Time Will Run Back (21 page)

“Why, chief? What would be the justice in that?”

“We would be rewarding workers—or at least groups of workers—in proportion at least to their group production.”

“We wouldn’t be doing anything of the kind,” said Adams.

“Not only would it be impossible to tell what any individual worker had contributed to the total production on a collective, but it would be impossible to tell what the workers had produced collectively.”

“But certainly we would know that, Adams!”

“No, we would not. All we would know is that the workers, their animals, their tools, their land, insects and the weather working or acting in combination had produced a certain total net result. But we wouldn’t know what to attribute to any one factor.”

“We would know that-—”

“Let’s begin with the weather, chief. If the collectives in the Southern Hemisphere got the right amount of rain and the collectives in the Northern Hemisphere had a drought, then those in the North might produce only half as much wheat per acre or per hand as those in the South. But it would be through no fault of their own. And for the same reasons the wheat yield on any one collective would fluctuate from year to year. It would be merely a matter of luck.”

“I concede the element of luck,” said Peter. “But your argument seems to be stronger against the system we already have than against the system I propose. The minimum production and collection quotas that we assign to the individual collectives don’t take account of this mere luck. Moreover, it seems to me that this element of luck is confined largely to farming. It doesn’t exist in manufacturing, for instance.”

“I have only begun,” replied Adams. “Let’s consider the land, now. The soil conditions are different on every collective. With poor soil the hands on one collective can produce, say, only half as much wheat per man per hour of work as the hands on a collective with good soil. Or, putting the matter the other way, the hands on a collective with exceptionally good soil could produce twice as much wheat per man per hour of work as the hands on a collective with average soil.”

He looked at Peter for confirmation. Peter nodded.

“Then it isn’t the fault of the workers on the poor soil, chief, that they produced only half the average production; and it isn’t the merit of the workers on the very good soil that they produced twice as much as the average production.”

Peter nodded again.

“Very well,” Adams continued. “Now let’s go on to the animals and tools and machinery. If one collective has horses and the other hasn’t any, or even if one collective has better horses than the next, the first will, other things being equal, produce more wheat per man than the second.”

Peter nodded.

“And if one collective has a few crude hand tools for the workers and the other has more tools or better tools, or if the second has tractors and the first has none, or if the second has more tractors per man or per acre or better tractors than the first, or if the first has a tractor that has broken down and the second has a tractor that works, then the second collective, other things being equal, is going to produce more bushels of wheat per man than the first.”

Peter agreed again.

“So the net of all this is,” Adams concluded triumphantly, “that we cannot attribute the collective production even to the workers collectively. The production is the
combined
result of the workers and the weather and the land and the animals and the tools and tractors collectively, and you can’t separate the contribution of one of these factors from the contribution of another.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” sighed Peter.

“And this doesn’t apply just to agriculture,” Adams continued, pressing home his point. “The same thing applies even more in manufacturing. The output of the workers in a factory depends entirely upon the amount and kind and quality of the machinery with which they have to work. The output of a factory with the best shoe machinery may be ioo pairs of shoes per man in the same time a worker with only a few hand tools could turn out only one or two pairs of shoes.”

“When did you think of all this?” asked Peter.

“I thought of it just now, chief, in answer to your proposal.”

“That’s what I suspected. It seems to me, Adams,” Peter said with pretended severity, “that you are a violent deviationist. You have been flatly contradicting Marx.”

“Where?” Adams asked. He seemed seriously alarmed.

“Marx declared in the first volume of
Das Kapital
—I have been doing a lot of studying in the last few months—Marx declared that labor is the one and only factor that produces value. He doesn’t say anything about the contribution of tools and equipment to production. He contended that the workers were being robbed of whatever part of the value of the total production they did not get—even though it would have been impossible for them to turn out this production without the help of the tools and machines with which somebody else provided them.”

“Oh, I’m sure, chief, that Marx couldn’t have said anything so foolish as that machines don’t contribute anything to the total of production! I’m sorry that I can’t cite the relevant passages off-hand, but I assume that he just took the contribution of machines for granted and averaged it out.... Or perhaps his point was that labor had originally built the machines anyhow.”

“Now don’t try to edit or revise Marx,” said Peter tauntingly. “Revisionism is a serious crime in Wonworld.”

Adams still looked anxious about this.

“Within the privacy of these four walls,” Peter quickly assured him, “you have entirely persuaded me that you are right, whether Marx agrees with you or not. Production is the
joint
achievement of labor and capital, land and nature. And I’ll admit I don’t see how we can find which factor contributes which percentage.”

“I’d like to point out,” said Adams, “that our present editions of Marx are all expurgated to prevent anyone from knowing what capitalism was really like and so prevent any efforts to restore it. Now perhaps the original editions of Marx did admit that capital contributed to production and to what Marx called
value.
...”

“Well, we’ll have a search made for all the relevant passages, Adams. Meanwhile I’m afraid all your criticisms of my proposal are right.”

“I wasn’t through, chief.”

“Go ahead.”

“Your proposal, you remember, was to reward workers in proportion to their production—I suppose by giving each of them what he himself had presumably contributed to production?”

Peter nodded.

“Then you would give the wheat grower a certain amount of wheat and the shoemaker a certain amount of shoes. But what would you give the road maker? Part of the road? What would you give the sewer worker? Part of the sewer? What would you give the telephone girl? Part of the wire? What would you give the barber? Part of the hair he cut off? What would you give the surgeon? Part of the patient?”

