The great advantages of the interview are its manoeuvrability and range. Beginning, usually, in a conversation and resulting in a printed representation of that, its production process is more complex than this suggests, combining the greater spontaneity and pace of speech with the greater scope and control available to both parties in written revision and supplementation, where in fact much of the work of composition may occur. A singular form only in the minimal sense in which the novel can be said to be one, the interview accommodates a whole array of spoken and written varieties at both poles of the exchange (exposition and narrative, and elicitation, but also argumentative rallies, interjections, anecdotes, asides) and licenses elliptical transitions from one topic to another—jump-cutting—in relative freedom from the constraints of the standard article form. At other times, it may serve the purposes of what might have been an article, creating a monologic argument or narrative with a facilitating second voice, in effect. Some of the interviews reprinted here move at this end of the range, offering extended and methodical historical treatments of their material. But even in those cases, the differences are palpable. For the interview as conceived of here is among other things a kind of portraiture, or rather self-portraiture—and a mode in which, then, however discreetly, thought becomes thinking, something of its character as a process is reanimated, as concepts find their forms and effects in the grain of biographical sequences and historical construction is re-inflected in the lived interpretations of memoir. Even at its most austerely conceptual or political, and in so far as it goes beyond the merest formal simulation of spoken exchange, the interview takes on the distinctive colorations of autobiography and memoir. The temporal complexity of these interviews brings a further enrichment of meaning. Each, read alone, is straightforward enough: a specific mix of recollection, statement and expectation framed at a point in time. Read as a confluence of voices, in the order suggested here, their suggestions multiply, often movingly and not least ironically. Shared chronological time is criss-crossed by individual histories, one account varying from other accounts of the same thing, the anticipations of earlier generations sometimes coexisting awkwardly with the retrospects of the younger—and both now exposed, after a greater or lesser lapse of years, to readers who, for now, have the privilege of final retrospect. Impersonal cruces in politics and theory are not rendered less objective or less demanding in this process; the fact of ‘complexity’ is not an exemption from judgement, and the personal is not a solvent of public contradiction. But they are heard differently, echoing as moments in a collective historical experience.

[...] The concept of labour is the hinge of my analysis. For labour is not biologically determined. If a lion attacks an antelope, its behaviour is determined by biological need and by that alone. But if primitive man is confronted with a heap of stones, he must choose between them, by judging which will be most adaptable to his use as a tool; he selects between alternatives. The notion of alternatives is basic to the meaning of human labour, which is thus always teleological—it sets an aim, which is the result of a choice. It thus expresses human freedom. But this freedom only exists by setting in motion objective physical forces, which obey the causal laws of the material universe. The teleology of labour is thus always coordinated with physical causality, and indeed the result of any individual’s labour is a moment of physical causality for the teleological orientation (Setzung) of any other individual. The belief in a teleology of nature was theology, and the belief in an immanent teleology of history was unfounded. But there is teleology in all human labour, inextricably inserted into the causality of the physical world. This position, which is the nucleus from which I am developing my present work, overcomes the classical antinomy of necessity and freedom. But I should emphasize that I am not trying to build an all-inclusive system. The title of my work—which is completed, but I am now revising the first chapters—is Zur Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins, not Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins. You will appreciate the difference. The task I am engaged on will need the collective work of many thinkers for its proper development. But I hope it will show the ontological bases for that socialism of everyday life of which I spoke.

[...] Lenin [...] never presented basic changes and new departures as merely continuations and improvements of previous trends. For example, when he announced the New Economic Policy, he never for one moment said that this was a ‘development’ or ‘completion’ of War Communism. He stated quite frankly that War Communism had been a mistake, understandable in the circumstances, and that the NEP was a correction of that mistake and a total change of course. This Leninist method was abandoned by Stalinism, which always tried to present policy changes—even enormous ones—as logical consequences and improvements of the previous line. Stalinism presented all socialist history as a continuous and correct development; it would never admit discontinuity. Now today, this question is more vital than ever, precisely in the problem of dealing with the survival of Stalinism. Should continuity with the past be emphasized within a perspective of improvements, or on the contrary should the way forward be a sharp rupture with Stalinism? I believe that a complete rupture is necessary. That is why the question of discontinuity in history has such importance for us.

It is interesting to note that popular dissatisfaction with the economic situation in Czechoslovakia was greater in the more recent period, when living standards were much higher, than in the period immediately after the war when the masses believed that austerity was in the service of revolutionary ideas and socialist construction. By replacing revolutionary ideals with the promises of a consumer society, the bureaucrats only create trouble for themselves. On the other hand, it should be stated that an economic crisis itself is not sufficient to bring about a change in the situation since bureaucratic regimes have reserves with which to prevent an explosion caused by purely economic factors.

Yes, I think it would have happened and it was already happening even before 1968, as a reaction against the egalitarian system introduced in 1955. Under the latter, everybody in Czechoslovakia was within a narrow range of salaries. This means that there were no material rewards for responsible jobs, whether for intellectual work or for important posts in the factories. From the ideological point of view, you may say that this was progress. But in the transitional period of development of a socialist society, I think it is necessary to use both moral and material incentives. Precisely because a socialist society should favour technical and scientific development more than capitalist society does, its technical and scientific personnel should be paid accordingly. Of course, even in this period, inequalities did exist, in the sense that even if people had identical salaries, some of them—party leaders for instance—had many other facilities.

