COLLECTIVISM RECONSIDERED

...Does it amount to more than an extension of privilege for the upper layers of the new technological hierarchy, civilian or military...

...Under Stalinist-fascist rule, where this democracy has been smashed, the safeguard is lost and we confront the specter of 1984...

...Thus the political issue of our day is joined in the one field where technical progress confers ever greater power and responsibility upon the upper layer of the new social hierarchy...

...Many factors no doubt went into that experience: the destruction of the traditional workingclass parties and organizations, with the resulting loss of leadership...

...It is enough, for a start, if those in charge of their particular sector take an intelligent interest in its operation and are given the right to do so...

...push...

...But I think Burnham may be credited with having asked the right question, though he probably gave the wrong answer...

...If Stakhanovism can score some degree of success under conditions where labor is deprived of its bargaining power, the reason is surely that, for all its systematic distortion in the interest of maximum output and the deliberate creation of new group privileges, it has tapped some hidden source of willingness to participate...

...The same world conflict that gave rise to the resistance movement and the partisan swarm also saw the emergence of the armored spearhead racing far ahead of the infantry, the air armada flying in formation over the battlefield: at both ends of the scale the specialist breaks loose from the inert fabric geared to an outmoded technology...

...Serfdom" would seem to be incompatible with anything as dynamic as modern technology...

...192 GEORGE LICHTHEIM...

...They touch too nearly upon the issue of power, and upon the function of those whose business it is to instruct the public but who more frequently are engaged in misleading both themselves and others...

...It is only a step from here to the apparently paradoxical phenomenon of Communist regimes engaging in forcibly suppressing the class struggle and even banishing it from Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory...

...It is only under conditions of political freedom that the tension between labor's prime aims and their socialist derivatives has a chance of working itself out...

...If the outlook is none too good for those at the bottom of the ladder, there are compensations in the offing for the higher and middle grades of the hierarchy: not merely for Burnham's "managers," 1 but the entire group 1 Professor G. D. H. Cole, in a suggestive paper published in the December 1950 issue of the British Journal of Sociology, stresses the vagueness and ambiguity of Burnham's terminology, his tendency to shift from political to economic categories and vice versa, his failure to differentiate between those in control of the industrial setup and the technologists who merely service it, etc...

...Technical 184 education of workers, and scientific training of managers, is part of the same process of what the Germans call Verwissenschaftlichung...

...but at any rate Communist theorists are in no doubt that it is incompatible with the sectional push and pull that is the lifeblood of our modern pluralist democracies...

...It depends on who is planning and for what...

...the hand grenade proves effective in fighting the tank...

...There is pressure at both ends of the mechanism, for raisons d'etat may require measures unpalatable to all groups and it takes an absolute ruler to mediate such conflicts, once the democratic mechanism has been abolished...

...But it is not a form that lends support to the pessimists who see only the growth of bureaucracy in an increasingly hierarchical order...

...It is not simply that this group is growing in numbers, in social importance, and perhaps in the collective influence it exerts on industrial policy—there is also the emergence of a novel form of "industrial democracy" within this particular corporate body, a democracy based on -technical competence...

...In this sense, and in this sense only, fascism and Stalinism are ideologies of the new class, which, like every new class, identifies itself with "the state," i.e., the public good...

...of administrators, consultants, scientists, technologists, engineers, and skilled workers —for the group that might perhaps be termed the technological stratum...

...The point is that the interests of the party and of the privileged stratum coincide, at any rate in the area where emphasis is placed by both on the aim of maximum productivity...

...Questions of this kind can never be wholly freed from the odium that attaches to politics...

...Such attempts to introduce scientific concepts into political discussion represent an important advance—on condition that the social context is kept in sight...

...But the ideology that subserves this purpose would be ineffective if it did not echo the demand of the social key stratum for a "strong" authority with power to plan, and its indifference to the conflicting claims of the major classes...

