A Journey to Eastern Europe

...There was a time when discussions of the theme of alienation in Marx's early writings were denounced as "revisionism," "bourgeois falsifications," and the like...

...this has combined with the regime's obvious need for social accounting to encourage Polish sociologists to work in a rather empirical temper...

...IV After having visited Poland, I went to the German Democratic Republic...

...A day later, on a cafe terrace, I met a Hungarian social scientist who is distinctly post-bourgeois...

...He also supposed that he was a pure scientist: insofar as his technical services to men in power caused him doubts, he could view them simply as an exercise in technique and refuse responsibility for the uses to which his services were put...

...Some took the view that alienation had in principle been overcome with the establishment of state socialist regimes...

...V My trip had begun, in effect, in Yugoslavia—at the 1965 summer school convened by the Praxis group . These philosophers and sociologists, from the universities of Zagreb and Belgrade, worked on the premise that philosophy consists in the relentless criticism of everything that exists...

...he was later to repeat these views, in a way which was much appreciated by his public, at the World Congress of Sociology in Evian, in 1966...

...I visited Hungary, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic—as well as Yugoslavia which, politically, is in a class by itself...

...He has written a series of parables on biblical themes and is much occupied with phenomenological philosophy's search for the essence of man and culture...

...When I arrived, the acute question was how much critical thought the regime could stand...

...Z supposed that the regime (or regimes) he served were intrinsically moral, or at least no less moral than other historical regimes and capable of being educated to do better...

...I inquired...

...He was of course quite in touch with events in France and Germany, less so with the English-speaking world—although he did not complain of an absence of visitors...

...Lukacs himself has a subscription to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the extremely mediocre daily which in Western Germany is an object of contempt for every rightthinking leftist...

...An essay on Schaff's book by Z. A. Jordan, "Socialism, Alienation and Political Power," appeared in Survey, July, 1966...

...What I have termed the new nationalism cannot be narrowly circumscribed...

...The sensation consisted in the fact that among his assertions were the following: The conception of alienation found in Marx's early writings was a central element in all of Marx's thought and gave it a humanistic component the ignorance or suppression of which deformed Marx's thought and intentions...

...a certain hope for a world changed for the better, not unmixed with despair that this will ever come about...

...In one thing I noticed a certain similarity between Budapest, London, Paris, and New York: weakness of character always seemed to be a more prominent feature of the moral profiles of those absent than of those present...

...I also recalled what had been said by Rudi Supek, a Zagreb professor who is one of the editors of Praxis, about the fundamental division which occurs within rather than between the two world power blocs...

...whatever may have been said to him, he continues in his official and public functions...

...He had spent a good deal of time flying between Siberia and California in connection with some gigantic research project, and he was especially proud of his connections with the American universities...

...Any remaining climculties had to be understood as transitional phenomena, or as clue to political mismanagement, but not to essential aspects of the structure of the new society...

...While I was there, the Communist leader Walter Ulbricht declared that the East German state was not only the legitimate guardian of the national interest, in its policy of alliance with the Soviet Union, but the legitimate heir to Bismarck's foreign policy: I could not imagine that this was received with enthusiasm in Poland...

...I am indebted to the Rabinowitz Foundation for support of a continuing study of the intellectuals as a social group, of which this report is a small part...

...Lukacs himself, if I have correctly understood his views, thinks that alienation was a necessary phase in the development of socialist consciousness in capitalist society, and that in the same society the crushing weight of direct exploitation has been replaced by the more subtle forms of domination associated with the integration of the working class into an economic system which requires high levels of consumption expenditure...

...It is less well known that he is an immensely distinguished technical philosopher, the author of a significant book on Spinoza, a student of the philosophy of the Counter-Reformation, and a writer fully identified with the national tradition in Polish literature...

...a persistent interest in Marxism as a doctrine, at once of social analysis and human liberation...

...But if Budapest intellectual society lacks the openly parallel and competing networks of intellectual activity we are used to, it does offer any number of interstices in which persons of a critical disposition can work...

...The resultant difficulties and oppresiveness can be reduced — but only if the problems are recognized and not if their very existence is denied...

...But Marx himself proceeded from the elaboration of the doctrine of alienation to devise a new social theory and to prescribe a new politics...

...I left Lukacs bearing one indelible impression: the decor of his apartment, his manner, the intensity and discipline of his application to his work, all mark him as a representative of that cultivated Central European Burgertum which recent history has either destroyed or overtaken and to which Karl Marx himself belonged...

