1. What is the main function of a plan under socialism? According to Mao Tsetung, an authority no doubt, “[a] plan is an ideological form. Ideology is a reflection of realities, but it also acts upon realities.”[1] Clearly, the same is true of the crusades and Christianity. Defying Marx’s attacks on ideology as such, Mao Tsetung puts ideology to work. As a practical man, as a true leader of a post-revolutionary party-state, he does not neglect a single practical instrument at his disposal, regardless of the theological imprint such instruments may bear.

2. Marcuse’s analysis of the new rationality of Soviet Marxism provides a coherent interpretation of Mao Tsetung’s statement, although Marcuse is not concerned specifically with planning, or with Chinese Marxism:

The key propositions of Soviet Marxism have the function of announcing and commanding a definite practice, apt to create the facts which the propositions stipulate. They claim no truth-value of their own but proclaim a pre-established truth which is to be realized through a certain attitude and behavior. They are pragmatic directives for action. For example, Soviet Marxism is built around a small number of constantly recurring and rigidly canonized statements to the effect that Soviet society is a socialist society without exploitation, a full democracy in which the constitutional rights of all citizens are guaranteed and enforced; or, on the other side, that present-day capitalism exists in a state of sharpening class struggle, depressed living standards, unemployment, and so forth. Thus formulated and taken by themselves, these statements are obviously false—according to Marxian as well as non-Marxian criteria. But within the context in which they appear, their falsity does not invalidate them, for, to Soviet Marxism, their verification is not in the given facts, but in “tendencies,” in a historical process in which the commanded political practice will bring about the desired facts.[2]

Therefore, according to Marcuse, it is meaningless to analyze the propositional content of Soviet Marxism outside of the pragmatic context in which it is embedded. Ideology is a practical tool, an instrument designed to motivate and guide social action. Ideology must thus be judged by the impact it has upon the reality, that is, by the standards of social practice:

The value of these statements is pragmatic rather than logical, as is clearly suggested by their syntactical structure. They are unqualified, inflexible formulas calling for an unqualified, inflexible response. In endless repetition, the same noun is always accompanied by the same adjectives and participles; the noun “governs” them immediately and directly so that whenever it occurs they follow “automatically” in their proper place. The same verb always “moves” the proposition in the same direction, and those addressed by the proposition are supposed to move the same way. These statements do not attribute a predicate to a subject (in the sense of formal or of dialectical logic); they do not develop the subject in its specific relations—all these cognitive processes lie outside the propositional context, i.e., in the “classics” of Marxism, and the routine statements only recall what is pre-established. They are to be “spelled,” learned mechanically, monotonously, and literally; they are to be performed like a ritual that accompanies the realizing action. They are to recall and sustain the required practice. Taken by themselves they are no more committed to the truth than are orders or advertisements: their “truth” is in their effect. Soviet Marxism here shares in the decline of language and communication in the age of mass societies. It is senseless to treat the propositions of the official ideology at the cognitive level: they are a matter of practical, not of theoretical reason. If propositions lose their cognitive value to their capacity of bringing about a desired effect, that is to say, if they are to be understood as directives for a specific behavior, then magical elements gain ascendancy over comprehending thought and action. The difference between illusion and reality becomes just as obliterated as that between truth and falsehood if illusions guide a behavior that shapes and changes reality. With respect to its actual effect on primitive societies, magic has been described as a “body of purely practical acts, performed as means to an end.”[3] The description may well be applied to formally theoretical propositions. The official language itself assumes magical character.[4]

At this point Mannheim’s distinction between ideology and utopia, where the former tends to conserve, while the latter tends to transcend social reality, is indispensable.[5] Soviet Marxism is utopian to the extent that it still promotes the ideals of Marxian theory against all evidence concerning a “deviating” reality. The magic indeed confronts this “primitive” reality.

