The Thinking Reed

BK: There are two concepts of economic reform. One is a kind of technocratic imposition of capitalist elements onto the existing system.

AC: Material incentives?

BK: Material incentives are not necessarily capitalist. When you think that human beings are animated only by material incentives, that is capitalism. For that matter one could ask, What is the alternative to the material incentives of the Westernizers? The major incentive for Russian workers should be more free time.

AC: That reminds me of a West Indian organizer in London who once said to me, ‘Less work, more leisure. ’

BK: People should have some say in how much they work. Given the choice, they may not work more but they will work better. The quality of their work will improve tremendously. Free time, incidentally, means a better quality of life, which in itself is much more than a matter of living standards.

AC: What do the technocratic reformers want?

BK: More power to managers, more strength to market forces but without abolishing the system of centralized bureaucratic planning, centralized distribution of resources. They just want to give managers more power in establishing prices for the final product. That’s a bureaucratic-capitalist mix. The technocratic-conservative faction says, Let us do everything we did before, but better — better managers, better computers. One of our people said that these reformers are ‘serfowning liberals’, as in the nineteenth century. They want some kind of feudal capitalism; that is, manipulative elitism. This means forcing ordinary people to pay for the crisis produced by bureaucratic management. If you don’t abolish the central elements of bureaucratic management, the crisis will be reproduced again and again.

AC: And the other currents?

BK: A growing left-wing current expresses the necessity of democratizing not only the political system but also the relations of production, giving people more say in decision-making; more possibility for workers to elect their managers and also have direct democracy on the enterprise level. There are a few people in the official groups who support those ideals.

It’s strange that the most radical people in the official sphere are culturally oriented. They are not thinking about enterprises and economic reform. We have generated a lot of papers on the economy, but the intelligentsia is generally more interested in social and cultural problems, thus surrendering the economic sphere to the conservatives. It’s an important point about any cultural radicalism or liberalism. You try to establish cultural hegemony, but when you think you’ve got somewhere you find, finally, that the decision-making centres are inside the economy and you can’t reach them. That’s why the socialist club movement is important; we’re trying to cross that gap between the sociocultural and the economic spheres.

AC: On the economic front what thinkers influence your group?

BK: Internationally, some Hungarian economists, like Janos Kornai, though now we consider him to be moving to the right. Many are disappointed with his recent work, but his earlier work, from the fifties, on overcentralization influenced a lot of people. Also Wlodzimierz Brus, a Polish professor at Oxford. Some are interested in Scandinavian social democracy, whether anything can be learned from that, though I should stress that the people looking at Sweden are not social democrats. More broadly, people are very influenced by Marcuse and by Gramsci. Among the members of Obshchina, Bakunin is very important. People are information-hungry and seize on any left-wing thought.

AC: So how are you bringing your ideas to bear in the economic sphere?

BK: For example, we’ve set up a group called the Campaign for Just Prices, trying to show that price rises are not only unnecessary and unjust but also anti-reformist. Either you change the whole structure of decision-making — in which case you don’t need to have centralized price reform at all, because you have established fundamental democratic structures — or, as is the case in the context of the present structure, price reform necessarily ends up being anti-reformist. So, first, give more power in decision-making about prices to the local authorities — since they are more sensitive to market pressures and also to local needs, and will be forced to find a balance between the two forces — but at the same time democratize those local authorities. Second, you need to have differentiated prices functioning as a redistributive force, making richer people subsidize the consumption of those poorer than themselves. That means higher prices for luxury goods, restaurant meals and so on.