When Efficiency Meets the Party

In the mid-20th century Soviet Union, the economy was planned from the top down. Prices, outputs, and resource flows were determined not by markets but by administrative targets. Yet behind the scenes, some Soviet thinkers were asking a dangerous question: Could the plan itself be made more rational?

One of them was Leonid Kantorovich, a brilliant mathematician who pioneered linear programming—a method to optimise resource allocation. His models calculated “shadow prices”: not market prices, but mathematical indicators of how valuable a resource was to the plan. These could have made planning more efficient. But to use them would mean acknowledging scarcity, inequality in performance, and trade-offs—things the official narrative tried to suppress.

What follows is a fictional scene, based on real ideas and real tensions, imagining what a conversation between Kantorovich and a Party official might have sounded like.

GOSPLAN BUILDING, ROOM 47 – LATE EVENING

A half-lit office with cracked walls, radio static humming in the background. Rain taps the window. A black Bakelite phone rests beside a stack of resource allocation charts. Leonid Kantorovich, lean and serious, sits across from Comrade Petrov, a Party liaison with the Ministry of Food Supply.

Petrov flips through a folder labeled: “Optimisation Plan No. 32 — Leningrad District Mills.”

PETROV
(reading)
“Reduce flour allocation to Mill No. 3 by 20%... reallocate to Mill No. 5, gain of 14,000 additional loaves weekly.”

(pauses, looks up)
Why? Mill No. 3 meets its quota. On time. Clean books.

KANTOROVICH
Because Mill No. 5 converts each ton of wheat into 3% more usable output. It’s better designed. Less mechanical loss. The model shows we lose efficiency by treating both mills equally.

PETROV
(suspicious)
But we don’t ration flour based on equations. We assign it based on political quotas, production reliability, and regional balance.

This…
(taps the paper)
...this makes it look like Mill No. 3 is “less valuable.” That’s a price signal. Not a plan.

KANTOROVICH
It’s a shadow price, not a market price. The model assigns value based on opportunity cost, not ideology. If we shift resources according to this data, we get more output. Fewer shortages.

PETROV
And next week the bakery workers in District 3 riot because they didn’t get their flour. “Sorry, comrades, we ran a shadow model.” Is that the line?

KANTOROVICH
No. We plan better. We explain better. But we stop pretending that inefficiency is egalitarian.

(pulls out another sheet)

Here—look. Steel allocation. Factory 47 makes bolts with a 6% material loss. Factory 92, only 2%. But they both get the same input because... why? Political favour?

PETROV
Factory 47 is in Magnitogorsk. Loyal managers. Excellent Komsomol record.

KANTOROVICH
And Factory 92 is in Perm. No press coverage. Fewer medals. But the bolts are better.

(sharply)
Comrade, math does not care who got a Hero of Labour badge.

PETROV
But the system does.

(leans back)
If we implement your model... prices shift. Resources flow unevenly. You’ve created a logic that overrides Party instinct. And that, Leonid, is politics.

KANTOROVICH
And pretending those instincts are efficient is not politics—it’s ritual. You want results, or symbols?

PETROV
We want stability. You offer turbulence in the name of truth.

(silence)
You’ll get your pilot trial. Quietly. In Perm. No publication. No public pricing reform. And if the bread queues shorten, we’ll say it was the Five-Year Plan. Not the math.

Kantorovich nods, defeated but composed. He knows this is the only way forward—for now.

No Easy Roads: Strategy in a Post-Revolutionary Time

Is armed struggle still a viable path for social transformation? In countries where some form of electoral democracy exists, however flawed, this is a question that deserves serious thought. Even Che Guevara, often seen as the symbol of armed insurrection, warned against violence where peaceful avenues remained. In Guerrilla Warfare, he wrote:

"Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

Terror tends to beget terror. It rarely inspires collective courage. More often, it breeds silence, surveillance, and stagnation. Social life becomes narrower. Political organisation, harder.

We also live in a time where revolutions of the classical kind—ruptural, decisive, and transformative—have become rare. What lies ahead instead may be long, uneven, often demoralising periods of institutional struggle and slow change. This isn’t to dismiss militancy or organisation. But it is to admit that revolutions today may need different strategies.

