The Thinking Reed

So far as distribution is concerned, we must move toward the market, which is the natural framework because it’s the only way to establish the sovereignty of the consumer over the producer in the Soviet economy, which is producer-dominated. So in that sense some movement toward the market is needed, but the problem is to accompany that with a movement toward producers’ democracy, toward more participation of the people in decision-making, with some redistributive mechanism which should be democratic.

AC: Now, by ‘market’ you don ’t mean capitalist relations.

BK: Not at all. What’s the difference between ‘market’ in the capitalist sense and in the socialist, Marxist, revisionist sense? I think the major point is that for capitalists ‘market’ means the regulation of production, and for socialists in Eastern Europe the idea is that the market should exist simply as an indicator of the quality of our decision-making. So far as production is concerned, planning should be democratized, but we also need an alternative source of information, to test the quality of the decisions.

AC: Like some kind of economic polling procedure, as it were.

BK: The dominant factor, though, is not the market but democratic participation. Democratic participation without such a testing mechanism is utopian. Any kind of modern economy is market economy, whether in the Soviet Union or the United States or Sweden. If you have commodity production you have a market, so the problem is not plan versus market, but which kind of market and which kind of planning, which kind of decision-making?

AC: There’s a tendency in the West to read all recent Soviet developments in terms of Gorbachev’s initiatives, which is surely a naive way of looking at events.

BK: Under Brezhnev there was already some kind of bureaucratic pluralism, and today the power struggle is not more intense than in Brezhnev’s last years, but it is more visible, because now we have glasnost'.

There are bureaucratic institutions and groupings that have different political concepts. It’s rather more of an American than a Western European type of pluralism. We have a one-party and the Americans a two-party system, but in the sense that interest groups are more important than the formal political machinery, a certain similarity becomes evident. In that way the Soviet system is evolving toward an Americanized system, with much more weight attached to lobbies, political groupings inside the structure, which impose political constraints on the elite. What is truly new is that grass-roots left-wing and right-wing tendencies are trying to influence that structure.

AC: When did the socialist clubs here form?

BK: It has been a spontaneous movement. Some of the groups that existed under Brezhnev were destroyed. They tried to re-emerge after his death, when some people got out of prison.

AC: Like you.

BK: Yes. I’d been in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow for thirteen months [April 1982 to April 1983] for publishing an underground magazine called The Left Turn. It’s interesting that students joining the movement now, under perestroika, are trying to change the name of the socialist clubs’ bulletin from Eyewitness to The Left Turn simply to demonstrate continuity. Some clubs came about spontaneously: for example Obshchina, which is one of the best and most critical, active and conscious. It’s a student group, but some of its members are no longer students. Then there’s another type of club, formed by people with political experience: for example the Club for Social Initiatives, which was set up to coordinate the actions of the left-wing clubs and promulgate the history of the left-wing movement inside the Soviet Union. In fact you could say that it is somewhat of a hegemonic cultural project, which thus far hasn’t run into the ground.

AC: So the present plan of the clubs is to develop reinvigorated socialist concepts and try to circulate them?

BK: Yes, and to become a real factor, a real pressure group, in the decision-making process. In local issues the groups can have great effect. With global problems it’s not so easy. We’ve managed to get a lot of people at the official level to accept our role as a pressure group and to recognize that under perestroika it is normal for such groups to exist. Even those who don’t identify themselves with us see that it’s necessary to have forces on the Left to counterbalance the Right. For such reasons we sometimes have some good opportunities presented to us by the authorities.