A view of a death: On communism, ancient and modern

Abstract

It seems to me both astonishing and awful that little sustained attention is being given to the meaning and character of that amazing disestablishment, for our leading theorists told us quite bluntly that socialist regimes were secure. By this I do not mean to draw attention to the enthusiasm of the adherents of the project ^ neither to Trotsky's lyrical belief that we would be better proportioned, sleep less, and make love with more style nor to Khrushchev's ever-so-recent boast that socialism would bury capitalism. My focus is rather on Western academics. Thus Raymond Aron, the supreme analyst of the diierent polities of the industrial era, argued ever more ¢rmly in his last years that no change was possible inside the communist world. It is important to note that this view was not con¢ned to a particular generation wedded to anti-communism. Interestingly, the greatest sociologist of the current generation conceptualized matters in much the same way as late as the mid-1980s ^ and this despite clear leftist political persuasion: the Soviet Union was seen as joining to its despotic power the infrastructural capacities that came with modern means of communication so as to ensure its stability.