his readers to look in a different direction, beyond "fanaticism" and toward a positive and rational search for attitudes "long current in the West and useful for promoting experiment and economic growth" (see his concluding comment in the symposium).

What are the attitudes that Mao has recently tried to inculcate in his subjects? Contempt for a qualitative grading system in middle schools and universities; contempt for the independence of scientific researchers; acceptance of political orthodoxy before technical competence as the standard of excellence of all specialists; and acceptance of increased regimentation and of even less remuneration for more work. Are these the attitudes honored by leaders of democratic governments and "long current in the West"? 2

M®

ost totalitarian rulers (including Hitler, Stalin, and Mao) have justified their actions to others and, no doubt, to themselves—in terms of some greater good which their actions would supposedly bring to their subjects. What Mao shares with Hitler, however, is the frank and explicit rejection of "humanism" as a motive or goal of his policies. The explicit onslaughts against humanism in Mao's China began long before the events of the last year which Professor Schram finds so embarrassing, and one of the gravest charges hurled by Mao at the Soviet "revisionists" was the alleged humanistic direction of their policies after Stalin's death. Within China, even Mao's most abject apologists and adulators have refrained from employing this term in regard to their leader.

2 The Peking Jen-min Jih-pao, on December 26, 1966, called for "revolution" in the factories, and on December 31, the paper instructed peasants to join in the economically irrational frenzy, which now includes grossly falsified economic claims.

A semi-humanist-or even a quarter-humanist-tolerates the ethical, religious, and political views of other men. The deprivation which men subjected to Mao's thought reform must suffer is crucially omitted from Professor Schram's image of Mao. By insisting on a semi-humanistic motivation, he downgrades the antihumanistic consequences of Mao's practice. Other observers have not concealed the fact that Mao's criteria of mental purity are frequently altered, and that his demand for intelligent men to adjust mentally to each change of policy through painful self-disparagement imposes a harried life of uncertainty and tension.

P

rofessor Schram feels that there are only certain "striking parallels" between Maoist China and Stalinist Russia. Yet if we take the essence of Stalinism to mean the perpetuation of a one-man cultist control over a Leninist (that is, highly centralized and undemocratic) party, then Stalinism is at the very center of Mao's political rule. It is misleading to suggest, as does Professor Schram, that the Red Guards ("mass action by adolescents") and not a "police apparatus" were the means employed by Mao to repress opposition in the CCP. The real Stalinist means was the secret arrest of some real opponents, including Lo Jui-ch'ing, P'eng Chen and his committee secretaries, Lu Ting-yi, and Chou Yang, and close surveillance of

3 An almost identical position is taken by Professor Franz Schurmann on this important point: "Mao, unlike Stalin, has long since learned that the use of instruments of violence, such as the army and police, to resolve political disputes can create a chain of escalating violence without end." (H. F. Schurmann, "What is Happening in China?," The New York Review of Books, Oct. 20, 1966). Actually Mao's police apparatus removed the oppositionist Politburo members from their real power positions well before the Red Guards were organized and encouraged to denounce them.

others-including Liu Shao-ch'i, Madame Liu, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Only after these arrests took place was Mao ready to use the Red Guards to terrorize party leaders whom he and his new lieutenants had marked for public intimidation. The Red Guard "arrest" of P'eng Chen and his secretaries was an ex post facto sham affair; for the real secret arrest took place nine months earlier, in March 1966. It is not the Red Guards but Mao and his new sextet (including Madame Mao) who will decide whether former Politburo members will survive and whether regional, provincial, and municipal party secretaries will be purged or permitted to continue in their posts.

Like Stalin, Mao is terrorizing the entire party apparatus because it is not absolutely submissive to him (though, admittedly unlike Stalin, he has used his wife to single out important victims). Like Stalin, he has formed new "sextets" and "octets" among the leaders in order to change the power alignment so that it remains below him in the Politburo. Like Stalin, he has placed former well-trusted lieutenants on semi-public "trial" and has used the ritual of leveling false charges and extorting false confessions. Like Stalin, he insists on being designated the “supreme commander" at home and the "leader" of all true Marxist-Leninists abroad. Indeed, in fostering a nearreligious cult of his person and of his writings, he has not only borrowed a leaf from his predecessor but easily surpassed him.

not supported by any demonstrable facts. He may even say that this "belief" is an article of fundamental personal faith. But even that would not prove it true, or even dispose of the doubts raised by those who have valid rational grounds for challenging it.

Political conjectures must correspond with political reality. Of what

conceivable value are conjectures about Mao's private thought processes except in relation to Mao's actions in the real world? And of what value are such conjectures when they are not correlated with Mao's concrete practice because the discrepancy is too enormous and too obvious?+

Arthur A. Cohen

+ Professor Schram departs furthest from reality whenever he depicts regimentation as an example of Mao's yearning for freedom of the individual. "Mao's hatred of the older limitations placed on freedom of the individual by religion and family ties has by no means diminished and is prob ably one of the reasons for the experiment of the communes." (Schram, op. cit., p. 33). Similar logic might also be employed to explain Mao's forced labor camps, which also overcome the limitations placed on freedom of the individual by religion and family ties!

EDITORS' NOTE: Readers are welcome to comment on matters discussed in this journal. Letters should be addressed to the Editors, Problems of Communism, US Information Agency, 1776 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 20547.

Views on Yugoslavia

TO THE EDITORS: There are important points in the F.W. Neal W.M. Fisk article "Yugoslavia: Towards a Market Socialism" (November-December 1966) that need to be corrected or clarified. The very title of the article, purportedly descriptive of Yugoslavia's economic system, is quite vague unless the term "market socialism" is carefully defined. This the article does not do.

