Perestroika and the Primacy of Politics

...While proceeding with political reforms, as we must, we should also keep in mind Poland's experience...

...And this can only happen after a radical reform of the party and government mechanism...

...Hence his vacillations in negotiating with England and France, and hence the course of action that led to the pact with Hitler...

...This becomes even more bizarre when one considers that it was precisely because the tzarist regime virtually ignored this proposition that capitalism in Russia developed so slowly and that the country was pushed toward revolution...

...If the base isn't * For years, the kolkhoz has been used as a source for feeding the city...

...Half of a director can't sit submissively for two hours at a raikom meeting and listen obediently to officious rhetoric while the other half of him returns to his office at the plant and begins to perform miracles of productivity and self-sufficiency...

...Yugoslavia's difficulties—again in my view —are rooted in its political system...

...It is clear to me, for one, that Hungary's problems are rooted in the failure to restructure its heavy industry...

...But the emphasis was almost invariably on technology—that is, now on developing chemical industry, now on land improvement through drainage or irrigation, now on shifts in our military production...

...There is a marvelous line in Eduardo de Filippo's play about Aesop: don't trust anyone who passes judgment on whether someone is or is not ready for freedom...

...Its problems are many and serious, yet anyone who has been both there and in the Soviet Union over the past ten or twenty years cannot but be struck by how much better and easier life is in Yugoslavia, especially considering the low economic level it started from...

...It is mandatory for us to proceed immediately with a drastic overhaul of our political system, while at the same time keeping in mind the kind of economic system we want to create...

...Hence, the economy must take precedence over everything else...

...The reason for it is that capitalism rests fundamentally on the laborer's ability freely to trade his labor...

...Nevertheless, I firmly believe that political reforms must be our number one priority now...

...One of Stalin's blind spots—among so many others—was his failure to understand the way in which capitalism is tied to democracy...

...We have, after all, some experience with a bureaucracy bent on eradicating every sprout of democracy...

...When wages were guaranteed from above—when, in other words, financial accountability was, for all intents and purposes, done away with...

...Several years ago in Poland political freedoms outpaced economic reorganization...

...For the craving for freedom is a universal phenomenon, common even to people who do not fully realize it, or may think that they don't want it...

...And this failure stemmed precisely from the failure to restructure the party-government apparat, which objected to the industrial reforms because they would have undermined its power and privileges...

...Attempts to build roads and hospitals or to provide children with adequate schooling usually come to naught—A:B...

...Alec Nove (Dissent, Fall 1989) is right to emphasize the crucial and long-term connection between the economic and political institutions in the USSR...

...Such judgments sound like the unsuccessful fox, who comforts himself for not being able to reach the grapes by saying they are sour anyway...

...Yet we considered our economic structure the only possible model of a socialist economy...

...Which is to say that just as no viable economic institutions can be created without correspondingly viable political institutions, so the viability of the latter depend on that of the former...

...Again political considerations first and above all...

...Only then will we be able to overcome the onerous legacy of the past...

...And they all point to one conclusion: because the process of dismantling the fetters to progress has been directed almost exclusively at the economic system, the latter, too, is incapable of functioning properly...

...The city executive committee took the name of this insubordinate troublemaker off the list of apartmentallocations, thus forcing him to choose between his family and his job...

...nonetheless, Soviet textbooks on political economy WINTER • 1990 • 95 glasnost Watch contain not a word about freedoms as the main precondition for the flourishing of capitalist production...

...This is in fact how capitalism developed...

...For how, some people would ask, can we embark on political reforms in an economy of scarcity...

...Our director retaliated by canceling several bus and tram routes...

...The recent events in China are a striking illustration of that...

...To sum up, then, if it is true that economic reform cannot develop without political reform, the opposite is equally true...

...If the kolkhoz employee has the basic part of his salary guaranteed "from the top," regardless of the results of the work of the entire working force, it is the top that will in effect be running the farm, elections or no elections...

...Not good enough: within two hours inspectors from the Motor Vehicle Bureau were standing on every corner outside the factory, checking the license of every single driver and taking down the plate number of every vehicle...

...This is so, first of all, because of the peculiarities of our current phase of economic reorganization...

...The contrived and—as the historical record demonstrates—feckless nature of that relationship arose because rather than making the economy the bedrock of a new political system, we did precisely the opposite...

...And only after this work is done introduce democratic changes in the political superstructure...

...The chairman of an WINTER • 1990...

...We have grown up in a country whose political structures arose independently of and indeed without regard to the economic base, and which have in fact served as the principal instrument determining and shaping our economic institutions...

