REVIEWS
Bensman, David & Coser, Lewis & Benjamin, Saul Hillel & Oromaner, Mark & Coser, Rose Laub
BOLSHEVIK FEMINIST: THE LIFE OF ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI, by Barbara Evans Clements. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 352 pp. $15.00 ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI: SOCIALISM, FEMINISM, AND THE BOLSHEVIK...
...It was for reasons of expediency that Lenin agreed to establish the Women's Bureau—so that women would not be attracted to femimism, which was said to favor the rights merely of individuals and not to recognize the class nature of the struggle...
...That move became politically urgent, for as white-collar workers came into the labor movement, they exerted considerable pressure on the Social Democratic party to shift emphasis from income equalization and high marginal taxation, and toward programs expanding employee control in the enterprise, that is, industrial democracy...
...The virtue of a thesis, Gouldner informs us, is its contribution to "organizing discussion in an intellectual community by its pointed implications for certain intellectual traditions...
...The final volume was published in 1980, the year of his death...
...But in 1970 Burnham suddenly discovered his deep ideological commitment to 244 Soviet- or Cuban-style politics and instituted a "Cooperative Socialist Republic...
...Here it all is—Messianic visions, contempt for and disgust with his followers, complaints over his sufferings while he sacrifices all for the very followers he despises...
...Gouldner, however, argues that the New Class is a self-interested and flawed class and that, in the West, "the New Class's rise will more likely be like that of the bourgeoisie than like revolutions made in the name of the working class...
...She died of a heart attack in 1952, at the age of 80...
...Time and again, Fallows records examples where the object at hand is the quest for certainty...
...While committed to control of the economy, it also espouses a pluralistic democracy that limits the threat of censorship...
...OUR FATHER WHO ARE IN HELL: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JIM JONES, by James Reston, Jr...
...Third, in 1976, the government revised the country's labor law and made employers liable to negotiate on any issue the trade unions demanded...
...For Gouldner money and culture are forms of capital...
...perpetuated civil inequality...
...When the cup is empty, she throws it away without regret and bitterness...
...Those who fought and those who died were disproportionately from the social and economic classes whose parents or relatives had little to say about the policies that sent their sons to war...
...He could then have analyzed the conflict between the "New Knowledge Elite" and the "Old Moneyed Class" in the West and the "New Knowledge Elite" and the "Old Political Elite" in the East...
...On the basis of these formulations, Stephens is able to argue that a socialist program of structural reforms, aimed at socializing the control of capital, has the potential to attract the support of white-collar as well as blue-collar workers...
...I could agree if it were not for the fact that this is a misunderstanding of Kollontai's view...
...First in 1971, the Law on Improvement of the Working Environment increased the power of union safety officers, and gave them access to information about their companies...
...The business of the defense business is to do business...
...You fuckers, I like to look at you now, because you don't know how clever I am...
...But, writes Clements, what about their own "enlightenment...
...The various plans to deploy the extravagantly expensive MX missile system, for example, are but the latest offspring of the magician's cleverness...
...In order to lessen the dissonance between their power and their perceived goodness, many intellectuals have been willing to join vanguard parties that, upon achieving power, have limited the exercise of the CCD...
...Kollontai's views on sexual liberation caused consternation among socialists and Communists alike...
...A left Hegelian sociology also accepts dissonance as part of reality...
...Accordingly, "a draft should not be enacted because it would make foreign intervention either easier or harder...
...Factories, electrification, uneducated workers, military power, foreign policy, nuts and bolts—none of these concerned Kollontai...
...Lenin knew this...
...It allowed virtually no one to be fully human...
...The most important questions about how the weapons actually work cannot be conclusively answered until they are fired...
...KOLLONTAI WAS A CLEAR THINKER and an amazing orator who could sway crowds...
...It is the kind of madness that creates the structural conditions for the surrender of individual wills to the (alleged) collective superpower...
...Some 26 percent reach the Pentagon (Reagan's target over the next four years is to lift that figure to about 32 percent of the annual slice-up...
...Socialists and Communists held that working-class women were supposed to realize that their interests were totally the same as those of working-class men...
...Vietnam annals are stocked with complaints about the ineffectiveness of a rifle that repeatedly jammed in action...
...It is distinguished qualitatively because it is also a community of language...
...Stephens offers no easy solutions or cheap comfort...
...It ended with one monk dead and the monastery unoccupied...
...She was determined to show that motherhood was not to be a private responsibility but a social contribution...
...She married an engineer, to the displeasure of her parents who thought the young man inferior to Aleksandra in intelligence...
...Kollontai believed that such support was the responsibility of the state...
...the abasement of the self in the name of the Cause—all this was already in place when Jones left Indianapolis...
...Without growth, many European socialists believed it was impossible to provide security and improve living standards for the masses without disturbing the cooperative relationships between business, labor, and government that had prevailed for at least a quarter-century...
...for Social Democrats were more flexible than Communists, allowing the expression of different interests within their party...
...Throughout his career he was interested in developing a critique of social theory as well as an understanding of the place of scholars and intellectuals in society...
...Most of them feared that work on behalf of women was "separatist," divisive and distracting from the mission of the proletariat...
...There has been "a substitution of procurement for defense...
...Burnham had originally been put into power by the CIA and the British secret service in 1964 to counter the pro-Soviet regime of his predecessor Cheddi Jagan...
...This ambition to develop a general theory creates some difficulty in following Gouldner's otherwise clear and historically based analysis and critique...
...But the list seems an elusive grail...
...A combination of the ideas of Gouldner and Thomas helps one to understand the present attack on the public school system...
...Her final clash with Lenin occurred in 1921 at the Tenth Party Congress concerning the Workers' Opposition, then under the leadership of Shliapnikov...
...While it may take centuries of development for the New Class to assume political authority, when this happens it will do so in its own name...
...He was only allowed a short visit to the destroyed remnants of what had once been Jones's empire, and he only talked to a few survivors in Guyana and the United States...
...Thus Bell and Galbraith are criticized for having presented a view of the members of the New Class as benign technocrats whose elite status is "more or less inevitable and trustworthy...
