The Sociology of Marxism
Lipset, Seymour Martin
The continued influence of Marxism as an intellectual doctrine, as distinct from its role as the integrating ideology of Communist societies and parties, surprises many who regard its basic...
...Stalinism and Leninism Soviet totalitarianism and Stalinism, therefore, must be seen as derivative from Leninism...
...411-413...
...On one hand, he refuses to acknowledge the possibility that latter-day sociology is superior to Marxism in any way, or even that it could possibly incorporate any of its approach...
...even the fluctuations and crises have become something they take practically for granted...
...By that time, Marx had lived in England for 15 years, and the Inaugural Address which he wrote for the International reflected British experience...
...It is important to note, with Lichtheim, that for German SocialDemocracy, for Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg, as well as Bernstein, the fight for socialism was identical with the struggle for more political democracy...
...After the Manifesto, the Class Struggles in France, the Eighteenth Brumaire, and the Civil War in France became the basic texts of concrete class analysis...
...Emphasis mine...
...He concludes with words reminiscent of Michels (whose name is curiously never mentioned) that "the march of events was to confirm what critical observers of the labour movement had already begun to suspect, viz, that political 'rule' by the working class was an impossibility, whether in advanced or backward countries...
...The differences among them concerned the role of the party, not the necessity for revolutionary policies...
...Lichtheim, though much harsher in his judgment of Marx and his sociology than most academic sociologists, defends Marx against those sociological critics who according to him seek "to prove Marx wrong by invoking 'status differences' as distinct from class relations...
...Why did it not experience major revolutionary movements in this period...
...This was immediately perceived by every Marxist of note, from Plekhanov and Kautsky to Luxemburg and Trotsky...
...Political democracy produced political reformism, while small-scale industry and the absence of centralization sustained "libertarian" doctrines...
...But basically, except for his pamphlet on the Commune, Marx had abandoned an insurrectionist image of the revolution and had formed, as Lichtheim points out, "a political outlook which fitted the requirements of the modern age...
...On all the matters concerning Marxist doctrine which were in dispute in the German party, the Mensheviks like the Bolsheviks were in agreement with the Marxists...
...In Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
...The issue, of course, is not when men first recognized status as distinct from economic class —the ancient Greeks knew of this distinction—but rather whether the concept is used as an analytic and explanatory category or as a descriptive one...
...The clue to the mystery lies in the political backwardness of Germany, compared to western Europe...
...Explanations for the phenomenon of Japanese economic growth (Japan rather than any Communist state has the most rapidly growing economy) have been offered by sociologists which could be absorbed with the framework employed by Lichtheim...
...All quotes not specifically footnoted are from this book...
...Recently Talcott Parsons has pointed to the "striking fact that general orientations in this field [sociology] have, in recent years, tended increasingly to polarize between a nondogmatic and nonpolitical 'Marxian' position and one which in the broadest sense may be called one or another version of the theory of action [his own conceptual approach...
...But though Marx's final judgment of the Commune was that it had exaggerated the potential of the situation, that it had not been socialist and had been foolishly unwilling to compromise, his published Civil War in France was to instruct generations of Marxists that the Commune "was essentially a working-class government, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor...
...But though Lichtheim may feel that he has written the penultimate answer to Marxism as a sociological approach, one may safely predict that Marxism will not only remain alive as a source of political ideology, but that its insights into the operation of social systems and processes of change will also continue to enlighten social science research...
...He tells us that this Communist belief is sustained by the actual role of the Communist party as the mediator between the privileged stratum of Russia] and the masses...
...If the Commune presented a political model for a socialist state, it was a model of a completely free democracy with competing parties, not a society led by a "vanguard" party...
...Once the peasantry had ceased to be a revolutionary force, the age of successful proletarian insurrections was over...
...Speaking generally, totalitarianism is the outcome of a situation in which the state is captured by a party which has resolved upon the wholesale reconstruction of society...
...The Paris Commune had led Marx temporarily to return to the youthful rhetoric of chiliastic revolution contained in the Manifesto, and his even more violent "Jacobin-Blanquist aberration in 1850," the Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League...
...See my elaboration of this thesis in Political Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), pp...