...The defects and outrages of the administrative system have gradually seeped into public consciousness...

...Finding the Right Blend This much said, it is necessary to stress that however important democracy is in general terms, its actual form and shape are intimately bound up with the form and shape of the economic system it engenders...

...Let me offer a few examples...

...Both political democracy and internal party democracy are instruments aimed at bringing ever greater numbers of people into the processes of perestroika...

...Elected deputy to the Congress of People's Deputies in March of 1989...

...He refused to believe that the democratic bourgeois republics would oppose fascism...

...or put differently, economic changes did not keep pace with political changes...

...They derive from bitter practical experience...

...And an economy subordinated to the exigencies of politics is incapable of meeting the needs of a society...

...The Case for Political Reform First There is a good case, then, to be made for placing the emphasis on economic reforms...

...Develop new economic structures...

...Rather, it was his article of faith that they would make common cause with fascist regimes...

...If economic reform somehow goes off the track, so will political reform...

...Why...

...93 Glasnost Watch ispolkom* will no longer dare to scoff at a supervisor chosen by the work collective only when ispolkom elections themselves are democratic and a candidate who ignores the law on enterprises can be decisively rejected.** At this point raikoms still expect factories to produce volunteers to distribute vegetables, clean streets, and the like...

...And elections have indeed been taking place...

...Yugoslavia is another case in point...

...In the course of successful bourgeois revolutions, while the bourgeoisie proclaimed the supremacy of all freedoms, it actually imposed restrictions in the area of politics and ideology...

...Which is to say that democratic institutions built on authoritarian economic foundations are just a facade...

...The Case for Economic Reform First Thus a new wisdom came into being: the real problem, it said, lies not in the leadership, not in the merits or shortcomings of this or that research institute, not in the structure of governmental bodies, not in the method of rule, but rather in an economy driven not by economic laws and considerations but by a strictly political-administrative engine...

...Workers have in many cases taken matters into their own hands, but without the democratization of party and political bodies their efforts are doomed...

...that is congruous with it...

...Fundamental restructuring must of necessity be a mass phenomenon...

...Presented with a long list of candidates running for office, he or she might even cast a vote for socialism...

...Apart from purely economic arguments, there are more general reasons...

...Yet after a while the interest in elections subsided...

...Experience has taught us that all societies are ripe for democracy, for it is something that turns us into full human beings...

...Changes like the creation of the zemstvos [local rural self-governments], trial by jury, the rise of an independent judiciary, and so on...

...It might be useful, therefore, especially for the benefit of the foreign reader, to examine the reasons for this response...

...At the present time, we find it impossible to bring about swift improvements in income and standard of living...

...A person is a single entity...

...If we want people to take active, creative roles in the factory, in research institutes, in hospitals, in distributing vegetables or in a sports stadium, we must allow them to be equally active and creative in elections to the local soviet, in deciding what should happen to the atomic electric power station in the Crimea, in solving the fate of the Crimean Tatars or Nagorno Karabakh...

...That won't stop unless they begin to elect as leaders people who worry less about rotting vegetables per se and more about a rotten administrative apparatus that has never learned that vegetables should be distributed without regional depots and bureaucratic middlemen but on the basis of economic interests and contracts...

...On closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that only in those enterprises — factories, shops, cooperatives—where khozraschet is the norm, where workers have a real stake in productivity, is there a keen interest and participation in the election process...

...Millions of Soviet citizens repeat this axiom at school examinations, millions nearly choke on quotations from Lenin...

...The director refused: "I can't," he said, "I'm on khozraschet and without a contract signed beforehand I can't do anything...

...The very fate of perestroika, it seemed, hung on the ability to overhaul our economic system...

...At the end of August 1988, for instance, a district party committee (raikom) asked the director of a bus factory for buses to pick up children at a Young Pioneers camp...

...Half of a worker can't applaud at a meeting, echoing ready-made slogans and dropping his ballot into the box without even reading it while the other half works as hard as he can on contract with his crew...

...As it turned out, England fought Hitler to the death—which is to say that it fought against a system that annulled the bourgeois freedom of competition and deprived workers of the right freely to hire out their labor, or to choose and quit jobs as they saw fit...

...The hell with your Motor Vehicle People," he concluded, "and the hell with your khozraschet too...

...Efforts to temper or overcome this resistance have thus far met with little success, which strongly suggests that unless the very nature of that apparatus is changed, that is, unless it is replaced with a body of officials directly responsible to the electorate and genuinely interested in implementing a radical economic overhaul, the reforms will remain a dead letter...