...Welfare programs form part of the "entitlement" category, but amount to a puny 6 percent of the federal annual expenditures...
...231 pp...
...And so on...
...And Fallows offers sound advice, particularly for those on the left: the draft is a political tool, whatever else its more immediate functions...
...The Soviet diplomats clearly were attracted by Jones's plans to remove his flock to the Soviet Union Think of the chance to counter all the stories of Soviet defectors with the news that nearly a thousand Americans had decided to come to the workers' fatherland...
...Examples are the Cuban, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian revolutions...
...The corrupt regime of Comrade Leader Forbes Burnham profited in diverse ways from Jones's shrewd political support...
...His critique is not limited to Marx and Marxists...
...Consider this specimen: You who are stupid piss-ants and reptiles, who are lower than the primates, you can make whoopee if you want but your whoopee makes me sick...
...W. I. Thomas emphasized the importance of the "definition of the situation" in any analysis of social situations...
...If the capital of the Old Class takes the form of money, the capital of the New Class takes the form of culture...
...I am sorry to have to say I was disappointed...
...When he is approached by a man who offers to buy his foreign currency at black-market rates, a commonplace occurrence in many countries both East and West, he speaks about the man's "degeneracy...
...8.95...
...Yet Shiva Naipaul's portrait of the sad state of Guyana is the best part of the book...
...There was, first, it will be remembered, a fear of "separatism" of interests even in a pluralist movement such as social democracy and, related to this, the view that feminism was individualistic, that it ignored class interests as the crucial factor in the fight for a free society...
...In Gouldner's eyes the path to class succession is not an easy one...
...AS SHIVA NAIPAUL SHOWS in some detail in his book, the Guyana government lacked the Soviets' caution...
...peace, peace...
...Shortly before October 1917 she was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee, and immediately after the Revolution Lenin appointed her the new government's first Commissar of Social Welfare...
...It is why the great majority of his followers, despite or because of his ravings, stuck with him to the end and never lost their belief in him...
...Wherever uncertainty looms its unseemly head, the mad rush is on again to design "the next brilliant item...
...its will to power...
...240 NATIONAL DEFENSE, by James Fallows...
...In earlier years she had been independent in her actions and ideas on politics and women, fighting the party bureaucracy at every step...
...The leadership could point to "the backwardness of the people" in rejecting Kollontai's vision...
...Middle-class America's rage against the war ran parallel to the rising price it began to pay directly...
...But both Social Democrats and Communists were always ambivalent about fighting for the equality of women...
...My forecast is, unfortunately, that while this book deserves better, its acceptance will be limited—because of Gouldner's insistence that all social phenomena are complex and therefore require a dialectical analysis...
...and, very critically, the condition of the other classes...
...The unique aspect of this authority basis is that it is critical of all authority, including itself...
...It lies, I am convinced, in the structure of his perverse utopian community...
...In order to "socialize" the economy in the long run, the Plan would require companies with more than 100 employees to transfer a portion of their profits in the form of newly issued shares of stock to "wage-earner" or "employee-investment" funds administered by the local and national unions...
...Gouldner suggests that knowledge be added to Weber's charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal authority basis...
...but however imperfect, it should seek to incorporate the notion of "a generalized system of national service...
...You gonna commit treason...
...Friction is the only certainty in war...
...and, finally, rested on a worldwide maldistribution of wealth...
...but they continued to believe in him...
...Stephens also clarifies the problems and obstacles that stand in the way...
...Fallows puts this in political context as he quotes a Marine staff colonel: "I wonder about the morality of a nation that lets the disadvantaged do the fighting...
...When Rose Laub Coser and I wrote about the Jonestown tragedy (in Dissent, Spring 1979), the sources of our interpretation were limited to journalistic accounts...
...He was an exhalation of the moral decay I could sense all around me...
...arts and sciences...
...Wherever possible, we should restrict our ability to improve or acquire data that would serve the game of strategic predictions...
...Quoting one veteran of 19 years at the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake, California, Fallows seems to sum up his case: "There is no competition and incentive to produce...
...A baneful marriage of high-tech impresarios and economic analysts has spawned equipment, like the M-16 rifle, which "even our enemies would not remove from dead American soldiers...
...More important than the actual merit of her view about free love is the fact that it was seized upon for political and especially sexist reasons...
...The party leadership objected to her proposals on the grounds that the peasants would consider state support of illegitimate children a public licensing of prostitution...
...Although Engels's work on the family and Bebel's book on women were widely read among them, most felt that the women's problem would be dealt with by the liberation of the working class...
...Lenin told Clara Zetkin, as Farnsworth reports, that he "wouldn't bet on the reliability of those women who confuse their personal romances with politics...
...While the principle of an all-volunteer army remains attractive (chiefly because its contrary has the philosophic demerit of being coercive, discriminatory, and, in a sense, "always unfair"), Fallows urges a new draft...
...the Rohatyn plan calls for government to expropriate covertly the wages and property of working people to generate funds for new investment...
...THE MEIDNER PLAN is the centerpiece of Swedish socialists' program for industrial democracy...
...Afterward, she was finished off completely when she proceeded to carry her protest against Bolshevik policies to the Congress of the Comintern...
...According to Angelica Balabanoff, as quoted by Farnsworth, Kollontai was [a] frequent source of both personal and political annoyance...
...The new woman searched from one to another, not realizing that she would find her ideal only in the future, when human beings had learned to love...
...Arguments about strategic arms are not disputes about 242 facts but of faiths...
...Members of the New Class "want power commensurate with what they think to be their own value, and intellectuals have a very high opinion of their value...
...The New Class is distinguished quantitatively in its possession of a relatively greater stock of cultural capital than other classes and in the fact that a relatively larger part of its income derives from this capital...
...She also disagreed with Lenin on the definition of bureaucracy...
...Each of these analysts has failed to examine and see both the liberating and repressive potentialities in the New Class...
...Thus it might be possible to preserve workers' living standards even in an economy that is growing slowly...
...In fact, among that number a mere 25 (numbers, not a percentage) "possessed degrees from any college, of any quality, anywhere in the United States...