...The Germans were first in this field and owed much of their early success to this fact...

...Moreover, they cannot effectively oppose any collective slogan to a regime that is itself in appearance, and to some extent in intention, collectivist...

...One hears a great deal about push-button warfare, but what seems to be happening in fact is rather that small teams of specialists, and somewhat larger groups of technicians, are developing forms of activity denied to the old foot-slogging infantry...

...In the 193945 war, mass armies were already at a disadvantage unless broken up into small units that could develop initiative...

...2 Any future advance will probably have to start from a concept of technical education that envisages it not simply as a means of improving efficiency, but as a link between the worker and the planner...

...In the first place, even •the introduction of a limited form of collective responsibility at some level would be a net gain...

...The trenches of the First World War marked a pause between two techniques...

...This has not prevented some trade union movements, e.g., in the United States, fromtaking part in rationalizing the production process...

...One should not conclude that the ruling party functions as an "organ" of the new directing class, except in a vague and metaphorical sense...

...We shall never get anywhere in political science if such distinctions are not given due weight...

...But the only place where socialism and the workers could come together was precisely the place where it was determined they should not meet: on the factory floor or at the pit-head...

...There is indeed no single simple conceptual apparatus that will enable us to sort out valid theories from spurious ones...

...The Stalinist drive for maximum industrialization and maximum output has its own logic and even dialectic: if it subjects the entire society, including its top stratum, to the tyrannical rule of the planners and the secret police, it also compels the Communists to dispense with working-class support and to transform their own ideology into a crude technocratic vision of endless material advance at the expense of all human and social considerations...

...It took some time until the lesson sank in, but by 1945 it had been learned: Communism must cease to be "proletarian...

...From this standpoint the various personal and political factors which served to inflame this particular dispute appear secondary and not especially interesting...

...Leon Blum (who later changed his mind on this subject) cried out against the establishment of a "Praetorian Guard...

...at this level the workers experience the claim of solidarity, which becomes the distinctive touchstone of labor organization, and the central concept around which the consciousness of the worker takes shape...

...That miscalculation was the belief in the existence—in industrial countries such as Germany—of a "revolutionary proletariat" with a spontaneous capacity for political organization, even under a hostile totalitarian dictatorship...

...To "proceed according to plan" is to assume the overriding importance of a general idea—in other words, of a collective idea...

...It is nonetheless unstable, its internal contradictions showing in the constant need to reinforce the apparatus of repression and in the gradual emergence of a breach between the planners and the planned...

...The great fact remains that for 12 years labor did not stir, while the dictatorship maintained itself, thanks to the more or less whole-hearted support of just that key stratum which was simultaneously beginning to emerge in the U.S.S.R.: the technical intelligentsia...

...This, however, is the problem of every absolutism...

...but it is only where autonomous labor organizations have been replaced by state-controlled ones that organized resistance to the drive for maximum output has disappeared...

...When one glances through the writings of our modern, hard-headed, nonutopian sociologists—students of industrial organization, of "labor relations," of the corporation and its managerial structure—one notices a strain of controlled optimism in their otherwise businesslike and down-toearth findings...

...If every one of the "professional hierarchies" were so organized as to encourage autonomy, self-government, decentralization of authority—this would seem to be the sane and healthy core of the "corporatist" idea travestied under regimes which never seriously meant to apply it...

...It is just because of this that individualism of the traditional sort goes by the board...

...Giving real authority to production committees would have meant strengthening shop stewards as against union organizers who had no intention of furthering such experiments...

...If the ethos developed in this form of process is radically different from that of the old free-wheeling entrepreneur, it is not necessarily inferior to it in point of willingness to assume responsibility...

...They indicate the domain where both disciplines may be expected in future to overlap...

...At all times and in all societies, trade unions have stood for less work, more pay, more leisure, the minimum of rationalization compatible with job security, and a rate of advance geared to that of the slowest and weakest member of the team...