...The two founding figures of the doctrine, like later parties that claimed to be their orthodox successors, modified their beliefs in line with changing circumstances of capitalist society...
...In Latin Europe, the workers' movement divided between reformist, largely non-Marxist socialist parties, and anarchist or syndicalist movements...
...The tragedy was not its failure—that, as Marx argued, was inevitable—but the fact, as Lichtheim suggests, that it introduced "a political myth" which sharply contradicted the political concepts which had been emerging with the formation of the First International in 1864...
...Engels wrote in his critique of the draft program of the Erfurt Congress of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1891: "If one thing is certain it is that our Party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic...
...Historyof the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (New York: International Publishers, 1938), pp...
...The great mass of the people grow up in the conditions in which they have later to live, are accustomed to them...
...Where the Mensheviks differed with the Bolsheviks was precisely over the question of organizational structure and democracy or dictatorship...
...In this mature conception, labor's conquest of power represents an aspect of the struggle for democracy...
...American experience proved that the working class would come to power...
...They enabled Lenin both to ignore the conclusions of the mature Marx and Engels in favor of democracy, and to distort the reality of the Commune itself...
...the problem, however, is that he attempts no explanation, he simply ignores the facts, Similarly, there is no mention of the emergence of mass Communist parties after World War II in Italy, France, and Finland...
...Britain was to remain the great disappointment...
...Before hastening to conclude that socialism therefore spells monolithic rule by a caste of planners, it is well to remember that historically this danger was perceived quite early by the nascent labor movement which for precisely this reason insisted that socialism should be democratic...
...They were not able to recognize that the social conditions which might sustain proletarian revolution had disappeared forever in advanced industrial countries, "that the October Revolution, so far as being the first great proletarian uprising, might be the last...
...Though, as Lichtheim makes clear, the issues of what Marx and Engels really meant are basically irrelevant to any effort to understand the development and political significance of Marxism, it is important to note with him that the political content changed greatly during their lifetime...
...W. A. Forster, in a public speech implored the young men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as English...
...There, more than in any other part of Europe, the conditions which sustained the chiliastic doctrines of 1848 continued to exist...
...In his eagerness to get Marxism out of his system, Lichtheim will not even accept the arguments of those who argue that Marxism's erroneous and tragic assumptions about politics "are extraneous to what is really important about Marxism, namely its sociology...
...In 1892 he wrote that he had been unable to understand why the British bourgeoisie continued to submit to the landed aristocracy after they had attained economic dominance until the great Liberal manufacturer, Mr...
...For as Julian Martov and many other Mensheviks pointed out, they, rather than the Leninists, advocated policies which corresponded to the activities of the Commune which Marx had approved...
...What its ideologists fail to see is that the Soviet state is not unique in harmonizing social conflicts, preserving law and order, and in general functioning as the executive organ of society as a whole...
...Rather they believed that their revolution would spark similar revolts in the more developed countries which could then aid them in the economic - development of Russia...
...It is ironic that Marxists have taken as the classic model of bourgeois polities and societies precisely the one nation, France, which later-day social scientists were to treat as the classic case of a society whose business class least reflected the capitalist ethos...
...And "if anyone introduced a profound `revision' of Marxist doctrine, it was none other than Lenin himself...
...As I have indicated, he has absorbed, largely through Marxism, a variant of this type of inquiry...
...But although in What Is to Be Done...
...356-57...
...Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959), P. 369...
...68-71...
...The Bolshevik form of Marxism emerged and had its successes primarily in pre-capitalist underdeveloped nations...
...In these countries the workers' movement seemingly exhibited relentless opposition to capitalism, as well as to "class rule": the latter term signifying not the domination of the bourgeoisie (of which indeed in Germany there was little sign), but rather as with Lassalle, the absence of democracy...
...Marx's hopes in 1848-50 failed because "mid-nineteenth-century France was already too highly organized...
...And Lichtheim adds in a footnote: "The notion that 'status' is a modern discovery could only have occurred to people who have never been outside a university...
...he was alive to their significance...
...The Bolshevik leaders, of course, did not understand this...
...But while Marx and Engels did change their ideas in the direction of what later was to be known as reformism, the fact remains that a total working-class conquest of power remained the ultimate goal...
