Part Two: Groping

Chapter 17

WHEN Stalenin regained consciousness be was, as the doctor had predicted, almost completely paralyzed on his right side. His talk was reduced to monosyllables: "No -- yes -- it -- he -- she -- that -- who -- where -- what?"

Particularly "what?" -- asked in every connection, and sometimes without any apparent connection at all. Peter had constantly to guess what it was that Stalenin was asking about. His father seemed to understand a good deal that was said to him, and to be able to indicate his wishes. But his wishes, with the passage of time, became constantly more passive, except in things that concerned his immediate animal comforts.

But the stroke had brought about something far more remarkable than hemiplegia. It had completely transformed Stalenin's character. The strength, the hardness, the brutality, the cynicism, melted away. He became gentle, childlike, affectionate.

For ten days after Stalenin's stroke Peter spent every evening at his bedside. They were dreary vigils. At the same time that Stalenin's supper was brought in, his food-taster would enter, hollow-cheeked and expressionless, and take a little something from everything on the tray, to make sure it was not poisoned.

When Stalenin was sitting up again Peter cut his visits down to three evenings a week. He found his father astonishingly easy to manage now. He discovered that he could get approval for almost any course of action he proposed, merely by the tone and manner in which he proposed it.

Peter's first task, he was convinced by Adams, was to strip Bolshckov of any real power over the political and economic life of Wonworld and to assume it himself. But he felt it would be dangerous to do this in so pointed a way as to humiliate Bolshekov publicly. So he relieved him (by forging orders signed Stalenin) of his duties as Commissar of Production, Chief of the Central Planning Board, Chief of the Supreme Economic Council, and Chief of the Congress of Co-ordinators. Peter turned all these offices over to Adams, with the understanding that he himself was to make all the really crucial decisions.

To save face for Bolshekov, and to pacify him, Peter decided to appoint him Chief of the Armed Forces, and to announce in the name of Stalenin that this position was so important that it would occupy all of Bolshekov's time.

"That is the worst thing you could do," warned Adams. "Bolshekov will make the armed forces loyal to himself, not to you."

"I have gone as far as I safely can for the present," Peter said.

"There is only one safe course with Bolshekov," said Adams. "You must liquidate him. Arrest him quickly and quietly; have him shot immediately; make no announcement unless you have to; if you do, accuse him of treachery; arrest everyone friendly to him, everyone capable of leading a revolt; wring confessions out of them that they are Bolshekovites, and plotted -- "

"I'm not going to have anything to do with such methods," Peter said. "If my mind is clear about any one thing today, it is that brutal and degraded means inevitably lead to brutal and degraded ends."

"With Bolshekov in power, or even with Bolshekov alive and free, you are in danger of achieving nothing but your own downfall. And mine -- if I may be permitted to refer to so minor a consequence. It's his life or ours."

"I'm not going to begin my deputized rule with a murder," Peter answered. "I intend to strip Bolshekov of power, and I've gone as far as I can at the moment."

"Will you do at least one thing?" pleaded Adams. "Make Bolshekov head of the Army and Navy, if you must, but at least turn over the Air Force to someone else."

"Whom would you suggest?"

"Why not take that portfolio yourself ? Just sign a decree by Stalenin appointing yourself to the job. You could design a very dramatic uniform for yourself."

So Peter signed two new decrees, one appointing Bolshekov head of the Army and Navy and another appointing himself head of the Air Force. He forgot about the uniform.

He began to take up with Adams the problems that had been troubling him increasingly since his arrival in Moscow.

"I'm going to ask your advice," he said, "on every important problem. I hope you won't simply approve whatever I suggest. If you do I'll make some fantastic mistakes. Can I count on you to be completely outspoken and candid with me?"

"Candor is what I like most. You can count on me absolutely."

"We ought to be on a less formal basis," said Peter. "It's obviously so awkward for us to call each other 'Your Highness' that we practically haven't been calling each other anything at all. What is your first name?"

"My full name is Thomas Jefferson Adams. It's my real name too. I never took a party name, like Stalenin or Bolshekov. Most people that know me well just call me Adams."

"I'll call you Adams, then. Will you call me Peter?"

Adams nodded. But he apparently felt awkward about it. He took to calling Peter "chief," in a half-ironic, half-affectionate way, as a sort of compromise.

Peter began to speak about the poverty, misery, inefficiency, waste, tyranny, servility, and terror of Wonworld.

"Surely it is possible, Adams, for mankind to devise a better system than this!"

"I agree that it is possible, chief. But I should like to remind you that the best minds in Wonworld had been working on this problem ever since the triumph of communism. Successive reforms only seem to substitute one set of evils for another .... This, of course, is only what a few of us in the Party have been saying to each other. Stalenin and Bolshekov are two of those to whom I have never dared to say it."

