ABSTRACT
The problem of participation is paradoxical in nature. In its origins, the ideology and political movement of communism represented an attempt to create a basis for a fuller participation both in the social and political system of the early industrial age. The original idea of communism was essentially Utopian in nature. Leninism then superimposed the party as a political formula for elite control first over the workers' movement and then over the revolutionary government of the workers and peasants. A system can motivate its members by ideas, by threats, or by incentives. The central dilemma is whether economic reform will produce irresistable pressures for political reform. The bottom line is that genuine participation is incompatible with the rule of a Leninist-type party. Ultimately, the inability to resolve that conflict and to provide for genuine participation may prove to be the undoing of modern communism.
