ALI~D G.

Me~R

Communist Revolutions and Cultural Change *

When the study of Communism began in earnest in the United States

about twenty-five years ago, "Communism" seemed to be a word with
a precise meaning. The political movement and the system of govern-
ments for which it stood were regarded as a uniform, indeed an uncom-
plicated, entity. Little or no attention was paid to differences between
the several Communist states or the many Communist parties; and
the leading Communist system, the U.S.S.R., was described by one
of its most authoritative students as having no internal structure.
The symbol for the totality of Communist systems and parties was
an undifferentiated piece of rock--the monolith. In accepting it as
the symbol for Communism, Western scholarship allowed itself
to be taken in--as so often--by the public-relations imagery of the
phenomenon it sought to describe.
In recent years, students of Communist parties and Communist
polities have tended to concentrate more on the differences between
them and on differentiation processes within them. The recent
tendency to apply the word " s y s t e m " to these polities and to the
so-called "Communist bloc of nations" expresses the scholars'

* A preliminary version of this article was presented at the annual meeting

of the American Political Science Association, September 5-9, 1972, in
Washington D.C.
346 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

awareness that they are dealing with complex structures of differen-

tiated elements. By now our awareness of differences and divergencies
even in areas once considered immutable core elements of Com-
munist systems has led to the situation where we no longer know
what Communism is, or what persons, parties, or polities should
be placed within that category. Of course, our confusion is no more
than a mirror image of the polycentric schisms within the Com-
munist camp. If Communists in Moscow, Peking, Rome, Paris,
Havana, Santiago, and Berkeley read each other out of the fold, we
no longer have reliable criteria for deciding whether we should regard
Cuba, Tanzania, Yugoslavia, or Chile as Communist systems, or
which of the five or ten political groups in France that call them-
selves Communist or Marxist-Leninist are really part of the
phenomenon.
In the past few years it has become fashionable to explain some
of these differences in terms of the persistence of cultural traits,
which modify Communist systems and parties. A variety of ques-
tions can be, and have been, asked in this context. For example,
how are we to explain, and how much attention ought we to pay to,
the persistence in Communist polities of cultural traits that revolu-
tionary leaders sought to eliminate, such as religious practices,
national allegiances, loyalty to family, anti-Russian feelings, attach-
ment to private property, or even forms of polite intercourse
associated with bourgeois or feudal life styles?
How strong can we expect such traits to remain?
What is the political significance of Stalin's formula concerning
national forms for socialist contents? Does this formula envisage
different forms of Communism? And if so, what is the relation
between form and content? Do different forms shape the content
sufficiently to yield different social and political systems? There
seems to be, for instance, something specifically Bulgarian about the
present system in Bulgaria, with its pronounced egalitarianism, its
peculiar mixture of discipline and easygoingness, of affluence and
underdevelopment, its industrial development within a rural setting,
its provincialism, and its awareness of the outside world. Similarly,
there seems to be something specifically German, or Prussian, .in
the mix of Prussian culture with neo-Stalinism which has made the
German Democratic Republic a very special and highly successful
member of the Communist family of nations.
Further, can changes in Communist systems be explained as the
result of subtle influences from one country to another? I am
referring not so much to the imprint of Soviet institutions and
practices on East European client states as to reverse influences
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 347

from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, and from such newly
acquired territories as Western Ukraine and the Baltic republics to
the older territories of the U.S.S.R. 1
To answer these and related questions to be brought to the fore
in this paper, it has been suggested that we would do well to
borrow the concept of culture from our colleagues in anthropology,
even though the trend in anthropology in recent years has been to
reject this concept and to opt instead for more rigorous behavioral
and quantitative approaches. Some of the reasons for this trend
will become obvious when I discuss the concept of culture.
Moreover, at a conference on Political Culture and Comparative
Communist Studies held at Princeton in November 1971, 2 Robert
Tucker suggested that the concept of culture be employed not only
to explore residual differences between Communist systems, but
also to serve as an overarching paradigm for Communist systems
in general. Nor is Tucker the only, or the first, to make this
suggestion.
Thus, having abandoned totalitarianism, ideological determinism,
and the idea that the compulsive aggressiveness allegedly built into
the Russian national character can explain all Communist behavior,
having applied more avantgardist models from contemporary com-
parative politics for somewhat less sweeping middle-level work, and
having toyed with developmental, bureaucratic, technocratic, and
mobilization models, we are now asked to study Communism as a
specific form of political culture.
In this paper I shall discuss some connotations of the concept of
culture, its usefulness in explaining certain problems encountered
by students of comparative Communism, and methodological
implications of its use.

The Concept of Culture

Culture denotes a society's, hence also an individual's, heritage--
something transmitted from the past, something learned from older
generations. This heritage is social rather than biological in nature
since it originates in membership in a group---a group having a
history of its own. Culture is a precipitate of this history. 8 One

1. These reverse influences were discussed at a conference held at the

University of Michigan in May 1970.
2. For a summary of the discussions, see the Newsletter on Comparative
Studies of Communism, V, 3 (May 1972), pp. 2-17.
3. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of
Concepts and Definitions, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American
348 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVECOMMUNISM

implication of this definition is that culture is relatively impervious

to change. It persists despite changing social, economic, technological,
and political conditions, or it changes more slowly. In periods of
social change, culture lags behind other elements of social life. It is
that " d e a d hand of the p a s t " about which Marx wrote in the first
page of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. To quote
Kroeber and Kluckhohn:

... because acts take place in time, the past continues to influence
the present. The history of each group leaves its precipitate--
conveniently and, by now, traditionally called "culture "--which
is present in persons, shaping their perceptions of events, other
persons, and the environing situation in ways not wholly
determined by biology and by environmental press. Culture is
one intervening variable between human "organism" and
"environment." •

What is the " g r o u p " that transmits its culture to its members?
Presumably it could be any group--a clan or tribe; a religious
community such as that of the Buddhists, Jews, or Muslims; a
" p r o d u c t i o n " community such as that of the plantation culture; a
social class such as that of the bourgeois culture; or a supranational
entity with its own history, or its own way of life; such as " t h e
West.'" In most cases, however, it seems to have been taken for
granted that the outstanding transmitter of culture is the nation.
One of the many reasons is the close association of both concepts u
culture and nation--with language.
Another implication of defining culture in terms of social heritage
is that each culture is sui generis. According to this theory, some-
times strongly expressed, each culture originates in a particular
group or nation. It is unique, non-transferable, non-repetitive; for
the outsider it is irrelevant and insignificant unless he interacts with
members of the group.
Among the users of the term there is sharp and, it seems to me,
irreconcilable, disagreement over the contents of culture. Some
writers define culture as the subjective element behind human
action: the attitudes, beliefs, motivations, values, expectations, and
explanations with which people approach other people or institu-
tions-indeed, approach everything around them, including nature

Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, XLVII, 1 (1952), p. 49.

