ABSTRACT
Alongside all the discussion about what is to be done, there is under way in the USSR a more abstract debate about what is to be thought. Along with other reformist economists, Leonid Abalkin argues that the Soviet system of property relations is at the root of the problem, since it is held to be property relations that primarily distinguish socialism from capitalism. He would doubtless agree with the Polish economist Wlodzimierz Brus that "socialism entails a particular concept of property rights—a system of ownership whereby society is genuinely in control of the means of production and benefits from their use." The young Soviet writer Sergei Andreev has taken the argument to its logical conclusion and asked how the power of the bureaucracy can be broken. Andreev categorizes the USSR as a dictatorship of a "new class" consisting of fourteen million manager-bureaucrats who stand to lose from any change in the existing system and therefore undermine all attempts at reform.
