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lNotesand Comment
SLAVIC
PROBLEMS
IN SOVIET
REVIEW
AND
UNPROBLEMS
SOCIAL
THEORY
BY LEWIS S. FEUER
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Slavic Review
119
with the freedom of the individual implies that they have a potential
of providing a critique of the "alienation" of individuals in the Soviet
planned society. Nevertheless, although they can write studies of the
concept of "alienation" in Marx's early manuscripts, and essaysshowing
how the philosophies of Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger, Niebuhr, Sartre,
et al. are symptoms of the modes of "alienation" of man under capitalist society, the "alienation" of themselves, their fellow intellectuals, the
peasants, and the workingmen in Soviet society remains for them perforce an unproblem.
The history of sociological science is bound up in America and
Western Europe with two sorts of attitudes toward society-one a social
reformist, critical outlook, the other a social pessimism according to
which the existing realities are a part of the inevitable scheme of
things; the Webbs, Robert Park and the Chicago School, Lynd, Lester
Ward, Beard, and Dewey exemplified the former standpoint, and William G. Sumner, Pareto, and Max Weber were essentially representatives of the latter. In the Soviet Union, however, sociology maintains
a kind of shadowy existence, because on the one hand it must curb its
reforrmier's
impulse to criticize and reconstruct the workings of Soviet
society, and on the other, it cannot allow itself to regard Soviet life
with the analytic-descriptive tools of pessimistic realism. Consequently,
Soviet sociology tries to adjust itself to the role of a scientific servitor,
who amiably confines himself to those small assignments the regime
confides to him, and joins in the conspiracy of silence never to raise the
big, important questions. In the West every few years we have had
books calling on the social scientists to face the truly significant issues;
J. A. Hobson's Free Thought in the Social Sciences, Robert Lynd's
Knowledge for What?, and C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination were all exhortations of this character. The freedom of the
Soviet social scientists will be proclaimed one day only when one of
them dares write a book on the unproblems of Soviet social science and
the social causes of their own pusillanimity. No Soviet sociologist has
dared to raise the question of the validity of Michels' law of oligarchy
in the Soviet Communist Party; no Soviet sociologist these last thirty
years has written a single essay or book analyzing the phenomenon of
anti-Semitism in its widespread manifestations. No Soviet social scientist has dared even to suggest a study of the social conditions that made
possible the "cult of personality," the masochist acquiescence of the
Soviet people to a generation of terror, and the role of the party in
masochizing itself and the people.
Committed as servitors to the Central Committee, the social scientists
find themselves, sometimes reluctantly, compelled to fulfill the role of
ideologists rather than scientists. It was Engels indeed who first spoke
of "an end to all ideology" which would ensue when people brought
into consciousness the unconscious impelling forces of their thought
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fully designed; the workers were drawn from six groups, unskilled,
skilled manual, skilled machine, conveyor operators, automatized, and
maximum automatized workers. The five factories included machine
industrial, textile, building, chemical, and food processing plants. The
investigators obtained objective data on the production output, both
quantitative and qualitative, of each of the 3,000 workers, as well as
information on their discipline and "social activities." They then tried
to correlate the productivity data with the degree of satisfaction felt by
the workingmen in their jobs. They found that dissatisfaction in one's
job could reduce productivity from 10 to 20 per cent, while satisfaction
in work could raise it from 10 to 15 per cent. Their most unusual
finding, however, was that the chief cause for dissatisfaction with one's
job was (what they called) "the poor organization of industry." A workingmnan,for example, would report in the morning at his factory, but
the necessary raw materials would not be on hand for manufacturing
to begin. The workingman would then receive his basic daily wage,
but through no fault of his own he would earn no production premia.
This situation was wholly unlike the experience of American workers,
for whom managerial inefficiency is not a primary factor in job discontent. The Leningrad sociologists are clearly, however, circumscribed in
the use they can make of their findings. They do not ask: to what
factors in the functioning of the Soviet economy do the workingmen
attribute the poor organization of industry? To what extent do they
regard such malfunctioning as inherent in planned economy? To what
extent do they regard it as arising from remediable bureaucratic abuses,
malpractices, and inefficiencies? The poor organization of industry, it
was found, was the chief reason for the high labor turnover, for the
wandering from job to job. Why have the unions failed to express the
workers' discontent? Is there a repressed longing to express their dissatisfaction in political terms?
Such were the unproblems which emerged as Soviet industrial sociologists outlined their work, the boundaries of their studies which may
be seen but never mentioned. The 3,000 young Leningrad workers
were assured that their answers to the questionnaires would be used
constructively; they were told that the findings would be turned over
to the government for guidance in its helping them. Would a young
worker jeopardize his bread by articulating honestly and fully the dissatisfaction he feels when he knows that all he says can be made available to the government? In a totalitarian society, there is an indeterminate margin of error in all interviewing and questionnaires, but the
study of that margin of error and the degree of its indeterminacy is the
most significant unproblem in the methodology of Soviet social science.
Political sociology in general remains forbidden territory in Soviet
social science. What kind of person selects a career in the Communist
Party apparatus? How does he compare in honesty, initiative, and in-
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by arguing that such conditions are common to all countries which are
industrializing themselves; in their by-gone days of Marxist methodology, they would have denied that there could be a demographic law
common to both socialist and capitalist types of industrialization. Similarly, the Soviet demographers have found a decline in the size of their
urban families which corresponds to phenomena in European capitalist
cities. Their own evolving social policy has meanwhile made obsolete
the anti-Malthusian bias that characterized Marx's writings. Therefore, young Soviet demographers have, despite the objections of the
ideologists of the older generation, scrapped the anti-Malthusian heritage. Both capitalist and socialist societies, they say, undertake family
limitation and birth control because both experience the common influence of education, the ethic of individual happiness, and the conditions of urban life. Fortunately, the young social scientists have found
the fortifying authority of a later letter of Engels in which he acknowledged that even communist society may find itself "obliged to regulate
the production of human beings," and "to achieve by planning a result
which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in
France and Lower Austria."3
What is done in practice, however, is not acknowledged in theory.
The dialectical method may be repudiated in concrete sociological
research, but no Soviet methodologist dares to discuss openly the revision of the dialectical methodology. The status of the Marxian dialectic
is, in basic respects, an unproblem for Soviet methodology. During the
discussion which followed a lecture of mine on the sociology of science
at the Institute of Philosophy, I called attention to the contradiction
between their practice and the relevant passages in Marx's second preface to Capital. I found that although they were curiously ignorant of
the latter, they still felt compelled to deny that there could be any contradiction between their research theory and their official dogma. The
"contradictions," they insisted, were all mine.
What then is the over-all pattern concerning problems and unproblems in Soviet social science and philosophy? Where the exigencies of
competitive coexistence are directly felt, Soviet science has tended to
relinquish its dogmatic Marxism and to adopt a more flexible standpoint. Mathematical logic, for instance, enjoys a high prestige in the
Soviet Union at present because it is associated with computational
machines and electronic systems. Where technology has come into conflict with ideology, with its claims reinforced by the need to compete
with the West, there ideology has given wvay to science. But the displacement of ideology is carefully contained. Mathematical logic, for
instance, flourishes in departments of mathematics; in departments of
philosophy, on the other hand, the dialectical logicians maintain a
3 Marx and Engels onzMalthus, tranis. Dorothea L. Meek and Ronald L. Meek (Lonldon,
1953), pp. 108-9.
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