...Unlike the 1848 Manifesto, which stressed revolution, the Address as Lichtheim notes emphasized "the aims of organized labor, working through legislatures...
...However, in discussing the belief of the Russian Communists that their "state serves the general interest," Lichtheim presents what can only be described as a typical example of ahistorical functional analysis...
...cit., p. 486...
...The Communist editors than state: "On these statements of Engels Lenin comments in State and Revolution: `Engels repeats here in a par * In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895 (New York: International Publishers, 1936), pp...
...Lichtheim pays little attention to the extent that Marx tried to draw socialist lessons from America...
...Since the party knows itself to be doing what in principle every ruling power must do: namely, hold the balance between the socially dominant class and the working people, it can with a fairly good conscience repudiate the charge of serving the interests of the privileged upper crust...
...As Lichtheim states, "the Manifesto spells out the implications of a world-view which owed more to reminiscences of 1789-94 than its authors would have been willing to admit...
...A class which encouraged or tolerated the dictatorship of a body such as the Communist party was clearly not fit to exercise political power, and possibly inhibited from such a role by something more permanent than mere immaturity...
...It obviously would not have been possible for Lichtheim to deal with these matters in detail in this book, but some mention should have been made of the problem which such developments pose for the issues he does discuss...
...The Logic of Gradual Change The proposition that revolutionary Marxism could win support as a response to the social strains inherent in rapid industrialization but • George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961), $8.50...
...As Marx wrote: "The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated...
...Hence radical Marxism, before World War I, was unable to become influential in western Europe and North America, while it secured considerable support in the politically or economically backward regions of central and eastern Europe...
...It praised British labor for having pushed the Ten-Hours Bill through Parliament, and saw in the growth of the cooperative movement promise for even greater advances...
...Marx tried to explain the increasing political conservatism of the French and other continental bourgeoisie on the ground that they were frightened by the emergence of the proletariat as a distinct class which threatened private property...
...Socialism's triumph would follow from the inevitable growth of such movements to a position of power as capitalist industrialization created a majority of proletarians employed under conditions of large-scale industry, who would develop class consciousness as a result of the inherent conflicts with the owning class...
...In discussing industrialization in Czarist Russia, he mentions in passing that the two nations which rapidly were entering the industrial age before World War I were Russia and Japan...
...Their analysis of class struggle always posited a continuing basic conflict between the workers and their parties with the dominant class...
...Lichtheim later suggests that 1917 was probably the last date that Russia might have had a revolution, that with greater industrialization it would no longer have provided the social conditions for revolt...
...Lichtheim, in spite of his extensive historical knowledge and use of comparative materials, basically seeks to illustrate a thesis rather than to test hypotheses...
...Moreover the idea of a classless society was not simply a philosophical extravagance...
...And ironically, this book will probably do more to keep Marxism viable within the academy than to destroy it...
...This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Lenin was a true heir of the Jacobins as glorified and supported by the Marx of 1848-1850...
...There can be little doubt that Marx did not use it analytically...
...Marx pointed to the Paris Commune as conclusive proof that the proletariat could come to power in its own right, that it could destroy the old state apparatus, and Marx's propagandistic pamphlet on this subject was subsequently to serve Lenin in good stead in his polemics...
...This image of a continuing class struggle did not find much support in the politically more democratic western countries...
...Up to First World War Marxism had its greatest successes between the time of Marx's death in 1883 and the outbreak of World War I in Germany and AustriaHungary...
...Effects of the Commune Although the Paris Commune deserves a special place in the annals of socialism since it gave rise to the one major example of socialist internationalism (the German Social-Democratic leaders faced jail to defend it), its ultimate impact on the Marxist movements can only be • For a detailed account of situations in which French capital demonstrated its unwillingness to take advantage of economic opportunities which were seized by their British equivalents see David Landes, Bankers and Pashas (London: Heinemann's, 1958...
...Lenin basically proposed, in violation of the traditional Marxist emphasis on the need to develop class consciousness and political maturity among the workers, to place a small group of professional revolutionaries in complete charge of the movement, and not to admit the workers to the party, since they were incapable of absorbing the necessary knowledge...
...Yet the fact was, as Marx himself acknowledged in a private letter in 1881, the Commune "was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the major...
