570
PAUL NEUBURG
household chores even, are sharply different: the woman who just a
few years ago was looked at as a proper housewife is now seen as
the old-fashioned mother-in-law,
~rumbling
about the emancipated
laziness of her son's young wife a good deal more than does her opposite
number in the West.
In addition, the accelerated development of the last twenty-five
years has been seen by substantial parts of the peasantry and semi–
rural groups in Eastern Europe as an alien menace. In the early
days, which are not forgotten, this reaction generated a nationalist
resistance to the Party as the agent of two very different phenomena:
Western industrialization and Soviet Comillunism. Now, the same gen·
eration which in the 1950s hated Russian folk songs on the radio hates
pop music as equally foreign, and would have it banned in fa\'or of
the national folk songs.
It is in this general context that the Party's dialectical-futurist
propaganda has helped to ann the young agai'l1St their parents. Com·
bined with the effects of rapid development, it has given the \l'ord
"old" not just a derogatory, but a lmost a denunciatory, meaning. At
the same time, it has given the word "modern" the sense of "unquestion·
ably best," whether applied by East Europeans to electronic equipment,
outdoor lavatories, hair styles, or human emotions. In arguments between
young and old, the terms are, of course, applied with a special force, and
if the argument involves politics, then the dialectical rationale may come
to be employed in the original sense, separating the young as the van·
guard of the future from the old.
This, however, can be of little comfort to the Party.
It,
too, is often
faced in arguments with the young by the rationale it has itself so often
emphasized: "We the young people are the owners of the present,"
wrote an eighteen-year-old school boy in the Bulgarian Youth League
paper in 1967. "The old times are passing into history, and you'll do us
a favor by not reminding us of them over and over again. You do
nothing but lose our confidence."
In fact, its membership statistics shO\\· a clear generational drift
against the Party. Among students in Budapest, for example, in 1968 only
1.1 percent (two-fifths of the 1963 percentage) were Party members.
while in Czechoslovakia in 1971, O\'er two-fifths of the Party's workinO'·
class melllbers were pensioners. Were Lenin writing today, in all honesty
he would have to begin with "We are the Party of the future which,
however, seems to belong to the old."
Of course, apart from boredom with its rhetoric, the main reason
for the Party's aging is that it is at the heart of a centralist systelll
