THE CONTENT AND FORM OF REALIZATION OF THE NATIONWIDE ECONOMIC INTEREST

G. N. GREDIN

Primary and determining in the system of economic interests of socialism is the general, or nationwide, economic interest. “The chief and most fundamental interest of the proletariat after it has won state power is to increase the quantity of products, to raise the productive forces of society on a tremendous scale,” wrote V. I. Lenin¹.

As an independent form of manifestation of the entire totality of socialist production relations, the general economic interest has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, when our literature turns to this problem, it sometimes forgets everything that Soviet economic science possesses on questions connected with economic interests. Thus, if on the whole one may regard as generally accepted the view of interest as an objective category, then with regard to the general interest it is sometimes asserted that it is connected with ideas of duty, responsibility, working honor, professional pride,² that, unlike all others, it is realized only through moral incentives to labor, or else that its realization presupposes extra-economic coercion, and so on. It turns out that the general economic interest, as an independent subject of political-economic research, is something lying outside the bounds of the economy proper, although no one denies its primacy in the system of economic interests, or its direct influence on production.

Interests are distinguished by type depending on what constitutes their content, what essential connections in the economy, politics, and so forth they express. Such are material, political, spiritual, and other interests.

In form, within each type, interests are considered as general, collective, and personal. Moreover, sometimes the basis for such a classification is taken to be the belonging of each of the interests to a definite subject (society, group, and individual). But the fact is that one and the same subject may be the bearer of all three basic forms of interests. If one approaches the system of economic interests as an aggregate of the universal, the particular, and the individual, then the universal inevitably

is present both in the particular and in the singular. Therefore, it is not the subject itself, but the range of those material conditions of existence which are reproduced in the realization of each of the economic interests, that serves as the basis for classifying them by forms. Relatively independent forms of interests exist only insofar as there objectively exist relatively independent structures of material needs, the satisfaction of which ensures the further functioning and development of each participant in the process of production.

The general economic interest may be defined as the objective necessity of reproducing the material conditions of existence of society as a whole. It is the expression of a definite socio-economic commonality of people’s existence under conditions of joint, collective production. Economists who regard interests as subjective phenomena and reduce the content of the general interest to the general goal of production believe that, since there can be no general goal of production in a class-antagonistic society, the general interest is only a specifically socialist form³.

In their time, criticizing the Young Hegelians, who denied the objective existence of general interests, K. Marx and F. Engels wrote that “with the division of labor there is also given the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the separate family and the common interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another; and, moreover, this common interest exists not merely in the imagination, as the ‘general interest,’ but first of all in reality, as the mutual dependence of the individuals among whom the labor is divided.”⁴

If the general economic interest must be the expression of a definite socio-economic commonality of people’s existence, then in pre-socialist formations the basis of such commonality is the social division and cooperation of labor. Unification in a single labor process or in closely interconnected processes creates a state of general dependence—an objective necessity, independent of the will and desire of the people of each of the separate agents of production, to reproduce these general material conditions of existence. The general interest is not an interest identical for all. The economic interest of the proletariat stands in antagonistic contradiction to the interest of the capitalist, but, like the interest of the capitalist, it is derived from the general interest. Just like the capitalist, the worker, so long as this mode of production functions, can reproduce himself only if the general conditions are reproduced. “The proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a single whole. They are both products of the world of private property. Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence, and thereby the existence of its opposite—the proletariat. This is the positive side of the antagonism, private property satisfied in itself. Conversely, the proletariat as proletariat is compelled to abolish itself, and thereby its conditioning opposite—private property, which makes it the proletariat. This is the negative side of the antagonism.”⁵

Thus, the general economic interest is not a specific feature of socialism alone. But under socialism there is created a qualitatively—

...a qualitatively new objective basis for the commonality of people, arising not simply from the collective form of labor but also from the joint appropriation of the conditions and results of production.