See also Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, Ill.: Free
Press, i949), p. 8.
4 . Op. cit., p. 186.
 C O M M U N I S T RI~VOLUTIONS A N D CULTURAL CHANGB 349

and deities.:While this subjective element is attributed by some to

individuals, and must then be explained psychologically, it is attri-
buted by others to institutionalattitudes,such as those of organized
religions or constitutions, or the formal doctrines expounded by a
culture's classical writings. Still,whether attributed to individuals
or to institutions,culture is a bundle of subjective states which,
together, enable people to define situations, to orient themselves
within the world both cognitively and morally. By implication, since
all perception is selective,culture determines what things will not be
perceived, what will be taken for granted.
If culture ~s the subjective element of human life, what is the
objective element? It seems to me that the intent behind the subjec-
tive definition of culture is to separate certain mental states or pre-
dispositions from actual behavior, thought from action. This view
is expressed by theorists who define culture as the sum-total of our
propensities toward action and reaction in given situations.*
From here it is a small but significant step to a definition of
culture as the pattern of actions, reactions, and interaetions~ This,
too, can be restricted to the individual. But it can also be applied to
groups and societies, and it can include not only informal patterns
of interaction but also formal rules, procedures, and institutions
according to which, and within which, the 'members act. To take
this step to a more comprehensive view reflects the fact that in
practice it is diflqeult if not impossible to maintain the separation
between subjective propensities, actual behavior, and the framework
within which behavior takes place. So defined, culture is everything
except the biologically given. It comprises not only attitudes, mental
states, and propensities but also the entire framework within which
people relate to each other, including the social structure, the
economy, and the political system. And once culture is everything,
what distinguishes it from other aspects of human behavior is nt)t
so much its contents as a manner of ordering or viewing the contents.
Culture is not a specific activity, like production or politics or sexual
relations; it is something permeating all these and other human
activities. As a concept in the study of human behavior it signifies
the scholar's intent to place all behavior into a special frameworlc,
to apply a specific ordering principle to the study of social life.
What provides this ordering is chiefly a sense of style, an aesthetic
category; so that culture should be defined, in Nietzschean fashion,
as the li£e style of an individual or an aggregate of people: When

5. See Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Pblitics:

A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 23.
350 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

older generations transmit ~ culture to younger generations, they

are transmitting their life style, which presumably pervades their
language, their beliefs, their attitudes, and their patterns of action
and interaction, as well as their organizational forms and institutions.
Whatever definition one accepts, culture is a category correspond.
ing to actual phenomena in the collective life of the human species.
It is not an empty word. And yet, while we may well conclude that
culture is, the difficulties confronting anyone wishing to study it
appear to be overwhelming, regardless of what definition one has
chosen.
Suppose that we agree on defining culture as the subjective element
behind human interaction within a group. Then the following ques-
tions stand out among many that will confront us. Who within any
group expresses its culture? Political elites and their ideological
spokesmen? Does Suslov represent or express Soviet culture, or Agnew
ours? Should one read Independence Day or May Day speeches to
learn about a nation's culture7 High school civics texts? Pulp fiction?
Editorials in popular tabloid papers? Should we turn to the academic
or artistic elites, and if so t o whom--Sholokhov or Brodsky, Hun.
tington or Marcnse? We have an infinity of additional choices, and
each can be criticized for its own inadequacies. Among them all
I would consider most suspect and least reliable those that sup-
posedly provide the most pertinent answers: academic spokesmen
of the existing system whose books describe their own political
CUlture.
An answer to these doubts about the reliability of informants is
to do one's own research into the orientations and predispositions
that constitute a group's culture. In other words, one must do survey
work. Whose subjective states should be surveyed remains a problem,
of course. In addition, survey work is beset with a host of built-in
traps familiar to students of the pertinent literature; it becomes
even more unreliable when done across cultures. Moreover, in the
Communist world scholars from other countries simply have not
been allowed to do it. The subjective states of people in that world
remain inaccessible to direct research, even ff such research were
reliable.
We are therefore tempted to find out about subjective states by
the indirect method of inputing them on the basis of observable
objective data, such as institutions and actual behavior patterns. We
observe the prevalence of bribery in some system and infer the
existence of a certain attitude toward the political system and its
component elements. This method is of dubious validity because it
begs the question it is supposed to answer, that concerning the
 COMMUNIST RBVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 351

relation between culture and politics, or between subjective states

and behavior. Failure to cope with this problem characterizes much
of the literature on culture, especially on political culture. Again
and again one encounters the stated or implied assumption that
once one knows attitudes, one can derive, explain, or predict behavior,
or arrive at similar conclusions about individual features or the
total characteristics of a political system. A direct causal relation-
ship between subjective states and the functioning of the system is
taken for granted. 6 Similarly, some scholars make bold inferential
leaps from individual attitudes to the entire system, with no role
assigned to mediating and articulating links. Of course, the scholar
must artificially limit her horizon and narrow her focus, if/ndeed
she is to obtain any results whatever. But simplification means
obscuring problems.
In the literature dealing with the relation between culture and
behavior, two kinds of simplification stand out. One, which I shall
discuss below, is the belief that a culture can be described in rela-
tively unambiguous terms. The other is the assumption that every-
thing in a social system must be functional, that things have to fit,
which includes the expectation that subjective states be congruent
with institutions and behavior, culture with politics. I shall refrain
from speculating on why this assumption is so common in con-
temporary social science. But in dealing with the relations between
culture and social life, it is spectacularly out of place. For have we
not pointed out that culture comprises those aspects of social systems
which change most slowly? Culture is that which lags. Culture
assumes a non-fit between itself and other elements of society. In
the light of this statement the attempt to infer subjective states
from behavior appears ludicrous.
In their descriptions of reality, to be sure, many scholars are
aware of the non-fit between culture and other elements, such as
politics. But often they profess helplessness in the face of such non-
congruity and express disbelief that people can live with so much
dissonance.
An example is Lucian Pye, who points out that the Chinese gentry
preached the stem rules of Confucianism but practiced an easygoing
Taoism, whereas the peasants professed Taoism, with its faith in
non-action, but lived lives of hard work and all other 'Confucian

