The Thinking Reed

Market socialism had not suffered an economic defeat, only a political one. Where the economic experiments were continued for a fairly long time they produced, on the whole, some positive results — although new problems were also revealed. The classic examples of experiments more or less consistently pursued were Hungary and Yugoslavia. These countries achieved the biggest successes in Eastern Europe. Experiments in a number of factories in the USSR gave excellent results, but the ideology of ‘market socialism’, in its original form, was closely bound up with Communist reformism and a naïve belief in the pragmatism of the ruling statocracy and the socialist nature of the existing system. The hope that market socialism might be introduced from above proved illusory, and that predetermined its defeat.

It was significant that the greatest successes were achieved in Hungary and Yugoslavia, countries which had experienced popular revolutions. The reforming section of the ruling circles would never have realized their aims by themselves, without pressure from below. The exception here was Czechoslovakia, but ultimately this exception proved the rule: the reformers failed. Consequently the idea of market socialism underwent a crisis, to rise again later in the programme of forces which were not so much intrasystemic as openly oppositional, extrasystemic. The words ‘socialist market economy’ were banned from the official press. After 1971-74 it was possible to defend those ideas only in samizdat and foreign publications. True, in the legal press too, many economists wrote in favour of a market-socialist economy,35 but the actual expression had to be replaced by something else, and hints resorted to. One could be frank where partial questions were concerned, but no developed theoretical programme could be advanced, as Birman, Lisichkin and others had done in the sixties. The economists themselves began increasingly to feel that they were outsiders, and to compare themselves to a doctor whom a patient asks for prescriptions, only to throw them away in the nearest rubbish bin.

The defeat of market socialism was not final. It would be revived in a fresh political form: the future of the socialist opposition was bound up with the solving of the problems it posed. But before new democratic ideas began to spread there was disappointment at the fate of the reforms, loss of confidence in Leninism, Communism, socialism — everything one had so naively believed in during the sixties. As usually happens, the baby was chucked out with the bath water. Still, in history things never happen in any other way.

There was a pause in the social struggle. A great deal had to be thought about and understood. On the morning of 21 August 1968 the entire ideology of Soviet liberalism collapsed in a few minutes, and all the hopes aroused by the Twentieth Congress fell to the ground. Whereas previously liberal intellectuals had comforted themselves with the thought that, on the whole, our society has a sound foundation, that it has not lost its socialist character, that — as Yevtushenko wrote in his Autobiography — the revolution was sick but not dead, the events of 1968 scattered those illusions. It was not a matter of ‘the excesses of Stalinism’ but of the system itself. For many, recognition of this fact meant spiritual and ideological collapse. Understanding of the new truths did not, of course, come to everyone at once, but an obvious reexamination of values began. Rakovski wrote that ‘it would be unhistorical not to see the real heroism’ in the Communist liberals of the ‘thaw’ period,36 despite their naivety. But 1968 put an end to their hopes, and along with them their ideology, in the form it then bore. It had proved helpless to withstand the tank armies of the neo-Stalinist state upholding its monopoly of ‘Communism’.

It was almost like Mayakovsky’s verses:

Communism from books
is easy belief.
(To serve it up in books
is fashionable)
But this —
brings ‘rigmarole’ to life,
and shows Communism
in flesh and blood.37

1968 and the Crisis of Reform Ideology

Political experience affects social consciousness much more strongly than any theories, even the most sophisticated. If social experience does not favour them, ideas cannot be assimilated by a sufficiently large number of people. In 1969-78 the overall situation was unfavourable to the spreading of reformist-Communist theories. The illusions of the sixties had become patent. It was clear that if socialist ideology was to revive at all, it must be in some new — and certainly non-Communist — form. Even some prominent figures of the ‘Prague spring’ said so. J. Pelikan wrote, after 1968: