USSR Soviet journal interviews Trotskyist economist THE MOST WIDELY READ Soviet liberal publication, the weekly Argumenty I Fakty, which has a circulation of up to 30 million, published an interview with Catherine Samary in its December 2 issue (No. 49). Samary is the author of a comprehensive study of the Yugoslav economic model published by the Notebooks for Social Research and a leading revolutionary Marxist critic of the economic systems of the bureaucratized workers' states. The interview was given last summer. The following is a translation of it as it appeared in Argumenty i Fakty.
start of the 1980s was to renew the course of market reforms in an attempt to reunify the country and cut down the foreign debt through tight austerity and regulating production with the help of world-market prices.
The results were catastrophic. Today, inflation has reached 100% [it is now over 1,000%], and 12% of the workforce is unemployed. Powerful social tension has developed. • Nonetheless, market regulators have enabled the capitalist coun tries to reach a high level of satisfyIng people's needs and solving social problems that we cannot handle now.
The present level of economic development and social protection cannot be seen only as the result of the market. To a large extent, social guarantees were won by the working people themselves through a long struggle for their rights. Besides, today's capitalism represents a society where there is a high level of planned development of social policy within the framework of the firms and corporations.
The notion that it is possible in a few years to go down the same path that it has taken the developed capitalist countries two centuries to complete is utopian.
Moreover, the market will lead to vast gaps between the incomes of various strata of the population. And inasmuch as values different than those in the West are deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people, this will serve as a dangerous source of tension.
Those who rejoice over the successes of the free-enterprise wave in recent years usually say nothing about about the fact that it has widened the gap between the developed and developing countries. Besides this, it has made it possible to delay a new worldwide crisis through a vast extension of credit. The US has become the world's biggest debtor; its debt equals the total debt of the so-called third world countries. • So, you are against overcentralİzed bureaucratic planning as well as against the market. In that case, where do you see the way out?
The choice is not between the market (which is supposed to bring efficiency and democracy, that is, for those who have to have money and jobs) and social protection (with inefficient bureaucratic planning and an absence of democratic freedoms)! This is a false alternative that has to be rejected.
I am not against the market as such. I am against the dictatorship of the market (just as I am against the dictatorship of the bureaucracy), against looking to the market as a cure-all. A market is necessary, but under the control of the society. The principal solution is economic democracy, self-management.
Working people have no reason to
M ANY SOCIALIST COUN-
TRIES are now going over to market relations. Does the market offer the key to solving the problems arising from overcentralized bureaucratic planning? Our correspondent G. Valiuzhenich discussed this with Catherine Samary, a sovietologist, instructor at the University of Paris and a collaborator of the Institut de URSS et de l'Europe de l'est. Her doctoral thesis was devoted to a study of the "Yugoslav experience." Today she is studying the reforms underway in our country. • Catherine, in the 1960s, "market socialism" was introduced in Yugoslavia. Many of us now place hopes in that, but that country is in a crisis. In your opinion, what is the reason for this?
Most of the specialists consider that the reason is that the market has not been developed enough. I argue that it is the insufficiency of economic and political democracy in Yugoslavia.
From the early 1950s until 1964, there was a system in which most of the decisions were made first of all at the central level, "from above," although the enterprises were "self-financing.". Self-management was strictly limited by the price and credit systems established by the central planning bodies and directives. In this period, despite the rapid rise of the economic indicators (yearly growth rates of over 10%, a sharp increase in the production of consumer goods), certain sources of tension developed (dissatisfaction of the miners with the low prices for 10 coal that led to lowering their incomes; opposition by the well-off republics to the redistribution of means among the republics). In connection with this, an attempt was made to reduce the role of the government in favor of the market. By the way, it seems to me that a stereotype has formed in your country -whoever is against the market is for dictatorship. That is far from the way it is. In fact, another variant is possible.
In a centralized system, you could plan only the big strategic questions and determine priorities. Most decisions should be taken on the regional, local or enterprise level. The economy should be regulated, but without exercising "tutelage" over every enterprise.
However, this variant requires a fundamental democratization of political life. That did not happen in Yugoslavia. In 1965, the centralized capital investment funds were liquidated, along with other previously used instruments of planning.