...he gave the impression of a very spry sixty...

...This was all fairly abstract, but I gathered that there were a good many tensions just beneath the surface...

...I can simply report that, when I finished my talk, some students told me: "At last, someone who takes Marxism seriously...

...The Communist societies now proclaim, and their political and economic elites are beginning to practice, a new doctrine of efficacy...

...Hungary is a country of ten million...

...He talked freely of his own work, a complete edition of which is being published in West Germany...

...Here, perhaps, are some of the psychological sources of that discussion of alienation which is now beginning in Eastern Europe...

...It is not surprising that this text, well documented with appropriate citations from Marx, did not please all of its readers...

...A noble intellectual critique of Communist reality and strong popular currents which reject any collective aspirations whatsoever, courageous political dissent and a totally cynical careerism, a new internationalism and old nationalisms—these are the result...

...I observed that I was not myself a GM shareholder but that in any case I doubted the analogy...

...more of them seemed to wonder how much intelligence the regime could absorb...

...The Communist party, which could not entirely renounce its educational aims, would do well nonetheless to end its arbitrary and rigid attempt to control art and science...

...Some aspects of the current ideological crisis in Eastern Europe are reminiscent of the crisis of liberalism (resolved in nearly every country but our own) ; when it became clear that a large measure of civil liberty combined with parliamentary rule were insufficient to attain liberalism's ideal ends, socialism gained adherents among those previously liberal...

...The recent achievements of Polish sociology have been considerable: important, lucid, and penetrating studies of Polish society have been made, and some general contributions to our larger understanding of all societies...

...Schaff, it should be emphasized, was not simply writing a retrospective critique of Stalinism but analyzing the present situation of Marxist humanism in the countries ruled by Communist regimes...

...In these circumstances, and precisely at the moment when a new type of Communist political and economic technician is emerging to begin the replacement of an older and more dogmatic generation in the leaderships of the several parties, the intellectuals have had occasion to refer again to the early Marxist texts on alienation...

...In the West, the principal question seems to be: how can man live with dignity...

...An increase in intellectual freedom is not, of course, automatically productive of similar developments with respect to political freedom—but it can lead to the latter...

...They complained about the slowness of the transformation, announced their willingness— verging on enthusiasm—to collaborate with a Communist party directed by technicians like themselves...

...A new Marxist theory of the individual, based on old Marxist conceptions but not in contradiction with the findings of the empirical sciences, can help overcome that sort of repression...

...Still others held that alienation in a socialist form was present but that in principle it was eradicable, a position of course compatible with the view that a good deal of alienation (however defined) could be found in socialist society...

...The content of routine, as well as its pervasiveness, has encouraged the East European intellectuals to conclude that whatever else they may live in, it is neither utopia nor likely to become so...

...obtaining it depends upon the often arbitrary decisions of obscure bureaucrats...

...It may well entail phenomena like distinctive national patterns of Communist economic development, although experiments in areas like economic planning seem to be crossing frontiers...

...They had shown that the larger the sphere of autonomy and command in the exercise of an occupation, the more identification with the task on the part of the worker: a finding not all that specific to socialist society, and interesting on that account...

...What did come rather short in the discussion were both Protestantism and Marxism...

...There is a sense in which Marxist humanism is a very direct successor to bourgeois ethics (in the historical and not the pejorative sense of bourgeois...

...they were critical Marxists...

...Hungary was, after all, part of the Hapsburg empire: Budapest and Vienna are less than an hour apart by air, four hours by road...

...Ten years ago, this in itself had political implications: to produce responses to a questionnaire which showed workers less than overcome with enthusiasm at socialist management required some courage in the immediate post-Stalin period...

...The breadth and openness of their culture was quite impressive—they were in this respect no different from the intellectuals of Paris, London, Frankfurt, or Milan...

...The present president of the International Sociological Association is, indeed, a Polish colleague, Jan Szcepanzski, and his election was clearly intended as a tribute to Polish sociology...

...He pronounced himself as more optimistic than ever on the future of the socialist societies, although his optimism seems to concern the distant rather than the near future...

...Note: Adam Schaff's book was published in 1965 by the State Scientific Publishers in Warsaw under the title Marksize a jednostka ludzka...

...The terrible experience of Stalinism is now past...

