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braced by Western academic intellectuals. (She writes, in a language
replete with religious imagery and association, that "I understand
myself as a recipient of Marx's philosophy...." But unlike her
many Western fellow-Marxists, she experienced firsthand (in
Eastern Europe) the delicate problems which attend the application
of this theory to the lives of people, and her experience led, among
other things, to a renewed and deep appreciation of pluralism of all
kinds, as this volume and her other writings testify. She is unlikely to
be found among Western intellectuals who time and again discover
the advent of true socialism in assorted Third World police states.
Her Kingdom is not of this world.
Yet a stubborn utopian streak (or what I am tempted to call a
God-seeking Marxism) lurks in these pages. Professor Heller evi–
dently does continue to wish for and believe in (as have others before
her) the possibility of a social order that will be free of relationships
of subordination and superordination, conflicts of interest, and the
division of labor. She is sympathetic to "radical needs":
A unitary humanity as a reality
and not merely as an idea, as a com–
munity of the unity of mutually understanding and mutually
supporting different forms of life, which all continually remove
conflicts of interest between them: that is a radical need . It exists
as a need, but it cannot be satisfied within a society constituted
by relationships of subordination and superordination and con–
flicts of interest. .. .
. . . Radical needs are . . . needs which one can imagine being
satisfied simultaneously. It is even our duty to think how they
could be satisfied simultaneously within a society ... not to be
based on subordination and superordination.
The radical utopia here envisioned, like the old Marxist one,
remains haunted by the original sin of the division of labor. ("It is
part of the idea of the radical utopia that it is committed to the aboli–
tion of the quasi-natural division oflabor, to the abolition of the con–
fhct of interest and hence the abolition of interest regulation itself. ")
In short the state will and should wither away.
Professor Heller seeks a political state of grace where the
plurality of needs (approved) will flourish without a conflict of in–
terest (deplored):
We therefore have to conceive of a value with
a claim to universal
validity
[my emphasis
1,
and the universal observance of this value
