BOOKS

Joseph Clark

Dreams and Nightmares

THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, by Vivian Gornick. New York: Basic Books.333 pp. $10.

A FINE OLD CONFLICT, by Jessica Mitford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 265 pp. $10.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNIST: A PERSONAL VIEW OF A POLITICALLIFE, by Peggy Dennis. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co. 302 pp. Paper, $5.95.

THE GREAT GAME, by Leopold Trepper. New York: McGraw-Hill. 442 pp. $10.95.

N ow I know why I flunked the test given byVivian Gornick at lunch in a Chinese restaurant. Itturned out that she was screening me for aninterview to be used in a book she was writing onthe romance of American Communism. Butbetween the egg roll and the fortune cookie sheapparently concluded that I was not among thosewho "walked the wire successfullly and remainedwhole and strong." Clearly, both her thesis andideology were so neatly packaged in advance thatshe did not want to add my experience to that of anold, departed friend and comrade whom she hadalready interviewed.

My friend had been terribly disruptive of her ideefixe of Communism as creator of that "innerpassion" and "intensity of illumination that tore atthe soul," to cite a bit of her description. Gornickwanted no more tampering with her dream ofCommunism, which spoke "with such power andmoral imagination." If only she had shared withher readers what she meant by "moral imagina-tion," there might have been far more than thesingularly cluttered, but uninformative contents ofher account.

Whatever the Communist experience was, it is

touching to see how some—in what we oncelovingly called the capitalist press—have taken theGornick description to heart. The New Y ork Timespublished a section of the Gornick "passion" in itsBook Review, followed by a laudatory review by ademocratic socialist, whose emphasis on the crucialrequirement, that socialism must above all bedemocratic, played a part in the departure of thisreviewer from the Communist movement. Anumber of "capitalist" journals now print reviewsof books on the Communist experience, which twitformer Communists for daring to entertain bitterrecollections and give them good marks only if theyremember that experience without regret orrecrimination. This was the message of the reviewin Newsdav, a paper of considerable circulationand solid capitalist paternity. Its reviewer, JessicaMitford, was the author of that witty satire on theAmerican funeral business, The American Way ofDeath. Now she had written a book on herexperiences in the American Communist party, amore amusing and a better crafted book thanGornick's, but equally lacking in candid recollec-tion and equally barren of political appraisal.

Still another book, by Peggy Dennis, widow of

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Eugene Dennis, the former general secretary of theAmerican CP, turns out to be far more significantthan Gornick's or Mitford's, but in a way that theauthor, alas, never intended it to be. Peggy Dennisnever meant to depict the rejection of mind andreason, the acceptance of a discipline that prompt-ed acquiescence in anything demanded fromabove, even to the point of leaving an only childwith the Russians permanently, on orders fromCommunist International leaders Georgi Dimitrovand Dimitri Manuilsky. But that is what she hasdone, and it emerges in painful detail.

Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jewish Communistwho worked for Soviet intelligence and indeedorganized the Soviet espionage network in WesternEurope when it was occupied by Hitler, performingincredible feats in behalf of the Red Army battlingagainst the Nazis, has also written about theCommunist experience. Some of it dovetails neatlywith the Dennis book. He lived in the sameComintern Hotel Luxe in Moscow where Peggyand Gene Dennis lived. On his return to Moscowafter his war service he "sat" ten interminable yearsin Soviet jails. After Sialin died he was exoneratedof any kind of "guilt" and allowed to return to hisfamily in Moscow. He tells how he is reunited withhis sons, but they cannot recognize him. He says to

his oldest son, "I am your father. Ten years ago Ireturned to Russia, and for ten years I have been inprison. I have just been released and brought hereto you—Do you have any questions to ask me?"His son replies: "Only one, Why were yousentenced? In this country, innocent people don'tspend ten years in prison."

IITHE SUBJECT MATTER of all these books has acquiredan insistent timeliness, whatever the shortcomingsof the books themselves. Commentators andstatesmen debate Eurocommunism. The discus-sion goes on and on about Communists in Americaafter World War II, when they became the excusefor the blight of McCarthyism. Some value may bewrung from the Gornick and Mitford booksbecause there are Americans who will discover thatCommunists were real live people, fed with thesame food, hurt with the same weapons, subject tothe same diseases. From all four books there comesa realization that the 1956 revelations by NikitaKhrushchev about the horrors of Stalinisminaugurated a deep and endless crisis of Commun-ism.