...But the abortive results engendered by the succession of political administrations—Stalin, Malenkov, Khnishchev-Bulganin, Khrushchev alone, BrezhnevKosygin, Brezhnev alone—and the failure of the various "scientific and technological" solutions led us to the conclusion that the source of our problems lay not in these programs and not even in the personalities of the leaders, nor in the apparat—in a word, not in the realm of politics at all, but somewhere deeper, precisely in the kind of economic structure that we had fashioned with the help of the administrative system...

...In addition, they disposed of considerable democratic freedoms...

...What use can a nation make of greater political rights if it is forced to spend hours standing on lines...

...Second, that the new economic system requires a political system This article was translated from the Russian by Josephine Woll and Abraham Brumberg and annotated by Brumberg...

...A second historical parallel is connected with experiments in economic reform in socialist countries— in Hungary, for instance...

...I am convinced that its much and long-touted system of "self-government" (including workers' councils) was much more façade than substance...

...Let me again turn to the experience of capitalism, which clearly tends to democracy...

...The director got the picture and—orders notwithstanding— sent his buses off to the raikom...

...These simple propositions concerning the interrelationship between economics and politics frequently elicit reactions from Soviet citizens ranging from stupefaction to anger...

...Only after the capitalist economic base had been firmly established did political democracy begin to flourish...

...But it's the end of the month, we're finishing up our orders—if you wait until tomorrow there will be buses available...

...changed, all our energy will again be diverted into doomed "chemicalization" campaigns or landimprovement schemes...

...How can a crew meet its contractual obligations when it has pared away all its superfluous workers yet is expected to provide a couple of men to clear snow...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that any suggestion to concentrate on political institutions is met with bewilderment...

...Fascism was not the only possible and logical result of the development of capitalism, as Stalin thought, but just such a "defect" of capitalism's development as the "cult of personality" was a deformation of socialism: likely in a given confluence of circumstances, but not an inevitable outgrowth of the system...

...When and why...

...Other and more thorough reforms were enacted between 1864 and 1874...

...When collective farms were first established in the 1920s, they were supposed to be 92 • DISSENT glasnost Watch run strictly on a khozraschet [self-accounting, or financing] basis...

...This essay will appear in the forthcoming Perestroika: Chronicle of a Revolution, edited by Abraham Brumberg (Pantheon Books)—A.B...

...And third, that further economic reorganization is impossible without radical changes in our political institutions...

...In real life a director can't be split in two any more than a worker can...

...But one must remember that for nearly twenty years, a whole *** The reform of 1861, which abolished serfdom, nevertheless still deprived peasants of full civil (including property) rights, in fact making them completely dependent on the government bureaucracy...

...Where self-financing is a mere formality, the elections serve either as a means of settling personal accounts, or they elicit widespread apathy—surely yet another example of the extent to which democratic forms depend on economic realities...

...It has come to be used by many Soviet writers for the ruling machine created by Stalin and not fully dismantled to this day...

...Moreover, any attempt to introduce sweeping political changes might well result either in an elemental uprising "from below" directed at the apparat and nullifying the whole perestroika program or from the apparat, which having long ago mastered the art of manipulation would now emasculate the new democratic institutions and remain firmly in the saddle...

...According to the new rules, workers in an enterprise are now supposed to elect their directors...

...Faced with such compelling arguments, it seems audacious to advocate an opposite course: political changes first, economic restructuring later...

...Let us take a leap into the present...

...forms of such a democracy will change, but the main criterion must be to turn workers into the principal agents of reforms...

...If the latter is not altered, political changes will be mere tinsel...

...The law on enterprises, enacted in 1987, is supposed to provide enterprises with the freedom to plan their own inputs and outputs on a strict cost-accounting basis, without interference from central ministries...

...Unfortunately not...

...All of these efforts, each valid in its own way, came to nothing: resources were invested and used in a fundamentally ill-conceived and ineffective system...

...In time, the political structures coalesced into what I have called elsewhere the administrative system,* with its powerful and bloated bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, a string of "personality cults," and inherent constraints on scientific, technical, and, above all, economic progress...

...The agenda seemed disarmingly simple...

...The Soviet Union paid an awesome price for Stalin's failure to understand the fundamental interrelationship of capitalism and democracy, of capitalism and fascism...

...Democracy without economic reorganization can lead to this outcome too...

...Some of the opponents of perestroika point to them as a salutary lesson of how our reforms, too, may end up...

...What can democracy offer under such conditions...

...But we are loath to apply this fundamental principle to our current problems...

...Are we again to put the cart before the horse...

...Are we to focus once more on shell rather than substance, albeit this time in the name of democracy and perestroika...

...Who knows...

