Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the economic of socialism (whether actually-existing or hypothetical), political philosophy, the social organization and intellectual development of literary criticism, or participatory democracy in social movements. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983)

Alec Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism (1979)

Alec Nove, Socialism, Economics and Development (1986)

Alec Nove, Efficiency Criteria for Nationalised Industries (1973)

Alec Nove and J. A. Newth, The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development? (1967)

Nove was (as these titles might suggest) a British economist, the child of exiled Mensheviks, who made a specialty of studying the Soviet economy, and of advocating market socialism. He's best known for two works: The Economics of Feasible Socialism and An Economic History of the USSR. The former is a personal touchstone which shaped me deeply; the later is merely very good. Looking up something else, I happened to discover that a bunch of his books are now available through our library electronically, so I plunged in.

I'll start with the most important book first. The point of Feasible Socialism is to advocate for, and sketch, a socialist economy "which might be achieved within the lifetime of a child already conceived", i.e., not in some distant post-scarcity future. The first chapter explains why Marxism offers absolutely no useful ideas about how to actually run a socialist economy. (Here Nove summarizes Soviet debates on this matter in the early 1920s --- debates which have been little known since, and so often, in effect, re-run from scratch.) The second chapter looks at the entirely-negative lessons to be drawn from the Soviet experience, and the third at the mostly-negative lessons to be drawn from Cold War-era Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and China. The last two chapters lay out Nove's attractive vision of a market socialism, with lots of public provision of many goods, and workplace democracy where sensible and feasible. (He is sound on seeing that there is a tension between democratic control of an enterprise by its workers, and democratic control of that enterprise by the people-as-a-whole.)

On re-reading, I am relieved, chagrined, and exasperated. Relieved, because I still think this book holds up, and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy. Chagrined, because I've written a lot about socialism and planning over the years, some of it well-received, and on examination I have just been channeling a book I first read as a teenager. Exasperated, because we keep having the same conversations about the same bad ideas, without actually being able to retain and build on the better ones, like Nove's. (I have been making this complaint on this blog for nineteen years now.)

Since I have a weird completist tendency, I then proceeded to read the other four books here, since I hadn't read them before, and they were available.

The first two are collections of academic papers and essays; many of them are effectively studies for Feasible Socialism, not always in very obvious ways: Nove account of more-or-less self-inflicted economic crises facing Allende's government in Chile (observed as visiting faculty in Santiago) clearly informs his discussion of the transition to socialism. I also found very interesting his series of papers on the economic thought of the Bolsheviks (from before the revolution through the 1930s), and later Soviet economics of the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., Kantorovich and co. versus traditionalists).

Efficiency Criteria is a plea to think about why one would want a nationalized industry in the first place, as opposed to just regulating and taxing private firms.

The Soviet Middle East looks at economic development efforts in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The emphasis is on flows of money, machinery and trained personnel from the center to these regions. The environmental costs imposed go largely unremarked. That this was a project of imperial domination is on the other hand made very clear.

To sum up: go track down a co