Of the four authors, only Trepper confronts theissue. He writes: "We wanted to change man, andwe have failed. This century has brought forth twomonsters, fascism and Stalinism, and our ideal hasbeen engulfed in this apocalypse."

If an insoluble crisis developed among Com-munists in the middle 1950s, we still must face up toa great paradox: there is every reason to believethat Communist power, in the Soviet Union,China, and Communist satellite nations will bewith us for a long time. And Communist move-ments will flourish in certain West Europeancountries.

Much of the current discussion of Eurocom-munism leaves more questions than it answers,because it pays too little attention to the centralfactor that emerged in 1956: a Communistrebellion against Communist tyranny. That is theorigin and essence of Eurocommunism. True, therewere precursors of Eurocommunism that go backto the founding days of Italian Communism. But tounderstand the quality and direction of ItalianCommunism under Berlinguer is to know, aboveall, the crisis that swept over Communistmovements in 1956. The early signs of that crisisfirst appeared when the tyrant died in 1953. But itflared up everywhere in the Communist world afterKhrushchev's speech in February 1956.

If the Spanish Communists under Santiago

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Carrillo have moved further than any other CPtoward revising the tenets of both Leninist andStalinist tyranny, it is because the SpanishCommunists have carried even further than theItalians the evaluation of Stalinism, and to anextent of Leninism, begun by Togliatti in Italy in1956. This was the same analysis conducted in themiddle 'S0s by the John Gates faction of theAmerican CP. In 1956 Togliatti criticized thecircular reasoning that the Soviet Communistsapplied to the Stalin phenomenon. Stalinism wasthe fault of the "cult of the individual"; Stalinismand Stalin were the fault of Joseph Stalin. Togliattisuggested that this was a mockery of Marxism, letalone of common sense, the latter being far morepowerful a force for reason and logic than theformer. The revisionism of Togliatti in Italy wasapplied rigorously by Gates in America and thenextended into the experience of the SpanishCommunists under Carrillo.

This revisionism was deepest in Spain, but moremassive and meaningful in Italy, and no more thana facade in France. The French Communists underGeorge Marchais adopted "Eurocommunism" andunanimously "rejected" the dictatorship of theproletariat in the same way that they had acceptedStalinism and the dictatorship of the proletariatbefore.

IIIFROM THE STORMS that blew over the Communistcountries and through the Communist movementsin 1956 came a reaffirmation of a basic fact ofcontemporary political experience—there's a"Kronstadt" in every Communist movement.There was a rebellion against the Soviet regime bythe workers and sailors of the Kronstadt naval basein 1921. It was not an antisocialist rebellion, as theCommunists said at the time. It was a defense of thepromises of the 1917 revolution in Russia. It was aprotest against the betrayal of those promises thatwere made immediately after the Bolsheviks seizedpower. It was a rebellion against Lenin andTrotsky. This, too, bears emphasis because manywho come to the study of Communism in ascholarly manner and with high ideals come withillusions about the purity of Leninism as comparedwith the absolute tyranny of Stalinism.

Some 15,000 Kronstadt sailors and workersdemonstrated on March 1, 1921, in solidarity withsome of the demands of the workers of Petrogradwho were striking not only for economic demandsbut for free elections to factory committees andsoviets. The demands of the Kronstadt demonstra-tion were also for new elections to the soviets by

secret ballot and with unrestricted politicalfreedom. They demanded freedom of assembly andliberation of political prisoners, because by thistime there were more dissident socialist prisoners inSoviet jails than supporters of the bourgeoisie.They demanded the right of peasants to own theirown land and the right of all workers and peasantsto assemble, to organize, to agitate—to receive thefreedom that was promised to them.

True, there is an enormous gulf between thetheory and practice of Lenin and of Stalin. But itdid not prove to be an unbridgeable gulf. Lenin andTrotsky ordered the machine-gunning of theKronstadt rebels. Suppression feeds on itself. Onlydays after the Bolshevik seizure of power theopposition press was banned as "poisoners of themind of the people." A rereading of John Reed'sTen Dais That Shook the World might cause somewonder among those who were enthusiastic aboutReed and about Trotsky's explanation that "theclosing of the newspapers is a legitimate measure ofdefense." How scornful the Leninists were of suchBolsheviks as Karelin who protested the suppres-sion of newspapers with these prophetic words:"Three weeks ago the Bolsheviki were the mostardent defenders of the freedom of the press...The arguments in this resolution suggest singularlythe point of view of the old Black Hundreds and thecensors of the Czarist regime—for they also talkedof `poisoners of the mind of the people."