"But haven't changes brought any increase of knowledge, any progress?"

"We always officially announce that they have. Every experiment we make must of course be pronounced a success, even when we abandon it. But personally -- and entre nous -- I have never noticed any progress in my lifetime."

"But before that?"

"Well, of course, if you believe the official histories -- "

"Well, let's put all moral, political and economic questions on one side for a moment," Peter said, "and take merely technical and scientific progress."

"I've gone into that question, chief, out of personal curiosity. So far as I can figure, in the whole century and a quarter since the founding of Wonworld we have on net balance made no technical progress whatever. We have improved a few practical things -- or rather, we have applied what was already known in a few new directions. But in theoretical knowledge, as I told you once, we are actually far behind the level that the bourgeois scientists had reached in the last throes of the capitalistic world. Our official histories pooh-pooh it, but it seems to me that there is strong circumstantial evidence for thinking that the bourgeois scientists of the capitalist world had actually succeeded in splitting the atom. There are even grounds for believing that the bourgeois scientists had used this knowledge to invent an appallingly destructive bomb, and had actually used this. When I was a youngster, my father -- the only American up to that time who had ever got to be a member of the Central Committee of the Party -- once repeated whispers to me that the Soviet scientists stole the secret from the capitalist countries, with the help of bourgeois scientists and bourgeois fellow travelers, and that Russia got the jump on the capitalist world in using it. Some whispers went on to say that this, and not -- as our histories have it -- the inner technological decay of capitalism, was the real reason for the communist triumph. Apparently after our victory was complete, all the scientists who knew the atomic secrets were liquidated."

"But surely," said Peter, "nobody believes any of this melodramatic nonsensel"

"Oh, I'm not saying I believe it, chief -- My father didn't believe it; he merely cited it to show how fantastic the anticommunist lies could become."

"It certainly shows what childish minds these anticommunists had," Peter said.

"Yes, chief. We inner-circle communists have named this sort of thing 'Buck Rogers' stuff, after a notorious capitalist liar of that name."

"Who was Buck Rogers?"

"He was the richest man of his time, and invented such tales to keep the masses in subjection."

"Let's get back, Adams, to this question of technological progress."

"Well, my best guess, chief, as I've said, is that we are now technologically in the state of the capitalist world in the capitalist years circa 1918 to 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War."

"Didn't capitalism make any technological progress in the decades after that?"

"Personally, I think it did," said Adams. "One hears stories of airplanes propelled by jet power that went faster than the speed of sound -- "

"More Buck Rogers stuff?"

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

"Anyway," announced Peter with determination, "there is going to be progress now."

Adams nodded a loyal but skeptical assent. "Where do we begin?"

"That is the question that has been bothering me for some time," said Peter. "There are so many places to begin .... But the first thing that needs to be done is to free the people from terror, to free them from servility and groveling .... We must give them freedom from fear."

"From fear of what?"

"From fear of us, of course. From fear of the government."

"But fear is the only thing that keeps people in line! If people didn't fear the government, if they didn't fear our police, how would we be able to keep them from committing every sort of crime?"

"Crime would continue to be made illegal," said Peter, "and people would be punished for it by penalties graded according to the seriousness of the crime. But crime must be carefully defined by law."

"It already is."

"Maybe. But we should change the laws so that nobody can be arrested unless he is charged with a definite crime. He should be told what that crime is. He should be allowed to confront his accusers and to answer them. These accusers should present real evidence. The man accused should be assumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty and not, as now, the other way round. And maybe -- I haven't yet thought this out -- the accused ought to be entitled, if he wants, to have someone else who knows the law better than he does, and who knows better than he does what his rights are, to defend him. Maybe the government itself ought to provide him with such a defender."

"I shudder to think what would happen, chief, if the cards were stacked so much in favor of the criminals. You would practically never be able to find anyone guilty. The criminals would certainly be freed from fear -- "

"I think it can be made to work," Peter said. "Anyway, I'm going to try .... Don't misunderstand me. Crime will continue to be illegalized. But each crime will be carefully defined, and nobody will be punished unless he is guilty of an act that had already been defined as a crime before he did it. We are no longer going to have acts declared to be crimes retroactively."

"But suppose somebody does something that is clearly anti-social, that is clearly against the interests of the State, and we have merely neglected beforehand to define that act as a crime?"

"Then that will be our fault, Adams, and we will have to define it as a crime so that we can punish it in the future. But we will not punish anybody for having done it before it was defined as a crime. If I may invent a term, we will not pass any ex post facto laws."

