Bogdanov on the Role of Technology in a Collectivist Society

Source

Original source:

John Biggart:

"Bogdanov’s ‘Socialist Society’ as outlined in the Short Course in Economic Science of 1906 has been well summarized by James D. White in Red Hamlet. In what follows I shall summarize Bogdanov’s later outline, published in the first (1918/1919) and second (1923/1924) editions of Volume II, Part 4 of the Course in Political Economy where the title ‘Socialist Society” is replaced by the title “The “Collectivist Order”.

Recent source:

* Article: lexander Bogdanov and the suppression of “Collectivism”. By John Biggart.

URL = https://www.academia.edu/60162576/Alexander_Bogdanov_and_the_suppression_of_Collectivism_

Excerpt

John Biggart:

I. Technology under collectivism

a) Machines: sources of energy, mechanisms

Under capitalism, innovation is constrained by the profit motive; under Collectivism there will be no such constraint. The development of new energy resources (electricity, atomic energy, and others as yet unknown) will be facilitated. Management of the new technology will be automated (“avtomaticheski-signalnye pribory”). Developments in transportation and communications will remove material obstacles to the formation of the general human collective.

b) The labour force

Specialized skills will lose their significance. The functional divide between management (“organization”) and implementation (“execution”) of work will disappear: Since automated equipment will require a higher degree of technical knowledge; the worker will assimilate the functions of the engineer. Special skills and competences will not completely disappear but will become more transferable.

II. The economic aspect of collectivism

a) Cooperation

Collectivism means the conscious and planned organization (planomernaya organizatsiya) of work. This will not be bureaucratic-authoritarian centralization but rather a uniform (“odnorodnoe”) system of comradely cooperation. An apparatus for the coordination of the entire system of production, a statistical institution, will process information on labour resources and the goods produced by enterprises so as to achieve the necessary balance. Advances in transportation and communication will facilitate the rational (“tselesoobraznoe”) distribution of production units and avoid an over-concentration of human resources. In allocating occupations and determining the length of the working day, the coordinating apparatus will take into account the health, abilities and inclinations of the individual producer and not prescribe any norms.

“Cooperation under collectivism will be a scientifically organized system of comradely relations, a centralized collective based on a supremely mobile combination and grouping of elements, involving comprehensively developed and conscious workers possessing a high degree of psychic uniformity.”

b) Distribution

During the transition period distribution will be governed by the relationship between labour and reward. In the next stage, when the forces of production have been perfected, the economy is generating a surplus, and there are no vestiges of individualism and parasitism, the same freedom will be achieved as in the sphere of production: “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. The centralized allocation of human and material resources becomes a “scientific- statistical task and no more”. This task will be carried out by a “gigantic Statistical Bureau” that allocates resources on a global scale. The statistical methods currently used by stock exchanges and banks are precursors of the new system.

IV: Forces for development under collectivism

The fundamental and universal driver of development is the struggle with the unpredictability (“stikhiinost’”) of nature. Every step in the attempt to understand nature encounters new resistances that have to be overcome by new methods. However, the end of the class struggle releases energy that can be devoted to the ongoing conquest of nature. The depth of relations between people in their working experience will produce an abundance of factors for development, and a potential for innovation that we can scarcely imagine."

Commentary

John Biggart:

"Bogdanov’s innovation in Marxist theory ... might ... have been contentious. The term “communism”, he argued, should be used strictly to refer to the socialization of consumption and distribution. The cooperation of human beings in the work process, that is in production, should be referred to as “collectivism”. Certainly, in socialist society “communism” and “collectivism” would be inextricably bound up; but collectivism in work and production would be fundamental, whereas communism in consumption and distribution would be the “existential outcome” (“zhiznenny rezul’tat”) of the latter.

That, for Bogdanov, “collectivism” was not a perfect end-state, but an evolutionary process is evident from his cautionary remark that not only comradely but also authoritarian forms of organization could be present in both the collectivism of work and the communism of consumption and distribution. One or the other might be dominant according to time and circumstances."