...Rather, it may be and often is succeeded by forms of cooperation that leave considerable scope to personal and team initiative...

...They have had their reward in the form of disappointing coal output...

...In modern Communist doctrine, on the other hand, the state-party regime may appear variously as an expression of "true" democracy, or as the political form of the "dictatorship of the proletariat...

...Insoluble in theory— hence the theorists of absolutism are either blind to its function or deliberately dishonest —it is by no means so in the day-to-day business of overcoming its own contradictions by storing up fresh unsolved problems for the future...

...And it becomes a veritable caricature of the standard Victorian confession of faith in a mid-19th-century milieu such as the Manchester whose inhuman concentration on money-spinning so horrified the youthful Engels...

...Yet it maintains itself, albeit dictatorially, as long as it has the support of the new social key stratum: the technical intelligentsia...

...In the language of overt political discussion this discovery was translated into the harmless formula that the party must "learn to address itself to all groups...

...I t may be asked how this pattern fits the accepted image of a social order in which the producers collectively own their tools, or at least exercise some control over their use...

...The purge indeed is the mechanism whereby the party from time to time restores the balance between the conflicting pressures laid upon it by its dual role of absolutist ruler of society and technocratic organizer in the interest of the new directing stratum...

...What it involves is that the Trade Unions shall . . . transfer to the workers, under Trade Union supervision, certain of the functions of workshop discipline and organization that are at present in the hands of foremen and supervisors appointed by the employers to order the workers about...

...Unions exist to protect the worker not only against market fluctuations and loss of earnings, but equally against the pressure of mechanization...

...Characteristically, this reluctance disappeared when the Webbs had at last discovered a nominally socialist dictatorship with which, on account of its technocratic character and its successful emancipation from "proletarian" tendencies, they could identify themselves...

...That was true of the situation that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power, and in principle this particular experience could be repeated in any modern democracy with fully developed sectional and class organizations that function as pressure groups...

...Every totalitarian regime in one sense represents an attempt to do away with the class struggle...

...A great deal of the present outcry against centralized planning would come to an end...

...Professor Cole's proposals (in Is This Socialism?, New Statesman pamphlet, London 1954) for introducing workers' control at the factory level: "This I believe to be entirely practicable, provided that the policy receives the full backing of a sympathetic Labour government—but not otherwise...

...To do this the party must satisfy two apparently contradictory requirements: its power must be absolute, but it must also respond to the major needs of the technocratic stratum...

...It cannot do so without sacrificing the goals it sets for the new directing stratum...

...Revolution" no longer signifies "liberation of the toilers," but "all power to the planners...

...so, too, is the growing importance of teamwork and, at the higher levels, of what is vaguely known as planning...

...Fascist theory identifies society with the state, and since the latter is per de finitionem "above" class and sectional struggles, these are viewed as hostile to the real interests of society...

...Once this transformation has occurred it is not open to the Communist party to revert to its original role as a representative of working-class aims...

...Together they explored the possibilities of a new ethos...

...The fact itself is familiar to students of European politics, but its sociological significance is veiled by Communist silence on the key issue...

...In Marxian terms this signifies a change in the class structure of the party...

...To reproach them with this would be absurd: the placing of a brake upon mere efficiency is their raison d'être...

...And at any rate he has helped to bring sociology down into the political arena—where it belongs...

...For collectivists, its significance on the contrary lies in the fact that it arises spontaneously out of the modern process of work, while at the same time it enables the worker to develop his individuality...

...The COLLECTIVISM RECONSIDERED 185 armored division resembles the mechanized plant—a complex organization with hundreds of vehicles and a big repair-and-maintenance problem...

...Recent wars and paramilitary struggles have been distinguished by revolutionary innovations in this field rather than by stale routine...

...Second, no one ever pretended that democratic control can operate at every level upon the totality of the system...

