266
DANIEL BELL
he belonged to a Socialist study group, he had spent a year in
prison. Despite
his
halting English, he had kept up with American
empirical research. A short time before our meeting,
J.
had visited
a Western friend to borrow some periodicals, and a few days later
his housemaid had been questioned by the;secret police. He felt that
this renewed surveillance was only one sign of the general tightening
of controls. I lunched with
J.
and an economist friend of his, R.
People were tired of politics, they said, and were interested primar–
ily in their own affairs. The big question now was how the people
would respond to the changing state of affairs, especially the new
economic plan, which aimed at cutting consumption and stepping
up investments. In the universities, new ideological pressures were
being felt. The Party had decided once again to introduce compul–
sory courses in Marxism, especially for students in the social
sciences.
I asked R. to tell me about the workers' attitudes. He replied
that the chief problem was the wage chaos existing in the plants.
Wage differentials had collapsed, and because there was such a
lack of consumer goods, the regime had been unable to come up
with meaningful incentives. Because of this, many factories were
plagued by wholesale thievery. During the war, stealing had been
considered patriotic, a means of sabotaging the Nazis. Nor was there
I
much opprobrium attached to the act now. Stealing went on partly
as a gesture of hostility against the regime, partly because of low
wages-it was a way of supplementing one's income. Everybody
stole a little. Another growing problem was the unwillingness
of young people to go into agriculture or industry. The attractions
of white-collar work were enormous, and unskilled young workmen,
with little reason to stick to a job for any length of time, would
work for a bit and then knock off
to
bum around for a while. The
youth problem was the most difficult one facing the regime, and the
party seemed to have no real idea of how to handle it.
I asked
J.
to take me to the ghetto, and when we got there I
gazed with tremulous feelings at the acres of rubble that were the
remains. The entire area had been razed, and one saw only a flat–
tened cemetery of broken brick, except for one upright post, about
eight feet high, out of which jutted a steel beam topped with curved
iron. spikes and barbed wire. The beam, embedded
in
the
post,
had