...Instruct it in the art of economic self-sufficiency...

...First get rid of institutions such as the social consumption funds (for education, health, and the like), which are available at virtually no cost to those working in the apparat, and the various institutions that under the pretense of devising and running a coordinated planning system have been little more than a feeding trough for millions of bureaucrats...

...Most Soviet economists as well as numerous enterprise managers are now agreed that the law left enough loopholes in it to permit the ministries to impose obligatory plans upon enterprises...

...WINTER • 1990 • 91 Glasnost Watch These are not mere theoretical questions...

...The * The executive committee of a local soviet, the organ of state authority...

...Because the first problem to arise was where the newly freed serf could go to lodge a complaint against a landowner who contravened the 1861 reform, and solving that problem required eliminating the old patrimonial court system and creating a fundamentally different legal system...

...Every attempt to implement a more radical model of khozraschet immediately meets fierce resistance on the part of the economic and party apparat...

...94 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch generation's lifespan, Hungary achieved something evidently beyond the grasp of an average Soviet citizen: a normal existence, without queues, with enough produce and goods to meet the basic demands of the population...

...One might think that he won...

...The kolkhoz [collective farm], for example, constituted a kind of one-way pump, draining resources from the countryside and incapable of providing sustenance to the countryside...

...Without this condition—which requires at a minimum all formal freedoms—there can be no real competition...

...And we were never at a loss to support this assumption with apposite quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin...

...There are thousands of ways to sabotage an economic planner who relies on his "legal" rights...

...The new man asked the city executive committee to repair some broken machinery for which it was contractually responsible: the depot—as a self-financing enterprise—found the cost of repairs prohibitive...

...It is instructive to recall that Lenin himself regarded political reform as essential for successful economic reform...

...We can also see that socialist countries that have implemented economic reforms without radically altering their political institutions can come to a bad end...

...In other words, eliminate the economic foundations of a parasitic class that impedes progress...

...In a northern Siberian city workers at a public transportation depot chose a Moscow specialist as their director...

...And yet time and again it is precisely the hurdles thrown in our way by the party-state machinery that prevent us from undertaking decisive measures in the economy...

...Such changes would then be both logical and durable: implemented gradually, they would inspire neither social unrest nor ridicule...

...The first efforts at economic reform, introduced in 1985-86, have led me—and others—to three conclusions: First, that what our country needs is not reform but fundamental economic restructuring— that is to say, a new economic system...

...Its present difficulties are the result not of its reformist path but because somewhere along the way the leadership wavered, dawdled, procrastinated, and failed to implement urgently needed measures...

...He is free not only as a laborer but also as a consumer...

...As a result, democratic institutions were used to channel mass dissatisfaction arising from the leadership's failure to implement structural economic reforms...

...But in the meantime there is something we can and must offer immediately— namely, democracy, the sense of being the master of our lives, of being able to make decisions for ourselves...

...The city fathers regarded this legitimate demand as outlandish and brushed it off...

...How can a factory become truly selffinancing if hiring and firing decisions are made not by its manager but by the party...

...Examples abound...

...It is an excellent piece of advice...

...This seems like a self-evident proposition...

...A person who is fed and clothed is receptive to democratic rights...

...Attempts to organize the flow of resources back through the pump to the countryside led only to squandering them in every direction.* Economists like myself had pointed a finger at the politicians as the primary source of our economic woes...

...forced deliveries, corvees, and legislation tying the peasant to the land all caused the countryside to sink into economic and social misery...

...The agricultural reform of 1861 offers an interesting historical parallel.*** It is often forgotten that this reform—incomplete, partial, preceded by two decades of foot-dragging, implemented by the forces of the autocracy's bureaucratic apparat, conceived to defend the interests not so much of the landowners as of the autocracy and its apparatwithin a year mandated not only economic but also political changes...

...Feed and clothe the nation...

...Kolkhoz members fought hard at every election for "their" chairman and governing board as against those nominated from above...

...It is a social good in itself, as well as an incentive to progress in general...

...Democracy is not merely economically beneficial...

...Thus complete and genuine khozraschet and viable economic reforms are possible only in the context of full-fledged democracy, in both the party and the government...

...To be sure, Hungary faces innumerable problems...

...Popov coined the term "administrative system" in an essay published in Nauka i zhizn in 1984...

...True, in the past our political leaders occasionally tried to introduce new economic policies or changes in our economic mechanisms...

...Popov has urged that the liberal deputies (estimated to comprise at least 450 and possibly even 800 of the 2,250 members) constitute themselves into a distinct political group, something on the order of a "loyal opposition...

...q 96 • DISSENT...