Historical lessons underline this complexity. The Allende government in Chile tried to build working-class institutions through the state. It was overwhelmed—first by a strike of the petty bourgeoisie, then by a military coup. Venezuela appeared to solve the military question by electing a former soldier. But it couldn’t build enduring institutions of mass participation or diversify its economy. Cooperative experiments remained shallow. The state relied increasingly on repression as oil revenues declined. Maduro now seeks accommodation with capital.

In South Asia, the picture is mixed. Maoism in India spread across regions where the state was seen as extractive and external, especially in the Adivasi belt. But these zones were too isolated to shape a national strategy. Worse, they became militarised spaces, locked in cycles of insurgency and counterinsurgency, making any peaceful political work nearly impossible. In Nepal, Maoists won office—but not a revolution. They were effective in mobilising against the monarchy, but once the king was overthrown, they struggled to articulate a clear roadmap for the future. The movement, so focused on resisting royal power, lacked a cohesive strategy for post-monarchy governance and transformation.

So, what strategic alternatives exist? One idea is to work in the "cracks" of the system—building democratic institutions like cooperatives, community councils, or unions that can slowly expand and challenge capitalist dominance. These institutions may lack the power to confront the state directly, but they build capacity, confidence, and solidarity among the oppressed.

Yet this approach is not without limits. Such efforts may hit walls—legal, economic, political—that they just cannot overcome. Which is why another track might be equally, if not more, necessary: organising among workers in strategic sectors of the economy. These workers hold leverage. Their ability to disrupt essential flows—transport, energy, logistics—can compel the state to concede. Without this kind of strategic pressure, institution-building alone may remain contained and marginal.

In the end, no strategy is sufficient on its own. What’s needed is a political ecosystem: institutions that endure over time, rooted in everyday life; movements that can mobilise at scale; and workers with the leverage to shift state priorities. Not just bold ideas, but durable structures.

Perhaps the real uncertainty is not whether a path exists, but how to navigate between competing strategies—building local institutions within the system’s gaps, and applying pressure through organised leverage in strategic sectors. Each has its role, and each has its limits. The real work may lie in finding the balance, and staying with the difficulty of that task, even when no clear victory is in sight. The challenge is to build something that can survive the long haul—and be ready, when the moment arrives, to push history forward.

Why I (Strangely) Enjoy Reading American Neo-Cons

Mayur Chetia

I’ve been reading a lot of American neo-conservatives lately. I know—it sounds odd, even self-incriminating. After all, these are the architects of imperial wars, the cheerleaders of endless occupation, the ones who saw nation-building as a side hustle to military conquest.

And yet, I can’t help but find something intellectually engaging in their writing.

Not their politics, obviously. Their ends—control, domination, resource capture—are antithetical to everything I stand for. But their means—their obsession with state-building, institutional design, legitimacy—overlap with concerns that anyone thinking seriously about socialism, post-capitalist futures, or democratic planning must eventually confront.

Here’s what I think is worth learning from them:

 1. Institutional Engineering: A Weird Obsession That Pays Off

Neo-cons obsessively dissect how institutions work—or fail. They study judiciaries, armies, bureaucracies, tribal networks, patronage systems. Sure, it's often in service of maintaining power over others. But the detail they offer is real. Their work reads like grim statecraft manuals: how to co-opt local elites, how to rebuild a judiciary, how to avoid insurgencies inside police forces.

This kind of granular analysis is rare even among some left-wing thinkers, who sometimes treat “the state” as a black box. Neo-cons open that box and start labeling wires.

 2. They Take Chaos Seriously

 Say what you will about their motives, but neo-cons don't walk away from the mess they create. They are obsessed with filling vacuums. That means confronting the hard problems of post-conflict governance: how to manufacture legitimacy, how to hold elections that don’t collapse the next day, how to balance civil-military relations.

 It’s in these debates that they say things I find surprisingly useful—even if I want to apply them in a totally different context.

 3. Long-Term Thinking (Delusional but Structured)

Unlike liberals, who often want clean narratives, fast exits, and symbolic victories, neo-cons think in decades. They’re delusional, yes. But they also ask long-horizon questions:

How do we shape institutional inheritances? What compromises are necessary early on? How do we build a state that lasts beyond the next funding cycle?

These are also the questions that revolutionaries—real ones—must ask. Market socialists too.

