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PARTISAN REVIEW
Howard:
You seem to say that this opposition movement is unified as
opposition , but divided among itself. I even notice that you've got
a certain implicit criticism of Euro-communism that you haven't
)
really expressed . Now the Leninist question, of course, would be
who is going to be doing the unifying of this movement; who is
going to be bringing it "class consciousness"? Now, let me go a
step further with the Leninist image . Here you are in the West, in
London, running Palach Press . This has analogies to a certain
Mr. Illich (i .e., Lenin) who was running a press from outside
Russia and bringing "class consciousness from the outside ." It is a
nasty question perhaps, but where is the unification going to come
from; where is the political content going to come from?
Kavan :
I don't think your question is nasty; I think it reflects many of
the attitudes I've encountered in the West during my ten-year
absence from Czechoslovakia . First of all , yes, I think the
opposition is unified, especially on the things they do not want , on
sort of a negation of the system they now live in . It's not unified on
the type of society they want to live in, or rather it does not accept
the idea that one could come to a formula that would be accept-
able to all. The opposition concludes that it is not unified on the
matter of how to attain such a society. Very definitely, there are
differences. You mentioned that you've perceived in my answers a
certain skepticism towards Euro-communism . I think it reflects
the widespread disillusionment in Czechoslovakia with reformist
communists, and I stress that because in 1968 Czechoslovakia was
the country out of all the Eastern European countries where the
possibility of actually creating a society which would reflect most
of the principal ideas inherent in Euro-communism had the
r
greatest chance and the greatest potential. It's a fact that in times
of crisis the reformist communists were not capable of rallying the
people against the common enemy, that in times of crisis the
leaders of the Party, at least, showed that they were more afraid of
the people than they were of the invading armies and the conse–
quences of invasion, which led to a beginning of skepticism, of
widespread disillusionment. It gave birth to a desire to look for
alternative ways to attain a socialist society, and this is why, for
example , a new group called Independent Socialist emerged,
which is trying to unite all noncommunist socialists, and which
defines itself against the reformist communists and takes a
different point of departure. So there are these differences and