However, the contemporary reactivation of magical features in communication is far from primitive. The irrational elements of magic enter into the system of scientifically planned and practiced administration—they become part of the scientific management of society. Moreover, the magical features of Soviet theory are turned into an instrument for rescuing the truth. While the ritual formulas, severed from their original cognitive context, thus serve to provide unquestioned directives for unquestioned mass behavior, they retain, in a hypostatized form, their historical substance. The rigidity with which they are celebrated is to preserve the purity of this substance in the face of an apparently contradicting reality and to enforce verification in the face of apparently contradicting facts that make the pre-established truth into a paradox. It defies reason; it seem absurd. But the absurdity of Soviet Marxism has an objective ground: it reflects the absurdity of a historical situation in which the realization of the Marxian promises appeared—only to be delayed again—and in which the new productive forces are again used as instruments for productive repression. The ritualized language preserves the original content of Marxian theory as a truth that must be believed and enacted against all evidence to the contrary: the people must do and feel and think as if their state were the reality of that reason, freedom, and justice which the ideology proclaims, and the ritual is to assure such behavior. The practice guided by it indeed moves large underprivileged masses on an international scale. In this process, the original premises of Marxian theory play a decisive part. The new form of Marxian theory corresponds to its new historical agent—a backward population that is to become what it “really” is: a revolutionary force which changes the world. The ritualization of this theory has kept it alive against the power of factual refutation and communicated it, in ideological form, to a backward and suppressed population that is to be whipped into political action, contesting and challenging advanced industrial civilization. In its magical use, Marxian theory assumes a new rationality.[6]

In short, it is not the instrument which is primitive, but the social conditions which necessitate the use of such an instrument. Socialist planning is at the center of this new rationality. It provides the framework within which the prescribed behavioral patterns must be realized. It sets the goals that must be achieved in practice.

3. Every five-year plan is a new crusade, a new attempt to defeat the “realities” reflected in it. Every “realism” in this context is thus viciously attacked because it implicitly accepts the ominous reality as given, and consequently succumbs to the status quo. The ritual of planning serves primarily to preserve the secret of the entire social project: the residuum that cannot be dissolved by toothless reason. In Marcuse’s words:

Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from the “classical” form of ideology: it is not “false consciousness,”[7] but rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is “corrected” in the context of the “higher truth” represented by the objective historical interest. This tends to cancel the ideological freedom of consciousness and to assimilate ideology with the basis as part of consciously directed social action. As the contrast between ideology and reality sharpens with the growing contrast between the productive potential of society and its repressive use, the previously free elements of the ideology are subjected to administrative control and direction.[8]

The residuum becomes a magical component of reality, a lure that propels vast masses of people forward. The greatest danger is thus perceived in the collapse of this magical world, without which the everyday life would become unbearable. To remove this theological veil therefore indeed means to destroy not only the apparatus of the party-state, but the basic structure of society, without which its individual members could not survive. Hence, it ironically becomes necessary for every Soviet citizen to protect the magic from dissolution by applying all their energies in support of the only social project that offers to them a glorious future. Critical thought that neglects this is indeed far from emancipatory, for it threatens far beyond the regime itself: it threatens every single individual. Consequently, critical thought must be based on a clear distinction of utopian and ideological components of Soviet Marxism in general, and in Soviet planning theory in particular. The utopian component of socialist planning must still be protected against the ideological misuses of planning, since one of the vested interests of the party-state apparatus is still the realization of the original social project. And thus we confront the unresolved dilemma presented so aptly by Dostoevsky in his parable of Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor.

Footnotes

1. Mao Tsetung, A Critique of Soviet Economics, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977, p. 76.

2. Marcuse, H., Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971 (first published in 1958), pp. 74-75.

3. Malinowski, B., Magic, Science and Religion, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1954, p. 70.

4. Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 75-76.

5. Cf. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 (first published in 1929), p. 184:

[…] it seems possible to find a fairly adequate criterion of what is to be regarded as ideological and what as utopian. This criterion is their realization. Ideas which later turned out to have been only distorted representations of a past or potential social order were ideological, while those which were adequately realized in the succeeding social order were relative utopias. The actualized realities of the past put an end to the conflict of mere opinions about what in earlier situationally transcendent ideas was relatively utopian bursting asunder the bonds of the existing order, and what was an ideology which merely served to conceal reality. The extent to which ideas are realized constitutes a supplementary and retroactive standard for making distinctions between facts which as long as they are contemporary are buried under the partisan conflict of opinion.

6. Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

7. Engels, F., Letter to Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949-1951, p. 451.

8. Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 77-78.