...The society had robbed him of his humanity...
...highly intelligent yet incomprehensibly naive...
...Although she traced women's psychological subordination to economic dependency, she was aware of the problem of internalization...
...She accused the party of abandoning the program with which it had come to power...
...After a brief return from Norway in 1927, she fought one more battle on behalf of the new Family Code that was in preparation...
...Yet while she knew how to deal democratically with her own staff, having everybody, from party functionary to janitor, participate in her meetings, she had less understanding of how to win over outsiders who obstructed her plans...
...It is here that students are socialized by teachers who represent the broader collectivity and the CCD rather than in such intermediate institutions as the family, community, and church...
...THE ROLE OF THE NEW CLASS in Gouldner's analysis is similar to the role of the proletariat in Marx's theoretical analysis...
...That alleged theory apparently derived from the following statement, cited by Clements, about "the new woman": When the wave of passion sweeps over her, she does not renounce the brilliant smile of life, she does not hypocritically wrap herself up in a faded cloak of female virtue...
...Now, one has to explain it...
...All hell broke loose...
...The Swedish Social Democrats' strategy for industrial democracy included many parts...
...Guyanese bauxite and sugar are nationalized, the multinational companies have been expropriated, but the Comrade Leader now presides over a country where everything shows signs of advancing decay...
...According to Fallows, we must first acknowledge inherited constraints that dominate our nation's economy...
...She spent her last 8 years in Moscow, after more than 25 years in the diplomatic service abroad...
...About conventional conflicts, however intractable to prior reasoning, at least there are facts about which to argue...
...The influence of the New Class depends partly on its functional significance...
...Kolontai opposed the separate peace with Germany...
...stifled popular participation...
...Fallows quotes with effect the Prussian military theorist and field officer Karl von Clausewitz: "Everything in War is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult...
...Ultimately," Fallows argues, "a nation must pay a price for using troops in war, and it will be more attentive to the price from the start if all its members think they must pay...
...but they should not blind us...
...I know I couldn't trust nothing, only Communism, and the principle that is in me...
...JOHN STEPHENS'S BRILLIANT BOOK The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism helps outline how such a desirable outcome may be achieved...
...More truly representative armed services may have a progressive influence upon the fashioning of defense policy...
...That is a serious objection...
...Of course, the suffering of the veterans rang louder than the bells of the monks because it was eminently reasonable to assign empty space to starving and mutilated soldiers...
...its numbers and those of its allies...
...Thus, when Sweden's Social Democratic party returns to power, the prospects for increased worker decision-making in the workplace and for increasing social control of investment decisions are excellent...
...Indeed, he must have gloated over Kollontai's compromises in 238 those last years...
...In the early 1980s, the socialist desire to go "beyond the welfare state" has grown urgent...
...I have made long, long plans to take care of these enemies...
...followed corporate priorities in economic development...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press...
...14.95...
...But she soon broke with him, being bored with her married life, and left her one-year-old son with her parents in order to go to Switzerland to study Marxism...
...She demanded that they allow her to be free, and they tried to reduce her to the old dependence...
...autonomous and independent yet romantic and sentimental...
...But I believe that there is more at stake here than these political issues...
...15.00 ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI: SOCIALISM, FEMINISM, AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, by Beatrice Farnsworth...
...And finally, throughout we must be mindful of "the special nature of combat...
...He argues that since Marx did little to define the term, used the term class in defining a relationship to the means of production, and applied it to such historically diverse groupings as slaves, serfs, journeymen, or bourgeoisie, "then surely intellectuals and intelligentisia can constitute a new 'class.' " While Gouldner has the right to "feel free not to make a scholastic issue of the matter," I believe that a term such as the "New Elite" or the "New Knowledge Elite" would have been more appropriate...
...We must recognize that future events may distort or even cancel the merits of any plans to wage a war, or to defend ourselves from possible attack...
...Alas, Mr...
...It was a fine vision, unsullied by realism...
...And fired under conditions that duplicate conditions of warfare, not the controlled experiments on which both superpowers have amassed considerable data...
...The increasing dependence of the Old Class upon the New Class in the West is paralleled in the East by the increasing dependence of the political elite upon the New Class...
...Why have they all objected to a change in the status of women in society beyond merely writing about the position of women or the establishment of some "women's bureaus" or the sanctioning of women's journals...
...She was protesting the conservative tendencies to stabilize the individual family...
...Chief among Fallows's preoccupations in this richly anecdotal and sharply argued study is the burden of subjecting public discussion to the claims of reason...
...Yet if we remain the creatures we are, puzzled by uncertainty, ill at ease with our imperfections, we are likely to continue to seek to know what it is best we should only believe...
...There are obvious potentialities in the CCD for the undermining of all existing authority structures...
...Such oversights are emblematic of much that is wrong-headed about our plans for and public arguments about defense...
...Lenin was critical of bureaucracy, but he used the term as a synonym for "red tape...
...She saw free love as a temporary phenomenon due to the conditions of capitalist society, where the new woman was constantly leaving men because she made demands on them which they could not meet...
...These concerns are brilliantly presented in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, the middle volume of his trilogy "The Dark Side of the Dialectic...
...Next, the Aman Laws strengthened the power of shop stewards and Labor Market Boards, and placed worker representatives on corporate boards...
...Since only realistic, repeatable missile-entry tests could provide, in principle, the kind of evidence upon which sound strategic decisions might be taken, Fallows offers a practical suggestion for containing the arms race...
...The remaining 15 percent is left to quarrel about...
...Where the costs of miscalculation are so high, no "rational leader, Soviet or American, would risk unleashing their arsenals...
...Its very culture, therefore, contains the seeds of its own destruction...
...If we are to think clearly about defense, Fallows believes, we must resist the temptation to conceive the world in tidy, predictable terms...
...What they rarely add," writes James Fallows, "is that this technical achievement could not be converted into a strategic success because there was a ford just up the river...
...The government office refused to print it, and she had it printed at her own expense...
...research) and program (vocational vs...
...Defense contractors depend upon procurement officers to award them research and manufacturing grants, and procurement officers soon learn that their postmilitary retirement income can be happily supplied (and significantly enhanced) by employment for the contractors whom they previously judged...
...In the Swedish Social Democratic party of Olaf Palme, the French Socialist party of Francois Mitterrand, the German Social Democratic party of Willy Brandt, even in the staid Dutch Labor party of Joop den Uyl, there arose a critique of the welfare state on the grounds that it was bureaucratic...
...There are other features of contemporary military life that suffer a comparable divorce between purpose and practice...
...Chief among these is the composition of our nation's armed forces...
...331 pp...
...There are, to be sure, some worthwhile insights here, as, for example, Naipaul's realization that, [Jones's] corruption was not something which developed with time—as Jones became more power-mad, paranoid, or whatever—but was contained in the very premises on which the Temple was founded: the cult of the superman equipped with paranormal powers...
...336 pp...
...Such thinking has become standard operating procedure among Pen241 tagon officials and their extended professional family...
...This CCD requires that the validity of claims be justified without reference to the speaker's person, authority, or status in society...
...To believe in our survivability, Fallows claims, is to tempt disaster...
...he maintains that there is a trend away from ownership control by the Old Class toward management control by the New Class...
...Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has ever fired an ICBM on the north-south route that each side's offensive missiles would have to take in an actual nuclear attack...
...No, she holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love's joy, however deep it is, and to satisfy herself...
...This will make many uncomfortable with his work...
...Successful 20th-century revolutions, which have involved a transfer of private property to the state apparatus, have been led by revolutionary elites containing large numbers of intellectuals...
...Aleksandra Kollontai, the first woman to be a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party at the start of the Revolution, was one of the few Bolshevik leaders who survived the purges of the '30s...
...During the Vietnam war, exemptions went not simply to the demonstrably disabled, but to the clever and the resourceful...
...His book is largely based on these tapes and not on the stories of the survivors on which the early journalists had to rely...
...Arguments can—and should—be waged over the use of military force...
...Gouldner cites research that suggests a negative correlation between education and religiosity, authoritarianism, dogmatism, and ethnocentrism, and a positive correlation between education and autonomy, complexity and reflexivity...
...If other intellectual systems attempt to normalize the world and see a correlation between the good and the powerful and the bad and the weak, the left Hegelian does not assume that the powerful are good or the weak bad...
...Nor does it seem likely to now...
...Her pamphlet The Workers' Opposition showed analytical depth...
...Such a mutual ban would fundamentally undercut the acquisition of the kind of information that might serve to encourage either side to risk an exchange of nuclear arms...
...Reston also provides a mildly amusing account of the relations between Jones and the Soviet embassy in Guyana...
...At the same time, members of the New Class in advanced industrial societies are acquiring an increasing amount of control over the machinery of production and administration...
...The leadership never felt at ease with Kollontai...
...I'm a Man of Steel, though I feel every ache and pain...
...But they are also somewhat overwrought...
...With both blue- and white-collar workers highly organized, the balance of power in Sweden and Norway favors labor...
...Working women would hardly have been recruited for the party if it had not been for the Women's Bureau...
...The motor of that cleverness is the fear of uncertainty, the modern incapacity to sustain self-confidence in the face of the humbling unknown...
...His work is left Hegelian in that it holds that knowledge is important in influencing social outcomes, but this knowledge also is viewed as the ideology of special social classes...
...Even as it subverts old inequities, the New Class silently inaugurates a new hierarchy of the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful...
...The goal of every good bureaucrat is to get an exclusive franchise on what he is doing...
...Gouldner situates his own work in a left neo-Hegelian sociology...
...She had become the theoretical spokesperson for that movement...
...Here defense planning has no evidence...
...Enter two further "realities...
...q 247...
...Therefore: What is needed for the systematic analysis of the Old and New class is a general theory of capital in which moneyed capital is seen as part of the whole, as a special case of capital...
...that the examined life (their examination) is better than the unexamined life which, it says, is sleep and no better than death...
...By then Jones was surely already a madman...
...Fallows seeks to situate debate about how we select—and retain— those in military service within the larger context of the relation between society and the resources (and reasons) that society might bring to the task of defending itself...
...Why did Stalin let her live...
...Gouldner is not naive enough to argue that the capitalist class has lost its power...
...432 pp...
...Not only did she challenge the leader of the Revolution, but her ideas about the liberation of women went beyond economic demands and threatened the very nature of the whole patriarchal system...
...It is now no longer enough simply to be good...
...At best, we build our missiles and speculate about their consequences: we have constructed "nuclear theologies...
...This linguistic characteristic is the culture of careful and critical discourse (CCD...
...More than once [writes Farnsworth] the Central Committee asked Balabanoff to substitute for Kollontai in the leadership of the women's movement Balabanoff understood what she called the "intrigue," and refused these offers...
...At this Congress, although requests were made by women and some men to give government and party support to the work of the Women's Bureau, its mission was further restricted...
...Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press...
...This New Class, like all classes, contains contradictory elements, and one of its major contradictions lies in the tensions between the scientific and technologically oriented intelligentsia and the humanistically oriented intellectuals...
...Along with other Bolsheviks, she could not face being cast out of the society she had helped create...
...Nor does either side have reliable knowledge about the impact an exchange of nuclear arms would have upon the actual delivery of nuclear-powered weaponry...
...And Lenin's stereotypical view of women is surely exemplified in his statement, cited by Farnsworth, that contact between women and youth is "natural" because it is a continuation of motherhood...
...Not everyone would have to enter the fighting ranks, though Fallows seems to suggest there may be some virtue to requiring young people to share something of the more traditionally disciplined experience of "the ranks...
...The whole Bolshevik leadership, men and women, held this view, with the exception of Kollontai...
...She tried to take on everybody with the sheer force and sparkle of her intellect, and failed...
...Perhaps the authors fail to recognize these traits in her because philosophically Kollontai was consistent...
...At the heart of any such new draft would be the argument, inherently democratic, that privileges presuppose service...
...Here we get the brew of slimy wordage that poured almost daily from Jones's unconscious in the Guyana jungle...
