Soviet journal interviews Trotskyist
International Viewpoint #77 • January 29, 1990 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
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.
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
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 enter-
"self-financing.".
prises
Selfwere 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 coal that led to lowering their incomes;
10 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"
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
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 have enabled the capitalist countries 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 consciausness 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
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USSR economist
"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.
January 29, 1990 • #177 International Viewpoint 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
USSR / CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Nonetheless the government is only in power provisionally until then thrown on the street in accordance the holding of elections in June. During and after the election campaign hard choices will have to be made to give form to
Labor must be freed from the condition of wage labor. In fact, even the capitalists popular aspirations for national sovereignty and prosperity. In the of the leading countries have been obliged
Western media all the talk is of an inevitable return to capitalism in their own way to recognize this fact.
and the "free market", a view that seems to predominate also In the
They are trying to involve the workers in new government. In the interview below, noted human rights solving the problems of production, to link their interests with those of the entreactivist and revolutionary Marxist Petr Uhl, who has spent nine preneurs. To this end, they are even elaboyears in jail for his bellefs and activities, takes issue with this view rating a "company" ideology. But the limits of this workers' "self-management"
and also gives some insights into the real debates taking place and are, of course, very narrow.