A state that controls nationalized industries, has a monopoly of foreign trade and a monopoly on attracting foreign capital to one or other area of the economy, thus has at its disposal a rich arsenal of means which it can combine to accelerate the pace of economic development. All these means, however, although they flow from the nature of the socialist state as such, do not yet, in essence, intrude into the realm of production processes. In other words, had we preserved all the plants and factories in the form in which they operated in 1913, their nationalization would still have given us enormous advantages through the planned and economical distribution of resources.
The economic achievements of the reconstructive period are due to a large extent precisely to the socialist methods of productive distribution; that is to say, to the planned or semi-planned methods of providing various sectors of the national economy with the necessary resources. We have also examined the possibilities resulting from our relations with the world market primarily from the point of view of the resources of production, but not from its internal organization.
We must not, however, for a moment forget that the fundamental advantages of socialism lie in the sphere of production itself. These advantages, which we have so far utilized only to a negligible extent, open up boundless possibilities for accelerating the pace of economic development. The following should be given priority: the genuine nationalization of scientific technical thought and all industrial innovation; the centralized and planned resolution of the problem of electricity for the economy as a whole and for each region separately; standardization (or normalization) of all other products, and, finally, a consistent specialization of the factories.
The work of scientific and technical thought knows no barriers of private property in our country. Every organizational and technical achievement of any enterprise, every improvement in chemical or other formulations can immediately become the property of all interested factories and plants. Scientific and technical institutes have the opportunity to test their ideas in any state enterprise, while every enterprise can at any moment, through the institutes, use the collective experience of industry as a whole for its own benefit. Scientific and technical thought in our country is, in principle, socialized. However, even in this area, we have not yet freed ourselves from conservative barriers, some of them ideological, some of them material, which we have inherited along with the nationalized property of the capitalists. We are only just learning to make wider use of the opportunities arising from the nationalization of scientific and technical creativity. On this path, we will be able to achieve untold advantages in the next few years, which taken together, will lead to a result that is invaluable to us: an acceleration of our pace of development.
Another source of significant savings, and consequently of increased productivity of labor, is the proper management of energy. The need for motive power characterizes all branches of industries, all enterprises, and all material activity of man in general. This means that motive power can be taken out (to a greater or lesser extent) as a common factor for all branches of industry. It is clear what enormous savings we will achieve when we depersonalize energy, separating it from individual factories, to which it was linked only by private ownership, but not by technical or national economic expediency. Planned electrification is only part of the overall program to rationalize the heat and power economy. Without such a program, the nationalization of the means of production would not have yielded its most important fruits. Private property, abolished as a legal institution, still remained entrenched in the organization of the enterprises themselves, which were technically closed little worlds. The task is to make the principle of nationalization penetrate deeper and deeper into the productive process and into its material and technical conditions. The energy sector must be nationalized in practice. This refers to the existing energy-producing plants and still more to those we are yet to create. The Dneprostroi complex—which is designed as a combination of a powerful electrical station and a whole range of industrial and transport consumers of cheap energy–is already, in a technical sense, built on the principle of socialism. The future belongs to enterprises of this type.
The next lever of industrial growth is the standardization of products. This applies not only to matches, bricks, and fabrics, but also to the most complex machines. We must ignore the arbitrary wishes of the customer, which stems not from his needs, but from his helplessness. Every customer is forced to improvise and search for products, instead of being able to find ready-made, scientifically-tested samples that are best adapted to his tasks. Standardization should reduce to a minimum the different types of each product, taking into account only the basic conditions of the regions or the specific nature of production needs.
Standardization is socialization introduced to the technical side of production. We see how, in this area too, technology in the leading capitalist countries is breaking through the shell of private property, and embarking on a path that is, in essence, a fundamental rejection of competition, “freedom of labor,” and everything associated with it.
The United States has made tremendous progress in reducing the cost of products by standardizing their properties and qualities and developing scientific-technical norms of production. The department of standards (Division of Simplified Products), in collaboration with interested manufacturers and consumers, has carried out work covering dozens of industrial products, both large and small. As a result, the production of 500 types of files has been established instead of 2,300; 70 types of wire cables instead of 650; 3 types of bricks instead of 119; 76 types of plows instead of 312; 29 types of seeders instead of nearly 800; and finally, 45 types of pocketknives instead of 300. Standardization greets the newly-born; the simplification of baby carriages resulted in a total saving of 1,700 tons of iron and 35 tons of tin. Standardization does not abandon the sick; the different types of hospital beds have been reduced from 40 to one. Funeral accessories, too, have been standardized; the use of copper, brass, bronze, wool, and silk are excluded from the production of coffins. Savings on the dead, brought up to standard, yield thousands of tons of metal and coal, hundreds of thousands of meters of timber, etc.
Technology has forced standardization in spite of the conditions of capitalism. Socialism imperatively demands standardization, opening up immeasurably broader possibilities for it. However, we have barely begun this work. The growth of industry has created the material conditions necessary for it. All processes of renewing fixed capital must follow the path of standardization. Compared to the American model, the number of product types in our country must be reduced several times over.
Standardization not only allows for, but also requires, a high specialization of factories. From the factories where everything is produced haphazardly, we must transition to factories where something is produced to perfection.
It must be said, however, that, to our shame, even now, on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the socialist economy, we often hear complaints from economists, and even from engineers, that specialization in production stifles the “spirit,” narrows the scope of creativity, and makes factory work monotonous, “boring,” and so on and so forth. These tearful and thoroughly reactionary arguments are extremely reminiscent of the old Tolstoyan-Populist sermons regarding the superiority of cottage industry over industrial manufacturing. The task of transforming the entire economy into a unified, automatically functioning mechanism is the most grandiose task imaginable. It opens up an unlimited arena for technical, organizational, and economic creativity. The task can be solved, however, only by an ever bolder and persistent specialization of factories, the automation of production and an increasingly sophisticated integration of specialized, gigantic plants into a single production chain.
The present achievements of foreign laboratories, the power of foreign power stations, the breadth of American standardization, and the successes of American factories in the field of specialization immeasurably surpass our current endeavors in this area. But our state and property-rights conditions are immeasurably more favorable for this purpose than the conditions in any of the capitalist countries. And this advantage of ours will become ever more decisive as we move forward. In practical terms, the task boils down to measuring all possibilities and utilizing all resources. The results will not be slow in coming, and then we will total them up.