...The words written by Marx in the heat of internationalist ardor seeking to glorify the deeds of the Communards in a propaganda document were to plague the Marxist movement in the twentieth century...
...Britain and the United States, the most developed countries economically, should have been the prime examples of capitalist class relations and politics, but each deviated from the assumptions of growing class tensions...
...Engels himself has testified to his personal puzzlement over this issue...
...the urban rising needed an agrarian revolution to complement it, just as the Jacobin seizure of power in 1793-4 had done...
...Influence of French Revolutionary Thinking While most of the analyses of the origins of Marx's philosophical ideas have properly stressed the transition from Hegelianism, much more important for an understanding of his politics and sociology is the extent to which Marx's thought before 1848 was dominated by French revolutionary thinking, by an idealization of the role of the Jacobins, of the possibility of total revolution...
...ological...
...There the division into town and country, industrial district and agricultural district is so far concluded that it only changes slowly...
...The Tools of Analysis It is surprising to find a congruence between Lichtheim's analysis of political developments and that of most contemporary sociologists who have written on these problems...
...Britain retained stable aristocratic institutions, and the American working class was a model of moderation...
...and they consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by themselves.* But the main faults of Lichtheim's book are not primarily a result of his misconceptions of sociological modes of political analysis...
...Sources of Political Ideology Lichtheim has written a pessimistic book for a pessimistic age...
...pp...
...The Russian state was an autocracy, and was enduring all the strains typical of periods of early rapid industrialization...
...Jacobin, Blanquist, and Bolshevik tactics could only succeed in such pre-modern conditions...
...See "The Point of View of the Author," in Max Black, ed., The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 362...
...And Lichtheim notes that his methods were "modelled on the Marxist interpretation of Jacobinism as a radical-democratic movement which employed dictatorial means to clear the ground of pre-bourgeois encumbrances...
...I (New York: International Publishers, n.d...
...He went on to criticize the Communards for not having shown a "modicum of common sense" in reaching a compromise with their opponents in Versailles...
...What would have happened to the Party, to our revolution, to Marxism, if Lenin had been overawed by the letter of Marxism and had not had the courage to replace one of the old propositions of Marxism...
...Since the party according to Lenin was to be much more than a representative of the conscious policies of the workers, and had to win the support of a society which was overwhelmingly peasant in composition, it "could only succeed in this role if it represented an independent force, namely the 'classless' intelligentsia, which alone could staff the cadres of a ruling political elite...
...He wrote to Bebel that the reason for the growth of socialism in Germany as contrasted with its stagnation in other capitalist countries is that with us [in Germany] the industrial revolution is only just in full swing, while in France and in England, so far as the main point is concerned, it is closed...
...And since the "Marxist" writings of Marx and Engels cover a time-span of fifty years, from the days preceding the Revolution of 1848 to the period of Fabianism, a mass German Social-Democratic movement, and universal suffrage, there is much in their published works to sustain all variants of socialist doctrine...
...Or conversely if the Soviet experience (in a predominantly ill-educated peasant country) does indicate how bad a regime, a party claiming to represent workers can create, why should not the morality and decency of the Scandinavian or Commonwealth Labor and socialist movements suggest a positive potential on the other side...
...The thesis that the chiliastic image of a new society ruled by an intellectual elite on behalf of the poor (which is basically what the Leninist variant of Marxism implies) can only foster revolution in impoverished pre-industrial countries is, of course, not new...
...In the famous short course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union written under the close supervision of Stalin, we read the following: 'Before the Second Revolution [February 1917], the Marxists of all countries assumed that the parliamentary democratic republic was the most suitable form of political organization in the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism...
...ticularly emphatic form the fundamental idea which runs like a red letter throughout Marx's work, namely, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat.' "* Apparently Lenin and the editors were unable to distinguish any difference between the words "specific form" and "nearest approach...
...would lose its appeal with economic maturity, was explicitly stated by Engels in 1884...
...no effort had been made to exclude anyone from it...
...As Lichtheim indicates, Lenin's early writings on the need to organize for a revolution to be led by the proletariat alone "breathe the spirit of the Communist Manifesto and the Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League [which] is another way of saying that the Russia of 1898 was fifty years behind Western Europe...