So it was that the early but burgeoning tyrannyof Lenin and Trotsky (only a few concentrationcamps, only hundreds and then several thousandkilled in reprisals) became the monstrous tyrannyof Stalin.

The 1950s saw many "Kronstadts," notably inEast Germany, in Poland, above all in Hungary.On October 23, 1956, student demonstrations inBudapest led to the placarding of the city withdemands for evacuation of Soviet troops fromHungarian soil, elections by secret ballot in theHungarian Workers' party, and a long list ofrequirements adding up to a free and democraticsocialism for Hungary. The uprising that followedwas as spontaneous and broad-based as therevolution that overthrew the Czarist regime inRussia in March, 1917. Nevertheless, both JessicaMitford and Peggy Dennis view the Hungarianuprising as a dark manipulation of "fascist" forces.The extraordinary thing about the 1956 events wasthe extent of support from workers in the most far-flung parts of Hungary. But in the Mitford versionof "a fine old conflict," she prettifies the regimeagainst which the entire Hungarian people arose in1956.

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More than two decades after the HungarianCommunists themselves had admitted that theirpre-1956 regime was a police state in which firstRakosi and then Gero ruled with an iron fist andwith the secret police as the major instrument ofpolitical repression, Mitford writes of her 1955 visitto Hungary and reaffirms "everything we saw ofsocialist accomplishment." She rereads her dis-patches to the People's World and finds them—notmisleading, not refuted by events that horrifieddemocrats and socialists—merely "rather tedious."Mitford is still enthusiastic about the "exhilaratingexperience" of discovering the sumptuous foodenjoyed by the collective farmers. Her husbandBob, born in Hungary, "was particularly struck bythe evident prosperity and sense of progress wefound everywhere." No less than "everywhere."Shortly after they left, the people rebelled—everywhere. True, Mitford attempts an explana-tion, the Hungarian people were "manipulated bythe CIA from without and counterrevolution fromwithin."

On a Potemkin tour Mitford might not havebeen able to see everything as it was then inHungary. But here it is, 21 years later when sheshould have been able to go back and reviewHungary's tragic history, and all she sees isconfirmation that the Hungarian Freedom Figh-ters were "grasping, neo-fascist types." "Fascist"types, such as Anna Kethly, the Hungariansocialist leader who declared in November whenRussian tanks were ranging everywhere to putdown the rebellion: "The Hungary of tomorrowwill be a socialist state.... We must be watchful sothat the results of the Revolution do not disappear,as was the case in 19.19."

Though she admits that terrible revelations weremade by Khrushchev, Mitford stands by the"socialist" achievements of pre-1956 Hungarydespite everything that even the current rulers ofHungary have admitted. As to the prosperity thatshe and Bob saw in 1955, she could have used someof the 22 years since that visit to research what boththe Russian and Hungarian Communists divulgedabout the declining economic standards broughtabout by the Stalinist pre-1956 regime. Rakosi andother Hungarian leaders had been summoned toMoscow after Stalin died in 1953. The Hungarianscould say little when the Russians accused them ofbringing the Hungarian economy to the verge ofcollapse.

Peggy Dennis takes strong exception to thedenunciation of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in1956 by the Daily Worker under the editorship of

John Gates. She admits that the struggle of theHungarian people had started as a "people'srebellion" but then adds that "the fascist elementsgrouped around Cardinal Mindszenty had turnedthe people's rebellion into a blood bath." Denniscomplains that the Daily Worker at the time didnot provide a "factual analysis" of what washappening in Budapest. This brings us to afascinating failure of both Mitford and Dennis toreview some of the factual information the DailyWorker and the People's World were getting fromBudapest in that fall of 1956. First of all, theLondon Daily Worker correspondent in Budapestat the end of October, Peter Freyer, had refuted thereports of a fascist counterrevolution. He did notethat many of the secret police who were universallyhated had been killed during the uprising, but thatthis had in no way deprived the uprising of itspopular character; it only pointed up the universalfeeling about a secret police that had even pulledout the fingernails of Janos Kadar, later installed asthe head of the Hungarian government by theRussians.

