ABSTRACT
Structural reformism, if successful in its power aims, would thus give fuller expression to those centralizing and bureaucratic trends already visible in the advanced capitalist countries. Palmiro Togliatti's cautious introduction of structural reformism in the late 1940s was the first real departure from Leninist theory but it was not until 1956, when the Soviet leadership endorsed "peaceful roads to socialism," that the Italian Communist party and French Communist party finally adopted electoral politics as a positive factor in socialist transformation. Institutionalization thus dramatizes the underlying contradictions of structural reformism and calls attention to what Lenin called the "illusion of bourgeois democracy." A more pervasive critique of structural reformism is its virtual muteness concerning new forms of political life that could lay the foundations of a nonauthoritarian state. Hence, in contrast with the Soviet model, structural reformism would encourage an uneasy merging of the general and the particular, the public and the private, plan and market.
