Today there is a great interest in reconstructing Lenin's thought concerning the relation between vangard and masses. Lenin's definitive theses on the problem are seen to have been outlined in his famous and much discussed work, What Is to Be Done? which, for some, remains the only scientific answer to the problem (not fully developed by Marx and Engels) of the passage from “class-in-itself” to “class-for-itself.” For others, this work, impregnated by intellectualism and idealism, is seen as a classic of (...) the Stalinist era and is held to be the root of all the bureaucratic deviations of the Soviet experience. (shrink)

The necessary starting point in an analysis of Yugoslavia is the level of development of self-management. The 1973 law on collective work, the goal of which was to contain growing technocratic tendencies in the enterprises, has disciplined the powers of the “work units,” the democratic cells which are directed from below (in practice, they are something similar to department assemblies) and which were supposed to provide the most authentic foundation for self-management. These productive units can be compared to Western capitalist (...) firms whose goal, as we know, it to strengthen control over production costs, increase economic efficiency, facilitate management and create a more congenial atmosphere for work. (shrink)

Dieter Senghaas' recent volume on the problem of underdevelopment represents one of the few actual efforts in Western European culture of the last twenty years toward understanding the problem of underdevelopment from a progressive perspective. This exception is all the more relevant since it comes from a German scholar, i.e., an exponent of a scientific climate which is definitely conservative and often openly reactionary. Starting from the empirical discovery of the existence of an unbalanced social division of labor in the (...) world market (pp. 15 and 25), Senghaas is led to the repudiation of the Ricardian law of comparative costs and benefits (p. 27ff). (shrink)