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oppression... ." In particular, they sought to speak to Western left–
ists whom they correctly regard as harboring illusions and miscon–
ceptions about existing "socialist" regimes. Not surprisingly, central
to the argument of the authors is the link between socialism and
democracy ("we cannot conceive of socialism without democracy").
Correspondingly, one of the goals of the study is to strip regimes
calling themselves socialist of their "socialist facade" ; hence the term
"dictatorship over needs" is useful in reminding the reader that they
are
dictatorships and that they are dictatorships of a novel kind, more
ambitious and more comprehensive than the many other varieties of
repression history has produced. Here one should also note that the
authors do not recoil from using the concept of totalitarianism. They
point out that:
. . . in a totalitarian society the identification of public and
private goes hand-in-hand with the definition of the obligatory
creed and politics of the subject by the state . . .. All present East
European societies are totalitarian, independently of the degree
of their pluralism-tolerance. In them pluralism has been outlawed
to just as great an extent as before and this is precisely what
totalitarianism by definition means.
Unlike many Western students of Soviet type societies, Feher,
Heller, and Markus do not confuse the patterns of domination in
such systems with bureaucratization per se. They are cognizant of
the uniqueness of Soviet type bureaucracies, "not characterized by
formal rationality ." Moreover, "the Soviet bureaucracy
has
to be in–
efficient in order to accomplish its true aim: to stem the tide, to defer
the satisfaction of the population's needs.... Its function is primarily
to practice dictatorship over needs ... ." Along these lines they also
shed new light on the matter of rationality many foreign observers
and sympathizers have mistakenly associated with supposedly
socialist regimes:
Anyone entering these societies from the world of calculative ra–
tionality has, as first impression, the feeling that he has arrived
in Bedlam. Nothing functions, or at least nothing does in the
way one would expect having been brought up in the spirit of ra–
tionalist standards . .
Elsewhere they observe:
