REFLECTIONS ON THE THEORY OF POWER 57 expensive private restaurants on the Arbat divesting wealthy American tourists of some of their excess wealth. It is dangerous not to emphasise that the industrialisation of the USSR was a most amazing achievement, and not to mention that its distributive superiority over capitalism is clear. It is quite probable that the actual reforms of perestroika would not succeed. They might even, in the shorter run, create shortages, difficulties of all sorts. Some of its supporters argue that this is because these are being tried in the context of a generally antediluvian economic regime. But I wish to state one simple fact which strangely bothers dedicated Stalinists: if the Soviets are able to speak freely and express what they think, it is not a return to capitalism. It is simply a freer socialist society, which seems an excellent idea. We must see the socialist ideal as existing in history. A part of its existing in history is a necessity that it would be first realised in inadequate forms. The destiny of an ideal like Marx's is not to be simply realised, but to remain unrealised in constantly improving forms of socialist organisations, and to act as a principle which people can use to criticise the actual. It is the principle of 'self-movement' of socialism, to use an old-fashioned phrase. As we assert the historicity of everything, we cannot claim self-exemption. We cannot in effect say that all historical things are historical except the theory which says so. Those who have developed an ahistorical affiliation to the Soviet Union and declared in advance that it is a society of ideal perfection do of course face a logical problem: how to improve a perfect society. But they should not blame the Soviet Union, only their somewhat premature declaration. Even if perestroika fails for now, its historical significance would still remain. It has raised some basic problems of power under socialism with unprecedented sharpness and insistence, and the process of this questioniing is I suspect irreversible. We Marxists sometimes work with an excessively rationalist and economistic view of the social world, and our knowledge and control of its causalities. But no revolution is able to completely control its own course or consequences. It is not considered disreputable not to have control over the intractable forces and contours of history. The law of unintended consequences applies to Marxism as well, and there is nothing embarrassing in admitting this. Yet, happily, we retain a less stringent and more tragic form of control over the historical process. We are not able to push history to take the exact road we wanted, but we are able to push it in that general direction. Marxists may not have been able to improve the world in exactly the way they thought; but still undeniably they have been in enough control of events to have improved an unreasonable world. We should wish perestroika similar, if slightly ironical, success. I think perestroika allows us to think of our own situation in a less ideologically anxious fashion. By giving the ideal of Marx and Lenin back to us in all its complexity it reduces our dependence on the narrative of Soviet history. By emphasising its contingency, we can see