Prospects for a Change in the Communist World

...and that the problem he raises remains a basic one, requiring extended discussion...

...But the party, for reasons of doctrine and in order to affirm its supra-economic power, was never able to admit to having served only as mid-wife to a society which would escape from its tutelage...

...In writing his own moral and intellectual autobiography, he would have contributed more to our knowledge of the Communist than by his abstractions...

...This essence, according to Djilas, lies in the totalitarianism of the "new class...

...The antisectarian campaign of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung was never directed at the bases of dogmatism...

...Buried deep in the Communist soul, there is still the socialist idea, a demand for rationalization of social life, of respect for man, of economic efficiency...

...ONE MUST ALSO BEWARE of approaching in an "idealist" manner the "essence" or "nature" of Communism...

...Rather than reject Marxism, they wish to revise it...

...But in order to have a bad conscience, one must first possess a conscience...

...Furthermore this regime is affected by an internal fracture which the oriental despotism of the past did not experience: it is condemned by the ideology which it claims for itself...

...In terms of privileges, the various strata of the party bureaucracy were intermingled to a certain extent with those of the "productive" or administrative intelligentsia...

...It is certain that decisions concerning China or Poland and even Czechoslovakia are no longer made unilaterally in the Kremlin...

...In all domains, the intelligentsia, this new ascending class, even though not organized, formulate their liberal demands: the writers, the journalists fight the censor...

...Translated by PATRICIA A. KOSOBUD...

...This peculiar "bonapartism" is manifested somewhat similarly in the party: its tendency to play the classes one against the other in order to make the party the supreme arbiter...

...or, as the Yugoslays have done with such virtuosity, he can create substitutes for it...

...It is no accident that Rakosi decided against the advice of all the specialists on the construction of the metro in Budapest...

...For many years the intellectuals of Belgrade trembled before this implacable inquisitor...

...The following article comes from a Hungarian socialist now living in Paris, who is known in America for his recent book on the 1957 revolution in Hungary...

...But in order to carry out this action, the party apparatus—within which the professional revolutionaries, recruited from the heart of the proletariat, play an important role—had in the first instance to associate itself with the intelligentsia, that is to say the middle class: managers and specialists of all sorts, engineers, technical staffs, scientists, doctors, jurists, teachers, writers, journalists...

...but in the end it withdraws...

...but it is a factor with which one must reckon...

...But all within this heritage is far from being negligible or unsalvageable...

...Comments from readers are invited, and it goes without saying that Mr...

...This is precisely what distinguishes Stalinist totalitarianism from other totalitarianisms, for example the Nazi...

...The greatest danger to the monopoly of the Communist parties would be a meeting between "those who think" and the mass of workers who have become the object of history instead of assuming the role of shaping subject that they should have been according to Marxist theory...

...But at the same time, in reaction to the strong pressure of the secessionism and the urge to freedom that was seen at work in Hungary, another tendency comes into play: a tendency to patch up the ideological unity, to reforge the solidarity of the Communist parties and countries...

...the universality of science is more and more widely recognized...

...scientists and technicians express their I75 scepticism about the simplicity of the obligatory paths of MarxistLeninism...

...At bottom, the new middle class of Communist countries much resembles the western bourgeoisies of the 19th century...

...Fejto will have the opportunity to reply to his critics.— EDITORS The new political thinking of Milovan Djilas, as set forth in The New Class, is marked by a rather surprising contradiction...

...How explain the blossoming, in the midst of incurable sickness, of the seeds of health, of a humanistic critique, of a passion for reform...

...Djilas himself employs the term sometimes in a restrictive sense (bureaucracy of the party), sometimes in a broader sense: "the new class is composed of those who enjoy special privileges and a preferential economic situation based solely on the administrative monopoly which they hold...

...The privileged of the new regime, he says, must become totalitarian or die—and this, apart from whether communism is "national" or not...

...This essence resides "in the control and monopoly of ideas, and the expropriation of the society by the bureaucracy of the party...

...They seek a third way...

...And it is precisely the bitter period of struggle conducted by the productive intelligentsia against the parasitic bureaucracy which marks the real evolution in Communist countries...

...After the death of Stalin, centrifugal forces manifested themselves with a burst...

...Since 1954, when Mao Tse-tung conceived the idea of transforming "the empire" into a sort of "commonwealth," the idea has made progress...

...But he must submit to the law of democratization...

...In order to justify their political monopoly and their privileges, the party oligarchs claimed for themselves the mission of developing more rapidly than the bourgeois would have been able to do, the productive powers of the nation...

...Within most Communist countries, the oligarchy of the party substituted itself (in the offices as in the private apartments) for the dispossessed bourgeois and landowners...

...on the other hand he asserts that the changes which have occurred since the death of Stalin have altered not at all "the nature of the system," that national communism, despite increasing possibilities for emancipation from Moscow, is incapable of changing its "essence...