...Seemingly his uneasiness rests in what he regards as the ahistorical character of much of sociological writing, as well as the conservative bias which he sees inherent in functionalist theory...
...And the last two decades have witnessed three seizures of power by Communists, in Yugoslavia, in China, and to a lesser degree in Cuba, in which the mass base of the revolution was almost exclusively in the countryside...
...regarded as tragic...
...The Commune had been the legally elected government of the municipality of the Paris, and it had been controlled by a coalition of left parties...
...And his ultimate political evaluation is that Marx provided the key link between the Jacobin view of revolution and the emergence of modern totalitarianism, a judgment which makes of Marx one of the great demonic figures of history...
...The reception to their different writings correspond largely to the state of economic and political development of given countries...
...In doing so, he argues, such sociologists are in error, since "Marx was not unaware of the texture of social life: as an inhabitant of Victorian England he could hardly fail to notice the complex interplay of class and caste relationships, and in fact his writings supply ample evidence that...
...431-432, and p. 422...
...What is noteworthy in Lichtheim's presentation is his systematic effort to relate the modifications in the doctrine both by Marx and Engels, as well as by various "Marxist" parties, to the changing social conditions of the working class and their organizations in different countries...
...But if Lenin was unable to acknowledge he was a "revisionist," that he had rejected Marx and Engels' belief in democratic institutions, Stalin could and did...
...ity of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be...
...he came to the brink of stating this fact, the full realization was hidden from him...
...The French experiences reinforced the revolutionary and Blanquist aspects of Marxism which came to fruition in Leninism...
...the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat" left no doubt that the Marxists continued to regard the democratic republic as the political form for the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...It was impossible to be a gradualist or reformist in Czarist Russia...
...The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste of drones to represent the nation worthily at all state functions...
...T]he whole process can only go forward under "conscious direction," i.e., by unremitting pressure from above...
...Thus, as Lewis Feuer has pointed out, Marx saw in the early American Workingmen's Parties of the 1820s and 1830s evidence that strong socialistically inclined labor parties were endemic outgrowths in a bourgeois republic, and even urged that the * Marx and Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895, op...
...Since the bulk of the writings of Marx and Engels occurred during the period of slowly emerging legal labor movements, they themselves tended increasingly to accept the logic of gradual change, of the need to build workers' organizations of all varieties, parties, unions and cooperatives...
...but he ignored the fact that this phenomenon did not explain why the French businessmen were much more reluctant than the English to take advantage of identical economic opportunities.* Explanations that would account for variations in class behavior by reference to the differing value systems of national societies were absent, except on an ad hoc basis, from Marx's work...
...And Marxism supplied the theoretical and ideological base for an actual revolution in Czarist Russia, whose social conditions, in the early twentieth century, most closely resembled the European economic and political situation at the time the Communist Manifesto was written...
...This...
...Where Kautsky and other "orthodox" Marxists differed with Bernstein was not concerning political democracy, but rather on the question of whether major crises and tensions producing the need for a clear-cut taking of power by the workers were inherent in capitalism...
...they are ignored when they provide negative evidence...
...The general question of why France was economically backward as contrasted to the English-speaking nations did not concern Marx directly, although he was aware of the fact...
...explains how a movement which had never really broken with the Lassallean heritage could regard itself as "Marxist...
...T]he Leninist model in fact amounted to the political expropriation of the proletariat and its subjection to a dictatorial machine operated by the Bolshevik leadership: a leadership which was essentially self-constituted and irremovable...
...For a detailed study of the Paris Commune which demonstrates the non-socialist character of the uprising see Edward Mason, The Paris Commune (New York: Macmillan, 1930...
...With us on the other hand, everything is in full flow...
...But such analyses, both of class relations and of politics, became increasingly unrealistic with the evolution of mature industrial and politically democratic states...
...As Lenin remarked complacently...
...The Bolsheviks, as Lenin himself stated, were "the Jacobins of contemporary Social-Democracy...
...Rather, the basic weakness of the work is method * Frederick Engels, "On Historical Materialism," in Karl Marx, Selected Works, Vol...