Peter was silent under these taunts. He had no answer. He lit a cigarette and fell back into his own thoughts. Hadn’t he been a presumptuous fool for supposing that he could solve offhand all the problems that had obviously baffled all the best minds in Wonworld before him? If there were such easy answers as he supposed, wouldn’t they already have been made? Conditions in Wonworld were horrible: that he knew. But you couldn’t reform them simply by rushing in and demanding hysterically that everything be changed. He had been self-complacent and priggish to assume that he was the only man of good will. Reform was something that was possible only after the deepest study....

“You haven’t answered my questions,” Adams at length reminded him.

“Have you any more criticisms?”

“Yes,” continued Adams. “Let’s pass over the insoluble problem of how you are going to give his own production to each worker when he has merely contributed, say, to the production of some single great unit, such as a locomotive, or to the construction of things like sewers and roads and waterworks that can only be used by the community as a whole. Let’s pass over, also, all the workers that perform some intangible service. Let’s concentrate on the simplest possible problem—the workers that do turn out something, like wheat or shoes, that they might individually consume themselves. If you give the wheat growers the wheat, they will have enormously more than they can personally consume, and the rest of the world will starve. If you give the shoemakers the shoes, they will have more than they can possibly wear, and the rest of the world will go barefoot—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” shouted Peter, suddenly struck with an idea. “Of course, of course! Why didn’t I think of it before!
Let
the wheat growers keep the wheat they grow.
Let
the shoemakers keep the shoes they make. But let them exchange their wheat and shoes with each other to whatever extent they wish! Let everybody have what he makes and let him exchange the surplus above his own needs for whatever he wants of what somebody else makes! Then everybody will have to produce something in order to get something else for it. Everybody will be rewarded in proportion to his own production. That will give him an enormous incentive. And to be able to do this he will have to produce what somebody else wants. Then we won’t have to coax or exhort people to work any more. We won’t have to denounce them for shoddy work. Not only will everybody wish to produce all he can, but he will try to make it of as high quality as possible, so that somebody else will want it enough to give
him
what
he
wants in exchange for it. And then he won’t have to take the shoddy goods that the State hands out to him. He can pick and choose, and take only the goods he wants from the people who make them well—”

“Hold on there!” protested Adams. “What would become of our planned economy? It would be completely disorganized. Production would fall into chaos!”

“Why?”

“Why? Because each individual would start producing for himself. He would produce the things for which he could get the most other things in exchange that he personally wanted.”

“But in order to do that,” replied Peter, “he would have to produce precisely the things that other people most wanted.”

“Who would build the roads, chief? Who would repair the sewers? Would each worker be assigned part of a road or part of a sewer as his own presumptive production to exchange with someone else? And who would take over part of a road or part of a sewer in exchange for his own product? And whom would the iron miners exchange with? They could only exchange their crude material with the steel makers, who are the only ones who would want the iron. And the only things the steel makers would have to offer in exchange would be steel. Would you personally like to take home a couple of steel rails or an I-beam?... It’s just impossible.”

“Maybe that could be solved by a series of exchanges,” suggested Peter. “It’s true that only the steel makers would ultimately want the product of the iron miners, but the steel makers might be able to offer the iron miners food that they in turn had got in exchange for their steel.”

“Or part of a railroad that they had exchanged for their steel rails?” Adams’ tone was heavily sarcastic. “No; I haven’t even mentioned yet the real trouble with your idea. At present the Central Planning Board decides what things the population needs, and in what proportions. When you think of the hundreds of different consumption goods and services, that’s a tremendously difficult problem to solve. That’s a major headache all by itself. But when we’ve done this, we’ve only started. For then we have to decide how many factories to build, how many machines to build, how much of each raw material to produce, and how many workers to allot, to produce each of these consumption goods in the right proportions. And
then
we have to decide how much of each raw material to produce to build the factories and machines themselves.”

“But the Central Planning Board,” said Peter, “is always making terrible mistakes. We always find ourselves, at the end of every year of our plans, with embarrassing surpluses of this and appalling shortages of that. And when we have a shortage in one thing—for example, our present shortage of nails—it makes a great deal of the rest of our production pointless. We can’t finish our housing program until we get more nails. Meanwhile our production of window frames and doors, shingles and roofing, sidings and washstands, is all perfectly useless.... We have all these things rusting and rotting out in the rain.”

“How do you expect us
not
to make mistakes, chief, when we are faced with such a horribly complicated problem? We constantly have the best mathematicians working on the problem of getting the right proportions. Marx forbid that I should defend Bolshekov, whose mess I’ve just taken over, but I must concede—”

“Let’s not go into that now,”

“But the point I started to make,” said Adams, “is that if we cannot avoid such terrible mistakes even with our expert overall planning, where we are at least
trying
to match the production of each thing with that of all the rest, then we can’t even imagine the chaos that would follow if we let each man decide
jot himself
what to produce. Then nothing would match anything. We would die off like flies!”

Peter lit a cigarette and looked out again at the squalid city. “Well,” he said at length, “you’ve successfully disheartened me once more. But I’m not through, I’m not through! I’ve got a real idea by the tail, and I’m going to hang on. I’m going to work it out. We haven’t seen the last of economic progress—”

“For Marx’s sake, chief! First things first! I was nearly
murdered
a couple of hours ago—remember?
What
are you going to do about Bolshekov?”

PETER stood before the full-length mirror and admired his brilliant new Air Force uniform.

He had finally succumbed to Adams’ argument that he must build himself up as a public figure to counter Bolshekov’s influence, and above all that he must solidify his relations with the Air Force. So he had ordered this afternoon’s air maneuvers over Moscow and arranged to review them in the Red Square from the top of Lenin’s Tomb. Following Adams’ advice he had declared a half holiday and ordered all the factory heads of the Moscow district to march their workers to the square to insure a huge audience.