...Implicit in each is an exclusiveness which is both the strength and the limitation of the organism they sustain: since the claim is absolute, the COLLECTIVISM RECONSIDERED 187 practical consequences that flow from it cannot readily be abridged for the sake of convenience...

...True, the proximate cause of this drive to establish COLLECTIVISM RECONSIDERED 191 conformity is the need to erect an unchallengeable center of authority, which shall mediate all sectional conflicts and, if necessary, repress them by force...

...De Gaulle's career epitomizes the possibilities of the new order...

...Nationalization having been planned on purely bureaucratic lines, its relative failure in terms 186 GEORGE LICHTHEIM of output and of social relations was then blamed on Labour, or on the socialist concept...

...Hence the peculiar moral climate of modern Communism, with its double standard of truth for the elect, its contempt for "the masses," and its elevation of the individual conscience to public enemy number one...

...The lesson has now been assimilated by all modern armies, and where they are still reluctant to learn it, it is being drummed into them by the successes of guerrilla warfare...

...The term "bourgeoisie" in any case has long been used to designate the property-owning minority of the old "middle class," and it should not be employed by historians to fill the gaps in their own conceptual apparatus...

...Historically, the attempt to impose such a system grows out of the experience of political breakdown under conditions in which the various pressure groups of a fully developed mass democracy are deadlocked and, consequently, the state ceases to function...

...Though the monolithic community is an illusion, the monolithic party is real enough, and what keeps it alive is the attempt to substitute the state for society: to make the government the final arbiter of all social conflicts...

...It is a truism that political parties—and, at a higher level, the state—exist for the purpose of arbitrating such sectional conflicts...

...There is today great need for an analysis of the technocratic trend and its political implications, and it may be thought that such an analysis might come equally well from those who on the whole welcome this trend as from those who see only its dangers...

...Under totalitarian rule this process takes the form of periodic "purges...

...For in the end the sociology of politics comes down to the simple question of who makes the relevant decisions, and in what form...

...The ruling political party, amalgamating ever more profoundly with the socially dominant stratum, sees to it that exploitation reaches the maximum rate compatible with efficiency...

...Yet the unions are potentially an obstacle not merely to totalitarianism, but to forms of planning compatible with democratic control...

...since then the stalemate has been broken and the outcome has been to restore the importance of both the individual and the small group...

...Phenomena of this kind are, it seems to me, of equal concern to the sociologist and to the political scientist...

...No wonder every Communist movement (starting with the Russian party since the period of the great purges in the '30s) has increasingly transformed itself into an organization (not, however, an "organ") of the new elite...

...Means of destruction, like means of production, can become so closely patterned that the same individual intelligence is able to supervise their technical functioning and to direct their operational use: the tank commander, like the factory manager, is both a technical expert and a leader of men...

...They point to the necessity of a socialist doctrine that will ultimately make sense to planners and planned alike...

...Such fears unfortunately contributed to the destruction of the Third Republic, whose leaders had identified democracy with egalitarianism...

...If the technical intelligentsia 188 GEORGE LICHTHEIM in a sense is hoist with its own petard— since it is tied to the regime by the latter's unshakable allegiance to planning for higher production—the Communists themselves are held to theirtask by the need to interpenetrate ever more profoundly with the key stratum...

...Oddly enough, it is in the age of the thermonuclear bomb that the homemade weapon has come into its own again...

...It would be unrealistic, however, to overlook the common social factor: both movements ultimately compete for the support of the technical intelligentsia, and their real faith is technocratic, i.e., indifferent to property relations in industry...

...Such thoughts are 4 Similar tendencies have long been noticeable in the socialist movement: vide the longstanding refusal of the Webbs to accept the Marxian analysis of class...

...In this sense, 1933 has become the watershed between the old and the new doctrine of revolution— between "Communism, utopian and scientific," to paraphrase Engels...

...Nor should it be expected or urged to do so...

...It is clearly not true of the centralized state-controlled economy of totalitarianism: there the conflict has been violently resolved in favor of one of its elements...