...But if submission to autocracy or totalitarianism means that a class is "not fit to exercise political power," what is one to say about the political capacity of business, military, or bureaucratic strata, or Protestant ministers after their behavior in Nazi Germany...
...As Trotsky in particular was never tired of pointing out, it represented a throwback not merely to the immature proto-Marxism of 1848-50, but to pre-Marxist forms of organization...
...The chiliastic views expressed in this founding political document were appropriate for a tiny sect anticipating revolution in absolutist Europe...
...Perhaps the most ironic example of how little effect explicit formulations have on the way in which later generations of Marxists perceive what earlier ones wrote may be found in an official Communist edition of the Correspondence of Marx and Engels in which the following is printed on the same page...
...Surprising, because both in this book and others of his writings he has expressed considerable dissatisfaction with modern sociology...
...by the new proposition concerning the republic of Soviets...
...A concern with French politics remained the source-point from which much of Marxian ideas about class and politics were drawn...
...This is a tortured book, tortured because Lichtheim seems torn between past attachment to Marxism as the best form of sociological and political analysis, and current rejection of everything it stands for...
...But again, Japan which did not have a large revolutionary Marxist movement in its pre-modern phase, has developed one as a major industrial power...
...Basically, Lichtheim regards Lenin as the first great totalitarian leader who created the model which evolved into Stalinism and Fascism...
...It was the emancipation of the Bolshevik party—ultimately of the Soviet dictatorship— from all forms of democratic control that made possible the identification of "planning" with the untrammelled rule of a new privileged caste...
...It was wrong to try to speed up the pace of revolution...
...Marx's original political analysis as reflected in The Communist Manifesto was a product of a period in which concepts derived from an idealization of the French Revolution and the Jacobins predominated among those who would democratize the changing social system...
...George Lichtheim, whose book Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study represents the first detailed effort at a sociological analysis of the development and appeal of different variants of Marxism, presents as his basic thesis the assumption that Marxism as a set of revolutionary doctrines is most appropriate to societies in the early stages of industrialization...
...The sociology of European Communism clearly presents complex problems and requires the introduction of variables not employed in the book, e.g., strains derivative from conflicting values...
...The continued influence of Marxism as an intellectual doctrine, as distinct from its role as the integrating ideology of Communist societies and parties, surprises many who regard its basic errors and irrelevancies to the analysis of contemporary society as obvious...
...Under German conditions—and the same was true of Austria-Hungary, the other citadel of "orthodox Marxism"— democracy was still a revolutionary slogan...
...A Commission of the Central Committee of the C. P. S. U. (B...
...Remnants of the old peasant industrial production for the satisfaction of personal needs are being supplanted by capitalistic domestic industry, while in other places capitalistic domestic industry is already succumbing in turn to machinery...
...If the revolution gains a decisive victory—then we shall settle accounts with tsarism in the Jacobin, or if you like, in the Plebeian way.' It is important to recognize, as Lichtheim points out, that the idea propagated by Communists that Leninism in pre-revolutionary Russia represented orthodox Marxism pitted against Menshevik revisionism is simply not true...
...The first two states are discussed briefly in their pre-World War I period when their political behavior can be fitted into his general thesis...
...Engels' authoritative statement in his criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Program in 1891, namely, that "the democratic republic...
...In many ways they were similar as modernizing autocracies, but Japan is never referred to again...
...But if reformism had some strength in undemocratic central Europe, it was almost absent in the Czarist empire...
...On the other hand, he feels it necessary to deny to others, sociologists or not, the possibility of applying any part of Marxist analysis...
...Embarrassing, that is contradictory, evidence is largely ignored...
...This is a puzzling conclusion since it rests not as Michels' does on an analysis of the intrinsic oligarchical traits inherent in organization, but rather on the view that totalitarianism has been "accepted" by the Russian workers...
...And he notes that all Russian socialists agreed with Lenin that the proletariat had to be revolutionary...
...Consequently there are the snide remarks about sociology both for criticizing Marxism and for accepting it...
...Yet, ironically, as Lichtheim points out, France, though the country of the great bourgeois political revolution, was relatively much less advanced in economic terms...
...but this is to introduce an arbitrary separation between elements of the system which must be viewed as a whole...
Vol. 10 • January 1963 • No. 1