...Some, apparently, said that Schaff was "one-sided...

...From the 1965 session I took away some striking memories of the intellectual vivacity and political forthrightness of many in the Yugoslav intellectual elite...

...About what...

...During my visits, I saw friends and colleagues with whom I (and no doubt many of my readers) share much: a certain skepticism about authority, in particular the authorities under which we have to live —each in our parts of the world...

...When I visited Hungary, the discussion was still generally on a fairly theoretic and abstract note...

...They were deeply critical of what is known as goulash communism—despite no visible aversion to that excellent national dish...

...If I understood him correctly, he seemed to think that in the U. S. the politics of coalition is the only possible socialist politics...

...These had to come from without the scientific process, narrowly defined...

...After having met Lukacs, I understand his esthetic doctrines better, including his lack of sympathy for many of the modern movements in art...

...111 The atmosphere in Warsaw was much different...

...A new view of the relationship between the socialist citizen and the state is necessary, and there are circumstances in which the welfare of the collectivity demands a "wise disobedience" from individuals opposed to authority...

...Perhaps the most significant of their remarks was made by a younger physicist who declared that the historically privileged class of the future, privileged in the sense of having a historical mission which it alone could fulfill, was not the proletariat but the technical intelligentsia...

...At any rate, the Polish in tellectuals had an acute sense of the importance of the conflicts within their own society: in particular, they had the conviction that their problem was less to make contact with movements of ideas outside of Poland than to make a distinctive Polish contribution to those movements...

...Kolakowski's interest in other aspects of the classical tradition in philosophy seemed to me to be an implicit commentary on the immediate possibilities of realizing philosophy: history still made philosophy necessary...

...Meanwhile, if responsible and socially conscious behaviour was expected of the populace, then perhaps the new socialist elite could begin to set a good example to or dinary persons by improving its own conduct...

...Money as such seems not to be very much of a problem for the Budapest intellectuals, but currency for foreign travel is scarce...

...In the event it was a democratic socialism which incorporated elements from liberalism...

...When it is, it will clearly incorporate much of today's Marxism—certainly it will be more Marxist than today's democratic socialism or neocapitalism is liberal...

...At this moment, Hungary is a relatively porous society: the border with Austria is easily crossed, travel to the West is not difficult, and the limits of intellectual freedom within the country have been steadily widened...

...But the admission that alienation was not necessarily terminated by socialization of the means of production could de-sacralize the regime...

...But it will also have new elements, the outlines of which we can hardly discern at present...

...As I understood it, Z seemed to think that he had escaped what some of us still feel to be a dilemma, connected with our doubts about the moral uses of such knowledge as we have...

...He continues: a disciplined revolutionary movement can be as effective in repression as the exploitative system it overthrew...

...The discussion of alienation in Eastern Europe is also exactly what it is in the West—a response to a generalized condition of unfulfillment by those whose privileged position in society enables them to think and feel...

...the most distinguished of the Communist Marxist thinkers attests the link...

...The Sociological Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences had in effect begun a concrete series of inquiries into occupational attitudes...

...And that for the simple reason that the state continues to exist, just as before, as a power apparatus...

...He was not reported as having expressed a view on alienation in socialist society, directly, although he has said that the problem has changed within the past 50 years...

...He seems much closer to the followers of Lukacs, who are very much on the fringes of the Party, than to his old associates in the Party itself...

...The director of the Group, incidentally, is the man who was prime minister at the time of the revolution in 1956, Andras Hegedus...

...Z has suffered horribly in the past, had been imprisoned under Rakosi for "espionage," and was now enjoying a quite different sort of life...

...He questioned me about the New Left in America...

...Where once the East German regime put down a revolution with the aid of the Soviet Army, it now wrings its hands in embarrassed helplessness when attacked by its own Bob Dylan, Wolf Biermann...

...The 1965 summer school, and the two that preceded it, served as a meeting place for critical spirits from both power blocs...

...He was busy on a treatise entitled The Ontology of Social Existence, which may well constitute a later version (fortyfive years later) of his celebrated History and Glass Consciousness...

...There is evidence, also, that the next phase has begun: the effort to apply the notion of alienation in concrete analyses of the Communist societies...

...I was shown article after article attacking Schaff in the press, in reviews, in journals...

...He left politics thereafter for socio-economic research, took a doctorate in economics (in Moscow) , worked in the Central Statistical Bureau of the government, and has now turned to sociology...