5. Richard Fagen, The Transformation o f Political Culture in Cuba (Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 1972), has tried to show that in the Cuban
case the relationship was reversed: changes in behaviour led to changes in
attitudes.
352 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE C O M M U N I S M

virtues. Thus, in both cases behavior clashed with belief.'Richard

H. Solomon thinks he has solved the contradiction by arguing that
Chinese peasant life confirmed and mirrored the ideology of the
gentry." A much better solution is provided by Pye in an earlier
work, 9 where he describes a Chinese pattern of socialization-by-
shame, which leads to a culture of simulated conformity. Once
simulation or hypocrisy is part of a culture--and what culture is
free from itT--our efforts to make easy inferences from culture to
behavior, or vice-versa, will be confounded.
There is a cluster of questions closely related to each other which
deal with the origins of culture, its substance, and the manner in
which it is transmitted from one generation to the next. Precisely
what is being transmitted, and where does it come from? Residual
patterns from class structures of the past7 That seems to be the
implication of Lloyd Warner's study of Newburyport, Massachusetts
(" Yankee City ,,).toAttitude patterns from by-gone politicalsystems
or from societal adjustments to unique environments like the
American Frontier or the severities of the Russian landscape and
the Russian climate7 11 Nationally prevalent attitudes of a deeply
psychological nature which express and perpetuate themselves in
child-rearing patterns? This seems to be the conclusion to be drawn
from the work done on Russian culture by Henry Dicks ~2 and
Geoffrey GorerJ 8 and on Chinese culture by Solomon. Is culture
related to the life styles of social classes that have ceased to fill
important functions in contemporary society but that have not yet
disappeared7 That would be the implication of Wilhelm Reich's
The Mass Psychology of Fascism: ~ Or does culture consistof residues
from layer after layer of experiences, centuries past, that have
reinforced themselves in a rich and bewildering variety of ways?
That is what I would draw from James H. BiRington's The Icon
and the Axe: A n Interpretive History of Russian Culture:" Many

7. China: An Introduction (Boston: Little, B~own, 1972), pp. 342-343.

8. Mac's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972).
9. The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psycho-cultural Study of the Authority
Crisis in Political Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).
10. New Haven: Yale UniversiW Press, 1963.
11. See Wright Miller, The Russians as People (New York: Dutton, 1961).
12.'H~'nry V. Dicks, "Observations on Contemporary Russian Behavior,"
Human Relations, V, 2 (1952), pp. 111-175.
13. Geoffrey Gorer and 'John Rickman, The People of Great Russia
(London: Cressett, 1949).
14. Now York: Farrar, S~aus, and C-droux, 1970.
15. New York: Knopf, 1966.
 COMMUNIST RBVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGB 3~3

different theories about the genesis and substance of culture could

be adduced.
If we wish to study the relationship between culture and politics,
especially between culture and revolution, these are not irrelevant
questions. On the contrary, if we could reach some certainty about
the origins of culture, we would then be able to assess its strength
in the face of the concerted efforts made by Communist elites to
effect cultural changes. We would, in addition, have some indications
of how cultural changes are likely to be made successfully. For
example, among students of Chinese culture the view is widespread
that corruption is an age-old feature of Chinese political culture.
Against this can be plausibly advanced the hypothesis that corrup-
tion is a relatively recent import, having been brought into China
together with opium in the course of the nineteenth century. Like
corruption in many parts of the Third World, it may be a relatively
recent symptom of the decay of a stable indigenous culture prompted
by imperialist encroachments. A definitive answer to the question
would enable us to refine our notions about the difficulties confront-
ing Communist (and other) regimes seeking to eliminate corruption.
Once we define culture as everything--that is, as a category for
ordering the totality of a country's or a group's subjective states,
objective behavior, and institutions--then other difficulties face us.
One is the argument that a concept comprising everything explains
nothing. 1° Another is that differences in style are not of great interest
to the social scientist, who should instead be concerned with such
things as performance, production, welfare, freedom, and power--
about who gets what, when, and how. It seems to me that this
argument is weak. Political scientists are indeed interested in differ-
ences of political (and social) style---or ought to be, as long as they
are interested in authority and legitimacy problems, in mobilization
methods, and in criteria of performance.
The comprehensive and all-inclusive conception of culture brings
us back to the problem mentioned earlier, how to avoid oversimpli-
fication of what is infinitely complex. I t~nk one can claim that
the classification schemes used by political scientists from Aristotle
to Almond have been marked by primitivism, depending on one or a
few salient variables which, as the ordering principles, obscure the
rich variety of political experience.
In reading the literature on political culture, one gasps at the

16. The argument is made by Francis Castles, '~ On Communism and Poiiti-
cal Culturo," Newsletter on Comparative Studies of Communism, V, 1 (Novem-
ber 1971), pp. 55-56.
354 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

boldness with which, for instance, the entire universe of political

systems is divided into four cultures--Anglo-American, Western
European, totalitarian, and pre-industrial--and at the simplicity, not
to say simplemindedness, of the manner in which the several cultures
are described, as if they were coherent and unambiguous phenomena.
One could give numerous examples. Let me single out Almond's
suggestion that there is an Anglo-American political culture. In the
light of the profound differences in political traditions and attitudes
between Britain and the United States, this seems to me ludicrous
even without detailed examination; I can explain it only as a result
of excessive attention paid to the common legal base of the two
polities. To be sure, by characterizing this culture as multi-valued,
rational-calculating, bargaining, and experimental, Almond makes
it very flexible. Anything and everything fits into a multi-valued,
calculating, experimental culture. Indeed, it is defined so flexibly
that nothing seems loft except a calculating pragmatism which asks
only one question: What's in it for me? Some people might argue
that this question is indeed the sum-total of American political
culture. Yet surely this leaves out far too much. In particular, it
leaves out the tensions in Western, including American, political
culture, which have several causes. One cause is the many unresolved
ideological and psychological conflicts in the Western political
tradition--the conflict between individualistic and conformist ten-
dencies; the eternal conflict between rational and romantic moods;
the clash of hedonism with the puritan ethic; and others. Another
cause is the complexity of modern societies. Often they are multi-
national in composition. Even when they are not, they are composed
of many groups and classes, each with its own culture. Can one
begin to describe the political culture of, say, Hungary without
referring to the aristocrat/c, the liberal-bourgeois, and the populist
traditions that form its component parts?
The fact is that in every modern society culture consists of many
layers deposited in the society by the long and complicated process
of change. As culture changes, presumably i n response to changed
technological, economic, political, and social conditions, old cultures
do not disappear, certainly not completely. They are destroyed to
some extent, but they are also absorbed. And to some extent they
are preserved, relatively unchanged, within interstitial groups, usually
groups or classes that once were salient in the society but now
have become marginal. One might hypothesize that the more marginal
the group has become, the older its culture is likely to be. In the
United States today there are groups that live essentially by a culture
of the sixteenth century. Illustrative examples can be drawn from
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURALCHANGE 355

the realm of religious beliefs, artistic tastes, attitudes toward work,

views concerning property, sexual mores, and political predis-
positions. The final complication of all this is the fact that groups
considered marginal by an incumbent elite may nonetheless par-
ticipate in the political process; hence, their culture is participating
also. The resulting clash of cultures makes it extremely difficult to
describe adequately the culture of any modern country.
But, as I pointed out earlier, without simplification we cannot
have scientific studies at all. And by far the most serious objection
to the concept of culture is the argument that a phenomenon so all-
embracing cannot be studied in any systematic fashion. Once the
variables become too numerous and their interrelations too complex,
our models explode from being overloaded. And when such com-
plexity is built into a concept that is essentially qualitative, we are
left without methodology altogether. Is there a method for studying
culture? Do we have criteria for elaborating a typology of styles?
The answer given by Kroeber and Kluckhohn leans toward the
negative. In it we detect the chief reason why among anthropologists
the concept of culture has fallen into disuse, if not disrespect.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn point out that the variety of values and
value combinations, attitudes and attitude combinations, is so great
that it is difficult to imagine a satisfactory classificatory scheme; so
that in dealing with cultures we deal with unique phenomena that
can be communicated to others only empathetically, not scientifically.
Moreover, they emphasize that