"It seems to me, chief, that you have thought of a most ingenious way of tying the government's hands in advance. How can we guess ahead of time every crime that anyone can think of committing? And what's the use of having prosecutors and judges if we are not going to allow them to exercise any discretion?"

"The discretion of the judges will be exercised," replied Peter, "in interpreting and applying the existing body of law. The judge will have to decide whether the evidence presented by the prosecutor or the plaintiff is substantial enough to show that the accused actually did the act with which he is charged. But first the judge will have to decide whether the act with which a man is charged would fall within the pre-existing definition of a crime."

"How are you going to get a judge to act with all this impartiality and self-restraint?"

"We'll remove any judge who doesn't."

"In other words, chief, we'll remove any judge who doesn't act the way we should like him to act. Stalenin has been doing that already."

"But the government until now, Adams, has been removing judges for being too merciful or too impartial. I will remove them for being too harsh or too biased."

"This arrangement then, chief, will last only as long as your own power lasts -- certainly no longer than there is someone in power who feels exactly as you do."

"Well then," said Peter, reconsidering, "we will have to make the judiciary independent of the whims of the government."

"Won't the judges be part of the government?"

"Well, independent of the executive arm of the government."

"Pardon me, chief, but aren't you contradicting what you just said a minute ago? You were going to remove any judge who did not act with impartiality and self-restraint, and did not conscientiously apply the law as it stood. If you make your judges independent of you, how are you going to discipline them and make them carry out their duties and powers without abuse?"

Peter lit a cigarette.

"You're right. I'll have to give all this more thought .... But what I am trying to do is to establish what we might call a rule of law. The only way, as I see it, in which we can free the people from constant fear of their own government is to set up a definite code of rules, a definite set of laws, and then say to them: 'As long as you live in accordance with these rules, as long as you stay within these laws, you are free to do whatever else you wish without fear. You need no longer be in terror of being sent to a concentration camp or being shot just because you have incurred the personal displeasure of the judge, or of some government official, or of someone higher up than yourself. If you are accused, your accusers must definitely prove your guilt, instead of forcing you to try to prove your innocence. And above all, no so-called "confession" will be wrung from you by threats or fatigue or force or torture. As long as you stay within the pre-established code of laws, you are free to do as you like.' Such a rule of law, as I see it, is the only thing that will free the people from terror and from the arbitrary decisions of those in power."

"That's a very pretty picture, chief, but the problem isn't quite that easy. For example, what things are you going to legalize and illegalize?"

"Well ... I will illegalize murder, and assault and theft, and other forms of injury to other people -- "

"I have something more fundamental in mind," interrupted Adams. "How are you going to get people to work? How are you going to get them to do the unpleasant tasks rather than the pleasant ones? How are you going to get them to do their best on the tasks to which they have been assigned? These, and not the comparatively infrequent crimes you have just mentioned, are the problems that come up every day with everybody."

Peter sighed, and thoughtfully put out his cigarette stub. It was six o'clock, and he was due for dinner with his father. "That, Comrade Adams," he said wearily, "is a problem we will have to solve some other day."

Chapter 18

PETER knew it would be futile to try to get anything out of Bolshekov himself. But he had every top official of the secret police, from Kilashov down, report to him individually in his father's office for cross-examination. All professed to have no knowledge whatever of what had happened either to Edith or to Maxwell. There was no record to be found in any file of their arrest. Kilashov protested that if they had been arrested it had been without his orders and without his knowledge. And he swore to Peter that for an arrest to take place without a record of it somewhere in the secret police files was impossible. Peter must remember, however, that there was always a chance that private gangsters and wreckers might pose as secret police .... Such things happened. These impostors, for reasons of their own, may have done away with the Maxwells .... At any rate he, Kilashov, had ordered the Security Police to make the most thorough search. Naturally he was just as much concerned about the mystery as was Peter himself ....

In his spare time Peter began to make personal systematic visits to all the women's and men's jails in the Moscow district. In each jail he ordered the prisoners lined up before him. Gray, listless, burned-out faces without end that filled him with pity and horror; but among them he did not find the two he was so desperately looking for.

"Of course, Adams -- coming back to the questions you raised the other day -- of course people ought to consider it a privilege to work for the State, because when they work for the State they are working for themselves; they are working for each other . . ."

Peter stopped. He found that he was mechanically repeating the arguments of Bolshekov.

"I agree that people ought to feel this way," said Adams, "but our experience shows that they just don't. The hard fact is that some people simply have to do more unpleasant chores than others, and the only way we can get the unpleasant chores done is by compulsion. Not everybody can be a manager, or an actor or an artist or a violin player. Somebody has to dig the coal, collect the garbage, repair the sewers. Nobody will deliberately choose these smelly jobs. People will have to be assigned to them, forced to do them."

