The next book I'll be reading

Holy cats, Jo Walton knows how to review a book in such a way as to get me drooling. (She's no slouch at writing 'em too). The book under discussion now is Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, available finally in the USA. Spufford's book is an unlikely slam dunk, a blend of fiction and nonfiction that delves into the phenomenon of millions who believed the Soviet Union's command economy would work: "The characters, the points of view, really immerse you in the worldview of people who believe what they believe, as in fiction. And the thesis, the argument, is the thing that would be a story if the book were a novel. He’s using the techniques of fiction in the service of non fiction, and he makes it work."

• [Preston Sturges]

  One of the reasons that so  many people believed the USSR would work was that GHW Bush (aka Bush41) back when he was the head of the CIA formed “Team B” which swore up and down that we needed a Cold War to counter the Ruskie threat.  When the USSR collapsed 10 years later, everyone was shocked because it was conventional wisdom the Soviet economy was 3x bigger. 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_b 
  “……..Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Team B, approved by then Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of “outside experts” who attempted to counter the positions of intelligence officials within the CIA…..”

  If you read the cast of characters, you’ll see it was the same people who dusted off the script to start the Iraq war under Bush43 (aka Dubya)

  • [tenpou]

    To add to your point, Adam Curtis did a great analysis on it in his documentaries. Anyone who never heard of him and is interested in the topic of imaginary enemies should go watch those immediately. By [deity], I wasn’t keen on political history when I started and still I was engrossed.

  • [Jesús Couto Fandiño]

    This is set a bit before that. At the point described in the book, and well documented, it looked very much like the USSR was going to overtake the West – the rate of growth was amazing.

    A great deal of the book is explaining several reasons why that didnt happen, and how it all went to shit well, well before the 70s. Including how the ones with a clue and the knowledge to make it happen didnt really had a chance to make the Soviet system change enough to actually achieve its potential.

• [tnmc]

  “Spufford’s book is an unlikely slam dunk, a blend of fiction and nonfiction that delves into the phenomenon of millions who believed the Soviet Union’s command economy would work”  

  Is this by way of an analogy to understand the phenomenon of millions who believe the USA’s trickle-down economy would work?

  • [Jens Reuterberg]

    Well its not just the US. Its central in our ideological hegemoni across the globe. Whats even wierder is that its been disproven – but unlike the USSR you can’t point that out since it is so central, and doing it means your an “extremist” or “radical” or “leftwing” – which makes all your critisism irrelevant.

  • [Gimlet_eye]

    To paraphrase Churchill on democracy: capitalism is the worst economic system… except for all the others.

    • [cubicblackpig]

      Capitalism is a political system, not an economic system. You’re probably confusing it with a free market, which is a wonderful thing, just like unicorns and elves.

      • [Antinous / Moderator]

        Capitalism is a political system, not an economic system.

        Would you care to expand on that?

        • [cubicblackpig]

          Sure. It’s a system in which political  power is mostly in the hands of that class sometimes described as capitalists (although “investors”, “business”, etc are placid alternatives, “rentiers” an unnecessarily pejorative term, and “job-creators” the FoxNews rhetoric of choice) – essentially that section of the population that has sufficient wealth to make money from investing their excess wealth (i.e. not labour.) The industrial bourgeoisie if you want to get all Marxian about it. Their political influence is variously expressed – everything from media ownership to campaign finance – and leads to government policies which have a lot to do with serving the interests of that class – too-big-to-fail bail-outs, military Keynesianism, the plethora of business friendly laws and regs, corporate welfare of all sorts, etc. In less enlightened times you’d have seen more overt exercises of influence like the use of state power to crush the union movement, although the Gilded Age (amusingly regarded by glibertarians as an exemplary period of deregulation) was a particularly extreme case of the kind of state capture associated with this political system.

          Be that as it may, the one thing capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with, as anyone who spent the last decade with their head not wedged in a bucket can attest, is a free market. Not that such a thing, as I imply, is other than a purely mythical concept anyway.

          Course, if a person doesn’t believe in class, or thinks the US (for example) is a classless society (and I’ve noticed some US commentators seem to have as much difficulty separating the concepts “working class” and “middle class” as they do “leftist” and “liberal”) or, y’know, a democracy, they may have some objection to the terminology. But if you mean “free market” say “free market”. Capitalism is a society where capitalists are in charge, and they’re happy for state intervention in the “market” that serves their class interests, whatever their rhetoric about it.

• [dr.hypercube]

  Crooked Timber did one of their always excellent Book Events on Red Plenty (w/ posts from Spufford). Recommended long read.

  • [Noah]

    I came to post a link to Cosma Shalizi’s essay from this seminar:

    http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html

  • [ElfSternberg]

    Yeah, it was based on CT’s recommendations that I bought the book.  It’s as good as they say.  Characterization and history are spot on, and each chapter ends with a bibliography and a note from the author about with what and how he took liberties.

• [Illudium_Phosdex]

  Sounds like an interesting explanation of the real world mechanics that underlay the old Soviet joke:

  “What would happen if Communism came to the Sahara??”

  “Nothing. For twenty years.  Then there would be a shortage of sand.”

• [J. Brad Hicks]

  Yep. That’s the thing: it wasn’t just Really Smart people in the USSR who thought it would work. An awful lot of Red Scare paranoia in the US in the 1950s through the 1970s only makes sense once you understand that most right-wingers in the US were actually afraid that a command-and-control economy DID make sense, that it WOULD be more productive than a free-market economy, less redundant, less wasteful, more efficient — just worse for them, personally.

  • [Gimlet_eye]

    What, no credit for the American left-wingers who thought a command-and-control economy was a good idea? They weren’t exactly trumpeting the virtues of free markets back then, any more than they are now. It’s bizarre revisionism to blame the idea that the USSR was economically competent exclusively on the small numbers on the right who thought it was sort-of working. (“Most” conservatives absolutely did not think the USSR was “more productive” than a free-market economy except [possibly] in the area of a strong military.)

• [neilinchicago]

  Where and when did the expression “command economy” come from?

• [Adam S.]

  Just like most political left topics, the West has this one bass-ackwards too. All the financial collapse and economic ruin right in front of your face right now wasn’t caused by flaws in communism.

  The communist experiment in the USSR was ended within the first few years of Stalin’s reign of terror. Stalin’s regime was communist in name only.

  As it turns out, Marx was right about capitalism. It’s broken in the ways Marx predicted would happen a century ago.