Bungling Materialists

In Warsaw last week, thousands of Polish housewives queued up for sugar, flour, salt and potatoes. A shiny new self-service market called "Super Sam"* rang up $4,000 in sales during its first two hours.

To stem the panic buying, the regime dispatched extra food allotments into the city, reassuringly announced that warehouse supplies were ample. Few shoppers were convinced, especially after city officials set limits to individual purchases.

The housewives' fear was obvious. Poland, they were sure, was about to follow the Soviet Union in raising food prices.

Said one woman: "Why else did Gomulka go to Moscow?" Two Problems. Polish Party Boss Gomulka was not the only satellite leader to make the trip. Summoned unexpectedly to the Kremlin last week were the bosses of the Soviet Union's other dependencies --East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Reason for the conclave: a top-level meeting of COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), the lame, 13-year-old Communist-bloc alliance originally designed by Stalin as an answer to the Marshall Plan. The COMECON agenda was, as usual, secret, but obviously two acute problems had converged to unsettle Soviet policymakers: 1) the booming success of the Common Market, which violates Red dogma that capitalist states must devour each other in competition for new markets; 2) the chronic failure of collectivized Communist agriculture.

Moscow obviously felt that COMECON ought to imitate Western Europe by closer economic integration. It has been tried before. There has been some success in sharing manufacturing tasks (e.g., Poland to specialize in coal-mining and transport equipment; Czechoslovakia in heavy electrical equipment). But most other COMECON integration attempts have failed because the satellites have learned to distrust each other's--and Moscow's--promises. As Gomulka once complained: "Everyone peels his own turnip." Six Competitors. The meatiest turnip is the Common Market. Satellite commerce with Western Europe (most of it with the Six) is the bloc's main source of hard currency, and in the case of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia accounts for 30% of their trade. The Reds fear that this trade will be sharply cut as the Six deal more among themselves and less with nonmembers across the tariff wall, and that Communist trade will be clobbered in non-European markets by competition from the Six. To visiting Italian Foreign Trade Minister Luigi Preti, Khrushchev complained last week that the partnership between capitalist countries "is a marriage against nature, and nature will see it broken. In this marriage, there are not two sexes, male and female, only two males.''

No one understood why Nikita regarded Bella Italia as male (or the other Common Market partners, for that matter). But natural or not, COMECON was eager to share in the marriage. The meeting's final communique again called for a new, worldwide trade organization to rival the Common Market, but at the same time hoped for increased trade with the West. The message also promised, as Moscow had innumerable times before, that "in the near future" the Communist world will outproduce capitalism both in industry and agriculture.

Not bloody likely.

One Way. In East Germany the regime last week admitted that meat and milk production had fallen far short of the planned output. In Poland, which has largely returned to private agriculture, meat production is adequate, but floods have damaged much of the nation's essential potato crop. Bad weather has also struck Bulgaria, but this cannot excuse the fact that total farm production is only slightly higher than prewar. Wheat, once an export commodity, is now imported at a rate of up to 400,000 tons a year.

Rumanian grain production has matched prewar output only six times in the last 17 years. Horse meat in Bucharest is plentiful, but beef is scarce. Beef is also short in Hungary, which last year shipped $3,200,000 worth of cattle to West Germany in exchange for industrial goods.

The most glaring economic dislocation is evident in the Soviet Union itself, where consumers are still adjusting to price increases of 30% on meat and poultry and 25% on butter--"the only way," as the press explained again and again, to finance higher farm wages and pay for more farm machinery and fertilizer.

Five Percent. No one expected Russians or their satellites to go hungry, or to start a rebellion over the price of pork chops. But there was a deeper, less obvious connection between hunger and history. In the years following World War II, when the Communists marked their greatest gains, their ideological appeal was based on the "revolution of rising expectations." They promised food to the hungry, a better life to all. The great turning point came when ideology had to be replaced by performance. "Communism as an ideology," wrote Milovan Djilas five years ago in The New Class, "has mainly run its course. It does not have many new things to reveal to the world." Since Communism has lost momentum as a source of inspirational faith, the basic issue now is whether it can triumph as a practical economic blueprint.

In that sense. Communism is failing.

Not only has Moscow shown that it cannot readily afford both bombs and butter; it can ill afford to buy loyalty abroad. The Communists supply only 5% of the underdeveloped nations' industrial imports, accept an equally small percentage of exports in return; 95% of these countries' trade is with the West. As for Soviet foreign aid, paper promises of $6.5 billion last year contrasted sharply with the $305 million in goods and credits that, actually were delivered.

The revolution of rising expectations has not been satisfied by Communism even in its own countries. The big meaning of Russia's food troubles is that the Communists are in an ironic fix: they are materialists who are bungling materialism.

* Not named for Uncle Sam, but derived from the Polish word sam, meaning by oneself.

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