The labor collectives were free to use the surplus of various production funds left over after payment of taxes. That, of course, was a positive aspect. But at the same time, the decentralization of decisions on capital investment and criteria for redistribution quickly led to serious disruptions of the balance among industries. Dependence on imports increased. Local resources were underused, resulting in a growth of foreign debt. Beginning in 1968, there was a new rise of strikes for higher wages. Inflation exceeded the projected price increases. Unemployment rose. The Yugoslav economy became very fragmented, divided up as if into feudal fiefs, and burdened with a foreign debt on the order of $20 billion. Under the pressure of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the prevailing orientation from the
International Viewpoint #77 • January 29, 1990
accept inequality, imposed by the dictatorship of the market, as a natural thing. They have no reason to regard it as just (the result of some "universal economic laws") that they are treated as "things," as "commodities," which can be used and then thrown on the street in accordance with market criteria.
Labor must be freed from the condition of wage labor. In fact, even the capitalists of the leading countries have been obliged in their own way to recognize this fact. They are trying to involve the workers in solving the problems of production, to link their interests with those of the entrepreneurs. To this end, they are even elaborating a "company" ideology. But the limits of this workers' "self-management" are, of course, very narrow.
The new technologies are being oriented solely by profit criteria. They are eliminating more jobs than they create. In these conditions, it can be said with certainty that capitalism cannot remove class strug- that capitalism cannot remove class struggle and replace it with with a corporative spirit. This is prevented by rebellions of the poor and unemployed.
Do you think that there are crises veloping today in our country as a result of socialism?
Can you call "socialist" a system in which there is no "free association of the producers," in which there is no control by e society over social ownership? I don't think so.
Judging from the press, some economists here are saying that the socialist model was wrong from the start. It is responsible for everything, they say. It was the October revolution that threw the country into all its subsequent woes. They even say that there was no alternative to Stalinism, which supposedly was based on the ideas of socialism. These arguments are based on the ignorance of people who lack any deep knowledge of their own history. In your country, they have not yet even published the platform of the Left Opposition, which fought Stalin and proposed an alternative road for building socialism. In fact, you are now coming to its ideas — building genuine socialist democracy and self-management. *
USSR / CZECHOSLOVAKIA
«We must preserve respect for social justice"
THE new Czechoslovak government, under the presidency of
Vaclav Havel, has already taken a number of striking initiatives.
Negotiations are under away for the removal of all Soviet troops from the country by the end of this year, while Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus has called for the abolition of the Soviet dominated Comecon trading bloc. Czechoslovakia has asked for membership of the OECD group of industriazed countries and Havel himself has supported the reunification of Germany as a part of a more general process of European unification.
Nonetheless the government Is only in power provisionally until the holding of elections in June, During and after the election campaign hard choices will have to be made to give form to popular aspirations for national sovereignty and prosperity. In the
Western media all the talk is of an inevitable return to capitalism and the "free market", a view that seems to predominate also in the new government. In the interview below, noted human rights activist and revolutionary Marxist Petr Uhl, who has spent nine years in jail for his bellefs and activities, takes Issue with this view and also gives some insights Into the real debates taking place and to come in Czechoslovakla. The Interview was conducted in Prague on December 24, 1989 by Hubert Sandor and Catherine Verla. It has been shortened somewhat for space reasons.
M Y FIRST question is the following: why have you persisted in saying that you are fighting against the Stalinist system not in spite, but because of your communist convictions? How far have you been able to convince people of this?
At a meeting of ex-political prisoners, mostly from the 1950s, most of them very anti-communist, I stated that I was a Trotskyist, a revolutionary Marxist. I explained that it was my Marxist convictions that were the driving force behind my commitment; in my eyes there can be no socialism without human rights. And it seems that the system did not see my Marxism as a mitigating circumstance, as is shown by the time I have spent in prison during the past 20 years. Of course, you might say that my Marxism is an eccentricity or a sign of false thinking. But it is not so easy to view my activities - texts, the organization of youth in the 1960s, my involvement in Charter 77, in the Committee to Defend The Unjustly Persecuted (VONS), the defense of political prisoners and for the extension of free thinking - in the same way. There is respect for whatever motivates that kind of activity, be it religious belief or Marxist convictions.
There are big differences amongst us: there were those, like me, who saw the Charter as a step towards political revolution; others saw it as a way of spreading the word of Christ...I respected them as they respected me. It was a real laboratory for the tolerance of different viewpoints amongst people engaged in a practical struggle. This was less the case in the emigration. • But do you not think that your persistent Marxism can lead to the charge that you are congenitally incapable of a radical break with the system, while the anti-communists have made a complete break?