• . cultures are differently weighted in their values, hence are

.

differently structured, and differ both in part-functioning and in

total-functioning; a n d . . , true understanding of cultures therefore
involves recognition of their particular value systems. Compari-
sons of cultures must not be simplistic in terms of an arbitrary or
preconceived universal value system, but must be multiple, with
each culture first understood in terms of its own value system
and therefore its own idiosyncratic structure. After that, com-
parison can, with gradually increasing reliability, reveal to what
degree values, significances, and qualities are common to the
compared cultures, and to what degree distinctive. . . . x,

They criticize most scholars in the field of cultural studies for

organizing information according to the categories of their own
Western culture. " S u c h an ordering, of course, tears many of the
facts from their own actual context and loads the analysis. The

17. Kroeber and Kluckhohn, op. tit., p. 174.

356 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVI3 COMMUNISM

implicit assumption is that our categories are 'given' by nature--

an assumption contradicted most emphatically by these very investi-
gations of different cultures." 18 In the end, they argue that there
must be some basic questions and problems common to all cultures,
because all human beings share a common biological heritage and
because there are also universal facts and problems of social life.
The advice they give suggests a highly relativistic structural-
functional approach to the study of culture, in which the task of
culture classification is compared to that of the taxonomist in
biology: "Biologists no longer group together plants by the simple
but arbitrary factors of the number of their stamens and pistils, nor
animals by the external property of living in the sea, air, or land,
but by degrees of resemblances in the totality of their structures . . . . ,, lo
This, of course, is easily stated in the abstract but well-nigh unat-
tainable in practice. The empathy, the flexibility, indeed the wisdom
they demand are not easily found in the average scholar. Moreover,
it seems to me that the talent demanded for the study of cultures as
life styles is a sensitivity or sensibility of an aesthetic, and perhaps
also moral, kind, which has little it anything to do with the scientific
method. How it is acquired may be a mystery. If it can be taught
at all, then the social sciences are not teaching it very well now.
In the light of these diflqculties,which may not exhaust the range
of problems confronting those who deal with culture, the question
suggests itselfwhy anyone would wish to get into such a troubled
area in the first place.
One reason, of course, is the fact, already mentioned, that culture
is a concept that corresponds to something real. Whatever exists we
wish to study. Not only is it real, it is also interesting---asanyone
will admit who has observed the current cultural crisis in the
United States. Apart from this special situation, one can detect in
W~tern culture a persistent tendency toward psychological de-
terminism-that is, toward the belief that changed attitudes lead to
changed behavior. W~tcrn civilization especially seems to have
been preoccupied with the task of controlling and changing beliefs,
thoughts, intellectualand mental states in general. This preoccupa-
tion can be traced from the crusades against heretics, through
missionary work, religious wars, and propaganda campaigns, to
that aspect of American culture which makes us assume that political,
economic, marital, personal, and other problems can be solved by
changing perceptions, by imparting a new image.

18. Ibid., p. 176.

19. Ibid., p. 175.
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 357

One can perceive this preoccupation with the subjective side as a

mistake, if only because to divorce the subjective from the behavioral
side is an artificial boundary which cannot in practical research be
maintained--in real life it does not exist. But one can also perceive
it as a healthy reaction to the obverse mistake of overestimating
the effect of institutions and outstanding actors. When in the
eighteenth century Herder and others began to write history as the
history of cultures, they were implying that history is not made by
kings, dynasties, and railitary commanders, but by peoples, nations,
and enltures. Similarly, the emphasis on culture today implies that
history is not made only by presidents, first secretaries, parties,
bureaucracies, and political mafias ruling the Kremlin or the
Pentagon, but is made, still, by cultures.
I regard the recent popularity of the concept of culture as a
symptom of dissatisfaction with the general trend in contemporary
social science to establish artificial conceptual boundaries which are
themselves an invention of our own culture. In the literature on
political culture, the tendency has been to see culture, especially
political culture, as an aspect of the political system. Against this,
Robert C. Tucker has argued that we ought to view the political
system as an aspect of the culture.2° I am in wholehearted agreement
with this; the distinction is not arid scholasticism, but rather reflects
a choice between two approaches to the study of social life, one
of which I would call naturalistic and the other formalistic. Culture
is a naturalistic concept. It suggests that we study patterns of
interaction as something given, the way genus and species are given
to the biologist. Polities, in contrast, is a much more arbitrary,
eulturebound category, a much more artificial separation of certain
selected, endeavors and problems from the totality of social life.
This establishment of relatively artificial boundaries between different
areas of activity was itself a result of historic developments which
disturbed societies that were both more unified and more static.
The preoccupation with culture reflects the scholar's desire to return
to the study of totalities rather than disjeeted members.
Furthermore it implies a renewed emphasis on the complexity
of social life. From Aristotle's day to ours, the explanatory and
classificatory models used have been primitive. W e simply have
been unwilling or unable to handle more than a few salient variables
at one time. Inevitably, these variables are then proclaimed to be
the ones that are most crucial. In Western political science, for