In defining the content of the general economic interest under socialism, a mechanistic error is sometimes made, consisting not only in linking it with an entirely independent bearer (and consequently in opposing society, personified by the socialist state, and the individual), but also in assuming that each independent form of interests corresponds to a definite part of the aggregate social product, asserting that the general economic interest corresponds to the production and appropriation of the surplus product, while the personal interest corresponds to the production and appropriation of the necessary product.^6 The general economic interest, of course, is not the sum of individual interests. The needs for preserving and developing the general conditions of material existence do not coincide with the sum of the needs of individuals, since the social division of labor gives rise to needs that cannot be individual. At the same time, the general economic interest is present in every individual one, manifesting itself, among other ways, through it. Therefore its content and its material-substantive expression cannot be completely different from the content and material-substantive expression of individual interests.

Moreover, the attempt to assign to each of the economic interests the appropriation of only a definite share of the totality of the social product leads to the individual being considered most often merely as a consumer, which ultimately distorts the content of interest in general, since the existence of independent forms of economic interests is linked with various forms of distribution (B. Rakitskii, E. Borisov, and others),^7 or it is asserted that the content of any interest lies in the striving to obtain a share of income (Ya. Liberman).^8 Thus, interest appears not as an external manifestation of the entire totality of production relations, but only as an expression of the relations that take shape within one phase of the reproduction process—the phase of distribution.

The system of economic interests is a totality of dialectically interconnected forms. In pre-Marxist and contemporary bourgeois political economy and sociology, the question of the system of interests and of the relation between the personal and the general was, and is, resolved in an extremely simple way.

First, the most widespread notion is that the only really existing interest is individual interest (A. Smith, D. Ricardo, J. S. Mill, and others). This egoistic interest is supposedly identical with the interest of all society. Bourgeois political economists made many attempts to bring their own mechanistic approach to society as a simple aggregate of isolated individuals closer to Marx’s investigation of capitalist production, which also begins with the “cell,” the commodity, as a manifestation of the separateness of individuals. But at any degree of abstraction, in investigating the initial production relation, K. Marx never abstracted from the fact that everything occurring in the primary link is a manifestation

^6 Ya. A. Kronrod, Laws of the Political Economy of Socialism. Moscow, 1966, p. 417.
^7 B. V. Rakitskii, Social Funds of Consumption as an Economic Category. Moscow, 1966, pp. 18–19; E. Borisov, “The Unity of the Economic Interests of Society, the Enterprise, and the Working People,” Kommunist, 1965, No. 11, pp. 49–50.
^8 Ya. G. Liberman, The State Budget of the USSR under the New Conditions of Economic Management. Moscow, 1970, p. 9.

social. Contemporary revisionist models of “humane” and other kinds of socialism likewise hypertrophy the separateness of producers and place personal economic interest first, which, in their opinion, automatically ensures social harmony.

Secondly, far less widespread is the absolutization of the general economic interest, when the whole of society is regarded as the directly undifferentiated unity of all its members. In pre-Marxist social science, in this case, the general interest was understood as a certain abstract idea, a supreme goal; moreover, it made no difference whether this goal had an openly theological origin, as under feudalism, or whether it possessed a rationalistic character, as under capitalism. Contemporary dogmatists also proceed from the conception of society as an aggregate producer, in which all its members are merely links of a single labor force, which society disposes of entirely at its own discretion.

K. Marx was equally alien to the view of society either as a simple sum of individuals or as a direct unity. He regarded it as an organic whole, characterized by a dialectically differentiated unity, a unity of differentiation and integration⁶. In this case the system of economic interests appears as the interaction of various structural levels in socialist production. At each of these levels, every whole or part, society as a whole or the worker, simultaneously appears both as owners and as producers of material goods.

