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[[column 1]] been broken. Agriculture, if the program’s objectives are approached Could be fully incorporated at long last into the Soviet planning processes. In 1961, even with the prospects of record green harvest of perhaps 150 to 155 million tons, the fulfillment of the agricultural targets has little more prospect of realization than unkept pledges of the past. More Things for Nothing It does not require an overly close scrutiny of the program to realize that the abundance of goods and services which a communist society must provide is not promised for 1980. The fulfillment of the slogan of satisfaction “according to need” is, moreover, not to be a matter of individually determined personal requirements. Instead, the emergence of a kind of collective egalitarianism, based on carefully calculated “rational” Consumption norms for services, will mark the next phase of communist development. Primarily in those sectors where controls can be readily applied there will be a gradual transition to free distribution of either goods or services; but these highly propagandized free items currently involve a relatively small percentage—— approximately 15 to 20 per cent——of total consumer expenditures. Rental charges, now less than 5 per cent of average incomes, are to be eliminated, but new housing in large apartment blocks still will be centrally allocated; By 1980, the present 9 square meters per person in shared quarters (In the U.S. comparable figure is now 27 square meters) should have grown to a little more than an average of 10.5 square meters per person in individual apartments for every family, including newlyweds. In addition to free housing, and by 1980 such utilities as heat, light, gas, and public transportation, The advance of communism is to bring a vastly expanded network of communal feeding facilities, continued reduction of the working time to a six-hour a day in a 30 to 36-hour a week, free education from the boarding school through the university for some, and through 11 grades for all, and free medical care from the cradle to the grave. In one form or another, all these have been promised before. [[column 2]] Yet, despite all reservations, there will be a meaningful, if not precipitous, Advance towards a communist welfare state under Khrushchev in the coming decades. To a certain extent it will be possible to measure statistically the progress in this direction by the increase in which the social consumption funds, which are to account for 50 per cent of average real wages in 1980, compared to from 30 to 40 per cent at present. The savings of the 15 to 20 per cent of wages now being sent on what will be free services and goods in the future will represent a change of only 1 per cent a year, which is certainly the minimum for any program presenting a design for a communist society. To finance these benefits, despite the abolition of personal income taxes, does not pose any problems; the increased revenues from the turnover taxes on the plant expanded consumer goods sales, And taxes on the growing profits of industrial enterprises, will provide more than sufficient funds during the first phase of communism. Money, prices, and profits are to remain, not as despised vestiges of a gloomy past, but as a respected symbols of a glowing future. For most material personal needs, Soviet workers still will have to depend primarily on the earnings from their labor, and this will be true to an even greater extent for the peasantry, who still make up for nearly one half of the population and only now——after four decades——are to become eligible for the social security benefits listed in the program for 1970 and after. The Party Will Not Wither Consistent with classical theory, the coming era of economic abundance is to have as its political corollary “the withering away of the state.” But just as the full material benefits of communism must await a still indetermined date beyond 1980, the Soviet state has been granted another reprieve from its doctrinal death until communism has one its “contest with capitalism in the international arena.” In achieving this victory, a greatly improved system of economic co-operation with the other members of the Sino-Soviet bloc is to move these countries, with economies as different as those of N. Viet Namnand the DDR, and problems as varied as those of China and Czechoslovakia, “more or less [[column 3]] [[image]] A cartoon from “Pravda.” simultaneously towards communism.” But since socialism has been “fully and irrevocably” established in the Soviet Union, the Soviet state, according to Khrushchev’s major theoretical innovation in the program, is no longer a “dictatorship of the proletariat“; it is now, we are told, the state of an entirely classless society and the dictatorship and it’s “coercive organs” can be gradually dismantled by a transition to “communist self-government which will embrace the Soviet trade unions, co-operatives, and other mass organization of the people.” No clue is given to the stage And which such nascent forms of socialist administration will be sufficiently developed to permit the Party to dispense with the instruments of coercion which I have always been considered essential to Marxist-Leninists. The monopoly of power of the communist party is neither challenged nor diminished. On the contrary, as Khrushchev has stated on numerous occasions, there will be “a further enhancement of the role and importance of the Party as the leading and guiding force of Soviet society.” Although the proposals to limit the period of office for all ind- (Concluded on page 56) [[bottom]] NOVEMBER 1961 37
