From 1968, when you were the first person to be tried and sentenced after the Soviet invasion, right up to the present, when you were one of the last to be released from prison in November 1989, you have always sought to combine a militant defence of human rights with a firm rejection of the ‘other’, capitalist camp. Has this been a difficult path to follow?

As I explained recently at a meeting of former political prisoners, most of whom were violently anti-communist, I am a Trotskyist and revolutionary Marxist and this is the driving force of my commitment. As I see it, there is no socialism without human rights. My Marxism certainly does not seem to have been seen by the authorities as an extenuating circumstance: witness all the time I have spent in prison over the past twenty years. Of course, it is always possible to treat it as an odd quirk or an aberration. But it is harder to say that for my activity—the pamphlets and agitational work among young people in the late sixties, then my involvement in Charter 77 and vons, my work defending political prisoners and fighting for wider freedom of thought. All of that is generally recognized, so people respect what motivates that kind of activity, whether it be religious belief or Marxist conviction. We Chartists are in fact very diverse. There are those like me who saw the Charter as a step in the direction of political revolution, while others saw it as a way of disseminating the word of Christ. We respected one another, indeed there was a veritable laboratory of tolerance among the differing viewpoints of people all involved actively in the struggle. Outside, things were rather different.

Perhaps that is how things were in the past, among the Charter 77 militants. But will the same be true for the mass of people entering politics in the present period? Even though you have spent more time than most in prison—four years for Trotskyism and five for human rights activism, I believe, not to speak of numerous short periods of detention—will people not hold your stubborn Marxism against you, seeing it as a congenital inability to break radically with the system, whereas the anti-communists for their part do seem to have made a clean break?

But that is not true! They have not made the kind of clean break you mean. On the contrary, many of them are advocates of an authoritarian system. They want to calm the revolutionary upsurge, in order to put through their economic ‘reform’. There is also a race for ministerial or parliamentary posts, with the help of anti-democratic procedures. For the moment I criticize all this politely, as it were, because the old order is not yet defeated. But is this not the proof that my Marxism is more radical than their anti-communism? There is something very important at stake here: the emancipation of the individual, the transformation of object into subject, not just on the economic but also on the political level. I do not want to discuss the words ‘socialism’ or ‘Marxism’, but human emancipation as the precondition for social emancipation.

Yes, but even if decades of Stalinism have corrupted political discourse and made words like democracy and socialism equivocal, to say the least, thought is still unthinkable without words. Moreover, behind the problem of definitions, is there not a more substantial problem? In the Soviet Union, for example, there are plenty of people who talk about defending the interests of the workers, fighting corruption, even building socialism, but who unfortunately are only too often linked directly or indirectly to the existing bureaucratic apparatus. On the other hand, those committed to defending democratic freedoms, fighting for national sovereignty, enhancing the right to initiative and responsibility, in short to a radical break with the old order, are only too often convinced that salvation lies only in the development of a capitalist market. In other words, there are very few people who consciously reject both the capitalist and the conservative options. In the German Democratic Republic, by contrast, advocates of that kind of ‘third way’ seem to be more numerous. What is the situation in Czechoslovakia?

The bureaucratization of society has never gone so far in our countryas in the ussr. From that point of view, the situation may be more like in the gdr, but it is hard to say much more than this since the big economic discussion has not really started yet. In my opinion, the market has to be able to develop further in Czechoslovakia. This may perhaps seem like a regression, in relation to the communist ideal of a classless society, but I think it is an inevitable stage today. Of course, I am in favour of a plan worked out democratically, to determine the overall balance of priorities; but we must beware of the illusion that this could govern production down to the last detail. Only a market can allow the consumer real freedom of choice so far as clothes, shoes and so on are concerned. You will tell me that the problem lies in knowing how far the market can be allowed to impose its laws, how many workers should be employed per enterprise in the private sector, and so on. It is certainly hard to codify all that. But precisely because I regard a certain development of the market as indispensable, I would say the central question is that of democratic control and the practical forms in which workers’ self management is exercised. This is all the more true when we are dealing with foreign capital investments. Poland, after all, must have received a colossal foreign contribution to have the debts it has; apparently, however, in the absence of any control by the workers or consumers this brought it little benefit.

Unfortunately, there is small sign in Czechoslovakia of any worked-out conception of economic and political self-management. So far as the opposite conception is concerned, however, which aims to privatize medium and large-scale production, although this has on more than one occasion been evoked obliquely, it has never been discussed head on. That will start during the campaign for the legislative elections and continue thereafter. All the recently established political parties will have to take up a position on this issue. As for the workers in the enterprises, I am convinced that they will oppose privatization and domination of the Czechoslovak economy by Western capitalism, if this attacks their standard of living and working conditions and produces social differentiation. I think this is where the struggle for socialism is finally going to begin.