It is sometimes written that “the logical and historical starting point of social reproduction is individual reproduction in the initial cell of the socialist national economy—the production enterprise”⁷. No less popular is the assertion that “society can secure its interests... only through the economic interests of trusts and enterprises operating on the basis of khozraschet”⁸. It follows that the general economic interest has no independent form of manifestation. Such views, consequently, are connected with an exaggeration of the role and significance of commodity-money relations, which are recognized above all as serving separate, isolated links of social production. But where production is carried out “at the expense of the whole of society”⁹, relations within society take shape not with regard to an individual product produced at a separate, isolated enterprise, but with regard to the joint appropriation of the results of the collective labor of the co-owners of the nationwide patrimony. As a whole, socialist production is not the sum of individual processes of reproduction, but a single reproductive process which, in turn, breaks down into its separate component parts. V. I. Lenin repeatedly drew attention precisely to this aspect of socialist production when he wrote that socialist society is one nationwide syndicate, a single office, a single factory with equality of labor and equality of pay. V. I. Lenin saw the presence of a distinctive interconnection between state-monopoly ownership, which presupposes the overcoming of economic and other separateness, and nationwide ownership. He wrote that “socialism is nothing other than state-capitalist mo—

a monopoly directed to the benefit of the entire people and, to that extent, having ceased to be a capitalist monopoly”^13. As a gigantic organizational task, V. I. Lenin regarded the necessity of transforming “the entire state economic mechanism into one large machine, into an economic organism functioning in such a way that hundreds of millions of people are guided by a single plan”^14.

Thus, neither logically nor historically can individual reproduction be the starting point, since the relations of public ownership can be reproduced only on the condition that all social production functions as a single whole.

When Ya. A. Kronrod and certain other Soviet economists declare that there can be no production other than the production of enterprises^15, they proceed from the fact that they exclude the economic organs of the socialist state from the composition of the aggregate labor force and assume that, in those cases when “state power organizes large-scale production on state land and in state enterprises on a nationwide scale, distributes mass quantities of consumer products belonging to the state among the working people”^16, this activity of the state is purely superstructural and cannot be included as a component part of socialist production relations.

Such views became possible insofar as the planned form of movement of the socialist economy is interpreted in Soviet economic literature as the necessity of consciously centralized influence upon the economy; in other words, the understanding of plannedness as a form lacking real, independent economic content has become widespread. In this sense, plannedness is only an external mode of existence of all the other economic laws of socialism, and this interpretation provides full grounds for excluding certain specifically socialist forms of regulation of production from the system of socialist production relations, and for considering them merely as a manifestation of the economic-organizational function of the socialist state.

In reality, however, as soon as the genuinely nationwide economic interest replaces the general economic interest that also exists under capitalism, a specifically socialist form of its existence also appears. K. Marx wrote that where “production is under the actual control of society, which predetermines this production, society establishes a connection between the quantity of social labor time expended on the production of a definite object and the magnitude of the social need to be satisfied with the aid of this object”^17. That is, under conditions of directly social production, a new form of movement of concrete labor takes shape, when its distribution among kinds of activity is carried out not only indirectly, through the realization of the product of labor as a commodity, but also directly, in immediate accordance with the structure of social needs. Despite the broadest spread of commodity-money relations, this form of connection is determinative, primary. Prior to the beginning of the individual process of production at enterprises, society, which is mono—

^13 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 34, p. 192.
^14 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 36, p. 7.
^15 Ya. A. Kronrod, The Law of Value and the Socialist Economy. Moscow, 1970, p. 49.
^16 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 39, p. 273.
^17 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 25, part 1, p. 205.

as the full possessor of all the basic conditions of production, determines the most important national-economic proportions, sets in motion the material and labor resources necessary for the organization and functioning of production in individual links.

Under socialism the boundaries of aggregate labor power expand; labor “in supervision and management” (K. Marx), as a variety of productive labor without any reservations, becomes national-economic labor, since without it the social productive process is impossible. It is not current activity itself in the management of production, but the objectively necessary forms of maintaining proportionality in production, the distribution of concrete labor by types of activity, that are a component part of socialist production relations. The presence of this objective mechanism for the functioning of social production, which is in fact a dialectical negation of commodity-money relations, makes it possible to conclude that under socialism there exists a special, specific form for the realization of the nationwide interest.

