A Nonconformist Radical Thinker

...As Nomad has pointed out on another occasion, the ultimate threat of Communist Party leaders is a decision to convert a bureaucrat into one of the working masses, the putative "rulers" of a Communist country...

...Nomad quotes this passage from Machajski published in Russia in 1918...

...After the expropriation of the capitalists, the workers will have to equalize their incomes with those of the intellectuals, otherwise they are doomed to manual labor, ignorance, and inability to manage the life of the country...

...Equality as a goal and as an evaluative tool—in income distribution, in race relations, in cooperation among peoples and nations—has almost disappeared as a guide in current socialist thought...

...Even if one accepts the thesis that the managerial elite represents a new class, it is necessary to consider the decisive role that the political party plays within the bureaucracy, particularly in Communist countries...

...To this, Nomad had added an acceptance of Michels' "iron law of olicarchy" and his own version of the "permanent revolution": What improvements of their lot the masses have obtained in the course of history are due to their struggles under the leadership of those "out-elites" or would-be oligarchies, which in the process would obtain or attempt to obtain, power for themselves...

...By 1920 even the re-publication of Machajski books of twenty-five years earlier was prohibited): The workers will not have their "workers" government even after the capitalists have disappeared...

...Khrushchev, who has already proved himself worthy of Stalin's mantle, has now begun to close some doors of higher education, thus forcing the managerial and technical intelligentsia, whom some observers profess to see as a liberalizing force burgeoning in postStalin Russia, to think twice before risking the chance of losing the opportunity to educate their children...

...HERMAN SINGER...

...This collection of essays by the veteran writer Max Nomad is a reminder that we do have a radical who has devoted himself to uncovering unorthodox socialist thinkers and applying their theories to contemporary questions...

...Nomad is assertively pessimistic— his support of a democratic socialist Welfare State is based on the feeling that it is the least objectionable variety of inequality—but his analysis is pervaded by the hope that the claims of equality will result in easing the lot of the common man...

...This chapter, a most provocative one, perhaps oversimplifies the range of possibilities —it fails to deal with the new influence of the military in the American economy and culture—but the approach is nonetheless a novel one...

...In China the intellectuals in the bureaucracy are kept in line by the possibility of their being suddenly dropped into the abyss where workers and peasants dwell...

...THERE Is in Aspects of Revolt, as in Nomad's earlier books, a considerable number of valuable insights for an analysis of contemporary trends, particularly since Nomad is much more hard-headed and realistic than those sociologists currently dealing with bureaucratic decision-making a n d status symbols...

...In Nomad's permanent revolution, social change results from the incessant demand of the dispossessed for more of the better things of life, accompanied by a continuous succession of rulers, the "outs" challenging the "ins" until the end of time...

...James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, for example, was an application of some of the views of Waclaw Machajski, the Polish revolutionist whose ideas were first presented in America in Nomad's Rebels and Renegades in 1932...

...Machajski's works were infused with a condemnation of the Social Democratic spokesmen for their failure to recognize that, as he saw it, they were not actually concerned with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but with their own hope of obtaining privileged status maintained by education, the "capital" of the intelligentsia...

...The majority may be a "pedestal," but that pedestal is subject to ever recurring quakes, shaking or changing the oligarchs standing on top of it, and occasionally lightening the burden carried by the pedestal...

...In non-Communist Asian countries, middle-class college graduates who adopt radicalism as a means of obtaining positions within the state bureaucracy do not thereby become prime movers of revolt...

...This seems to involve a minor contradiction, since the very assurance of such changes—the clamor of the masses satisfied temporarily by the replace...

...ment of one revolutionary elite by another—would seem to imply the possibility of improvement for the mass of workers, despite repeated betrayals by their champions...

...And whenever those 90 "out-elites," having become "inelites" or oligarchies, turned their back on the masses, a new "out-elite," hungry for power, takes up the cause of the masses, and so on, infinitum...

...Occasional signs that the managers would pursue their own aims more intently than the Party might wish have vanished quickly whenever Communist leaders have asserted the primacy of a Party decision...

...Thus Michels' pessimistic "iron law of oligarchy" implies another "iron law" as well: that of permanent revolt against oligarchy, whether feudal, capitalist or bureaucraticmanagerial...

...The intelligentsia defends its own interests, not those of the workers...

...As long as the working class is condemned to ignorance, the intelligentsia will rule through the workers' deputies...

...To obtain this status the intellectual revolutionists offered, sometimes sincerely, sometimes hypocritically, aid in the workers' struggle for higher wages and equality...

...The question of education is also one of some complexity, since it would appear that it is a weapon which the political bureaucracy can wield with extraordinary effectiveness in Communist countries...

...IN HIS LAST CHAPTER, which deals with the question of the failure of socialism to strike permanent roots in the United States, Nomad predicts that the critical force in American life is 91 the growing engineering and technological aristocracy which may, under conditions of large-scale unemployment, resurrect plans for a society run by engineers, A la Veblen...

...There is a reminiscent aura in Aspects of Revolt, but it is to Nomad's credit that he has kept alive for radicals some of the more viable— and altruistic—values of the socialist tradition, and has been himself the exemplar of the truly non-conformist radical thinker...

...There are, nonetheless, some difficulties...

...Appropriately enough for the author of an earlier volume entitled A Skeptic's Political Dictionary and Handbook for the Disenchanted, Nomad's reward has been that some American radical intellectuals have expropriated his concepts without discussing their usefulness or recalling their source...

...Yet, it is a concept that can be central for socialists now attempting to review their beliefs...