Time Will Run Back

Chapter 29

HE walked along the line of haggard creatures, in their filthy rags, and stared intently at each vacant face in turn. He had now seen hundreds, thousands of these faces of what had once been men and women. But neither Edith nor Maxwell was among them.

He had not really expected to find them. He did not know whether he feared rather than hoped to find them here. But anything was better than sitting at his desk and getting negative second-hand reports that he did not trust. At least he was doing something himself. He had slipped secretly away from Moscow for a week, left his responsibilities there in charge of Adams, and visited every slave camp in the region that the time allowed. It had all been in vain. This was the last camp, the last line-up.

“I don’t understand you, chief,” said Adams when their afternoon conferences were resumed. He had been talking of Peter’s “negative attitude” toward the proposals of Baronio. “You have this passion for reform, and yet you reject one proposed reform after another without even trying it.”

“Would I have to jump out of this window,” Peter retorted, “to find out whether or not I would get hurt?”

“No doubt there are some things, chief, that one does know about in advance without trying them—usually because something very much like them has been tried before. But you can’t know everything that would happen under a particular proposed reform until you try it.”

“That used to be the very thing you objected to, Adams. My efforts to introduce personal liberty and real democracy were both wretched failures. And especially while Bolshekov is around, I can’t afford any more failures.”

“But your freedom of exchange for consumers’ goods was a great success!”

“Well, what experiment would you want me to try now?”

“You criticized me severely, chief, for proposing a system that provided harsh penalties for managers but no incentives. Well, why don’t you suggest or try some incentives for managers?”

“Such as what?”

“Suppose a manager of a particular factory turned out an output with a greater value than his input. Why not allow him to keep the difference?”

“All of it?”

“Well, half of it... or, say, some fixed percentage of it.”

“Suppose the situation were the other way round, Adams, and the manager’s input—his cost of production—were greater than the value of his output? Would he have to suffer the loss?”

“Exactly.”

“Suppose he didn’t have that much for us to take away from him?”

“Then, chief, you would be back to my penalties. Fire him. Or, if the loss was big enough, let him starve. Or shoot him.”

“I’m afraid, Adams, that your proposal wouldn’t quite work out. Suppose a manager really had a surplus of output over input. How would we know that that wasn’t merely the result of his having taken a reckless but lucky gamble? Or how would we know that it wasn’t really the workers in that factory, and not the managers, who were responsible for the gain shown? Or—most important of all—wouldn’t it probably be true, for the most part, that the gains and losses shown by the different factories had little or nothing to do with their individual management but were caused primarily by the arbitrary prices that the Central Planning Board put on the raw materials or labor that a factory bought, or on the finished products that it sold? In short, wouldn’t the gains or losses shown by individual factories depend primarily on prices? And aren’t we, then, right back to the price problem?”

“But if you have a price system for consumption goods, chief, why can’t you have a price system for the tools of production?”

“For the simple reason, Adams, that consumption goods are owned by individuals who exchange them only at ratios that they consider to their personal advantage, while all the tools of production are owned by the State. The State can’t sell to and buy from itself.”

“But why not, chief? Why can’t one industry sell to another, or buy from a third, even if all of them are State-owned?”

“Because the prices set would be arbitrary, fictional and meaningless. The Central Planning Board, Adams, just can’t play ‘market’; it can’t play ‘price system,’ like children playing house. Markets and prices, in order to perform the function they do perform—that of showing us the relative values that users and consumers put on things—must be real. Our present system of arbitrary allocations of raw materials and labor, arbitrary decisions concerning how big each industry should be and exactly how much of each product should be turned out—this is at least a controllable plan. It may not give people what they want, but at least it is far better than fixing prices at random and then watching the bizarre and unpredictable things that would happen under them.”

But Peter was troubled by Adams’ criticism that he condemned proposals without trying them. A few weeks later he came up with an idea that had been maturing in his mind for some time.

“One of our great troubles, Adams, is that we are trying to plan more than any human mind can hold. We are trying to plan every industry—and all their interrelations—and all the rest. Why not let the workers of each industry control and police their own industry? That would decentralize control and break up the planning problem into manageable units.”

“The idea has possibilities, chief... but it might lead to results we couldn’t foresee.”

“Precisely,” said Peter; “and that is why we ought to try it out.”

“But the results might be bad. They might give Bolshekov just the excuse—”

“Why not try it out, then, only on a small scale? Why not apply the idea, Adams, in only one province—far away from Moscow? Why not throw a censorship around that district, so that no news could get in or out until we were certain that the experiment was a success?”