 4. Their Failure Analysis Is Brutally Honest

Ironically, some of the best critiques of U.S. policy in Iraq or Afghanistan come from within neo-con circles. They dissect their own disasters in painful detail—why local elites turned against them, how corruption hollowed out institutions, how militia integration failed.

Ideology blinds them to deeper truths, but their post-mortems are analytically rich. There's a lot to steal here.

 5. Read with Caution

 Of course, it goes without saying: their normative framework is a mess. They treat people as clay, states as machines, order as an end in itself. Justice, autonomy, popular sovereignty—these are afterthoughts in their world.

 But that’s exactly why they’re useful to read. You’re not buying what they’re selling. You’re learning from how they build—even when their structures collapse.

 6. A Socialist Parallel?

 I’m interested in how to build a post-capitalist state that actually works. That integrates informal labour. That redistributes land without administrative collapse. That retools bureaucracies without elite sabotage. That regulates markets while ensuring service delivery. That earns legitimacy from below.

The technical challenges are similar—tax systems, local governance, institutional trust. And so I find myself strangely drawn to those who, for all the wrong reasons, have thought deeply about how to make states function after a rupture.

So yes—read the neo-cons.

Just reverse the moral polarity.

You're not looking for blueprints. You're looking for the reasons their blueprints failed.

 

Mourning the USSR: A Market Socialist's Reflection

Mayur Chetia

I became a communist long after the USSR had collapsed. The red flags had been lowered, the hammer and sickle replaced by new symbols, and the Cold War had ended in triumph for capitalism. And yet, even as someone who now identifies more with market socialism—grounded in feasibility, and committed to democratic institutions—I still feel the pinch. The loss of the USSR is something I carry. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

Why does the fall of a state I never lived under, one I never truly idealised, feel so personal? Because the USSR was more than just a state. It was a symbol—a flawed, battered, often tragic symbol, but a symbol nonetheless—of a world that dared to be different. A world not governed by capital.

A First Attempt at the Impossible

The Soviet Union was the first serious attempt to build socialism in history. That matters. The Bolsheviks had no playbook, no template. They improvised under siege—civil war, famine, international isolation. They made grave mistakes, sometimes monstrous ones. But they tried. The sheer ambition of creating a new mode of production—industrialising a peasant country, eliminating private ownership of the means of production, creating universal healthcare and education—cannot be dismissed as merely authoritarian folly.

Even if we now argue, rightly, for decentralisation, worker cooperatives, democratic planning, or hybrid models with markets—everything we debate is built on a terrain first opened up by the USSR.

A Different Moral Battlefield

The USSR shaped the entire 20th century. Without it, there would have been no postwar welfare state in the West—social democracy was capitalism’s answer to the Soviet threat. Anti-colonial movements across the global South drew inspiration, funding, and diplomatic support from Moscow. Even when we reject Stalinism or bureaucratism, we have to acknowledge the fact: the USSR made the idea of socialism real, not just theoretical.

That’s why today’s so-called socialist states—China, Vietnam—don’t feel the same. They are successful in their own way, but within the framework of global capitalism. They compete in markets, attract foreign capital, rely on wage labour and inequality. Their communist parties preside over capitalist development. The USSR, by contrast, never accepted capitalism’s rules, even when it failed to replace them.

The Death of an Idea

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, it wasn’t just a geopolitical shift. It was a historical defeat. Not just for one model, but for the belief that the world could be fundamentally reorganised. That human relations could be governed not by profit, but by planning, solidarity, and need.

As a market socialist, I do not want to resurrect the USSR. But I mourn it nonetheless. I mourn the audacity, the seriousness, the scale of its ambition. I mourn what its death made more difficult: the legitimacy of the socialist project itself. The space to imagine alternatives shrank overnight. Our ideas became tentative, marginal, riddled with disclaimers.

Still Thinking, Still Trying

But here we are. We read Alec Nove and Erik Olin Wright. We learn from Kornai and Kantorovich. We study failures not to mock them but to avoid repeating them. We build models not for utopia, but for real, achievable transitions. And we do this even when the world laughs, forgets, or demonises.

That pinch we feel? It’s the price of holding on to hope, without illusion. Of remaining a socialist—when there are no clear blueprints, no global momentum, no triumphal certainty. Only the long road ahead, and the refusal to give up.