Administrative-command System Research Articles

Some Lessons of History and Contemporary Life

At the Conference of the CPSU Central Committee in July 1989, alarm was expressed at the fact that doubt had unambiguously been cast on the essence of Marxist theory in the pages of the press and in a number of statements at the Congress of People's Deputies. Attempts to revise fundamental ideological principles and to cast a shadow over the Leninist legacy have grown more frequent in the journalistic media. Allegations have appeared that the origins of a command-administrative system go back to Lenin. It is natural that questions concerning the organizational structure of the communist party and the principles and norms of its life should be under scrutiny.

You Can't Outsmart Life

The resolution of perestroika's principal economic problem—the problem of overcoming the alienation of the worker from the means of production and the results of his labor—requires the radical transformation of property relations created by the administrative-command system. This means transforming the working people into real masters, the destatization [razgosudarstvlenie] of property, the affirmation and development of its diverse forms, and their legal equality.

Problems of Transition to New Forms of Organization of Management

The restructuring of the organization of economic management has entered a decisive and at the same time critical phase. The old structuresfrom the bottom to the topinherited from the administrative-command system no longer jibe with the new economic mechanism, while the new forms of organization of management have not yet gained in strength, are born with great difficulty while overcoming the fierce resistance of the bureaucratic apparatus. That which is merely new in form is frequently substituted for what is genuinely new in content. The flaws of the old structures appear once again in new garb. The persistent striving to usurp all rights in the upper echelon of branch management and to concentrate all responsibility in lower-echelon cells is unabating. Under these conditions, the self-renewal of the administrative-command system, which has been and still continues to be the main obstacle to the radical reform of economic management, occurs first here then there.

Socialism: Possible Variants

Various crisis phenomena in our country's system of socioeco-nomic and political relations have generated a question that was unusual yesterday but that is customary today: is this socialism? There are also answers to this question: either declarationsappealing for their newnessthat our society is not socialistic (without indicating the kind of society it is) or definitions of it as barracks socialism, socialism, etc. Historical facts of past and present attesting to the dominance of the administrative-command system, to arbitrariness, to repressions of the Stalinist period that are incompatible with socialism serve as arguments in all cases.

The Black Market

Over the past year or two we have all had the occasion to read and hear a lot, and even to voice our own views, about the deficiencies in our command-administrative system of management. A meticulous analysis of these deficiencies (as a matter of fact, they should not be called deficiencies, since we are talking about specific determining features of this system of economic management) was recently presented on the pages of Ogonek (nos. 29 and 30) by Academician A. G. Aganbegian. The rigidly assigned targets, the "ration-card" distribution of resources, the shortages of practically all resources, goods, and services, the extreme waste, the dictatorship of the producer over the consumer, the low quality, the decline in growth rates and in the quality of this growth-these by no means exhaust the list of negative aspects of our socioeconomic mechanism, which the measures mapped out by the June Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU are intended to overcome.