...The strains within the dictatorship (between the party leaders, the bureaucracy of planners, the technical intelligentsia, and the masses) constitute a pattern utterly different from that of Western democratic politics...

...In this context it is of course immaterial whether the employers are private owners or bureaucratic state boards...

...It may well be that the Labour government missed a major opportunity in this field...

...Here its solution—never completely realized—depends on labor's acceptance of the goal of a freely planned society with a high and rising standard of productive performance...

...for socialism is the point where the innate collectivism of the workers' movement encounters the drive for more responsible participation in the process of production...

...Even under the 1945-51 Labour government in Britain, resistance to the idea of "workers' control" in the mines (where it would, according to some experts, have been feasible) came from those who had in advance made up their minds against it...

...The party leaders must therefore be treated as infallible—though by a familiar paradox it is precisely these infallible leaders who from time to time are "unmasked" as saboteurs...

...Thus "loyalty," in its blindness, may become an obstacle to the attainment of aims to which the workers themselves are committed, since leaders who rise from the ranks tend to lose the confidence of •their erstwhile followers...

...It is not the intelligentsia in general that forms the core of the Soviet 190 GEORGE LICHTHEIM regime, but the technical intelligentsia in particular...

...All this of course implies an ethos very different from that of the old-fashioned entrepreneur, who was in the habit of extemporizing means and ends simultaneously and who seldom troubled his head about the connection between them...

...At the "managerial" level, so to speak, the process takes a different form, as befits the distinction between those who plan and those who merely cooperate...

...For the worker indeed technology holds the most direct access to science and everything that lies beyond it...

...but there are attitudes favorable to realism in sociology, just as there are others which make for aridity or "double-think...

...This is true even of the typical "mixed economy" of our age, let alone of the planned society that remains the only possible goal of democratic socialism...

...The Communist party is what it is, and it functions in the way it does, because its leaders have once and for all made up their minds that a total reorganization of society is possible and necessary, and that it must be achieved by force, from above...

...Its ethos is so entirely centered upon "all for one, one for all" that it cannot adapt itself to forms of process in which the hierarchy of skills automatically confers social status...

...The Fourth Republic, no less democratic than its predecessor, has overcome its fear of mechanized divisions and seems none the worse for it...

...3 Equally, we shall make little progress if we abstract from the reality of class conflict...

...The general who was also a technical expert turned out to be the central figure in his country's crisis...

...Unquestionably the leaders are aware of it...

...clearly a job for the expert, who in turn might reasonably think that he should be called in to advise on general strategy...

...But technical education without responsible participation soon loses its spur or degenerates into yet another aspect of "public relations in industry...

...Certainly a writer who in 1941 predicted that the whole world, America included, would rapidly go fascist, encourages a certain wariness on the part of readers...

...In a sense the Communist theorists have been keeping silent about it ever since the German debacle of 1933, which disclosed the fundamental miscalculation of utopian Leninist Communism...

...Hence the significant hostility of radical "New Dealers" and other representatives of the technocratic stratum to Marxian concepts that at first sight seem quite innocuous from the standpoint, say, of an administration or technician with strong leanings in the direction of planning...

...In the 1930s de Gaulle encountered resistance both from the conservative leaders of the military hierarchy and from the majority of political figures, some of whom scented authoritarian tendencies behind his scheme for the creation of a highly trained corps d'elite...

...Hence a certain penchant for elite doctrines, which in turn serve to frighten the more conventional democratic spokesmen...

...The original aim of organization no doubt is simply the need for collective bargaining...

...below him the military and professional hierarchy included hundreds of his type who later rallied to him, and these military reformers were helped and joined by modern-minded technicians and their political friends...

...Some of the most enthusiastic descriptions of modern large-scale industry have been provided by people who claim for "the corporation" those virtues of intelligent social cooperation, voluntary discipline, intelligent planning, scientific training, etc., which are in fact aspects of any large-scale organization whose work is rationally planned...