...246 The public education system is the necessary institution for the mass production of the New Class and the dissemination of the CCD...
...Most women in the movement—Ruth Fischer and Angelica Balabanoff come readily to mind—were thought to be silly whether they symbolized through their behavior the wish for sexual liberation, or the wish for purity as in the case of Balabanoff...
...But Stalin killed more women among the old Bolsheviks than he let live —and why Kollontai was to live, we simply don't know...
...She ordered the establishment of social services in the style we know today in Western society...
...as a result, the labor movement developed on strong craft lines and remained less centralized than in Sweden...
...Alvin Gouldner's interests transcended the boundaries of academic sociology...
...He now runs the country with the help of so-called people's militias, people's self-defense corps, and people's police...
...For the idea that movement toward economic democracy can only be brought about in times of prosperity depends on Keynesian assumptions about the economic "growth dividend" that can be invested in socially desirable purposes...
...To explain it, Dostoevskian intuition or a great deal of sociological imagination is indispensable...
...He not only fed Jones's paranoia about the FBI and CIA plots to destroy the community, but even attempted to sell the story of Jonestown to a Hollywood movie company...
...As Clements writes, Her socialism was based on three elements—community, revolutionary purity, and female emancipation...
...She may have been wanting in political efficacy, but she was a sharp analyst of social situations...
...Obviously, as Clements notes, "the demands of the veterans rang more loudly in her ears than the ancient bells of priestly power...
...While still working with Shliapnikov, a Bolshevik union leader who had been her lover, she fell in love with Dybenko, a sailor seven years her junior, and soon married him...
...Clara Zetkin, in Germany, had been more successful...
...The legitimacy of each of these is made problematic by the critical nature of the CCD...
...Well, Guyana is surely not a pleasant place to live in, but such strident outbursts hardly help clarify the issues...
...But never did it occur to her that one needs more than being right to win one's case...
...The concrete issue at stake was that the party wanted husbands, members of both registered and nonregistered unions, to be responsible for alimony and child support...
...12.95...
...With all its contradictions, the New Class has played a revolutionary role vis-à-vis the Old Class...
...Gouldner maintains that the alienation of the New Class from the Old Class and the internal unity of the New Class, at the present stage, are much intensified by the barred opportunities that confront it, because of an oversupply of educated manpower...
...204 pp...
...It ranges from the analyses of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils to those of Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse...
...Why did they not heed Kollontai's demand that the party promote women into positions of authority throughout the Soviet system...
...At the same time, our knowing that we may not be invulnerable has historically driven us forward to yet more sophisticated and even more uncertain mechanisms and consequences...
...Stephens points out that in Sweden, where the labor movement means the Social Democratic party and blue-collar workers are highly organized in unions affiliated with the party, Social Democratic governments helped the unions organize white-collar workers into the TCO...
...However neat the slogan "going beyond the welfare state" may be, it will take more than fine words to bring about industrial democracy and promote economic prosperity when effective demand for goods and services is stagnating worldwide...
...He attacked them viciously, ridiculed them and attempted to destroy their least bit of self-respect...
...This provoked plenty of gossip among her comrades whose sexist prejudices had remained intact...
...If defense is to get more, it is important to understand how little margin there really is in the federal arena with which to do that...
...But it was never "enough simply to be good...
...New York: Random House...
...As Clements quotes her, "The contemporary heroines have to fight a battle on two fronts: with the outside world and with the inclination of their forebears, which is deep within them...
...Gouldner argues that a new class system is arising in the Third World, in the "socialist" nations of the Second World, and in the late-capitalist 245 nations of the First World...
...She also proposed a marriage contract that would safeguard the interests of wives by having couples conclude agreements on their economic rights and obligations to each other and their children...
...It is noteworthy that Marx once filled out a "confession," a "questionnaire" for his daughter Laura revealing that the virtue he admired most in men was "strength," and in women, "weakness...
...Such weapons "change the atmosphere and induce incalculable winds which would affect subsequent missiles...
...The emancipation of women and the emancipation of all people would proceed from the creation of a harmonious society, built by the working class and by a party of revolutionaries who refused to compromise their principles...
...WHY THEN THE PERSISTENCE with which the defense establishment rejects arguments that might reorient its mission and practices...
...Pravda did not even print a notice...
...Although, as Farnsworth points out, the harshness of the polemics showed that the party leaders dealt with her as they would have with any man, sexism was rampant during the Comintern's proceedings...
...Soon thereafter, coincidentally, she was sent abroad on some mission, and then dropped from the Central Committee during the Seventh Party Congress in 1918...
...In 1980, however, of the 100,860 men who enlisted for their first term of active military duty, an extraordinarily invisible portion had any educational or social experience of college...
...During the 1970s, European socialists grew dissatisfied with the welfare state they had built, despite the prosperity and security it brought to European society...
...His book deserves widespread attention...
...Of course, she was right in her assessment of where the Communist regime was heading: the dream of the Revolution was no more, and Lenin's politics were spelling doom...
...Kollontai was born in 1872, the child of Russian aristocrats, of the second marriage of a mother who already at that time had mustered the courage to divorce her first husband...
...But this data, Fallows points out, is largely compromised...
...In this way she united her adversaries against herself and alienated the leader of the Revolution by telling him that he did not know his communism...
...Our mutual safety, therefore, lies in our shared ignorance of what might happen should either side push the button...
...Gouldner sees Eurocommunism as an effort to resolve this dilemma...
...In the dark pessimistic Weberian tradition, Gouldner concludes with the observation that, although the New Class is the most progressive force in modern society, The New Class sets itself above others, holding that its speech is better than theirs...
...I've made some big plans, honey, both here and there and everywhere...
...28.50...
...Gouldner's left Hegelian acceptance of dissonance illuminates the contraditory nature of the New Class...
...Yet what emerges here is not much different from the story we already knew...
...Too often, Fallows concludes, weapons are built not because they meet a demonstrated need but "to conform to paper projections of how a weapon should work...