"Well, perhaps we could compensate them in some way, Adams -- say by letting them work shorter hours than the others."

"We thought of that long ago, chief. It didn't work. It unluckily turned out that it was only the pleasant jobs, like acting or violin playing, that could be reduced to short hours. But we simply can't afford to have people work only a few hours on the nasty jobs. These are precisely the jobs that have to be done. We couldn't afford to cut our coal production in half by cutting the hours in half, for example; and we just haven't got the spare manpower to rotate. Besides, we found that on most such jobs a considerable loss of time and production was involved merely in changing shifts."

"All right," agreed Peter; "so under our socialist system we can't have freedom in choice of work or occupation. But couldn't we provide some freedom of initiative -- at least for those who direct production? Our propaganda is always urging more initiative on the part of commissars or individual plant managers. Why don't we get it?"

"Because a commissar or plant manager, chief, is invariably shot if his initiative goes wrong. The very fact that he was using his own initiative means that he was not following orders. How can you reconcile individual initiative with planning from the center? When we draw up our Five Year Plans, we allocate the

production of hundreds of different commodities and services in accordance with what we assume to be the needs of the people. Now if every plant manager decided for himself what things his plant should produce or how much it should produce, of them, our production would turn out to be completely unbalanced and chaotic."

"Very well," Peter said; "so we can't permit the individual plant manager to decide what to produce or how much to produce of it. But this is certainly a big disadvantage. For if someone on the Central Planning Board doesn't think of some new need to be satisfied, or some new way of satisfying an old need, then nobody thinks of it and nobody dares to supply it. But I have in mind something different from that. How can we encourage individual plant managers to devise more efficient ways of producing the things they are ordered to produce? If these plant managers can't be encouraged to invent new or better consumption goods, at least they can be encouraged to invent new methods or machines to produce more economically the consumption goods they are ordered to produce, or to produce a higher quality of those consumption goods."

"You're just back to the same problem," Adams said. "If I'm a plant manager, and I invent a new machine, I'll have to ask the Central Planning Board to get somebody to build it, or to allocate the materials to me so that I can build it. In either case I'll upset the preordained central plan. I'll have a hard job convincing the Central Planning Board that my invention or experiment won't fail. If my invention does fail, and it turns out that I have wasted scarce labor and materials, I will be removed and probably shot. The member of the Central Planning Board who approved my project will be lucky if he isn't shot himself. Therefore, unless the success of my invention or experiment seems absolutely certain in advance, I will be well advised to do what everybody else does. Then if I fail, I can prove that I failed strictly according to the rules .... Now take your other suggestion, chief. Suppose I devise a more economical method of making the product assigned to my factory. I will probably need different proportions of labor and materials, or different kinds of labor and materials, than I would with the old method. And in that case I will again be upsetting the central plan."

Peter sighed. "That doesn't seem to leave much room under our system for initiative, improvement and progress."

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

Peter lit a cigarette and thoughtfully blew some smoke rings.

"Very well then, Adams. So under our socialist system we can't have freedom in choice of work or occupation; we can't have freedom of initiative. But can't we at least give people more freedom in the choice of what they consume?"

"How are you going to do that?" Adams asked. "We issue ration tickets for everything we produce, and we try to distribute them evenly -- at least within each of the Four Functional Groups. We can't let people have ration tickets for more than we produce. They complain about that already."

"No, Adams; but some people like cigarettes and others don't; some like beer and others don't; some prefer spinach to potatoes, and some like it the other way round. Why not permit everyone his choice?"

"Well, maybe we could work out something better than the present rationing system, chief, but the fundamental problem remains. People can consume only what is produced. We must draw up our production plans in advance, on the basis of the known needs and assumed wants of consumers. And then .... well, I repeat: people can consume only what is produced. So how can they have freedom of choice?"

"I think there are two answers to that," said Peter, after blowing a few more smoke rings. "We could still give consumers considerable freedom of choice individually, even if they did not have much when considered collectively. In other words, out of the stock of goods already produced, we could devise some method under which one person could get more spinach if he preferred, and the other more potatoes, instead of each having to take the exact proportion in which the total supplies of spinach and potatoes, were raised."

"Well -- maybe, chief. But I still insist that the fundamental problem would remain unsolved. Considered collectively, how can consumers have any freedom of choice? They have to take what there is."

"But can't we find out in advance what it is they really want, and then make that? In other words, can't we guide production to anticipate the wants of consumers, instead of merely obliging consumers to take what we have produced?"

