Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran

Author:Timur Kuran [Kuran, Timur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, economics, General, Social Science, sociology
ISBN: 9780674707580
Google: HlKBaiCpSxYC
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1997-11-15T00:17:14.414523+00:00

Reform Communism

The surveys just reported are consistent with the hypothesis that the distortion of public discourse through efforts at preference falsification made it hard for East Europeans to grasp the root causes of communist failures. Further systematic evidence comes from the history of reform movements within the Soviet bloc.

When Khrushchev disclosed the enormity of Stalin’s crimes, an opportunity emerged for debating ideas that until then had been unthinkable. Yet confused bureaucrats were unprepared to exploit it. However much they themselves had suffered, they could not identify measures to prevent the recurrence of tyranny. Distinguishing between Leninist and Stalinist communism, they reasoned that a return to uncorrupted Leninism would provide an antidote to despotism. They would struggle for years to salvage the system before recognizing its fatal flaws.39

Reformist movements within the satellites of the Soviet Union exhibited the same pattern. None sought to overthrow the prevailing structures of domination or to alter the social order fundamentally. Imre Nagy, the leader of Hungary’s crushed revolution of 1956, denounced communist absolutism as undemocratic. But he remained wedded to “scientific socialism” as a doctrine of emancipation, without noticing that oppression was a logical consequence of the pretense of omniscience and infallibility characteristic of Marxian historical determinism.40 Likewise, the Prague Spring of 1968 was rooted in illusions about the possibility of giving socialism a “human face” without dissolving the communist monopoly of power.41 Not until the 1970s did movements emerge that sought to change the social order from outside the political establishment. One of the leading early dissidents, Adam Michnik of Poland, made clear, as did Havel in Czechoslovakia, that attempts to humanize socialism were doomed to failure and that meaningful change would have to come from outside the official structures of power.42 For at least another decade, however, Michnik’s views were widely treated as subversive. Most bureaucrats, scholars, journalists, and party officials remained committed to saving the existing social system. Even Gorbachev, whose actions unleashed the forces that killed communism, set out to make the old system work better.43

If there is any major issue on which leaders after Stalin were prepared to grant a modicum of expressive freedom, it was the economy. While continuing to preach the superiority of central planning and to forecast capitalism’s imminent demise, they recognized certain economic problems and encouraged constructive suggestions for reform. For many years, however, “revisionist” experiments remained wedded to key communist principles. Central planning continued to be regarded as indispensable, with only minor concessions made to the market mechanism. The harmful effects of monopolization, like waste and stagnation, were still seen as exclusive to capitalism. Privatization rarely became an issue, and when it did, the focus was on forms of cooperative ownership, as in the Yugoslav “labor-managed enterprise.” Black markets came under constant attack, but rarely were their sources scrutinized.44

The starting point of all discussions was Marxism. Inspiration was drawn from “liberal Bolsheviks” like Lenin and Bukharin, rarely from Adam Smith or his followers. A critic of revisionist thought has characterized the reformists as “prisoners of their own discourse.

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