Customer Reviews

The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Never has the Marxist-Leninist doctrine been more ridiculed than in this book.
First, the dialectic method.
Marxist encyclopaedists tried to impose dialectics on all natural phenomena. The articles in the different editions of the Soviet Encyclopaedia on Einstein's theory of relativity, quoted in this book, are a prepostorous example of the schizophrenia in communist countries. Officially, Einstein's theory was painted as an antiscientific Zionist scam, but the top politicians knew that scientists had to apply it in order to make atomic bombs.
Secondly, historical materialism.
Contrary to the Marxist doctrine, the judicial and political superstructure determined the production relations and the economic structure in communist countries. The latter were a living example that Marx was wrong.

As many revolutionaries, Milovan Djilas was disillusioned by the policies of the left who had taken power in East European countries. He saw the deadly infighting amongst the leaders, the rising reactionary bureaucracy, the liquidation of all political, philosophical, economical or social opposition and the absolutist power of the party. The small power elite milked the state budget for their own profit. The leaders became completely poisoned by the divine and devilish sensual pleasures of the wielding of uncontrolled power.
Therefore, Djilas stresses the all importance of a radical opposition. He could only dream of a parliamentarian one.

This book contains also an excellent comment on the May 68 revolt in Paris, an in depth critic of Lenin's 'Der Imperialismus als hoechstes Stadium des Kapitalismus" or of the vagaries of Simone de Beauvoir.
This excellent book should be read, at least, by all leftist die-hards.

Djilas's explains that Marxist ideology, and especially marxist philosophy ("dialectical materialism" - which Marxists elevated to a "science") was the unintentional seed of tyrrany that found their full expression under the communist regimes of his day.

The argument is all the more compelling because Djilas, himself a life-long communist, fought with the partisans in Yugoslavia against the fascist invaders, and eventually became the vice president of the country after the communists monopolized power. Yet his conscience and his deep and abiding love for humanity - in all it's imperfections - led him to begin writing a series of increasingly free-thinking articles, in which he called into question several of the basic tenets of their society and lashed out against the undemocratic nature of their government.

For this heresy, he was expelled from the party, stripped of all power, and eventually jailed (twice, for a total of nine years, with long periods of solitary confinement). He had nothing to gain and everything to lose from speaking his mind. He remained in Yugoslavia all his life, and he was always a committed democratic socialist.