INTERPRETING THE GORBACHEV PHENOMENON 77
stridently, at work in the Soviet Union during these seven decades? The Soviet people are what they are today because of the inspiration provided by Marxism and the stewardship of the communist party. The latter were hardly adjuncts of a primitive social morality, occasionally doing its biddings, and occasionally cutting athwart its biddings. Without the foundation of ideology, there would have been no Soviet system. Marxist ideology lays heavy stress on the law of social dynamics; what is currently taking place in the Soviet system is not the negation of this ideology, but its vindication. That does not mean that confusion and doubts do not persist. An ideology is moribund if it does not give rise to a phase of self-questioning every now and then; such self-questioning actually demarcates a live ideology from a dead dogma.
Other questions too arise. Lewin moves within self-imposed contours. At the core of the perestroika experiment is the felt need for a radical reform of the Soviet economic management system. In Comrade Gorbachev's words,
'Socialism and public ownership ... hold out virtually unlimited possibilities for progressive economic process. For this, however, we must each time find the most effective forms of socialist ownership and of the organization of the economy. Of prime importance in this respect is for the people to be the true master of production rather than a master only in name. For without it, individual workers or collectives are not interested, nor can they be interested, in the final results of their work.' (Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country and the World, Collins, p.83).
Thte is not a managerial or technological question alone, to be isolated from the tearing processes at work on the ideological plane. It is really that old, eternal issue of form and content socialist thought had continuously grappled with. If Lewin wants to relegate this ideological issue into an aspect of transitional difficulties a people travelling through anthropological time have to face from time to time, his analysis is both false and irrelevant.
There is reason to express oneself strongly on this point. The pitfalls of dealing with the problem of economic management on the basis of a non-ideological approach hardly need elaboration. Interested quarters have really gone to town to exploit the current ideological ferment in the Soviet Union for their narrow, opportunistic purposes. Many have got into the act, including quacks of all descriptions. They have great ambitions. They hope both to sabotage, in country after country, the global structure of national planning and to supplant the law of socialist valuation by adopting the so-called 'free market' principles rooted to individual profit motive. These propagandists actually have ideology very much at the back of their mind; they want to launch