But even more intriguing is the correspondencethat came to the Daily Worker and People's Worldfrom Freyer's successor, Sam Russell, who coveredthe events in Budapest after the second Soviet tankinvasion starting on November 4. Russell waschosen because of his political reliability andindeed he remained in the British CP long afterthese events. But he was a reporter, and he was withthe Hungarian workers at the huge Csepel andDunapentele steel and machine works. He sentdispatches describing the Budapest workers'councils as the real and unanimous representativesof all the workers. He wrote about a strike withouta single scab as an example of worker solidaritysuch as he had rarely seen anywhere else in theworld. He tried to put the best face possible on theRussians, and in one dispatch he described aworker delegation that had gone to the Russians tonegotiate and though the Hungarians remainedunpersuaded, they suggested that possibly "thedevil was not as black as he was painted." This wasa loyal British Communist writing about the Sovietfatherland as a devil, if perhaps not quite as terribleas pictured. What a pleasure it was for the DailyWorker editor, Gates, and for his foreign editor,myself, to spread the dispatches from the Csepelfactories across five columns above the masthead.Here was a class struggle and a national liberationstruggle in all its glory. But drowned in blood.

It is instructive to see how Vivian Gornickmanages to cast those who supported the

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Hungarian rebellion and sought to eradicateStalinism from the American CP as the uglyCommunists who did not manage to maintain the"wholeness," the "passion" and the "moral im-agination" of the clear-cut hero of her interviews.The hero of her "romance" is called Lanzetti. His"Marxism," she writes, "is, indeed, not so much apolitical doctrine as it is a philosophical perspec-tive, a piece of truth that lives inside him with suchsure knowledge it is not necessary for him tosacrifice reality to theory." Truth? Reality? On thepage before, Gornick writes about Lanzetti:

For, if you meet him today and in his presence youattack the Party or Stalin or the Soviet Union, he fliesinto a passion and cries: "Don't talk to me about theatrocities of Stalin! He only killed Russians! We killeveryone. Don't talk to me about Vietnam, the energycrisis and Watergate, and then dare to tell me what iswrong with the people and the Party and themovement that I represent and will belong to withhonor as long as I live.

Quite apart from the incongruity of comparingStalin's killing of millions with America killing"everyone" there is the "technical" matter of Stalinkilling only Russians. In the Luxe Hotel whereTrepper lived and where Gene and Peggy Dennislived, Stalin killed Finns and Poles, Italians andFrench. Germans and Spaniards, and the list couldgo on until we exhausted all the "national" partiesaffiliated with the Comintern. It has been accurate-ly noted that Stalin killed far more Communistleaders and far more rank-and-file Communiststhan Hitler did. Trepper describes how Stalinordered the murder of every member of the CentralCommittee of the Polish Communist party! Hetells how Togliatti sat on the Comintern tribunalthat condemmed Bela Kun, the leader of theHungarian Communist revolution of 1919, to dieas an imperialist spy.

IVWHAT THEN can be gleaned from these books aboutthe Communist experience? From the Gornickbook, precious little. You wouldn't even learn thename of the organization when it was transformedunder Browder; she got that wrong. Herchronology is all wrong. The reader of the Mitfordbook would learn as little about CP history andpolitics, but a little bit more of what an experienceit was to fight for Negro rights and to go to theDeep South in the fight to save the life of WillieMcGee.

What then was the Communist experience?

Obviously, it had to be many different things. Itincluded high idealism and passion, self-sacrifice,and often a great brotherhood among itsadherents.

But when examining the Communist experience,far more emphasis should be devoted, I think, tothe rebellion of the Communist when confrontedwith the betrayal of his ideal, more accurately,when the Communist perceives that betrayal. Callit revisionism, a Kronstadt, Titoism, nationalism,workers' control, democratic centralism, theWorkers' Opposition, self-determination. Call itthe Hungarian rebellion of 1956, the Czechoslovakstruggle in 1968, the German workers battlingSoviet tanks in 1953, the children of Moscowfighting Beria's police troops in the streets on theday of Stalin's funeral. Call it revolt of the damnedat Kolyma, call it Trotskyism, Bukharinism, aright-wing, a left-wing, a left-cum-right deviation.Call them Djilas, Mikhailov, Solzhenitsyn,Sakharov, Scharansky; call them the bearers ofwreaths to Chou En-lai's memorial; liquidators,economists, even God Seekers. Call it whateveryou will, there is this built-in spark of rebellionagainst Communist tyranny and betrayal in almostevery Communist heart.

What are the great moments in the experience ofthis former Communist? One such moment is half-described in Peggy Dennis's book. She tells aboutan article her husband had written for the DailyWorker in 1956; more important, it was written forand appeared in Moscow's Pravda. It was a careful,oh so restrained criticism of Stalin. But PeggyDennis censors the account of that article as itappeared in Pravda. The Communist world hadlearned a few days after Stalin died that one of hiscrimes had been the murder of the entire top ranksof the Soviet Union's Yiddish writers.