20. Robert C. Tucker, "Communism and Political Culture," Newsietter on

Comparative Studies o[ Communism,'IV, 3 (May 1971), pp. 3-12.
358 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

decades the one variable at the basis of our classification schemes

seems to have been a narrow definition of certain political rights
or freedoms--electoral choice, free speech, and the right to form
groups. Some contemporary political scientists have transferred their
interest from this to an overriding concern with stability, with law
and order. An emphasis on the much more comprehensive cluster
of values which we call culture may lead us to place the values of
freedom and order into a more sophisticated and relativistic perspec-
tive with other values, such as welfare, justice, national independence,
and many others.
By the same token, the concept of culture is an alternative to the
several very simplistic models we have used in our studies of Com-
munist systems, an alternative that is more open, more comprehen-
sive, more relativistic, less ideological, and, as we shall see, more
suitable for truly comparative studies.
In linking contemporary systems to their cultural roots in the
relatively distant past, and therefore emphasizing the unique rather
than the standard, those concerned with culture may also be reacting
to every kind of mechanistic and deterministic theory, including not
only totalitarianism and ideological determinism but also develop-
ment or modernization theory, with its deep roots in Western
ethnocentrism, economic determinism, and the cult of rationality,
and with its assumption of universally applicable trends of develop-
ment which can be directed or guided by the social scientist. Cultural
study rebels against the notion that history proceeds according to
universal laws; and even more against the assumption that history
could be made on the basis of conscious and scientific planning.
Thus the focus on culture symbolizes a rebellion not only against
Western modernization theory but against the equally ethnocentric
development theory contained in the works of Marx and Engels,
who were never ashamed to hide the utter contempt they had for
cultures other than the Western European. And it is a rejection
also of Stalin's formula, which relegates culture to the realm of
form while demanding uniform contents. Indeed, in Communist
countries it would be a manifestation of political dissent. In both
East and West it has ideological overtones. In the West, the emphasis
on culture may represent wishful thinking about the prospective
" t a m i n g " or deradicalization of Communism, or some other attempt
to play down our fears of Communist revolutions; it may also
express some nostalgia for pre-modern society. In one of the
appendices I wrote for the Kroeber and Kluckhohn volume twenty
years ago, I argued that the cultural historians of the eighteenth and
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 359

early nineteenth century were asserting the reality of something that

was about to be destroyed?1
In characterizing the emphasis on culture as the promotion of
naturalism in the study of human society, I am suggesting that it
may be seen, in sum, as an attempt to reject abstract models. Culture
is decidedly not a new model of society. Those who wish to focus
on it seem to feel that we have a surfeit of models, each as absorbent
and vag.ue as the next, and that high-level theorizing has become a
shell game with all empty shells. The student of culture, it appears,
wishes to study actual developments, and to do so not scientifically
but with the gift of normative and aesthetic empathy--a sense for
values and for styles. The kind of canvas he wishes to compose is
not made up by collecting or manufacturing aggregate data. The
emphasis on culture is therefore part of a turn away from the pseudo-
scientific pretensions of the behavioral and quantitative approaches.
Focusing on culture means participating in the post-behavioral
revolution.
For those who think this is too strong a statement, let me rephrase
it by asserting that those who would have us study culture are
urging us to undertake a thorough rethinking of our conceptual
models. Culture itself is not a model or a paradigm in the sense in
which these words have been used. It is in part an expression of
dissatisfaction with models and paradigms now employed, and
it implies the resolve to break down the artificial boundaries between
the subjective and the objective, and between discrete areas of
human endeavor. It also tries to comprehend the totality of human
activity and experience within different social aggregates.
To do so, the student of culture must, of course, impose some
sort of order onto the chaos of information confronting him. But
the criteria for ordering that information are aesthetic and moral
rather than empirical and scientific. A serious commitment to the
use of the concept of culture symbolizes the scholar's determination
to cut through the chaos of information with the resoluteness and
perhaps the willfulness of the artist, though in putting it this way
I am aware that there is often an aesthetic dimension to the work of
those who have made the most important contributions to science.
The decision to bring aesthetic and moral considerations into
the study of human affairs will sound radical and be unacceptable
only to those who insist on the scientific validity, rigor, and sound-
ness of contemporary social science. Emphasizing ,the' study of
culture implies a rejection o f this thinking as a n illusion. Those

21. Kroeber and Kluckhohn, op. cir., Appendix I, p. 208.

360 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

who make this emphasis convey the notion that much contemporary
social science appears unrealistic to them. Indeed, I myself would
argue that at times there is more insight into politics in various
works of fiction than in our professional journals.
The attitudes and reactions that I have adduced to explain the
recent popularityof the concept of culture in politicalscience could
be described as part of the revival of the romantic mood in American
society, a revival that is part of the crisis in American culture to
which I have briefly alluded above.

Culture and Communist Revolutions

Many, perhaps all, of the methods used for the study of political
systems can be applied to those processes of systemic change which
we call revolutions.
Unfortunately, the concept of revolution is fuzzy and controversial,
particularly on the point of causation. These difficulties need not
concern us here. We might all agree that revolutions are replace-
ments of incumbent social and political orders by new ones, with
corresponding changes in those crucial features that constitute social
and political order--elites, property systems, political institutions,
stratification patterns, to name only a few. In other words, revolu-
tions are replacements of one culture by another, perhaps with the
added proviso that the replacement is effected within a relatively
short time and that it involves violence. Such an identification of
revolution with cultural change employs the comprehensive definition
of culture outlined earlier in this paper. The narrower definition,
where culture is only the subjective element, can be used as well.
For it is obvious that in some fashion revolutions involve changes
in consciousnessmin attitudes, myths, beliefs, values, predispositions,
and other subjective states. Having said this, we are at once in the
midst of controversial questions concerning such matters as the
timing of such cultural changes (do they occur before, during, or after
revolutions?), the locus of such changes, and the impetus for them.
Such controversies apart, revolutions can be defined as conflicts
between modes of consciousness (cultures), with a revolutionary
elite seeking to break down the existing culture and replace it with a
new one. As Lenin wrote,

Within "each national culture elements---however undeveloped--of

democratic and socialist cfilture exist, for in each nation there
is a mass of working and exploited people whose conditions of
life inevitably generate a democratic and social/st ideology. But
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 361

in each nation there also exists a bourgeois.., culture--more-

over not just as "elements," but as the ruling culture. Hence
"national culture" in general is nothing else than the culture of
landlords, priests, and the bourgeoisie.22

When Sheldon Wolin refers to revolutions as "attacks on history"

he obviously sees them as attempts to break down and replace the
engrained heritage of centuries. Such Communist leaders as Lenin,
Gramsci, and Mao, each in his fashion, have given this replacement
of one culture by another an important place in their revolutionary
scenarios.
The new culture that Communism seeks to implant can be
defined in different ways. First, one could refer to a Marxist-
Leninist culture, which would be by no means easy to define, since
in fact it is a highly ambiguous heritage. But then one must also
see certain Communist revolutions as attempts to impose a Soviet
culture---itself a synthesis of Marxist-Lenlnist culture with Russian
culture---on the client states of the socialist alliance system.
In studying this attempt to impose a new culture, one must pay
attention not only to the goal culture that Communist elites seek to
create, but also to the resistance offered by the culture they seek to
break and replace. This incumbent culture may manifest itself
in a wide variety of forces, groups, and interests, including the
leadership of the Communist parties in these client states. Thus
Tire, Gomulka, Dub~k, Dimitrov, and others might be regarded
to some extent as representatives of the old culture strug~|ing against
imposition of the new. The resistance shown by Vietnamese Com-
munist elites to both Russian and Chinese domination is part of the
same pattern.
The student of Communist revolutions must be sensitive to the
complications in this change of cultures, especially to the possibility
that the new culture and the old may accommodate themselves to
each other in a variety of ways, so that the culture emerging from
the revolution will in the final analysis conform neither to the pre-
revolutionary consciousness nor to the intentions of the revolu-
tionaries. It will, instead, be a synthesis of the two.
Thus, Chinese Communism today is often regarded as a unique
synthesis of Marxist-Leninist and Soviet cultures with the Chinese
culture; Soviet Communism is often described as a specifically
Russian adaptation of Marxism; Albanian Communism may be an