...Of the present federal budget pie, 49.5 percent (60 percent when one includes interest payments) belong to "entitlements, or the uncontrollables...
...Stephens's approach, on the other hand, suggests that accumulated social capital, in the form of pension funds, can pick up the slack in job-creating economic activities, such as mass transit equipment, housing, and solar energy...
...He views reluctance to reassess policies about military conscription as a failure to acknowledge important practical implications of liberal/left theory...
...However one may object to actual and potential abuses of our military strength, if decisions about its use are to be democratically made, we require a citizenry that "feels it has a direct stake in its performance...
...From her father she learned the meaning of liberal values and a love of writing...
...Reston attempts an explanation through some fancy theology about Jones as the incarnation of the devil...
...If Marxists see a future in which a powerful and good proletariat will dominate, the left Hegelians accept "the possibility that those who are becoming stronger—such as the New Class—and to whom the future may belong, are not always the better and may, indeed, be morally ambiguous...
...yet Stephens's approach not only can meet it, it may be the only one that can do so...
...Over a period of 20-30 years, profitable firms would come under the control of their employees...
...Farnsworth notes that "Trotsky . . . bantered with Radek to the amusement of the audience over whether Kollontai should be called an Amazon or a Valkyrie...
...Weapons production has been severed from its purpose...
...What is needed to ensure "the invulnerability of the deterrent" is that the other side must believe we are invulnerable...
...Conversely, what is required for the understanding of culture as capital is nothing less than a political economy of culture...
...Indeed, National Defense offers compelling evidence that those for whom defense questions are matters of professional life are characteristically driven to exceed the cautions of reason...
...its relative autonomy...
...Analysts may second-guess each other's likely reactions to imagined conflict scenarios, but neither side has any basis for knowledge...
...Reston does not deal with, is not the sickness of Jones's soul...
...Clements and Farnsworth could have been a bit more critical of Kollontai...
...The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class takes the form of 16 theses...
...In 30 years of peacetime operation, Fallows claims, "the central function of the military has been perverted...
...Reston has neither...
...The party regarded Kollontai not only as one of its most talented orators," writes Farnsworth, "she was accorded the further honor, rare for a woman, of at least temporary acceptance as a theorist...
...But what if there is no "growth dividend...
...If the consequences of a military or defense policy are not "borne by the same public that must give its assent" to those policies, then the direction of both policies and their practices is less likely to earn accountability...
...THE SPIRIT OF MAX WEBER is present in this work...
...Instead, she cleverly pointed out something they had in common: they all distrusted the workers...
...These were not all of one mind, and she could have tried to find allies among them...
...Kollontai ran into trouble because of her feminist views...
...Apprehensions about—and resistance to—a burgeoning defense establishment remain legitimate...
...Despite lack of money and staff, and the hostility of the agency's staff that had been taken over from the previous government, Kollontai accomplished much as Commissar of Social Welfare...
...However, perceptions about social phenomena are frequently as important as the realities themselves...
...With hindsight we must recognize, however—and the biographers fail to do this—that much of her courage was based on a rationalistic fallacy...
...After the Revolution, Kollontai managed to persuade Lenin that it is imperative that working women, and the wives of workers and peasants, be mobilized for Bolshevism, lest they succumb to the propaganda of "bourgeois feminists...
...But in the larger democracies where business centralization has been limited, and where unions are weaker, progress will be much more difficult...
...Yet in the end she capitulated completely, agreeing to make changes in her previous writings that would indict former colleagues, and acquiescing to everything demanded of her...
...Fallows clearly grasps our dilemma...
...Gouldner dismisses the anticipated criticism of those who will be "dismayed (and even enraged)" by his use of the term class...
...Such a service would offer options under a mandatory umbrella...
...Swedish labor's success enabled the Social Democratic governments to begin moving a little "beyond the welfare state...
...Kollontai's pamphlet made little impact upon the Congress, at which she was treated with sarcasm by Lenin and Bukharin, who included in their polemics personal invectives to discredit her...
...Kollontai was not expelled from the party, but was sent abroad, in the diplomatic service...
...Shiva Naipaul's account of the politics of Guyana are vivid...
...This raises the larger question: why have Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as well as socialists of all shades in Western countries distrusted the women's movement...
...There is some value in having a chance to get the authentic flavor of Jones's ravings...
...Both Farnsworth and Clements have written excellent biographies, giving us not only details of Kollontai's political life and her feminist views but also a refresher course in the Russian Revolution...
...the idea of a preacher who did not believe in God and a church that was not really a church but a secret society...
...In a concluding chapter, Stephens argues that the smaller welfare states, such as Norway, Denmark, Holland, Austria, and New Zealand, as well as large Australia, could follow a similar path to industrial democracy...
...I feel like we're setting up a kind of class warfare...
...He begins with an examination of Marxist social theory in order to elucidate the concepts of "reform" and "revolution...
...At the Eleventh Congress in 1922, an investigation committee of which Clara Zetkin, her old friend, was a part, threatened Kollontai with expulsion from the party...
...Farnsworth speculates about the part played in this by Stalin's sexual sadism and his contempt for women...
...In this pamphlet, which she presented at the Party Congress, she wrote that the party's present problem lay deeper than the issues raised by the Workers Opposition: at stake was democracy in the party, and the power of the workers...
...Keynesianism has no good answer to that question...
...It was, in part, in order to avoid a position identified with economic determinism that C. Wright Mills preferred the term "power elite" to the term "ruling class...
...The members of the New Class face the dilemma of perhaps having to support the extension of the state's control in order to remove barriers to their ascendance, while exposing themselves to the censorship of that very state apparatus...
...Drawing on the works of such neo-Marxists and neoWeberians as Nikos Poulantzas, Erik Wright, G. Carcherdi, and Anthony Giddens, Stephens revises Marx in two ways: (1) He sees property rights as consisting of the right to make a variety of decisions about how property may be used, and he argues that socialization of the right to control the use of property is what socialists are after, rather than simply the socialization of ownership (2) He conceptualizes class relations so that he can distinguish between class interests in consumption and class interests in production...
...Perhaps this dilemma will sober and keep us...