...but it will not come if sociologists shut themselves off from the political scene...

...So the issue was drowned in a flood of talk about "joint consultation...

...and because of it one may witness the growth of an esprit de corps that causes people in this group to hold together, as professionals usually do, against those outside their own order...

...The new absolutism, like its predecessor, answers a social need other than the traditional urge of the state bureaucracy to establish conformity and suppress opposition...

...They can be traced in, for example, the military field, where science has for decades marched hand in hand with the emergence of the small highly trained combat team—or guerrilla group...

...In a sense this is the most rational social order conceivable...

...The unions, which necessarily stand in the center of this difficult process of reorientation from one level of awareness to another, cannot help facing both ways...

...sionally be reduced to variations on the theme "the king's government must be carried on," but the underlying reality is that the state has been captured by one particular political organization with a program for arbitrating all social differences...

...No examination of this kind can afford to overlook the political developments of recent years, which have brought about this kind of monolithic organization...

...The labor movement, especially at the trade union level, is desperately egalitarian...

...so would phenomena such as the commercialization of the press and the other media of mass communication...

...whether the system is run on capitalist, socialist, or "managerial" lines, the built-in economic pressures must find their equivalent at some level in a type of organization that gives scope to the personality of the organizer...

...In all probability we shall then find that the problems exhibited by the new absolutism are not totally irrelevant to our own society...

...If Hitler, with his adventurist mentality and program, could govern in this fashion, why not the Communist party...

...Similar aims were of course inherent in the various fascist movements, and to the extent that the latter have been superseded by the Stalinist drive it can be said that modern Communism is COLLECTIVISM RECONSIDERED 189 postfascist—not in the superficial sense that it has taken the place of a now defunct threat to democracy, but in the more important one that it has inherited and absorbed the ensemble of fascist organization and ideology...

...At the very moment when its demise was proclaimed by the totalitarians, democracy thrust its shaggy head through the window and dropped a submachine gun on the floor...

...Just because we are moving into an increasingly planned and hierarchical society, the primitive democracy of organized labor becomes the chief safeguard against authoritarian and, ultimately, despotic tendencies...

...What we need are not more learned disquisitions upon this or that aspect of Marx's or Max Weber's theories, but an attempt in the spirit of Marx and Weber to enter the new world of hierarchical organization, centralized planning, and monolithic political structures, of which the Communist regimes so far are the most extreme expression...

...At the present time, it seems particularly important to stress the role of the technical intelligentsia under totalitarianism, since it has lately become the fashion to analyze revolutionary movements —whether in Czarist Russia or contemporary India—in terms of intelligentsia politics...

...An effort to define all revolutionary movements as expressions of hostility toward the status quo on the part of intellectuals may give employment to numerous historians—some have already gone to work, from this point of view, on the history of the French Revolution— but it does not significantly advance our understanding of the current situation...

...4 The notion that society groups itself into classes with significant social aims inevitably entails the thought that the intelligentsia must at some stage define its relationship to the working class which, in a planned economy, it will have to direct...

...Solidarity" is for him what "honor" was for the feudal order, and "honesty" for the bourgeois: a claim that is felt as absolute because the existence of the individual depends on it...

...Why indeed should newspapers and radio stations not be controlled by those who work on them...

...It is the distinctive feature of modern monolithic "state parties" that they amalgamate the functions of the party with those of the state: the former becomes all-embracing and compulsory, while the latter is politicalized to the last degree...

...Partisans waylay the armored column...

...The modern totalitarian regimes must be viewed in the context of a rapidly changing industrial society, in which the growing importance of planning translates itself into the emergence of a hierarchy centered upon certain key groups...

...What the totalitarian regimes have :attempted along these lines is just successful enough to give our own society the necessary 2 Cf...