22. V. L Lenin, "Kriticheskie 7~metki po nstsionarnomu voprosu,"

Sochinenia, 2rid ed., Vol. XVII, pp. 137 and 143. Emphaeis in the ori~nal.
362 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

equally unique extension of deeply Albanian states of consciousness

with Loninist and StalJnlst culture. To understand Communism in
Czechoslovakia today, one doubtless has to become aware of the
extent to which it incorporates cultural traits that go back to the
early seventeenth century. I have already referred to the peculiar
blend of Prussian culture with neo-Stalinism that characterizes the
German Democratic Republic.
Furthermore, using once again a broad definition of culture,
comprehending behavior patterns as well as (subjective) predis-
positions, one can define revolution as a culture's response to stress.
Explanations for the rapidity, violence, and thoroughness of the
cultural change wrought by revolutions must then be sought within
that very culture which is being destroyed.
Finally, it is useful to regard Communist parties still struggling
for power as countercultures which must be understood not only as
carriers of Marxist-Leninist (and perhaps Soviet or Maoist) culture,
but also as special variants of the culture within which they operate.
A recent doctoral dissertation by Frank Casale 2s treats the Italian
Communist Party in this fashion and demonstrates the usefulness
of studying Communist parties generally, not by comparing them
with each other, but by showing their profound embeddedness in
their own national cultures. It may be sensible to assume that the
effectiveness of Communist parties everywhere depends largely on
the degree of their rootedness in their own native culture. I state
this with diffidence, not only because it may be unverifiable because
of the difficulty of defining such terms as "success" and "rooted-
ness," but also because the statement may in fact turn out to be
tautological. Nonetheless, it might be worthwhile to study the
successes and failures of Communist parties in the past half-century
within such a framework.
Broad statements like the-ones above could give rise to more
narrowly focused hypotheses, with suitable qualification. The follow-
ing is a list of suggestive sample statements from which might be
derived hypotheses for research~
1. Communist parties are more likely to be successful if they
advance their claims'in terms that fit within the culture of the
system in which they have come to power. The more it is in tune
with the society's culture, the more successful the revolutionary
movement is likel3/to be. As Alexander Simirenko has suggested
in a recent article, Communist systems apply to themselves a model

23. "Subculture, Ideology and Protest: The Nature of Mass Support for the
Italian Communist Party" (University of Michigan, 1971).
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 363

which I would call essentially Platonic and which he calls "therapo-

genie." The party sees itself as analogous to the physician; but it is a
physician who must continually bargain with his client-citizens
in order to convince them of his effectiveness as a healer. 24
In other words, Communist parties in or out of power must be
responsive to the pressures of the culture within which they operate.
The scholar, in his turn, must examine to what extent policy dilemmas,
discussions, and shifts can be explained as adjustments to national
culture or to its utilization. 25
2. In the effort to make use of the incumbent culture, revolutionary
parties, including Communist ones, are handicapped. The prevailing
culture is to a considerable degree a device for maintaining precisely
that system which the Communists or other revolutionaries want to
replace. One of the central components of any prevailing culture
can be expected to be an attitude toward, and an acceptance of,
property and power relations incompatible with the aims of the
revolutionaries. Similarly, the prevailing culture tends to take for
granted the underprivileged status of classes or groups which Com-
munist parties or other revolutionary elites seek to mobilize against
the system. All this must be stated with considerable reservation,
because, as I have pointed out earlier, the cultures of contemporary
societies are exceedingly complex, heterogeneous, and ambiguous,
making it possible for revolutionary movements to refer to selected
parts of the incumbent culture in legitimating their revolutionary
demands. Still, the Marxist axiom that the prevailing ideology in
any society is the ideology of the ruling class may well be applied
to culture in general, so that the prevailing culture constitutes a
current against which revolutionary parties are forced to swim.
Even so, Communist parties have made it extremely difficult for
themselves to make use of the prevailing culture for their own aims.

24. Simirenko's therapogenic model of the U.S.S.R. is printed in the News-

letter on Comparative Studies of Communism, V, 1 (November 1971), 25
et seq.
25. This should be done with caution, because things are always more
complicated than they seem. An example: Pye in his China: An Introduction
(p. 352) interprets the red-versus-expert conflict as an expression of traditional
Chinese views concerning authority clashing with the needs of modernization.
Yet the identical conflict of red-versus-expert has troubled every Communist
regime that has ever come to power; indeed, it is probably a source of trouble
for every kind of revolutionary regime, Communist or not. Have the Chinese
perhaps stated it more clearly? My answer is that both Lenin and Engels have
stated it quite clearly, but that it has been voiced more insistently by the
Chinese. If this is correct, can it be explained by the assumption that the
culture of the C h i n ~ has rendered them more sensitive to it?
364 STUDII~S IN COMPARATIVI3COMMUNISM

Their ideology refuses to take the culture seriously: the styles,

values, institutions, attitudes, and beliefs that constitute it are
relegated to the realms of superstructure and given short shrift.
Moreover, by the internationalist aspirations of their ideology they
deny the validity of national cultures in another way. In practice, of
course, the slogan of internationalism implies an intense client
relationship of individual Communist parties to a global center
(until recently, Moscow). By such strong ties to a foreign government
Communist parties have in the past often forfeited the possibility of
speaking convincingly in the name of their own national cultures.
In turn, the incumbent elites do their utmost to reinforce everyone's
consciousness of the international ties of Communists in order to
discredit them as representatives of the national culture. In the age
of nationalism, every ruling elite claims to speak for the entire
nation and indeed to have a monopoly on patriotism. The national,
cultural, and political loyalties of the reformer and the revolutionary
are everywhere suspect.
3. In Leninist writings, culture is defined differently from the
way it has been defined here. For Lenin, culture consisted of the
material and especially the intellectual achievements of a society--
the totality of its know-how in scientific, technical, administrative,
military, and other matters. Culture is a valuable possession which
is always in the hands of the ruling class and must be appropriated
by the revolutionary proletariat ff it wishes to be fit to rule; for at
the time when it comes to power the proletariat is still uncultured.
Lenin expressed his dismay over the lack of culture, not only among
the proletariat but even in the Communist Party, in the speech he
gave at the last Party congress he attended, the Eleventh. The
result of this argument is a strong ambivalence on the part of the
Communist Party toward the prevailing national culture: it must
be replaced but it must also be appropriated. "The task is to
bring the victorious proletarian revolution together with bourgeois
culture, science, and technology, which have so far been the attain-
ment of the few." 2o The scholar's awareness of this ambivalence
should make him sensitive to the adjustments made between Leninist
and prerevolutionary cultures.
4. The efforts of Communist revolutions to eradicate incumbent
cultures have succeeded only in part. Significant elements of the
prerevolutionary culture have managed to maintain themselves in
clear opposition to the wishes and plans of the Communist elites.

