The Lure of the Plan: The Impact of the Five-Year Plans in Britain

摘要

This article investigates the impact of the initial Soviet Five-Year Plans upon political discourse in Britain, and in particular its impact upon the left. It shows that a broad swathe of political opinion in Britain was encouraged by the impact of the crash of 1929 to accept the need for the state to intervene in economic affairs, and that the growth of the Soviet economy under the initial Five-Year Plans played a catalytic role in accentuating this opinion. Many commentators who rejected the political norms of the Soviet regime nonetheless considered that valuable lessons could be drawn in respect of economic policy in Britain. The article then looks at the attitudes held on the left towards planning, and concludes that the idea that socialist planning must involve democratic decision-making on the part of producers and consumers was submerged beneath a technocratic concept of lite economic management, and that the rise of this idea of planning during the 1930s was a component of the defeat of the wave of working-class radicalism that had erupted at the end of the First World War.