...One remark did astonish me: if he had to relive his life, he said, he might well choose to study political economy rather than philosophy and literature...

...They were quite delighted with my remarks to the effect that in the new Western class system a technological elite was gaining in importance...

...How far can the discussion of alienation go, if concretized in this fashion...

...I felt half envious of his complacency, as I left Budapest and went on to Warsaw...

...I was told of no one who held that alienation or some form of it was inevitable, due either to certain social arrangements in socialist society (for instance, a single party's monopoly of power) or to perennial features of any society's existence...

...Perhaps it was one of those offhand remarks which require no deep analysis...

...No discussion of persons ignored the political views of those being discussed, nor did they ignore their strengths and weaknesses of character...

...Let it be said that the revolution's long-term consequences have not been entirely tragic, despite the bloodletting, repression, and moral savagery attendant upon its defeat...

...He is skeptical of formulas and cliches, East and West, had noted that "optimization" (of efficiency and production) often conflicts with "humanization" in all management systems, and holds that no real progress toward this goal in socialism can be made until socialist elites and their decision-making processes are subject to the most rigorous public criticism...

...Most of the intellectuals have traveled to the West, frequently on official grants...

...We did not talk about politics, but about his most recent work...

...There is an important Polish positivist tradition of sociological thought and moral inquiry...

...He begins with an account of the present crisis in ideology and cites Roger Garaudy (the moderately independent French Communist philosopher): all philosophy today is in some way the philosophy of existence, since values are everywhere in question...

...Wage workers are subject to managerial discipline even in the absence of factory owners...

...Perhaps the simplest statement of the case is also the most accurate one: the new nationalism is part of a general emergence of spontaneous, often unexpected, sometimes not entirely pleasant social developments as a consequence of the relaxation of rigid Party controls, the abandonment of dogmatically derived attempts to impose a detailed map upon reality...

...Schaff's book has been published in German (in Austria and Western Germany but not in the German Democratic Republic) but not yet in English...

...It would have to be judged by its capacity to meet human needs rather than by imputed final ends...

...criticisms of "bureaucracy" are aimed at the clumsiness of certain bureaucrats and not at the principle of hierarchical organization...

...It is quite true that some of the more noxious aspects of the commercialization of culture are missing in Communist Europe...

...One evening, some of my friends took me to supper with Lukacs —an excellent central European cold supper...

...This, perhaps, accounted for the despair of some who took the view that the Polish ruling party was ineradicably narrow and frequently inept, as well as for the relative satisfaction of others who had concluded that they had won enough scope for the exercise of a certain amount of influence...

...Again, the distinction I had observed in Budapest seemed important in Warsaw as well: there were humanistic Marxists who were made to feel rather like utopian socialists, and there were those who wished to lend the regime more intelligence...

...Some intellectual processes have their own momentum: it remains to be seen where the recent interest in primitive aspects of Marxism will lead the embattled humanists of Eastern Europe...

...Few said he was entirely wrong...

...I sensed (and perhaps this was simply one of those idiosyncratic judgments which travelers make) a larger view, a less cramped and parochial feeling in Warsaw—but then I saw more people...

...did it have contact with the trade unions and the working class...

...I was struck by the German characteristics everywhere evident in the German Communist state: efficiency, orderliness, and the inevitable bureaucratic pedantry (a characteristic much less visible in the other Germany) . Here, too, national feeling was not entirely lacking— and where previously it had taken the form of resentment against a regime imposed by military force on a reluctant population, it now expressed itself in identification with the regime's visible economic progress...

...They met in great secrecy while I was in Warsaw: that very afternoon, I had several accounts of the meeting...

...It is quite true that the foreign newspapers sold on the newsstands are Unita or l'Humanite, but those who wish to do so can subscribe to Western periodicals...

...The intimation that alienation exists in socialist society opens the way not alone to a thoroughgoing critique of Hungarian social life under the new regime, but by implication challenges one of its moral fundamentals...

...Their view was that their own regime was being transformed from one based on dogmatic Marxism to one based on what for want of a better term I shall call technological Marxism...

...He seemed to have an infallible gift for selecting those most immune to any social ideas whatsoever.] He assured me that there was little difference between socialist and other economies: we had General Motors and they had the national planning boards, in which they too were shareholders...

