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.
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.