much viscose should they instruct a particular factory to produce, given the number and locations of other factories, the availability of sulphur, salt and coal, and the requirements of the fabric, cellophane, and tyre manufacturers?