26. V. I. Lenin, "Uspekhi i trudnosti sovetskoi vlasti," 8ochinenia, 2rid ed.,

Vol. XXIV, p. 68.
 COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 365

One could adduce the continued or even resurgent strength of

religious attachments in a number of Communist countries; the
continued and indeed growing strength of nationalist feelings among
many of the minority nationalities in the Soviet Union; the remark-
able persistence of an intelligentsia culture in families or other
groups that were part of that subculture one or two generations
ago. One could refer to persistent attitudes toward peasants, workers,
and other groups, and indeed to the self-appraisal of such groups.
Even forms of corruption typical within particular countries have
survived from the prerevolutionary period. Students of China point
out that the pattern of local resistance and accommodation to
central bureaucratic rule, which prevailed for centuries, can still be
observed in the People's Republic. The strength of these and other
elements of the prerevolutionary cultures is so great that some
scholars have argued that culture presents a more difficult obstacle
to Communist goals than do economic factors. Solomon's thesis, that
Mao's difficulties have been subjective rather than objective, cultural-
psychological rather than economic or institutional, might be applied,
with considerable changes in the details, also to Czechoslovakia,
Cuba, and Poland, and certainly to the Baltic, Caucasian, and
Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union.
5. Communism can be described as a deliberate and systematic
attempt at culture-building. Every revolution destroys an old system
and builds a new one. What seems to distinguish Communism
among other contemporary systems or movements is its success in
establishing viable new systems, with new institutions, with fresh
links to the population, with new patterns of participation, with a
new authority and a new legitimacy--in short, a new culture.
Communists seem to be masters at culture-building. What are the
reasons for this success? Perhaps Communism corresponds to felt
needs and interests of significant groups in the population. Perhaps
Communist elites are more skilful than others. Perhaps Communism
is more flexible, opportunistic, or in some fashion more ready and
able to put to use the political cultures of the countries where it
comes to power. This contradicts Communism's own ideological
rhetoric, but it might nonetheless be true.
6. Despite the diversity in Communist systems which can be
expected to ensue from such a clash of cultures, it may be possible
to identify significant features shared by all systems that emerge
from Communist revolutions. The set of such features could be
called Communist culture. Once this culture is defined, it could be
compared both with the prerevolutionary cultures and with the goal
culture that the revolutionary elites seek to impose. Of course, it
366 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

might also be compared with other, non-Communist cultures,

including our own.
I must repeat once more that all revolutions seek to replace an
old culture with a new one. The new one is expressed, in many
eases quite vaguely, by the revolutionary ideology and by the total
culture of the revolutionary movement. As we survey the history
of great revolutions since the Middle Ages, the intention of revolu-
tionary elites to effect cultural change is stated with increasing
clarity and deliberateness, until in the Communist movement and in
Communist polities we now have political entities avowing their
very purpose to be planned cultural change, executed scientifically.
For Marxism-Leninlsm claims to be, among other things, a science
of culture-building.
To anyone who defines culture as the heritage of a human aggre-
gate, the idea of planned euiture-building must appear contradictory.
Other ways of defining Communist revolutions must appear equally
contradictory. For instance, we can describe Communism as an
effort at planned modernization; or as state capitalismmthat is, a
process of economic development in which the state functions in lieu
of the entrepreneur. To people steeped in Western conceptions of
modernization or economic development, these notions are equally
contradictory, because modernization as we understand it implies
a lack of central planning, of organic and balanced growth, while
capitalism implies the predominance of individuals and corporations,
rather than the state, as entrepreneurs.
It seems to me that these contradictions result from excessively
narrow definitions of the terms "culture," "modernization," and
"economic development "----excessively narrow because they assume
the United States and Western Europe to be the exclusive models of
modernity, whereas in the case of culture they tend to overestimate
the static nature of group heritages.
As it is, the image of the culture which Communist elites would
like to see emerge from their revolutions is strikingly similar to
Western images of modernity. It includes a major emphasis on the
perfection of science, a need for sophisticated teetmology, and an
accumulation of material resources for science and technology. It is
concerned with the personnel requirements of a society worshipping
at the shrine of science, teetmology, and accumulation, so that the
culture of modernity, Communist-style, includes the image of a
people highly educated and professionally qualified. It envisages
the perfection of the functional division of labor for individuals and
groups, the participation of all to the limits of their expertise or
e0mpetenee, and the bureaucratization of all areas of day-to-day
 COMMUNIST RBVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE B67

decisionmaking. Further, it assumes maximum social mobility for

all within the bureaucratic merit system, and a floor under every-
one's standurd of living (this floor is called the welfare state). Finally,
it works toward such goals as national independence, strong defensive
capabilities, and national integration, meaning cultural integration
of all component groups and urbanization of all life.
To be sure, within the Communist world there are disagreements
on many details of this image of the culture of the future. The
Communist elites of China, Cuba, and Yugoslavia see bureaucra-
tization as somewhat of a threat and have tried in various ways
to promote alternative patterns of collective self-management. More-
over, even within the same Communist country, the image of the
goal culture changes occasionally, presumably in tune with changing
phases of development of the several Communist revolutions. If in
fact something we can call a Communist culture is to develop out
of all Communist revolutions, it is likely to be as variegated a
phenomenon as, let us say, the world-wide bourgeois culture of the
nineteenth century.