The very first foreign Communist article criticalof Stalin ever to appear in the Soviet press waswritten by Eugene Dennis. Making every effort notto offend the then Soviet leaders, who themselveswere up to their ears in Stalin's terror, Denniswrote of "the shocking crimes and crass violationsof socialist law and ethics." He condemned "the useof tortures, rigged trials ... and snuffing out oflives of more than a score of Jewish culturalfigures." But even at that time, after Stalin, theword Jewish was an alarming sign of impendingheresy to those who had survived in Sovietleadership. So, in printing the Dennis article,Pravda cut out the reference to the murder of all theleading Jewish literary figures!

But Dennis never complained about this

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censorship. Nor does Peggy Dennis, 21 years later,summon up the candor or courage to relate howPravda mutilated her husband's article. She getsaround that episode by omitting the fact thatPravda reprinted it.

What pleasure it was for me, then foreign editorof a Daili , Worker edited by John Gates, to writeabout the phrase that Pravda eliminated from thearticle. "If the charge was untrue, all Pravda had todo was to deny it.... Deleting the phrase fromDennis's article solved no problems for Pravda orfor anyone else. It only compounds the wrong thatwas done in the first place. Candor, not suppres-sion, is called for."

Which illuminates an aspect of "Kronstadt" thatmakes it such a stunning part of the Communistexperience. When Vivian Gornick presents herscurrilous portrayal of her arch villain, the man shecalls Bitterman, the man who wanted to deprive herof the "romance of Communism," she quotes himas saying, "The things we did, the lies we told...."Gornick also quotes Richard Crossman as an earlyculprit in this regard, for he had written: "Once therenunciation has been made, the mind, instead ofoperating freely, becomes the servant of a higherand unquestioned purpose. To deny the truth is anact of service...." What is one to make of suchsentences, Gornick asks? What one should make ofthem is, indeed, that those sentences quite ac-curately describe the minds of Pravda's editors,of Dennis and, sadly, of Peggy Dennis even now. Ifthere were truly ecstatic moments in the Commun-ist experience they came when the mind wassuddenly freed from the obligation to conform to a"higher" verity. That was why 1956 was such asingular year for many of us.

For thousands of others it had come earlier.What a wonderful time it was for some who spoketheir minds when the Moscow trials took place inthe '30s! If nothing else, freeing one's mind at thattime spared many Communists the necessity ofaccepting the proposition that Bukharin had triedto assassinate Lenin.

What could have been a better time than the yearwhen Molotov told the Communist world thatfascism was "a matter of taste," when Stalin leeredat the world standing by the side of Herr vonRibbentropp? What better moment for mind andconscience than the time when the Nazi-Soviet pactunleashed World War II? And what is one to makeof a book such as Gornick's, which cannot fathomthe gulf between a free and sovereign mind and onethat is the servant of a "higher and unquestioned"purpose?

How suitable the phrase, "renunciation of themind" in the light of Peggy Dennis's Moscowexperiences. She arrived there with Gene, who wasto work in the Comintern, in 1931, She quicklydiscovered that an iron curtain separated foreignCommunists from Soviet citizens, except those atthe Luxe. "No one could give me a plausible reasonwhy this was so," she writes. She and Genedeveloped warm friendships with others at theLuxe. These included "Boris" a China expert,"Bob" whose specialty was India, Boris's wife"Musa," on the faculty of the Soviet Institute ofRed Professors, and Bob's wife "Valerie" who wasstudying at a Party school.

Gene and Peggy finally left Moscow, but theywere back for more in 1937. This time they couldfind no trace of Boris or Musa, Bob or Valerie.Only on her third visit to Moscow in 1941 did shesee Valerie walking in her direction on GorkyStreet. "I started to greet her warmly, but shepassed me with a slight flicker of recognition,"Peggy writes. She then implored her comrades totell her what had happened and she learned thatBob had been executed. Boris and Musa dis-appeared never to be seen among the living, andValerie must not be approached. "I was told for hersake to leave her alone." Why was all thishappening? Peggy Dennis discovered that, "In thepurges of the Comintern in 1937 and 1938, the veryinternational activity and foreign travel demandedby the Comintern became the basis of charges of`foreign agent' that sent hundreds of Soviet andEuropean Comintern workers to labor camps andfiring squads."

