Work and Wages

It would be a grave mistake, in one’s preoccupations with technical aspects of planning, to regard the Soviet economic system only in the light of co-ordination and direction from above, and to ignore the democratic element in it which consists of active participation and self-activity from below, and which there is a good deal of evidence for regarding as fully equal in importance. One of several things that events since June 1941 have clearly established is that a picture commonly held in the West of the Soviet people as, in the main, a passive mass with little say and less initiative in the operation of plans and orders, needs to be drastically revised. Events have, in fact, shown the ordinary rank-and-file citizen, whether he be a farmer or village teacher turned guerilla fighter, a soldier or airman, or a worker in an evacuated “leap-frog” industry, to be possessed of a remarkably high level of independence and capacity for improvised organisation. In fact, events of recent years, both in peace and war, have displayed many examples of a degree of initiative suggestive of a quite new attitude on the part of the ordinary worker towards the industry and the society of which he is part; a degree of social morale that seems to be evidence of a new sense of social ownership and collective responsibility. It has been pointed out that Soviet army tactics have been built to an unusual extent upon the initiative of quite small groups of men in the field—of small formations “with the fire-power and the brain-power to act independently”. ¹ 70It is no less true of industry that the success of planning has been largely built upon a sense of responsibility towards one’s job, the extent and prevalence of which is probably without parallel.