...The best argument against these pessimsitic views of Djilas is the case of Djilas himself...

...Let us note however that the eclipse of conscience of the proletariat in Communist countries does not need to continue indefinitely...

...The explanation of this lies in the fact that after the nationalization of Soviet indutsry, the Soviet economy tended quite naturally to settle into State capitalism, directed by an oligarchy of managers...

...It is in this spirit that we now, tardily, publish his article...

...competence is emerging as the only solid basis for rising in the hierarchy...

...After having believed, contrary to all good sense, in the supreme virtue of the "directives," and of the political decisions emanating from the Politburo, they have partly returned in Russia as in the other Communist countries, to the classical stimulants of the market economy...

...And is it not interesting to notice that even though Djilas, no doubt because of his defiance and anger, was drawn to a harsh antiCommunist position somewhat like Souvarine, other impassioned but lucid anti-Communists, like Raymond Aron, fundamentally revised their theories...

...In fact the "national communist" (as has become clear in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland) is distinguished from his predecessor, the Muscovite Communist in that, deprived or almost deprived, of the direct support of the Soviet army, he must win a popular base in his own country...

...Despite all the nostalgia with which he regards totalitarianism, he must resign himself to some compromise with the people whom he wishes to make an ally...

...Already it has been reported that the Soviet directors themselves, no doubt to prevent spontaneous movements, have restored to the unions certain tasks for the defense of the workers' interests, at least on the factory level...

...it fears revolution and prefers transition...

...It has often been remarked that an air of bad conscience accompanied the acts and gestures of Stalinism, its exactions, its treacheries, its trials...

...It seems to us, however, that the process of de-Stalinization has opened the very heart of world communism to changes that can be retarded but not prevented...

...The fear of popular revolt has reforged the alliance of the party leaderships...

...the noise of the Hungarian insurrection made windows tremble as far as Hradsin, the White House of Belgrade, and the residence of Mao...

...At the same time, under the influence of a kind of collective instinct toward conservatism, the patry apparatus maintains its distance with relation to the intelligentsia, denounces it before the working class, and demagogically reproaches its "bourgeois tendencies...

...And how, moreover, can the essence of Communism be unchangeable, while the Communist is not...

...Did not Aron write, in a remarkable introduction to a book of documents on the Hungarian revolution: "We know that a Soviet regime is no more invulnerable than any other to the repercussions of economic development, to the emotions and dreams of men, to the influences coming from outside and above all from the West...

...This is why one must take with a grain of salt the anti-dogmatic protestations which the Communists periodically proffer...

...It is this that Djilas refuses to see: that there exists, as much in his own country as in the Soviet Union, a reformist intelligensia which tries, if possible, to rationalize the regime, of which they are the beneficiaries, without overthrowing it...

...It is liberal, but not anarchist...

...Absurdity is one of the forces of cohesion in the party...

...If it is true that as Djilas says, the Communist finds himself in a situation of "incipient civil war" against the population, this definition is also valid about relations of the bureaucrcay with the administrators and specialists...

...Nonetheless, it is clear that his argument is neither to be sustained nor disproved by reference to one or another temporary fluctuation of the politics of eastern Europe...

...A. Nove reports, in a remarkable study published in the November-December issue of Soviet Survey (An analysis of cultural trends in the Soviet orbit) , that despite the immense practical achievements which culminated in the launching of Sputnik, Soviet economic science has remained completely stagnant during the last quarter of a century...

...And did not Dedijer, the friend of Djilas, tell us, in illustration of his former Stalinism, that he would have been capable of shooting any compatriot who doubted Stalin's genius...

...The fanaticism of the Yugoslav Communists seemed to us until 1948 an impregnable citadel, a spiritual malady impenetrable to reason or good sense...

...The moral revolt of many Communists, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav and Russian would be incomprehensible unless it be considered a crisis of "the return of the repressed," provoked by the shock of the Khrushchev confessions...

...Djilas seems to recognize but one alternative to Stalinism: Western parliamentary democracy...

...WITHOUT DOUBT DJILAS' BOOK would have gained in profundity if he had attempted a "psychoanalysis" of the object of his hatred and repulsion: the reigning bureaucracy...

...A groping pluricentrism has succeeded the Stalinist monocentrism...

...It seems to me however that the Rude Pravo of Prague has been much closer to reality in asserting some months ago, that national communism is one of the forms of "revisionism" and is necessarily interdependent with other kinds...

...One can maneuver this ideal, twist it or confiscate it, as Khrushchev has actually tried to do...

...But precisely the tensions between commissars and specialists, both their tendency to merge and their quarrels, constitute one of the basic webs of life in Communist countries...

...The "national communist" can be deceitful in regard to democratization, he can postpone it, he can apply it in a formalist manner...

...It is by the grace of Marxism-Leninism that the bureaucracy of the party claims to dominate the specialists, to judge and coordinate their activities...