Peggy Dennis's friends were murdered in the'30s, 20 years before the Khruschchev speech.Peggy learned about that in Moscow at the timebut she had made that renunciation of mind, thatrelinquishing of conscience, and there was alwaysGene to explain it to her. If there are mysteries thatGornick must probe it is not the Crossman quote,but how people accepted such renunciation ofmind.

Trepper rejects the notion that his was a wastedlife. He feels pride and satisfaction for the part heplayed in the war against the Nazis. But his bookand his experience is sharply distinguished fromthose of Gornick, Mitford, and Dennis. Trepperheaps scorn on those Communist leaders whofeigned astonishment after the 20th Congress in1956. He calls to account all who did not rise upagainst the Stalinist machine; all, he says, arecollectively responsible. And he writes, "I am noexception to this verdict."

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Within the Soviet Union in the '30s, Treppersays, only the Trotskyists can lay claim to thehonor of having resisted. "By the time of the greatpurges, they could only shout their rebellion in thefreezing wastelands where they had been draggedin order to be exterminated. In the camps, theirconduct was admirable. But their voices were lostin the tundra."

Though an ever advancing socialization of lifeimposes social responsibility and social action onthe individual, it is the person who remainsessential and sovereign. Brought to a violation ofthe human condition and of human rights theindividual, even the Communist as individual,discovers that "the only part of the conduct ofanyone, for which he is amenable to society, is thatwhich concerns others." And Communists willharbor ever new "Kronstadts" because, "Overhimself, over his body and mind, the individual issovereign," whether or not he knows that the wordsare those of John Stuart Mill. ❑

Lewis Coser

Intellectualson Tap

Two CHEERS FOR CAPITALISM, by Irving KristolNew York: Basic Books. xiv and 274 pp. $10.

A specter is haunting Irving Kristol—the specterof The New Class. It consists of "some millions ofpeople whom liberal capitalism has sent to collegein order to help manage its affluent, highlytechnological, mildly paternalistic `post-industrialsociety." These educators, journalists, city plan-ners, social workers, editors, and civil servantsconstitute, so Kristol argues, a clear and presentdanger to the good, that is the business, society. It isagainst them that he directs, to borrow from Dr.Johnson, his "stratagems of well-bred malignity."

There seems to be a paradox here: Irving Kristol,editor of the Public Interest, Wall Street Journalcolumnist, and Henry Luce Professor of Urban

Values at New York University, seems by all countsto be a member of the class on which he heaps somuch obloquy. Is this a case of self-hatred? Notreally, the paradox is only apparent. It is not TheNew Class as such that he denounces but the valuesmost of its members espouse and the power towhich they allegedly aspire. Kristol defends virtueand the Protestant Ethic and is hence exempt fromclass biases as he rides into battle against thosemembers of The New Class, evidently the greatmajority, who have departed from the path ofrectitude by displaying "a habitual animus to thebusiness community."

The ideology of The New Class, the authorargues, is an "un-American' thing" that has onlyfairly recently been imported from Europe. Likeparrot fever, it is an infection that did not grow onnative soil but was brought over from corruptEurope. Those so infected may still use the rhetoricof liberalism but they are really socialists or at leastsocial democrats who worship before the shrine ofever increasing state intervention. "Though theycontinue to speak the language of 'progressivereform," says Kristol,

in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: topropel the nation from that modified version ofcapitalism we call "the welfare state" toward aneconomic system so stringently regulated in detail, asto fulfill many of the hidden anti-capitalist aspirationsof the Left.

Or, to be more specific, "the professional classes ofour modern bureaucratized societies are engaged ina class struggle with the business community forstatus and power." This struggle is largelyconducted, so our author avers, under the bannerof equality. The ideologists'of The New Class claimthat they are appalled at the inequalities ofAmerican society, at the scandal of poverty in themidst of affluence. But all this is only camouflage.What the game is really about is power. "What itcomes down to is that our nuovi uomini arepersuaded they can do a better job of running oursociety" than the business elite. They lust for powerand are greedy for influence. Sitting in the offices ofthe federal bureaucracy, in the common rooms ofmajor universities, in editorial offices and in theplush seats of media control, they attempt to wrestpower from the denizens of executive suites, and sohelp undermine the legitimate authority of ourbusiness civilization.

Now all this might be dismissed as a kind ofparanoid fantasy. I can find no evidence whatso-ever that social workers or city planners, popularjournalists and public-interest lawyers share a

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