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A review by clangfield
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
5.0
"Whenever he had been troubled by a memory, he had worked, telling himself that the best answer to any defect in the past must be a remedy in the future. The future had been his private solution as well as a public promise. Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present."
Bear with me as I struggle to describe this... novel? Not quite a novel but also somehow something more than a novel.
The book self consciously teeters between fact and fantasy, peppering its narrative of the mid-60s Soviet Union with fragments of skazki: fairytales. It begins and ends with stories of buckwheat oatmeal transforming into plentiful feasts, and peasant boys and girls being whisked away on magic carpets, casting a dreamlike haze over the whole thing.
The dream, of course, is that of socialist plenty. That through rational and democratic control over economics, the world of "hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing [what we would today call vibing] after dinner" will replace the one where the majority of us toil without owning the value which we produce.
The author is right to say that the main character of the book is simply this idea. But this idea is expressed through vignettes of vivid human characters, who sometimes recur and sometimes don't. They are the ones who lived and rose and fell in the world of which this idea was a part.
In the 1960s a group of Soviet cybernetic economists believed they had found the outlines of a plan to get there: to boil down the complexity of the state-run economy to a grand mathematical structure, whose finer points could be decided by computer-programmed optimization routines synthesizing data from around the country and sending back signals of what to make and where to send it. Much of it was based on the mathematics of Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The ideas were never implemented, except in small experiments. The Soviet planned economy was never rationalized in this way, and while it must be given credit for breaking the cycle of famine and "functioning" in the narrowest possible sense, it was always plagued by the inefficiencies and absurdities that have been pointed out ad nauseam (though correctly) by critics of socialism.
As Red Plenty's narrative tells us, these new economic ideas were among the many beacons of optimism during Khruschev's rule that were extinguished by the massive weight and darkness of the Soviet political machine as it shuddered back towards complacency, corruption, and shortsightedness. The author spares no punches in criticizing the bleak parts of the USSR, but places its failures in their political, social, and economic contexts in a way I believe to be fair, especially for a Western author.
The idea which is the subject of Red Plenty is not dead though. The last few stanzas of the book, which was published just a few years after the Great Recession, ask: "Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?" Just as those living in the Soviet Union asked themselves that, we who live here and now should be as well.
Bear with me as I struggle to describe this... novel? Not quite a novel but also somehow something more than a novel.
The book self consciously teeters between fact and fantasy, peppering its narrative of the mid-60s Soviet Union with fragments of skazki: fairytales. It begins and ends with stories of buckwheat oatmeal transforming into plentiful feasts, and peasant boys and girls being whisked away on magic carpets, casting a dreamlike haze over the whole thing.
The dream, of course, is that of socialist plenty. That through rational and democratic control over economics, the world of "hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing [what we would today call vibing] after dinner" will replace the one where the majority of us toil without owning the value which we produce.
The author is right to say that the main character of the book is simply this idea. But this idea is expressed through vignettes of vivid human characters, who sometimes recur and sometimes don't. They are the ones who lived and rose and fell in the world of which this idea was a part.
In the 1960s a group of Soviet cybernetic economists believed they had found the outlines of a plan to get there: to boil down the complexity of the state-run economy to a grand mathematical structure, whose finer points could be decided by computer-programmed optimization routines synthesizing data from around the country and sending back signals of what to make and where to send it. Much of it was based on the mathematics of Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The ideas were never implemented, except in small experiments. The Soviet planned economy was never rationalized in this way, and while it must be given credit for breaking the cycle of famine and "functioning" in the narrowest possible sense, it was always plagued by the inefficiencies and absurdities that have been pointed out ad nauseam (though correctly) by critics of socialism.
As Red Plenty's narrative tells us, these new economic ideas were among the many beacons of optimism during Khruschev's rule that were extinguished by the massive weight and darkness of the Soviet political machine as it shuddered back towards complacency, corruption, and shortsightedness. The author spares no punches in criticizing the bleak parts of the USSR, but places its failures in their political, social, and economic contexts in a way I believe to be fair, especially for a Western author.
The idea which is the subject of Red Plenty is not dead though. The last few stanzas of the book, which was published just a few years after the Great Recession, ask: "Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?" Just as those living in the Soviet Union asked themselves that, we who live here and now should be as well.