Implications for the Study of Communist Revolutions

Virtually every statement advanced in this paper about Com-
munist revolutions can also be made about those processes that
we call development, modernization, and Westernization.
All development can be seen as a conflict between old and new
cultures. Indeed, the history of the West for the past 1,000 years
can be described in these terms, and this applies even more strongly
to every encroachment of the West on other cultures, a long develop-
ment, one no less violent, bloody, and destructive than any Com-
munist revolution, from the first crusades down to the current wars
in Southeast Asia. One must, I believe, regard this gradually widen-
ing encroachment of the West on cultures surrounding it as an
integral part of the history of the West. In each case Of such
encroachment, there has been massive interaction between north-
west European culture and other cultures. Indeed, Communism sees
itself as being in direct continuity with this culture-bearing mission
of the West.
In each case, the new culture proved attractive to some members
of the old culture because of its economic, political, military, and
administrative performance capabilities.
Again, while I have defined Communism as planned cultural
change, we should not succumb to the myth that development in
the West has been organic, spontaneous, and relatively smooth.
368 STUDIES IN COIVEPARATIV]~COMMUNISM

Change promoted by the West has often been deliberate and willful.
This comment refers to the changes wrought upon non-Western
cultures by missionaries, slave traders, gold miners, sugar planters,
and railroad builders. But it refers equally to domestic entrepreneurs,
royal bureaucrats, city planners, constitution writers, captains of
industry, and. bourgeois revolutionaries.
In Western history, too, the old cultures resisted, and the entire
development can be described as a fitful, convulsive, painful, and
never quite adequate adjustment of the old to the new, the new
to the old, with the emergence of new cultures as the end product.
The process of deliberate cultural change in the West and by the
West has evoked as wide a variety of reactions as has been evoked
by Communist revolutions. It has been hailed as the noblest task of
civilized people: It has been denounced as a criminal and murderous
undertaking. And it has been ridiculed as an exercise in foolishness
and futility:
Now it is not good for the Christian's health
to hustle the Aryan brown.
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles
and he weareth the Christian down.
And the end of the fight is a tombstonewhite
with names of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here
who tried to hurry the East."
Rudyard Kipling
The inference to be drawn from these similarities between Com-
munist revolutions and the process of history in the West seems
clear. Viewing both as a clash of cultures 'occasioned by the attempt
to create.a new culture i n the place of an old one, we have a
basis on which to do comparative studies in a manner seldom
attempted (if attempted at all).
We shall want to dwell on the similarities and dissimilarities be-
tween Communist and Western {current or past) conceptions of the
goal culture. I 'venture that the similarities are greater than the dis-
similarities. T h e essence of both Communist and Western concep-
t i o n s o f the culture of the future seems to me to be rationality, or
the myth of rationality. This myth assumes that an empirical science
of human behavior, including .,politics, is possible. In its Western
form, i t ]~olds,t h a t mature; rational people make clear distinctions
between discrete areas of activity .(" boundary maintenance"). In
both ' cases, it is taken for granted that human activities can be
managed rationally, as if o n the basis of engineering principleS.
Again, both goal cultures assume that the chief concern of:lmman
 COMMUNIST RBVOLUTIONS AND CULTURAL CHANGE 359

aggregates is to accumulate material riches. For this purpose, both

lay great emphasis on the most e~cient exploitation of the natural
environment, without much concern for long-range consequences.
Both cultures are conspicuous for their lack of emphasis on ethical
considerations. I am tempted to assert that they are secular in the
sense of being emancipated not only from religion s , but also from
moralities.
To t h e composite image of the converging goal Culture, one
could add bureaucratization and urbanization, together with many
details. I find it significant that the Soviet textbook in ideology,
Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, provides_, a definition ot
socialism which is virtually identical with Western textbook defini-
tions of bureaucracy. Both axe defined by their goal and by the
manner in which they hope to achieve it--by the imposition of ration-
ality on human affairs through complex organizations and scientific
management.
Equal attention must be paid to differences in the two conceptions
of the goal culture. But this must be done dispassionately, without
taking sides, from the beginning. It will not do to call Communist
culture "quasi-modem," as Frederick Barghoorn has done in his
contribution to Pye and Verba's Political Culture and Political
Development. ~ He could do so because he singled out participation,
or "meaningful" participation, as the single salient difference
between Soviet and ~a~nerican conceptions of moderm'ty. It seems to
me that similar attention will have to bc paid to different concep-
tions of property relations, to different priorities in the use of
national resources which stem from the difference between the com-
mercial culture of the West and the socialist culture of Communist ,- r

countries. Finally, the collectivist ethics of Communism and the

individualistic ethics of Western culture arc linked to profound
conceptual differences concerning the overall purpose Of human life.
Beyond the comparison of goal cultures, the much broader con-
ception of cultural change through Cultural clash could become the
framework for range o f comparisons (a) within the Communist
world, (b) between the Communist world and the West, (c) bctweeii
Communist countries and former colonies of Western countries,
(d) between Communist countries and countries like ~Iapan which
defy simple classification, and (e) between Western countries.
•The range of questions that could be asked in such c0mparativc
studies has been suggested by the many hypothetical statements in

27. Lucian W . Pye and Sidney Verba, Political Culture and Poiitleal De=
velopment (Princeton, N.I. : Princeton University Press, 1965), Chap. 11:
370 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVI~COMMUNISM

this paper. For me, some of the most interesting ones are implied by
the similarity of Communist and Western elites in their attempt to
impose what I have called the culture of rationality. The questions
that suggest themselves include the foUowing:
a. Which culture is more effective in modernizing7 Which more
effectively promotes economic growth, participation, social
mobility, welfare, and other aspects of modernity7
b. Which modernizing elite makes a greater effort to preserve old
cultures?
c. Which modernizing elite encounters more resistance from in-
cumbent cultures, and in Which of the two processes do the
incumbent cultures maintain themselves more successfully?
d. In which of the processes is the process of modernization more
destructive, traumatic, violent, exploitative, or unstable7
Many groups of countries lend themselves aptly to comparisons
of this kind. I know of an imaginative study now in process covering
four countries quite comparable in their nineteenth-century culture,
but today falling into two very different camps: Bulgaria, Rumania,
Greece, and Turkey. North Korea and South Korea, East Germany
and West Germany, India and China, the Dominican Republic and
Cuba: I am amazed that there is not a wealth of comparative work
on these pairs, or that there are no comparisons of Communist
revolutions with political processes now going on in the Third World,
where "modernization" often means the adoption of the nation-
state, bureaucracies, strong armies, and modem propaganda methods,
but not economic growth, democratic institutions, and the spread
of welfare.~s
Ultimately, comparative work of this kind ought to aim toward
a new taxonomy of political systems, orders, and cultures. Obviously,
the criteria of ordering must yet be worked out, though the contrast
between socialism and capitalism will doubtless be part of it. What I
have tried to show in this paper is both the desirability and the tre-
mendous difficulty of using the concept of culture for elaborating
such a taxonomy.

28. Pioneer work in this kind of scholarship is now being done in Third
World countries. For a widely ranging survey of some of it, see the forth-
coming article by A. W. and N. L Singham, "Cultural Domination and
Political Subordination--Notes Towards a Theory of the Caribbean Political
System," which I was fortunate enough to see in manuscript form just as I
was completing this paper.