I think this question of involvement in politics is a very interesting one. I always believed, until really quite recently, probably till about twenty years ago, that in an ideal society everybody would take part in politics, that it was natural for people to wish to have some control over their lives and that the best way of achieving this was by political structures and political activity in the broadest sense—through tenants’ committees, students’ committees, workers’ committees and so forth. It always seemed to me that this was what most people, if they had the time and the freedom and the education, would want to do. Only fairly recently did I discover that most people want a quiet life and that the dedicated committee person is the exception rather than the rule. I think this is one of the things I learnt by being involved in politics. As long as you are involved you think it is really the most important human activity, you think you really are changing the world and affecting history. But you have to be able to stand back a bit and realize that most people don’t see it in that way. One of the biggest shocks I ever had in Cambridge was when I discovered that people in the college lumped me together with the Conservative secretary, because we were both interested in politics. I thought we were at the absolute opposite ends of world experience, but in fact to the rest of the students the politicos, left and right, were much of a muchness.

[...] Lenin would certainly have rejected the idea that Marxism was a critique of political economy: for him it was a critique of bourgeois political economy only, which finally transformed political economy itself into a real science. But the subtitle of Capital indicates something more than this—it suggests that political economy as such is bourgeois and must be criticized tout court. This second dimension of Marx’s work is precisely that which culminates in his theory of alienation and fetishism. The great problem for us is to know whether and how these two divergent directions of Marx’s work can be held together in a single system. Can a purely scientific theory contain within itself a discourse on alienation? The problem has not yet been resolved.

We have discussed the Della Volpean school in Italy, in which I received my early formation. What I would finally like to emphasize is something much deeper than any of the criticisms I have made of it hitherto. The phenomenon of Della Volpeanism—like that of Althusserianism today—was always linked to problems of interpretation of Marxism: it was born and remained confined within a purely theoretical space. The type of contact which it established with Marxism was always marked by a basic dissociation and division of theory from political activity. This separation has characterized Marxism throughout the world ever since the early twenties. Set against this background, the Della Volpean school in Italy is necessarily reduced to very modest dimensions: we should not have any illusions about this, or exaggerate the political differences between the Della Volpeans and the historicists at the time. The real, fundamental fact was the separation between theoretical Marxism and the actual working class movement. If you look at works like Kautsky’s Agrarian Question, Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital, or Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia—three of the great works of the period which immediately succeeded that of Marx and Engels—you immediately register that their theoretical analysis contains at the same time the elements of a political strategy. They are works which both have a true cognitive value, and an operative strategic purpose. Such works, whatever their limits, maintained the essential of Marxism. For Marxism is not a phenomenon comparable to existentialism, phenomenology or neo-positivism. Once it becomes so, it is finished. But after the October Revolution, from the early 1920s onwards, what happened? In the West, where the revolution failed and the proletariat was defeated, Marxism lived on merely as an academic current in the universities, producing works of purely theoretical scope or cultural reflection. The career of Lukács is the clearest demonstration of this process. History and Class Consciousness, for all its defects, set out to be a book of political theory, geared to an actual practice. After it, Lukács came to write works of a totally different nature. The Young Hegel or The Destruction of Reason are typical products of a university professor. Culturally, they may have a very positive value: but they no longer have any connection with the life of the workers’ movement. They represent attempts to achieve a cognitive advance on the plane of theory, that at the same time are completely devoid of any strategic or political implications. This was the fate of the West. Meanwhile, what happened in the East? There revolutions did occur, but in countries whose level of capitalist development was so backward that there was no chance of them building a socialist society. In these lands, the classical categories of Marxism had no objective system of correspondences in reality. There was revolutionary political practice, which sometimes generated very important and creative mass experiences, but these occurred in a historical theatre which was alien to the central categories of Marx’s own theory. This practice thus never succeeded in achieving translation into a theoretical advance within Marxism itself: the most obvious case is the work of Mao. Thus, simplifying greatly, we can say that in the West, Marxism has become a purely cultural and academic phenomenon; while in the East, revolutionary processes developed in an ambience too retarded to permit a realization of socialism, and hence inevitably found expression in non-Marxist ideas and traditions.

[...] If Marxists continue to remain arrested in epistemology and gnoseology, Marxism has effectively perished. The only way in which Marxism can be revived is if no more books like Marxism and Hegel are published, and instead books like Hilferding’s Finance Capital and Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital—or even Lenin’s Imperialism, which was a popular brochure—are once again written. In short, either Marxism has the capacity—I certainly do not—to produce at that level, or it will survive merely as the foible of a few university professors. But in that case, it will be well and truly dead, and the professors might as well invent a new name for their clerisy.

I came of age in a country that was not in the First World, but was not a peasant country either, which gave it a very particular form. My initial commitment to the revolutionary movement came first—books came afterwards. What I read seemed rather to confirm what my experience and intuition had already been telling me. In fact, I think this is generally the case: one is led towards rebellion by sentiments, not by thoughts. At the end of his statement to the Dewey Commission, Trotsky described being drawn to the workers’ quarters in Nikolayev at the age of eighteen by his ‘faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity’, not by Marxism. But perhaps the most crucial sentiment is that of justice—the realization that you are not in agreement with this world. There is a story that Ernst Bloch was asked by his supervisor, Georg Simmel, to provide a one-page summary of his thesis before Simmel would agree to work on it. A week later, Bloch obliged with one sentence: ‘What exists cannot be true.’ The thesis later became The Principle of Hope.3 It was this kind of ethical moment that was crucial for me—the discovery that there was a necessary connection between justice and truth.