Stephen E. Hanson - Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
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Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
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Stephen Hanson traces the influence of the Marxist conception of time in Soviet politics from Lenin to Gorbachev. He argues that the history of Marxism and Leninism reveals an unsuccessful revolutionary effort to reorder the human relationship with time and that this reorganization had a direct impact on the design of the central political, socioeconomic, and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991.According to Hanson, westerners tend to envision time as both rational and inexorable. In a system in which time is money, the clock dominates workers. Marx, however, believed that communist workers would be freed of the artificial distinction between leisure time and work time. As a result, they would be able to surpass capitalist production levels and ultimately control time itself. Hanson reveals the distinctive imprint of this philosophy on the formation and development of Soviet institutions, arguing that the breakdown of Gorbachevs perestroika and the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate the failure of the idea.
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Time and Revolution : Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
author
:
Hanson, Stephen E.
publisher
:
University of North Carolina Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0807823058
print isbn13
:
9780807823057
ebook isbn13
:
9780807861905
language
:
English
subject
Time--Social aspects, Revolutions and socialism, Soviet Union--Economic policy, Statics and dynamics (Social sciences) , Time and economic reactions.
publication date
:
1997
lcc
:
HM73.H316 1997eb
ddc
:
304.2/3
subject
:
Time--Social aspects, Revolutions and socialism, Soviet Union--Economic policy, Statics and dynamics (Social sciences) , Time and economic reactions.
Stephen E. Hanson
Time and Revolution
Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill & London
1997 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanson, Stephen, 1963 Time and revolution: Marxism and the design of Soviet institutions / Stephen E. Hanson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8078-2305-8 (cloth: alk. paper). ISBN 0-8078-4615-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. TimeSocial aspects. 2. Revolutions and socialism. 3. Soviet UnionEconomic policy. 4. Statics and dynamics (Social sciences). 5. Time and economic reactions. I. Title. HM73.H316 1997 96-13723 304.2'3dc20 CIP
01 00 99 98 97 5 4 3 2 1
Chapter 6 was previously published, in a slightly different form, as "Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?," in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left, ed. Daniel Chirot (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).
Page v
Contents
Preface
vii
Acknowledgments
xv
CHAPTER ONE
Traditional, Modern, and Charismatic Time
1
CHAPTER TWO
Time in the Works of Kant and Hegel
22
CHAPTER THREE
The Theoretical Cycle: From Marx to the Second International
37
CHAPTER FOUR
The Political Cycle: From Lenin to the End of the NEP:
69
CHAPTER FIVE
The Socioeconomic Cycle: From Stalin to the "Era of Stagnation"
129
CHAPTER SIX
Gorbachev's Perestroika and the Charismatic-Rational Conception of Time
180
Conclusion
200
Notes
217
Bibliography
243
Index
253
Page vii
Preface
The clock was accurate, but Margulies did not depend on it. He was not asleep. He always rose at six and was always ahead of time. There had never yet been an occasion when the alarm clock had actually awakened him.
Margulies could not really have faith in so simple a mechanism as a timepiece; could not entrust to it so precious a thing as time.
Valentin Kataev, Time, Forward!, 1932
The passage above, which begins a prominent Stalinist propaganda novel extolling the virtues of heroic efforts to overfulfill the First Five-Year Plan, unwittingly encapsulates a central dilemma of Soviet development: how might a regime whose purpose was to build a communist society beyond the constraints of ordinary time nonetheless enforce economically productive norms of time use so as to compete with the capitalist West?
Margulies, the archetypal Bolshevik engineer of the novel, is a character unimaginable in a Western context. Certainly, the idea that time is too precious to entrust to a watch seems hard to fathom from a capitalist point of view. What is time, anyway, besides the name we give to what a watch measures? A capitalist engineer reading Kataev's
Page viii
book today would simply laugh at its main conclusionthat economic productivity under socialism could have been enhanced if everybody in the Soviet Union had been like Margulies and thrown away his or her watch so as to utilize time in a more revolutionary manner.
Yet, as this study will show, Stalinist economic institutions were originally set up to encourage precisely this sort of behavior. Many of the well-known structural problems of the Soviet planned economythe enormous waste of human and material resources, the tendency of factories to alternate between periods of frantic rush work and periods of prolonged inaction, the shoddiness of goods, and the lack of incentives to innovatebecome explicable once we take into account something often overlooked in Western analyses: the men who designed this economy were not interested in trying to achieve efficiency in the Western sense.1 If the ideal of "bourgeois" economists is a system in which each unit of time is utilized in as productive a manner as possible given scarce resources, the goal of Soviet socialism was to organize production in such a manner as to master time itself.
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