...Gomulka has thus been able to claim (and one could not contradict it) that Polish adherence to the treaty of Warsaw is based at once on an ideological community and on the national interest (the Oder-Neisse frontier...

...On the one hand he prophesies the "complete disintegration" of Communism and states that the unity of the "world communist movement is irremediably compromised...

...It is by the grace of this Science of "General Laws" that a Zhdanov has greater knowledge of esthetics than Pasternak or Prokofiev, of physics than Einstein, that Stalin was able to improvise himself into a great linguist, a great strategist, a great historian...

...Fejto's manuscript came to us a good many months ago, and it may indeed be somewhat of an injustice to him that we have been forced, for reasons of space, to delay it until now...

...In opposition to the irrationality of Stalinism, the intelligentsia of the Communist countries seek new directions in rationality...

...It is this group which thus far has provided motive power for the evolution of Communist society and not the proletariat in the name of which the party reigns...

...For there is an absolute necessity for the party bureacracy to assure for its political decisions an independent "theoretical" basis, transcending the knowledge of the specialists and hence irrational...

...FROM THE ABOVE we hope it is clear why we agree with the French socialist Daniel Guerin in his amicable criticism of Djilas for having lost sight of the possibilities for specific change in Communist countries...

...But the most developed members of the intelligentsia of Communist countries, while criticizing their own regime, judge as severely the weaknesses of Western democracy, its lack of vision, its slowness in adapting to the conditions of the atomic age its lack of civism...

...BUT SUCH CONCESSIONS gnaw at the center of the totalitarian system...

...It expresses, in the first place, the solidarity and the interdependence of the various bureaucracies of the Communist parties...

...Thus the party that accelerates, by its own nature, bureaucratization, periodically launches "campaigns for debureaucratization...

...Edgar Morin, in the French journal Arguments, has already called attention to the danger represented by a simplified treatment of the term "bureaucracy" which the anti-Stalinist left often uses without analyzing the phenomenon in its genesis, complexity, heterogeneity...

...But this definition seems too imprecise...

...It reflects certain objective and , complex needs...

...It remains true that most of the leaders begin to recognize that the initial plan to control and foresee everything, that supreme ambition of totalitarianism, was absurd, unreasonable, foolish...

...On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that most of the countries in the Soviet bloc, including China, depend on the protection of the USSR against certain external pressures, which call into question their territorial status quo...

...and that, more recently, Khrushchev was able to chastise the rebellious writers...

...Later they were swept aside by the youth and the "ultras...

...they consult, they negotiate...

...Russian isolationism is crumbling...

...Even in Hungary the majority of the intelligensia, whose agitation was a source of the revolution of October 1956, were reformist in this sense...

...The Russians no longer dictate...

...The Cominform disappeared, following the 20th congress of the USSR Party, even as a symbol of the Kremlin's hegemony over the international Communist movement...

...It is in the economic domain that the antagonism between the party and the specialists is most evident...

...Certainly, theories such as those of the "withering away of the State," or of the "outlawing" of the law of value, like the ideas formulated by Lenin forty years ago about the form that the administration should take in a socialist state, now appear out-of-date and primitive...

...ANOTHER WEAPON employed by the party bureaucracy to justify its privileges "apart," is its participation in the "gnose," in the Marxist-Leninist Weltanschauung made into a metaphysics which, precisely because it sums up all knowledge, transcends any knowledge...

...This is the social predicament of the "apparatchik" which inevitabIy secretes dogmatism with its articles of faith—a new "opium of the people...

...But if this was so, how explain the evolution of Pijade, Djilas, de Lasota, Kolakowski, Imre Nagy, Tibor Dery...

...Partisan absolutism defends its position and withdraws only step by step...

...Indeed, Djilas also grants that before establishing themselves in a "new class, oppressive, exploitative and dogmatic," prior to having transformed Marxism-Leninism into a myth of justification, most Communists felt the power of a revolutionary morality...

...An incompetent but politically powerful manager shares advantages with the technical director, the superior officer with the political commissar...

...And while Khrushchev's decentralization measures are a step toward removing certain of the most anachronistic citadels of superplanning, and toward granting a greater autonomy to the managers, the supreme decision still rests not with the latter but with the regional bureaucracies of the party and the State...

...Slow, prudent, but irreversible the worker's awakening follows that of the intelligensia...

...The party apparatus, accused of incompetence and inefficiency, attempts to regain the confidence of the "specialists," makes important concessions to them, is forced to permit entry of greater numbers of the intelligentsia into the party, to merge itself with it...

...Was he not the most despotic, the most brutal, the most intolerant of all the Yugoslav Stalinists...

...it resembled the "fundamentalist" movements which used to agitate Protestantism, in that it tends to prune the Dogmatic, to reduce it to some fundamental truths, such as faith in the directive mission of the party, in the profound identity of the party-proletariat-people, etc...

...The party apparatus was grafted moreover upon a state bureaucracy inherited from the old regime which it was able only partially to renovate...