Students of the Five Year Plans are familiar with the overreach. Sing ambitions, the inflated claims, die disputed accomplishments, die misleading statistics, and the appalling human costs of “socialist industrialization” in Soviet Russia. They have generally ascribed these phenomena to Bolshevik dieory and practice. It comes as a surprise then to find die criticism of die early Five Year Plans foreshadowed, in almost identical terms, in die attacks made upon die earlier policy of rapid industrialization in Russia which is linked with the name of Sergei Witte, the Czarist Minister of Finance, 1891–1903. He, too, paraded seemingly impressive results and dubious figures, and he, too, was forced to exact dire sacrifices from popular welfare: Despite the profound dissimilarities between the Soviet system and die Witte era (they must go unstated here) there exists, it would seem, an underlying continuity, pointing to more fundamental necessities and profounder tragedies that backward countries widi strong nationalist and imperialist tendencies must face in die precipitous development of their resources. One special difference, however, should be noted in diis context. The distaste for die bitter fruits of forced industrialization, muted in Stalinist Russia, could frankly, although not entirely freely, be expressed in die eighteen nineties, when Witte's policies attained their full effect. The subsequent discussion of Witte's policies and their consequence is drawn from that public protest.

In Veblen's own critique of other economists—andtion of his theory is just that—he relied securely on quasi-Marxist a major por-simplicities concerning causation. Other economists “got that way” because they were members of or sycophants of the kept classes, aristocratically disdainful of the actualities of production. Their theories, if they were classicists, were “superstructural” in the sense of being both above and behind the battle, for Veblen was one of the pioneers in the use of the culturallag concept which has done so much to confuse the understanding of the relations between technology and society. If they were American classicists, such as (in Veblen's view) J. B. Clark, diey were likely to couple a pallid reformism with their “fine-spun technicalities,” offering palliatives at the level of pecuniary theory for evils rooted in the very divorce of the pecuniary culture from its industrial base. And this reformism Veblen saw as a leisure-class product, along with female philanthropy, the arts and crafts movement, social work, and vegetarianism—the archaic by-products of the sheltered life of the better-off and the better-educated strata whose menial and hence life-giving work was done for them by others. Reformism was archaic because it was pre-evolutionary, pre-Darwinian; for Veblen, “A.D.” meant “After Darwin.” His emphasis on the datedness of economic theory—a charge to which Americans are especially sensitive since we like to be progressive and up-to-date—led Veblen to express recurrent hopes for the “younger generation” of economists, whom he wanted to make less literate and theoretical, less parasitic and less sanguine, less refined and more machine-minded. For Veblen as for Rousseau, what was young was less likely to be corrupted and spoiled.

If We are to have a discussion of fabian England, it may be well at the outset to specify what we nean by fabian, even though we take England for granted. Under present circumstances in the world, die German methodology, which dictates beginning with definitions, should perhaps be employed in its Russian variant, which requires that serious discussion of any scholarly subject shall be prefaced widi an indication of what Lenin had to say on the topic. Lenin was interested i n the Fabians, interested enough to translate Industrial Democracy into Russian. It is therefore with special authority that he was able to say, “The most perfect expression of opportunism and of liberal labour politics is undoubtedly the Fabian Society.” His opinion took on added weight because he was echoing “Engels, who treats Messrs. Sidney Webb and Co. as a band of bourgeois humbugs whose aim it is to demoralize die workers, to influence them in a counter-revolutionary direction.” Lenin did recognize that “the Fabians are more sincere and honest than Kautsky and Co. because they have not promised to stand for a revolution; politically, however, diey are the same.” As we all know, in 1915, in the heat of the effort to “convert the imperialist war into civil war,” nothing more damning could be said than diat the Fabians were the same as the “pseudo-Marxist renegade” Kautsky.