...Lenin was outraged by her behavior...
...Like her mother, Aleksandra was to be strong-willed...
...Fifty-three American fighter planes were lost in the effort before the Thanh Hoa Bridge in Vietnam was finally destroyed by a guided missile...
...From 1920 to 1922 she was the director of the Zhenotdel, the Women's Bureau, 236 for whose establishment she had already fought before the Revolution...
...Lots of plans...
...At present, of course, the volunteer army has tended to formalize what, during the Vietnam shame, was the merely implicit record: "a service that exempts the rich or the otherwise fortunate is not a representative service...
...Although her performance must have been courageous and brilliant, to believe some witnesses, she had obviously set herself up to lose...
...The rational response would be "to develop forces and strategies that give us the greatest possible capacity to adapt to whatever the future brings," and Fallows does believe that there is "a rational list of what the nation needs for defense...
...KOLLONTAI WAS MUCH IN ADVANCE of her time, and this makes her biographies of more than historical interest...
...That is, "If men define situations as real, they will have real consequences...
...Today we would not find this statement so objectionable...
...Ineffective equipment, however, is one thing: Fallows's indictment strikes more deeply into the administrative machinery that produces devices seemingly immune to reliability or success...
...Unconcerned that this was one of the Russian Orthodoxy's holiest shrines, and without consulting the political leadership, she ordered the seizure of the monastery...
...You make your whoopee, while I do something that is far more significant, because I know exactly what's going to take place...
...Some of his ministers and officials took Jones's money, others slept with the (mostly white) girls that Jones provided for them, and the regime as a whole relished the political reinforcement that Jones provided in the form of mass rally supporters and enthusiastic press releases...
...its political skills...
...This coincided, of course, with the stabilization of the Stalin regime itself...
...Even after many tests, "prudent men" should doubt that all the relevant uncertainties have been removed...
...DRIVEN BY A GRIM LOGIC, the modern American defense establishment has invested enormous energy and resources in pursuit of ever more technically complex aircraft and weapons...
...New York: Seabury Press...
...But, when all is said and done, Naipaul's book is, deep down, a shallow contribution...
...In the area of family policy, she abolished classification of children as legitimate or illegitimate, created the Department for the Protection of Mothers and Children, and laid the legal foundation for full state-funding of maternity and infant care...
...One should not be surprised by Gouldner's argument that the moneyed class will be succeeded by another relatively privileged group, for while the history of all hitherto existing societies may have been the history of class struggles, "The lowliest class never came to power...
...Members of the Old Class are becoming increasingly dependent upon members of the New Class for technical knowledge...
...I personally remember that she was accused by both socialists and Communists in Western Europe of encouraging free love, and that the mention of her name provoked sarcastic remarks concerning her so-called waterglass theory...
...By 1905 she was a Social Democrat...
...Disputes about defense policy are not exhausted by skirmishes over the size of the Pentagon purse...
...She took heart from the development of the women's movement in the German Social Democratic party, under the guidance of Clara Zetkin, and actively backed Zetkin's demands for a women's bureau in every section of the Second International...
...its education...
...But she continued to live...
...New York: Times Books...
...New York: Simon & Schuster...
...Kollontai was called back to Moscow from her diplomatic mission in 1944...
...This is part of the historical procedure, part of historical change...
...Talk about "first-strike capacity," "protecting the Triad" (bombers, submarines, land-based missiles), or the frenzied notion of a "winnable nuclear event": these discussions breathe the rarified air of hypothesis and conjecture...
...Stephens concludes that countries in which the welfare state is most complete are characterized by two things: high proportions of their work forces belong to labor unions...
...These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine who has not seen War...
...Besides, and contrary to Gouldner's assumptions, self-criticism is not a practice of all sectors of the New Class...
...The mystery of Jones's ascendancy over his congregation does not yield to psychological or theological ruminations...
...Stop (or at least significantly limit) the testing of entry vehicles that can carry nuclear devices...
...The author provides some other hitherto unavailable information...
...It won't wash...
...243 James Reston's book is worth reading largely because, owing to a suit based on the Freedom of Information Act, he was able to gain access to FBI documents containing transcripts of Jones's nightly sessions with his followers...
...Those who talk well, it is held, excel those who talk poorly or not at all...
...Friction is the difference between war as it is imagined and war as it actually occurs...
...But on Fallows's own account, defense thinkers have never scored high on either prudence or the capacity to allow uncertainty to protect us...
...In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, industrialization started earlier...
...It could be argued that Kollontai's notion of free love is similarly sexist as that of those men who hold that one should "screw 'em and leave 'em...
...Its features should address just these traits...
...The actual role of education in undermining the status quo varies according to sector (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary), according to type of institution (teaching vs...
...Complexweapon enthusiasts readily cite such episodes when pressing Congress and the public for sophisticated hardware...
...As a result, he tells us little we did not already know...
...Badly pirated from the earlier, highly praised AR-15, the plight of the M-16 is typical: weapons development has fallen into the hands of a military "corrupted by the mentality of magic weapons," and often sabotaged by the "culture of procurement...
...In nuclear weapons, both sides have a stake in keeping either side from starting to believe it really knows how the weapons would actually perform...
...Too easily defense talk "drifts up into the thin air of grand abstractions...
...But here there are no facts...
...I was therefore eager to turn to these two books hoping that, with the distance of some two years, they would provide a more searching account of these horrifying happenings...
...Clements relates that Lenin was furious with Kollontai for having acted on her own, forcing his hand to decree the separation of church and state, which he believed then to be premature...
...For Kollontai, bureaucracy was a special arrangement of social relationships, in which "some third person decides your fate...
...There was, for example, her attempt to take over the Alexander Nevski Monastery in order to convert it into a home for homeless returning veterans who were roaming the streets of Petrograd...
...A "New Class" of intellectuals and technical intelligentsia is entering into competition with the "Old Class" of businessmen or party leaders who now control the various nations' economies...
...One gains the impression from both authors— though neither seems to be aware of it—that Kollontai was a woman of extremes: remarkably courageous yet a coward at the end...
