COMMUNISM NOW
511
ernment by consent then this trend has been obviously and even
conspicuously at work in Soviet society.
More important perhaps than the political trend is, to my mind,
its social undercurrent, which Western commentators and experts
have so far hardly noticed. After thirty years of the most ruthless
and savage suppression by Stalinism, egalitarian aspirations are
coming back into their own, regaining strength, and even exercising
a direct influence on official policy. Lack of space does not allow me
to summarize here, let alone to analyze, recent developments in
Soviet labor and wages policy. Their cumulative effect has been to
reduce the grotesque inequalities of the Stalin era. Stakhanovism, in
which those inequalities were epitomized, has been given a quiet
burial. The "progressive piece rate" (a method of payment under
which a worker producing above his norm earns rates rising in ever
higher progression with the additional output) has been declared to be
obsolete in most cases and socially harmful. (In Stalin's days the
"progressive piece rate" was sacrosanct!) The new wage system which
is now being worked out is to be based on the time-wage rather
than on the piece-wage, which Marx had described as a typically
capitalist form of payment and which Stalin proclaimed as the
quintessence of a socialist system of incentives. Twenty years ago
Trotsky described, in
The R evolution Betrayed
and other writings,
the crucial role of the piece wage in the Stalinist anti-egalitarian pol–
icy. Trotsky's argument has since been vulgarized and repeated
ad nauseam by all leftish and many not so leftish critics of Stalinism.
It is therefore strange that the same critics have failed to notice that
Stalin's policy is being reversed in this vital point, too. Similarly, anti–
Stalinists have invariably, and rightly, pointed to the introduc–
tion, in the '30s, for fees for secondary and higher education as a
measure promoting social inequality-some have even seen in it
the decisive act of a social "counter-revolution" in the U.S.S.R. It
is therefore at least illogical on their part not to recognize that with
the abolition of
all
fees for education Stalin's successors have struck
a momentous blow against inequality. (No nation in the West, not
even the wealthiest, as yet provides its citizens with free education in
all grades!)
De-Stalinization and "liberalization" would indeed be frauds
if they were confined merely to politics, and if they were not backed
