PARTISAN
REVIEW
89
The absences were very regrettable. Some of the Illissmg scholars are
neo-Marxists, and their encounter with a dogmatic orthodoxy would
have been educational for the younger sociologists from the state so–
cialist regimes, who were present in great numbers. Some are decidedly
ex-Marxists, and the sharpness of their positions would have enlivened
the Congress. Instead, discussion was befogged, and I had the im–
pression of swimming in a gelatinous substance. Talk was cheap but
genuine controversy was rare.
In no country are sociologists conspicuous for their reluctance to
speak, and the relative absence of conflict at Varna remains to be ex–
plained. Harangues there were aplenty. A pseudo-Marxist aggressive–
ness marked the contributions of many of the participants from Eastern
and Central Europe, who seemed quite unable to distinquish between
intellectual polemic and a level of discourse which would have stupified
Agitprop cadres at a party school. We also had to bear with those who,
in the middle of discussions, read from totally irrelevant prepared texts.
Chairmen who had prepared their sessions for months in advance were
at the last minute asked to accommodate just another few more Soviet
or Bulgarian papers.
What I have called pseudo-Marxism is less an ideology than it is
a catechism or an incantation. It is also a sociological phenomenon. The
groups from the state socialist regimes were quite profoundly divided,
and that division was in itself a mitigating element at the Congress.
There were, to begin with, differences of intelligence: not even all the
varieties of Stalinism and Brezhnevism have been able to alter genetic
variations. I had the impression that the more dogmatic representatives
from the eastern societies were actually the less gifted ones. Factors of
social inheritance also played their part. Many of the Bulgarians, the
Communist Germans and some of the older Russian recruits to "intel–
lectual" activity from Party organizations were quite obviously not from
academic or professional families, not offspring of the intelligentsia, but
sons and daughters of manual workers. Upward social mobility, in state
socialist regimes as well as our own, extracts its own cultural price: the
crudity and historical shortsightedness of the pseudo-Marxists expressed
a lack of education, an inability to work with the complexities of a
tradition - even their own. I recall a moment when Alain Touraine
reminded a session that not all revolutions were made by Leninist-type
parties: the French had not been. Cultural and intellectual isolation
must also have played their part in engendering vulgarity: the Poles,
the Czechs and some of the Russians have traveled widely, as have the
Rumanians. The Communist Germans rarely get to the Sorbonne or
Berkeley, and most of them have not been to Frankfurt, Goettinger or