...Schaff's discussion of Marx's conception of man owes much to the recent discussion in the West — and he does not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to those Western Marxists and Marxologists who have often been abused in Communist writings...

...Its focus is on the individual's possibilities of fulfillment in present historical circumstances...

...Perhaps so, but even Marx's greatest opponent in German thought, Max Weber, held that scientific rationality could not in itself provide men with goals...

...The powerlessness and lack of autonomy of important parts of the population, their recourse to available substitutes for genuine participation in their society, seem to mock the hopes of mankind for a better life...

...One particularly lengthy attack (to judge by the translation made on the spot for me by a Polish friend, a particularly vituperative one) was made by someone described to me as "a great thinker...

...In the East, "the wish for a better and happier life shows itself to be stronger than theoretic problems...

...Since they find themselves in a Marxist state with a Marxist official doctrine, they criticize it, much to the displeasure of the more dogmatic elements in the League of Communists...

...In the meantime, my friends in Budapest seemed to live the same busy lives as the rest of us...

...It is a remarkable fact about the entire discussion of alienation, East and West, that it reflects the response of the intellectuals to their society —their condition generalized...

...He thinks about how he can keep his job as head of the state radio system...

...At any rate, I found no oppressiveness in the Hungarian atmosphere...

...Certainly, some elements in the Communist party believe in something like this: their newest slogan is "Die gebildete Nation" ("the educated nation") and their economic planning seems predicated on their not giving up the advantage they now possess over the other Communist countries — they have the best educated labor force of any of them...

...They felt that it had indeed begun, with the expropriation of the means of production—but that nearly everything else needed to be commenced again...

...Yes, he thinks all the time...

...Their philosophical reflections on this have, for the moment, only limited political implications...

...In particular, they thought that popular education or re-education for socialism was exceedingly defective, that the entire quality of life in Hungary was questionable...

...11 Discussions of alienation in Eastern Europe have had to proceed elliptically...

...On this view, the intellectuals' concern with alienation entails an assumption of moral responsibility toward others...

...The Austrians take their heritage seriously: they seem to have found or made a vocation as a spiritual and economic meeting place for the nations that were once in the empire, the Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles especially...

...Really great...

...Today, the emphasis on empirical work may well have a meaning not dissimilar to that which often attaches to this sort of work elsewhere: it is a mode of keeping a certain distance from larger social criticism...

...My visit to Germany brought me to a conference center of the Protestant Church, where I took part in a discussion of "Technology and Humanism" (exactly the sort of theme favored for such discussions in West Germany, too) . The participants were mainly Protestant technicians: computer specialists, technologists, agronomists, officials from the various ministries, physicians...

...I was told that Gomulka himself was enraged, and that he complained that Schaff had found words to justify his (Gomulka's) imprisonment in the Stalinist period...

...It was clear that Z could be used by the regime in a way in which Lukacs (and some of those he had influenced in an empirical direction) could not...

...Finally, no useful purpose was served by denying that chauvinism, xenophobia, and antiSemitism were still found in socialist society and even among Communists...

...And, it should be said, these are often protected and patronized by those with rather more adequate political connections...

...Life is crowded in Budapest, in a literal sense: apartments are small and many persons live in extremely cramped quarters...

...The latter, it should be said, seemed more downcast in Warsaw than in Budapest...

...This implies that no automatic mechanism exists which can introduce the abolition of alienation along with the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production...

...my own impression is that this may be a European trait rather than a specifically Communist one...

...It is a sign of the total degradation of official intellectual life under Stalinism that we should have to treat this as progress...

...He justified this in precisely the same terms as his counterparts in the West: the collaboration of men of science with existing regimes served to increase the rationality of the latter...

...Two real forms of alienation continue in socialist society: the monopolization of power by a privileged group and the necessity of work in an economic organization characterized by the division of labor...

...Increased production, skillful administration, even a consciously pursued (and publicized) policy of facilitating social ascent are on the new agenda of Communist politics...

...I visited Hungary in October of 1965, nine years after the revolution and its tragic aftermath...

...I also had the privilege of spending some time with the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski...

...A visit to the University was also on my program, and I was invited to talk to sociology teachers and students...

...Expropriation and centralized planning have not been sufficient to attain the ends of Marxism as a political philosophy: the right praxis has as yet to be found...

...I found Lukacs at eighty astonishingly young...

...A considerable over-simplification, no doubt: but one which can focus thought...