The essence of the Marxian notion of socialism is collective ownership of the material means of production. Market economy, on the other hand, means, first of all, mutual independence of demand and supply, with various degrees of effective pluralism on each side of the market depending on the divisibility of specific demands, and on the technology of production and size of particular markets on the supply side. Thus the market principle requires not only autonomy of individual

persons and spontaneous groups of persons in consumption, but also autonomy of individual enterprises in quest of external (demand-oriented) and internal (cost-reducing) efficiency. These essential requirements of a market economy are to assure that production will serve genuine human wants and will do so with an unceasing effort at lower unit costs, which is the only way to minimize universal scarcity.

It follows that the possibility of a "socialist market economy" depends on whether collective ownership of productive assets is compatible with the necessary autonomy of individual enterprises. In the Yugoslav system this problem has in principle been resolved by making individual enterprises virtual "collective owners" of their assets and revenues, subject only to an average four-percent "rent" and some other tax payments to the state. Whether such a splintering of collective ownership still adds up to "socialism" is debatable, especially since the application of the market requirements of autonomy and pluralism of firms also tends to generate and multiply individually managed small enterprises in farming, handicrafts, professions and other services.

Beyond the problematic concept of Yugoslavia's economic system itself, there are three further questions that must be answered. To what extent has

the Yugoslav economy in fact been transformed into such a hybrid “socialist market economy"; at what pace is its further transformation taking place; and what are the observable effects of this transformation on the efficiency of the system's performance?

From the Neal-Fisk article we learn that actual transformation of the Yugoslav system has been slow and uneven. Although the principle of "self-management" as the operational lever of "socialist market economy" had been proclaimed as early as 1950, its implementation and operation were obstructed until July 1966 when Aleksandar Ranković was removed. It is only since the fall of Ranković that a vigorous effort has been under way to implement the reform of July 1965, which was irrevocably to commit Yugoslavia to the proclaimed socialist market economy.

The crucial change is the transfer of the bulk of the industrial investment function from the political center to the enterprise. For this purpose, firms are to retain a considerably larger share of their sales revenues. But to make this transfer both effective and efficient, a capital market had to be established. A fundamental reorganization of the banking system was to create the mechanism for this. It is too early to assess the working of this rearrange

ment. In the past, Yugoslav banks acted as transmission belts for an essentially political allocation of fiscal investment funds among various industries. Now, the opposite danger exists. Banks may become too dependent on specific enterprises that supply their capital funds. In the absence of a truly open market in long-term securities, the emerging capital market may not acquire sufficient flexibility for efficient allocation of investment funds.

The Yugoslav system is still grappling with the fundamental problem of how to establish and maintain a flexible price system in its product markets. If the danger of chronic inflation or recurring recessions in the framework of a flexible price system is to be contained, the latter must be backed up by a sophisticated monetary policy. But in Yugoslavia such a monetary policy is yet to evolve. In the meantime inflationary pressures are being checked by an almost comprehensive price freeze, which goes against the very essence of a market economy.

On the enterprise level, the most serious remaining problem in the Yugoslav system is the lack of a dependable mechanism for orderly managementemployee relations in a system where employees of each firm are to be their own collective managers (self-management). Internal frictions therefore multiply and could seriously impair the efficiency of the system. There are even signs of an emerging general antagonism between the trade union leadership and enterprise managements. (See on this several reports and articles in Ekonomska politika of October 22 and 29. and November 12, 1966.)

On the political plane, Messrs. Neal and Fisk do not seem to have grasped the basic rationale of the federal character of Yugoslavia. They seem to equate the rising pressure for a consistent implementation of the constitutionally established federal principle with a "narrow ethnic-national particularism." In this they are certainly wrong. For it is a historical fact that Yugoslavia is a multinational country. Genuine liberalization is therefore bound to lead to a far-reaching federal rearrangement of the existing political system resulting from twenty years of Ranković's manipulations.

Messrs. Neal and Fisk speak of the possibility that the regime "might pioneer in the political realm by establishing a socialist opposition." Yet the regime does not tire of repeating that it will never tolerate any kind of an opposition party. (See on this a recent statement by Koca Popović as quoted in Life magazine, Dec. 9, 1966, p. 130.) But it is fascinating to speculate about the possibility that the regime could transform the existing front organization-the Socialist Alliance-into an independent second political organization by simply freeing it of its present Communist party leadership and membership, and still stay completely within the formal limits of the existing constitution. This, in my view, appears to be the only realistic hope for a twoparty system to emerge in Yugoslavia, short of a major upheaval.

Since the fall of Ranković, pressures for such a change appear to have become irresistible and are spearheaded by the constitutional courts of Yugoslavia's constituent republics. Their immediate demand is that, in accordance with the constitution, federal legislation be limited to establishing basic guidelines only. Beyond this, it has already been announced, for example, that the Assembly of Nationalities is to be revived as the principal political body at the federal level. The resignation of the government of the Republic Notice

of Slovenia in December 1966 focused worldwide attention not only on the growing importance of parliamentary bodies in Yugoslavia's system of gov. ernment, but also on the growing assertion of national republics as the locus of a new polycentric system in which the federal government is to serve only as a coordinating center.

...

Finally, the article is vague on the changing role of the League of Communists in the evolving Yugloslav sys

tem.

CYRIL A. ZEbot Georgetown University Washington, D. C.

In identifying Dr. Shanti S. Tangri, author of the article "China and Peaceful Coexistence: Some Considerations" which appeared in the January-February issue, the Editors neglected to mention that Dr. Tangri, in addition to being Associate Professor of Economics at Wayne State University (Detroit), is also Research Associate at the Center of South and Southeast Asia Studies, The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). We regret this omission.