"We are always trying, chief; but it isn't so simple. Suppose, for example, that in relation to the wants of consumers we turn out too many peanuts as compared with pins? Then we will run out of pins sooner than we run out of peanuts. In other words people will use up their ration tickets for pins before they use them up for peanuts. They will then start taking peanuts because they can't get any more pins-"

"Oh, come!"

"Well, change the illustration -- They will start taking more spinach, for example, because they can't get any more potatoes. But because they are entitled by their ration tickets to the entire supply of both, and because their need for goods exceeds the entire supply of goods, they will end by consuming the entire supply of spinach as well as of potatoes."

"But if people consume all of one product before they turn to another," asked Peter, "don't we know that we are producing too little of the first or too much of the second?"

"Usually we do, chief. But we can't know from that just how much more of the first we should have produced and how much less of the second."

" -- Can't we tell from the preceding rate at which the two products have been consumed?"

"No. Because if people begin to think that soap is going to run short before salt, they will all scramble for soap. Therefore soap will run short in the state commissaries sooner than otherwise. The relative rate at which soap is taken by consumers while it lasts will be faster than if people thought that both soap and salt were going to last them throughout the consuming year."

"But can't we keep making readjustments in the relative amounts produced, Adams, based on this experience, until we get consumption of soap and salt and everything else to come out even?"

"That's what we are always trying to do, chief. But I still haven't got to some of the real problems. The trouble is that very few things are consumed evenly throughout the year even if we should get the relative production of each thing exactly right. People don't burn coal evenly throughout the year, but only in winter. And if they have the storage room, they ask for the entire supply they are entitled to as soon as the ration ticket permits it. Yet the fact that three-quarters of the whole supply of coal is asked for in the first week of the consuming year doesn't necessarily mean that the coal supply is short or is going to run short. Again, ice is consumed mainly during the summer, and all sorts of other things are wanted only seasonally. The only reason people turn in their coupons for new clothes evenly each month throughout the year is that we stagger the validity dates on the clothes coupons in the first place so only one-twelfth become due each month .... And still again, some things, like vegetables and fruits, are consumed entirely within a few months of the year for the simple reason that that's when they come on the market, and they won't keep. In short, trying to figure relative shortages and surpluses by relative rates of consumption throughout the year is a tough problem. In most cases we who direct the economy have to solve it by pure guesswork."

"Couldn't we figure it out by mathematics?" asked Peter.

Adams grinned and shrugged his shoulders. "How are you going to find the mathematical formula for somebody's wayward desires? How are you going to find the equation for when I want a cocktail -- or whether I want a Marxattan or a Stalini? ... And I haven't even mentioned one problem. Suppose there is some product, or some potential product, which is not produced but which, if it were invented or discovered or produced, people would want in great quantities? How are you going to find by mathematics that people would want such a product if it existed? Or even that such a product is missing?"

Peter sighed. "It's all pretty discouraging. We seem to be reduced to the conclusion that under our socialist system we can't have freedom in choice of work or occupation and we can’t permit freedom of choice for consumers. Is that right?"

"People are free to use or not to use their ration tickets," answered Adams.

"In other words," said Peter, "they are free to consume what we tell them they can consume. They are free to consume what we, the rulers, have decided to produce."

"Right, chief."

There was a long pause.

"Well, I can think of one more kind of freedom," Peter said, "and I am determined to create it. That is the freedom to criticize the government."

Adams started. He seemed to waver between incredulity and alarm. "You mean that you would permit people to criticize the actions of the government, and perhaps even denounce the government, and go unpunished?"

"Exactly!"

"Why, chief, you and I would be destroyed in a few weeks! If we allowed people to criticize us with impunity they would lose all fear of us -- all respect for us. There would be an explosion of criticism that would blow us out of our seats-out of Wonworld. And what would we accomplish? Our successors would, of course, immediately suppress criticism again, for their own survival. If we are going to make reforms, let's find out for ourselves what's wrong. Let's make our reforms quietly, not under pressure. . .

But Peter concluded that Adams was wedded to the status quo and would argue against any innovation whatever. He was determined to go ahead with at least this one great reform.

He issued a proclamation inviting criticism of the government. It promised that there would be no punishment if this criticism was constructive, truthful and responsible. The proclamation was published in all the government newspapers, broadcast on the radio, even published on billboards.

"This young idiot will soon hang himself," Bolshekov confided to Kilashov, when he heard the news. "Maybe it won't be necessary for us to lift a finger."

Chapters 19-42 are coming soon. Our apologies for the delay.

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© 1973 Henry Hazlitt. For permissions information, contact The Foundation for Economic Education, 30 South Broadway, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533.