ABSTRACT
Marxism endows the revolutionary elite with the passion not only for power but for modernization and industrialization. But once the decisive break toward industrialization has been accomplished, the given society is bound to develop needs and aspirations, including those for “bourgeois freedoms,” which clash with the monopoly of power by the revolutionary elite. Upon a doser examination, the New Left then begins to remind one of the Old Left, that variety of anarchist and utopian socialist theories which had preceded and then battled Marxism, were reduced to relative insignificance by the latter, but never quite disappeared. The idiom of Marxism provides a more convincing rationalization of political repression in the name of progress than does that of more traditional forms of authoritarianism. Marxism, which plays a prominent part on the world scene, has become but an ideological façade in the country where it originally triumphed.
