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and workers into time-wasting machines no longer interested in the
quality and finish of what they produce. As a result, an experimental
reorganization is being put through that will give companies a good
deal of freedom in their planning and make them responsible for
showing a profit, the amount of which will then affect the employees'
wages-Liberma.nism, in short. It's a radical departure from previous
directives and dogmas-opposition to which has cost people their jobs,
and some their freedom, even their lives-and sardonic jokes about
it are endless. One of the printable: "What's the New Economic
Mechanism? It's pouring new wine into our split-open heads." (Jokes
are very much part of local cybernetics, and are savored by all regard–
less of allegiances. Indeed, according to a member of the Central
Committee, "In Hungary there's division of lahor. The I1eactionaries
make up the jokes and we party members spread them.")
Nevertheless, this N.E.M. seems the most sensible idea yet tried,
It further confuses people about just what in practice socialism is,
but few Hungarians will mind that as long as they can live better and
there's room for their initiative. At the moment there's widespread
apathy and cynicism which only a combination pf the profit motive
and a sense of purposeful political involvement can combat, and per–
haps not even that. It is the result of the succession of those mistaken
and yet murderously self-assured policies of the fifties, but also pf the
experience of 1956 and the feeling, which has grown further since,
that nothing the mere citizen of a tiny nation says or does can
possibly matter. "We may talk, yes," said a man sunning his bare chest
by the Danube, "we can 'say what we like and nobody will report us
to the police ,or take us away. But that's because they too have
realized that it makes no difference, and they know that we know it.
Our lives are ruled by messages between Moscow and Washington."
Then he laughed, which, although his only relief, seemed the worst
thing about it. Worse even than the vision of tragic dQOm which has
haunted the nation since the eighteen-thirties, and the thought of
which the present suicide and abortion rates, among the most appalling
in the world, seem once more to revive.
At the same time, there's no shortage of people who are confident
and want to try, whose elan or frustration derive from the fact that
they care. About the country as a whole, and about their share in it.
There's a great feeling of ownership, almost unknown
in
the West,
about every new thing that's accomplished-be it the Elizabeth Bridge
or a luxury hotel by Lake Balaton or the successes abroad of the
Modem Ballet. There's also bitterness at the nepotism, bribery and