“Have you decided, chief, who our guinea pigs would be?” “How about the Soviet Republic of Peru? That’s certainly remote enough!”

So Peter arranged to go to Peru personally to supervise his experiment. He kept his trip a public secret, redoubled the guard around his father, had Bolshekov more closely watched, and left Adams again in charge of Wonworld at Moscow.

At the very start he found himself confronted in Peru by a problem of unexpected difficulty. He wanted each industry to be self-governing and independent. But what was an industry? Where did each industry begin and end? Did the copper industry consist purely of the copper mines? Or did it include the smelters? Did it include the makers of copper wire? Or were the wire makers—whether they made wire of copper, aluminum or steel—a separate industry? Should the sugar growers be grouped with the sugar refineries or with the farmers? Were the shoe manufacturers part of the leather industry, or part of the apparel industry, or an industry of their own? Was carpentry part of the building industry, or part of the furniture industry—or a separate industry?

These problems of classification were endless. No general principle seemed to apply. Practically every decision finally made, Peter at length realized, was at least partly arbitrary, and most of the decisions were completely arbitrary.

At the end, when the Peruvian commissars he had appointed had finished their work, they had named fifty-seven different industries. Peter had asked that these be reclassified into an even fifty, but he now recognized that they could be classified into only a dozen “industries” or into several hundred.

A temporary head was named for each industry. Someone jokingly nicknamed these heads the industry “czars.” Each industry was told to organize itself in any way it thought fit, provided each worker was allowed an equal vote. The industry could fix its own production, its own prices or terms of exchange, its own hours and conditions of work, its own entrance requirements.

Some Peruvians called the new system “syndicalism”; others called it “guild socialism”; and still others liked the name “corporativism.”

Peter returned to Moscow, promising to be back in Peru in six months to see how the new system was working. He left a secret cable code with the three top commissars to keep him informed.

Before two months had passed he received urgent cables begging for his return.

He came back to find a chaotic situation bordering on civil war.

The first thing the workers in each industry had done had been to exclude anybody else from entering the industry. Each industry had quickly discovered that it could exact the best terms of exchange for its particular product by rendering it relatively scarce. There had then developed a competitive race for scarcity instead of for production. The workers in each industry voted themselves shorter and shorter hours. Each industry was either withholding goods or threatening to suspend production altogether until it got the prices it demanded for the particular kind of goods it had to supply.

Peter was indignant. He called in the various syndicates of workers representing each industry and denounced them in blistering terms for the selfish and shortsighted way in which they had “abused” the privileges he had conferred upon them.

But as he studied the matter further he cooled off, and took a more objective view. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that the fault was his own. It was inherent in the system he had set up. He had allowed each industry to become an unrestrained monopoly. The more essential or irreplaceable the product that it made, therefore, the more it could and would squeeze everybody else. Inherent in his system had been the assumption that production existed primarily for the benefit of the producers—whereas, he now saw, its only real justification was what it provided for consumers.

He dismantled the new system entirely, and ordered the restoration of the old centralized socialism under the Central Planning Board at Moscow.

Bolshekov, he later learned, had got wind of the experiment and its failure, but fortunately had had no way of making his knowledge public. Peter thanked his lucky stars—and Adams’ foresighted advice—that he still had control over the radio and the newspapers.

But as an economic reformer he felt more frustrated than ever before.

Then suddenly, one night at the piano, when he was playing a Bach fugue, an idea hit him like a bolt of lightning. He stopped midway in an intricate passage. His mind had been returning to a question that Adams had asked: “Why can’t you have a price system for the tools of production?” And he thought of his own answer: “Because consumption goods are owned by individuals... while the tools of production are owned by the State.” Of course, that was the right answer... but wasn’t there an answer to the answer?...

Yes, there was! Why hadn’t Adams made it then? Why hadn’t he himself thought of it then? He knew the answer! The tools of production didn’t have to be owned by the State!

It was late at night. But he rushed, hatless and coatless, out of his own apartment, took the automatic elevator to the street level, waved aside the sentries at the main entrance, and ran alone along four blocks of solitary streets to Adams’ rooms, using a pass key that Adams had given to him. He routed him out of bed, shook him awake, threw his arms around his shoulders, slapped him on the back, hugged him.

“I’ve found the answer, Adams!” he shouted. “I’ve found the answer to all our problems! I’ve found the key that unlocks everything: Private ownership of the means of production!”