The exaggeration noted above of the role and significance of the individual process of reproduction and of the role of commodity-money relations also finds expression in the fact that, up to the present, there is a juxtaposition of administrative and economic methods of management. By the former is meant direct influence on the will of the managed subject, an individualized command, the implementation of the principle of one-man management; by the latter, the fulfillment of national-economic tasks in direct correspondence with the material interests of each separate link. In this case, the strengthening of economic methods of management now being carried out must mean that, above all, the best conditions are being created for the functioning of individual enterprises, and that “the separation of the process of individual reproduction from the social one is being strengthened,” as N. D. Kolesov believes.^18 Touching on one of the more particular questions, N. D. Kolesov asserts that “a reduction in the number of economic indicators by which the activity of enterprises is assessed means the strengthening of its economic independence.”^19

It is hardly possible to agree with so categorical a statement. The measures of the economic reform are not aimed at strengthening the separateness of enterprises, although an expansion of operational-economic independence does indeed take place. The reduction in the number and the change in the system of planned indicators pursue the following aims:

First, to consolidate and overcome the excessive fragmentation of the previously existing system of indicators, so that the nationwide interest can be conveyed to the direct producer more easily and at the least cost.

Second, the distinctive feature of the new system of indicators is that, while smaller in physical volume, they contain no smaller amount of meaningful information conveyed to enterprises and received from them; consequently, they must more fully reflect the reproduction processes taking place at the enterprise.

Third, the new system of indicators ensures a closer connection between production and consumption, the correspondence of the activity of each enterprise to aggregate social needs; that is, its ultimate goal is not the expansion, but the gradual overcoming of separateness.

^18 Scientific Notes of the Department of Social Sciences of Leningrad State University, issue XI: The Political Economy of Socialism. Leningrad State University Press, 1970, p. 23.
^19 Ibid., p. 24.

As practice shows, the new system of plan indicators is not free of shortcomings, the chief of which was the abandonment of the centralized setting of tasks for the technical re-equipment of production. The attempt to influence these processes indirectly, through greater stimulation of the increase in realized output obtained by raising labor productivity, is not always successful, as is evidenced by the insufficient rates of growth of labor productivity in Soviet industry in recent years. Consequently, what is involved here is a violation of the objectively existing interconnection between the nationwide and collective interests, confirming once again that to realize the general economic interest only through forms characteristic of collective, separate interests—stimulation, commodity-money relations, and so forth—is extremely difficult and may lead to consequences undesirable for our economy.

A certain exaggeration of the indirect levers of influence on production, and a restricted interpretation of economic methods of management in economic science, are explained by the fact that, in essence, society is still treated in the political economy of socialism not as a socio-economic, but as a socio-political organism. Therefore society as the real subject of economic activity is practically not studied; and in defining plannedness, instead of its real content as a form of existence of concrete labor, the external mode of its existence is put in the foreground. The involuntary impression is created that the realization of the nationwide interest is connected with extra-economic coercion, with the power-based character of influence, and so on; therefore the combination of the general and collective interests has come to appear as a combination of administrative and economic methods of management.

1. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 44, p. 345. ↩

2. S. P. Sirotkin, S. I. Skarzhinsky, A. V. Solov'ev, Labor—Stimulation, Distribution, Use. Verkhne-Volzhskoe Book Publishing House, 1967, p. 99. ↩

3. The Economic Role of the Socialist State in the Period of the Full-Scale Construction of Communism. Saratov, 1963, p. 89. ↩

4. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 3, p. 31. ↩

5. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 2, pp. 38–39. ↩

6. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 12, pp. 725–726. ↩

7. “Economic Sciences,” 1968, no. 9, p. 81; Political Economy of Socialism. Leningrad State University Press, 1970, p. 5. ↩

8. “Economic Sciences,” 1969, no. 4, p. 9. ↩

9. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 232. ↩