...The more "rational" and "scientific" its ideology, the better its chance to absorb the technological stratum, but the latter's rationality comes to a decided halt before the phenomenon of class...

...It was the collapse of working-class resistance to Hitler in 1933, and the almost total passivity of labor during the 12 years that followed, which cured the Comintern of its error...

...The energizing power of such ideals, and their loss of attraction when confronted with alternative ways of life, makes up three-quarters of the real—as distinct from the official—history of social organization...

...Half his appeal lay in his ideas on scientific warfare, rather than in his oldfashioned patriotism or his unbending refusal to concede defeat...

...The London dock strike of October 1954, which involved an issue of labor discipline, will perhaps in retrospect appear as the first major conflict that turned on the worker's status rather than his income...

...The real significance of the change was more profound: the Communist leadership had at last understood that to the Stalinist "revolution from above" there corresponds a social stratum which organizes the planned society from the top downward—the technological intelligentsia...

...Such changes in the prevailing pattern are not confined to industry...

...In fact, however, there is scarcely a large-scale organization where there could not be made a start if those in control were not in principle opposed to it...

...Much as they would disclaim sympathy with syndicalist notions or other forms of social romanticism, they are far from hopeless about the human pattern disclosed by large-scale organization...

...Its own position in the new society is not yet sufficiently assured to permit that degree of objectivity toward social processes which the bourgeoisie achieved a long time ago...

...Pushed far enough, such education, if it cannot altogether eliminate the distinction between mental and physical labor, can at least set up its own hierarchy in the workshop, turn the worker into an amateur technologist, the soldier into a potential NCO, and thus overcome the modern "alienation" that undermines efficiency no less than welfare...

...Communists and fascists can both argue that they are concerned with the overriding interests of the community, and they can do so because from the technocratic standpoint it is a matter of indifference whether the means of production are "owned" by private capitalists or by the state, provided they are "run" by the new directing stratum and the workers are kept well in hand and forbidden to strike...

...II S uch ideas are, or should be, in accordance with the traditional aims of the labor movement, insofar as that movement is responsive to socialist tendencies...

...Workers' control" might usefully start in places where there exists no social prejudice against people who are "merely" workers...

...Where this was not done— as in the France of 1940, or the Germany of 1945—disaster resulted...

...disturbing—and not only to "sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights...

...Under fascism the official justification for this state of affairs can occa8 A suggestion that leads to the further remark that, for all the cultural resemblances to midVictorian society which appear so striking to the student of Soviet affairs, one cannot speak of a "middle class" or "bourgeoisie" in the U.S.S.R., unless such terms are to be completely emptied of meaning...

...the Nazi regime's success in banishing unemployment, though at the price of war preparations, etc...

...Far better to concentrate on problems of "social engineering" that by-pass the political issue...

...For although the workers —or some of them—may incidentally benefit from the headlong drive for greater output, the central energizing concept is no longer democratic but frankly authoritarian and hierarchical: Stalinism recognizes the key role of the technical intelligentsia in the planned society it is building, and it assigns to the party the difficult task of mediating between the directing stratum and the masses...

...But its place is not, or not necessarily, taken •by bureaucratic routine—not even under a totalitarian regime, which tries to stifle initiative in every field save the one in which it remains dependent on the maximum energizing of human activity: that of production...

...They must continue to protect their members and yet assist the whole community to realize its aims...

...Without the latter's active support they cannot govern, far less meet the competition of political rivals whose own economy is still dynamic enough even by totalitarian standards...

...Here, though the workers may protect themselves by ca'canny, they can no longer utilize the unions to slow down the rate of technical progress, which thus tends to be high...

...We have here another instance of the peculiar dialectical relationship between fascist and Communist movements, and of their tendency to copy each other...

...Insofar as such tributes are deserved they reflect the impact of scientific training on the way in which things are managed under conditions where both the administrator at the top, and the foreman near the bottom of the ladder, must know something about the technology of production...