...The real conflict, he declared, was between the libertarian humanists and the bureaucratic technicians...

...The utopian goals of Marxism have receded from view, or rather, have been replaced by a certain amount of discussion about the "creative" use of leisure time — a discussion which could just as well occur (and frequently has) under a capitalist regime...

...Their revulsion for the construction of a society organized primarily around material progress and material emulation seemed as great as that of the British New Left as I knew it in the late fifties—and their rhetoric was not all that different...

...The anecdote is probably apocryphal, but if Gomulka complained in these terms, I can understand his feelings...

...The persons I saw were, indeed, not very close to the Party...

...The regime required, not critical Marxism but technical specialists and Z was prepared to be as technical and specialized as possible...

...It became clear to me rather quickly that they were more technician than Protestant...

...Old traditions, among the intellectuals, of contact with Western Europe have been renewed—and this at a period when the intellectuals and the intelligentsia as a whole have gained more importance than they previously had in the Communist societies, and constitute a much larger social grouping than they did even 15 years ago...

...Schaff (whom I saw) was very pleased with the controversy...

...I do not really know what the situation in Poland may be in all its complexity...

...What I have termed the recrudescence of national peculiarities in the case of Hungary, and the other East European nations, has led to a new internationalism in Eastern Europe...

...Alienation had not disappeared with the expropriation of the means of production since, above all, the state in socialist society continued to function in a manner which was frequently oppressive...

...the 1966 one, for reasons unclear to me, was cancelled...

...Even an optimum of democratization, far from attained yet in socialist societies, will leave men confronting a state apparatus which in the nature of the case will not wither away...

...What did make them different (and at the same time curiously like some socialists in Western Europe) was their sense of obligation to what we may term the unfinished revolution...

...Adam Schaff is Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Academy of Science, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party, and a prominent representative of Poland and official Marxism generally at international conferences...

...he had just published a sensational book...

...I have read a number of his essays and also talked with him: I have the impression that he uses sociological research in the pursuit of new political ends which I shall describe as a form of technological humanism...

...He has withdrawn from the critique of daily political existence and is free to work quite unhindered pursuing his major theoretic interests...

...now that things were improved, the philosopher had nothing better to do than to discover alienation in Poland...

...His own work then (under the title Marxism and the Human Individual) is intended as a contribution to the attainment of an improved life for those under socialism...

...The penalties for deviation have changed: those who ten years ago faced jail are now irritated by the denial of travel subsidies, or by being confined to less attractive posts, or by exclusion from the activities which lend influence, money, and prestige...

...He has dropped Marxism...

...Marx held that the revolution would make philosophy and metaphysical reflection (including religion) redundant: philosophy developed to its highest point would become life itself, in the form of revolutionary activity...

...A year after I saw him, he was expelled from the Party—allegedly for remarks made at a political discussion at the University of Warsaw, where he teaches...

...It would be the most arrant philistinism, however, to suppose that this exhausts the problem...

...I interpreted this as a withdrawal from the Marxist notion of the realization of philosophy...

...The bluntness of the assertions I have listed is attenuated only slightly by Schaff's insistence that the distortions of socialism could be explained by the historical circumstances of the seizure of power in countries lacking a bourgeois democratic tradition: indeed, the explanation was in itself a highly unorthodox one...

...Marx distinguished between real man as he is known to us and true man—as he can become...

...Poland is four times as large...

...A conference had been held, under more or less official auspices, at which a number of views had been expressed...

...The Party convened a special meeting of intellectuals to discuss Schaff's book...

...Kolakowski has been celebrated in the West as a spiritual hero of the Polish October of 1956 and is best known for his critical studies of the crisis in Marxist political philosophy...

...A thorough critique can be contained, however distasteful to those in power: abuses could be attributed to a set of circumstances which did not necessarily cast doubt on socialist principles...

...During my travels in Eastern Europe in 1965 and 1966, I was able to glimpse some of these forces at work...

...It reflected something essential in the new East European atmosphere: the recrudescence of national peculiarities...

...Domination of a softtempered kind, however, remains domination...

...We have now reached a phase in which philosophical considerations of Marx's early writings are acknowledged to be legitimate...

...A German translation was published in the same year by the Europa Verlag, Vienna, under the title Marxismus and dos menschliche Individuum...

...Real man, according to Schaff, still has to contend with alienation: In all forms of socialist society known to us until now various forms of alienation have appeared...