Abstract
Successful revolutionaries become rulers and bureaucrats. In the latter roles, Leninists have engaged in practices like those in all political systems, particularly authoritarian ones, insofar as political inequalities are preserved. Political inequalities imply a differentiation of access to power in policy making, and thus exist in all polities. But Marxism, more than any other modern political notion, raises the promise of socio-economic and political ‘progress’, usually seen as greater equality. In that emphasis on equality lies the presumed intimacy between party and people, between élites and masses.
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Notes
James S. Coleman makes the point regarding a functional need for status differentiation and cites Talcott Parsons’ comments relating leadership to prestige in ‘The Development Syndrome: Differentiation-Equality-Capacity’ in Leonard Binder et. al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton University Press, 1971) p. 82.
David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (University of Chicago Press, 1965) p. 73, cited by Coleman, op. cit., p. 82.
Daniel N. Nelson, ‘Development and Political Participation in a Communist System’ in Jan Adams and Donald Schulz (eds), Political Participation in Communist States (New York: Pergamon 1980). Jan F. Triska and Ana Barbic distinguish among League of Communist members, Socialist Alliance members and other citizens in Yugoslavia with respect to participation, sense of efficacy and other attitudes. See their chapter, ‘Evaluating Citizen Performance at the Community Level’ in Daniel N. Nelson (ed.), Local Politics in Communist Countries (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980) pp. 54–89.
Sidney Verba, Norman H. Nie, and Jae-On Kim Participation and Political Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) p. 5.
Joan M. Nelson, Access to Power (Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 396.
Murray Yanowitch, Social and Economic Inequality in the USSR (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1977) pp. 169–70; Yanowitch cites data from Soviet sources revealing that 70% or more of occupations such as typists, secretaries, telephone operators, and primary and secondary teachers are filled by women. Scientific personnel and high level industrial managers are rarely women. Wages of women range from 62–74% of men in Soviet surveys cited by Yanowitch.
See Georgeta Dan-Spinoi, Factori Obiectivi si Subiectivi in Întegrarea Profesionala a Femeii (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei, 1974) pp. 93–4.
Jaroslav Krejci details non-income sources of status in Czechoslovakia in Social Change and Stratification in Post-War Czechoslovakia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) pp. 39–156.
Sidney Verba and Goldie Shabad, ‘Workers’ Councils and Political Stratification: The Yugoslav Experience’, American Political Science Review, vol. 72, no. 1 (Mar. 1978) p. 85.
These ideas reflect the arguments of a prominent East European official who has published in the West under the pseudonym of Felipe Garcia Casals. One of his/her publications, ‘Theses on a Syncretic Society’, appeared in Theory and Society, vol. 9 (1980).
See Daniel N. Nelson, ‘Workers in a Workers’ State’, Soviet Studies (Oct. 1980).
Ion Petrescu, Psihosociologia Conducerii colectiva a Intreprinderii Industriale (Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, 1977) p. 56, reports that only about one third of employees in machine construction and chemical refiningenterprises knew their few ‘elected representatives’ to workers’ councils.
There are many varying interpretations of the degree to which communist states have made headway in lessening class differences beyond what we might expect from socio-economic changes that could have occurred in a non-socialist environment. One might consult Yanowitch, op. cit., Peter Wiles, Distribution of Income: East and West (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1974)
Peter Zwick, ‘Intra System Inequality and the Symmetry of Socioeconomic Development in the USSR’, Comparative Politics, 8: 4 (July 1976)
David Lane, The End of Inequality: Stratification Under State Socialism (London: Penguin Books, 1971)
and Walter D. Connor, Socialism, Politics and Equality: Hierarchy and Change in Eastern Europe and the USSR (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1979).
See Vasile Cucu ‘Regarding Romanian Judete and Their Industrial Output’, Geografie si Urbanizare (Iasi: Editurlb Junimea, 1976) p. 44. Data concerning public expenditures on Polish provinces were provided to this author by Professor Barclay Ward (University of the South). ‘Commune Politics and Socioeconomic Parameters in Yugoslavia’ in Daniel N. Nelson (ed.), Local Politics in Communist Countries op. cit., passim.
Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘Provincial Politics in China’ in John M. H. Lindbeck (ed.), China: Management of a Revolutionary Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971) pp. 174–8.
Mary Ellen Fischer, ‘Nation and Nationality in Romania’ in George W. Simmonds (ed.), Nationalism in the USSR and East Europe (Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1977) p. 518.
In the Soviet case the RSFSR had a 1975 per capita investment of 409 rubles vis-à-vis 265 rubles for the rest of the USSR, and some republics in the Ukraine and Georgia have declined in investment shares during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. See Martin C. Spechler, ‘Regional Developments in the USSR, 1958–78’, in Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1979) p. 159.
Other analysts have expressed this relationship in analogous ways. Terry N. Clark, in his monograph Community Power and Policy Outputs (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973) pp. 42–3, for instance, offers the equation I = PaR, where I = influence, Pe = an ‘activation probability’ and R = resources.
Jacek Tarkowski, ‘Wplyw Lokalny w Centralyzowanym Systemie: Zascby Lokalny Aktyw Kierowniczy’, mimeo, December, 1976, pp. 3–13; see also, by the same author, ‘A Study of the Decisional Process in Rolnowo Powiat’, The Polish Sociological Bulletin, no. 2 (1967) p. 94.
Daniel N. Nelson, ‘Developing Socialism and Worker-Party Conflict’ in Maurice Simon and James Seroka (eds), Developed Socialism in the Soviet Bloc (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1982).
Two good accounts, in the Soviet case, of such activists are included in Jan Adams’ ‘Political Participation in the USSR’ in Daniel N. Nelson (ed.), Local Politics in Communist Countries, op. cit., and Theodore Friedgut’s, Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton University Press, 1979).
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Nelson, D.N. (1988). Leninists and Political Inequalities. In: Elite-Mass Relations in Communist Systems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09104-1_6
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