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West Berlin. Their more sophisticated spokesmen (Hahn, Steiner, Braun–
reuter and others) were interesting. The others should have been told by
a regime jealous of its international standing to shut up.
Intellectually, pseudo-Marxism consists of a few elementary proposi–
tions, repeated compulsively, and mostly false. The theme of the Con–
gress was "Contemporary and Future Societies, Prediction and Social
Planning." The pseudo-Marxists insisted on a rigid distinction between
state socialist and other societies. The "laws" of development applicable
to the one type could not be applied to the others. None speculated that
there are not any "laws" of social development, but simply successions
of historical structures with different
degr~es
of responsiveness to con–
cious historical will. This was surprising, since their conception of "law"
in their own societies presents their respective Communist parties as the
sole legitimate and effective incarnations of human historical will. To
this was linked the assertion that the working class (exceedingly vaguely
defined) in fact exercised power and held productive property in these
societies. I did ask a Communist German how we could understand
this last claim: were there not, as mediating factors, state, party, the
division of labor, authority structure in the work process and differen–
tial allocation of the social product? The answer was brief: the ques–
tion was a "theoretical and not an empirical one." As I heard it, I
could not help but think of the German phrase,
auf die Gesinnung
kommt es an,
it all depends on your point of view.
The "laws" of development for the state socialist regimes determined
the interpretation of their empirical research. Since these societies were
"victoriously" developing their productive and moral capacities, they
had no conflicts. Occasional problems in development meant only in–
sufficient assimilation of the official social morality. Critical studies of
bureaucracy were few, although the Vice-Rector of the Komsomol
Academy in Moscow did report on a study of popular attitudes to local
bureaucracy which suggested something other than complete satisfaction.
The pseudo-Marxists used empirical research to "verify" laws which
were nothing but projections of their own dogmatic minds. There was no
Marxist analysis of production relations, of superstructure, in their own
rp.gimes. Contradiction central to Marxist theory as a category for ap–
prehending history did not exist for them.
In these circumstances, the pseudo-Marxist contribution to admin–
istrative technology in their own countries was nil. States and societies
cannot be governed by recourse to a few elementary dicta, particularly
when the dicta are false. This difficulty did contribute an opportunity
for the more serious sociologists in these countries. I would divide them