...In 1930, the Bureau was finally abolished altogether...
...Kollontai's personal life did not endear her to her comrades...
...Socialists and Communists alike have never questioned the basic stereotypes, Bebel's statements in Die Frau notwithstanding...
...In a democracy, Fallows reminds us, "a military must represent its society...
...Yet Communists regarded it as an isolated effort, cut off from the general party work...
...You better know whom you are dealing with...
...239 and labor/socialist parties have frequently been in government...
...Having already severed his followers from any contacts they individually had possessed, having deprived them of any means of individual survival such as property, passports, etc., having broken down each individual's ego by rearranging friendships, courtships, and marriages—having, in a word, broken down each individual's orientations to people or things, Jones deprived his followers of any capacity for informed judgment, action, even a dim awareness of self...
...His general observations about the West Coast are offensively condescending...
...Tactics are read from textbooks, emphasis is put on "magic weapons" rather than on men and the harsh, unpredictable life, and death, which is battle...
...Knowledge systems are historically shaped...
...Recent events in the United States indicate that the Old Class and its political representatives are far from dead...
...In the 1930s and '40s, as in the '20s after her defeat at the Eleventh Congress, she decided, as Clements cites, that "obedience was preferable to isolation...
...Fallows's topic is nuclear conflict, exchange between unimaginably ferocious weaponry...
...The decentralization and disunity of the British union movement prevented the Labour party from ruling as long as its Swedish counterpart did and this, in turn, meant it was harder to organize white-collar workers after the Second World War...
...JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY, by Shiva Naipaul...
...He did not want her expelled from the party, and he was reluctant to attack her in public...
...To Lenin's notion that contact between women and youth was "natural," she countered that there was ground for an alliance between women and youth because both were in the position 237 of being potential rebels...
...The monks rang the bells, a crowd gathered, and sailors were called in to disperse the people and occupy the monastery...
...Obstacles to improved public understanding of defense questions are varied, but there are "three realities against which all our military plans should be tested...
...The key, Stephens argues, will be labor organizing, particularly among whitecollar workers...
...Soon thereafter she turned her attention to women's issues...
...In 50 or 60 years, the majority of equity capital would come under collective control...
...Simplistic judgments about the "efficiency" of various weapons and strategies have their source in modernity's pervasive obsession with uncertainty...
...Burnham's corrupt dictatorship and Jones's corrupt utopia seem to have been made for each other...
...13.95...
...As prices of energy and raw materials have increased and interest rates soared, the economic precondition for the welfare state—rapid economic growth —came to an end...
...And how come she survived...
...Nowhere is this more evident, or more dangerous, than in the prospect of nuclear war...
...She assumed she was going to her death, to judge by her last letters...
...THE TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM TO SOCIALISM, by John D. Stephens...
...Like many Bolsheviks who were purged, Kollontai signed false statements indicting former comrades...
...In the meantime, in the United States and Italy, where labor/socialist parties have not been able to govern, levels of union organization are much lower, and the balance of power favors capital...
...Rosa Luxemburg—not a feminist in any sense—escaped this fate although I well remember that she also was accused by political adversaries of being a "romantic"—an adjective often used as synonymous with "silly...
...When it comes to arguing about arms, that is no simple matter...
...institutionalized inhumane conditions in the workplace...
...Jones's private madness, while real, does not sufficiently explain the public suicide of 913 of his followers...
...She demanded communes, revolutionary purity, and the emancipation of women...
...25.00 cloth, $13.00 paper...
...And again to work...
...At both the Tenth and Eleventh Congresses, and at the Congress of the Comintern, she conducted herself with great dignity and strength, ignoring humiliating invectives, going straight to her main point: the Communist party had gone wrong...
...THE FUTURE OF INTELLECTUALS AND THE RISE OF THE NEW CLASS, by Alvin W. Gouldner...
...We learn, for example, about that scavenger, Mark Lane, who, after having exploited the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy as well as of Martin Luther King, saw another opportunity in Jonestown to exploit a tragedy...
...121 pp...
...235 Kollontai joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, drawn into their circle by Lenin, who was impressed by her determined antiwar position...
...Two questions remain: Why did she capitulate to Stalin...
...Fallows suggests that there is some comfort to be taken...
...But by combining study of the classical social theorists with a command of recent empirical studies, Stephens shows that the program of Sweden's Social Democratic party is relevant not only to socialists seeking to break out of the impasse of the welfare state but also to those who have not yet been able to build one...
...He tries to fill the gap with an account of the excesses of San Francisco's counterculture that may be news to his British audience but is old hat to American readers...
...To understand how such madness can have such horrendous social consequences one must ask how it contributed to create a social structure from which individuals could not extricate themselves...
...ALL THIS TIME Kollontai continued her activities on behalf of women...
...But I appreciate the fact that they don't let us forget that she was one of the few people who as early as 1921 and 1922 stood up at official Communist party and Comintern meetings, to declare her opposition on the basis of socialist principles—and that her insights about the place of women surpassed by far those of other socialist feminists, across the left spectrum...
...Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike were suspicious of the women's movement, ready to label attempts to foster women's interests as "bourgeois feminism...
...Some readers may react to Stephens's book by questioning its relevance at a time when Reagan is dismantling the welfare state...
...But, then again, what would the Soviets do with these thousand deluded followers of a madman...
...In order to determine how socialists might get past the current impasse, Stephens analyzes why some of the European welfare states are more complete than others...
...How she combined theoretical astuteness with political naiveté—a fact the biographers fail to point out—is revealed in her treatment of her opponents...
...He has ruined it economically while amassing a gigantic personal fortune, rigs all elections so that the blacks who are his basis of power invariably prevail over the Indian laborers who are Jagan's mainstay...
...In the end, the embassy people, good bureaucrats that they were, kept away from too much involvement with Jonestown...
...But the real question, and this is what Mr...
...The attack on the educational system and on other cultural institutions associated with the New Class may itself contribute to its further alienation from the Old Class—an example of what Gouldner's mentor, Robert K. Merton, called the "selffulfilling prophecy...
Vol. 29 • April 1982 • No. 2
