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This article criticizes philosopher Richard Rorty's pragmatism. Until recently, Rorty had not addressed the conjuncture of issues and concerns that constitute feminism. Feminists have critiqued him, however, calling attention to perceived weaknesses and lapses in his pragmatism. Rorty's pragmatic impulse, in contrast, consists of an impatience with differences that do not make a difference and a distaste for baroque invention and for useless epicycles, for whatever does not get to the point. The invisible hand conception attempts to bring together the Romantic and pragmatic impulses by merely asserting that they are natural partners. This view conceives of the strong poet and the utopian reform politician not as antagonists, but rather as simply two slightly different variants of the same species, whose respective activities are complementary if not strictly identical, providing grist for the same liberal democratic mill. Rorty recognizes that once an oppressed group invents a new language, its terms and categories may be commensurable neither with that group's previous self-descriptions nor with those of the oppressors. The task of a democratic-socialist-feminist pragmatism not only is to resist recognized oppressions, but also to bear witness to those oppressions that are not now recognized as such, and to testify to the possibility of still unimagined new languages that would problematize currently accepted practices and institutions.

The article focuses on social change and social control. Social scientists have learned to approach crises as processes over which subjects have little or no influence. They concede, nonetheless, that crises should not be separated from the subjective point of view, since, as patients laying on sickbeds, individuals experience their helplessness before the ironclad objectivity of their critical state. As reformers, men and women became involved with the relations between political action, cultural values and economic performance. They learned to explain how institutional and technological changes might influence the pace of social evolution. They wasted time and health musing over the rapports between equality and efficiency, and established at which junctures fast and consistent growth of capital investment might have been best accommodated. They volunteered to calculate the costs and practical benefits of economic efficiency or redistribution of wealth. They stated principles of scientific management, devised a reference system for the study of work motivation and labor relations. They perceived a possibility to induce macroeconomic stability and devised institutionalized models for controlling political choice.

The article focuses on the feminist potential of radical democracy. The radical wing of second wave feminism grew in large part out of the angry rejection of the male left by some of the women who had been involved in civil rights and anti-war movements. Radical democratic theory is being increasingly talked about and written about in academic circles. It claims to reflect and inform a historical period characterized by the failure of forms of state socialism in Western and Eastern Europe alike. Attacks on the welfare state in Western Europe and the crumbling of the Soviet bloc have paralyzed much of traditional socialist discourse. In contrast, proponents of radical democratic theory claim to be able to expand the realm of political and public debate to include concerns about the environment, the increasing militarization at national and international levels and the subordination of marginalized groups on the bases of gender, race and class. Feminists have roundly criticized the tenets of classical and contemporary liberalism, both in theory and in practice.

The article presents an analysis of the social movements in Zabaikal'e, a region in Southeastern Siberia traditionally inhabited by the semi-nomadic hunters and herders known as the Evenki. In the past five years, the Evenki have begun to call attention to the social and ecological problems that intensive resource extraction is causing for their traditional lands. Their proposals, articulated through petitions, newspapers and interviews, call for the reform of collective agriculture and for a re-empowerment of local structures of government. Evenk activists have taken advantage of the recent political liberalizations to reflect positively on the types of institutions they would like to establish. The struggles of the Evenki thus inform more general debates about the significance of the recent reforms to state socialism and the new social movements that have spawned them. Through an analysis of the prescriptions of Evenk activists, the article argues the necessity of rejecting the paradigm that has been used to characterize the relation of civil society to the state in Siberia.

The article presents a discussion on the book "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society," by Jürgen Habermas, a renowned philosopher. This book is a translated version. Habermas's philosophical-historical critique of the concept and function of the public sphere in England, France, and Germany from the Renaissance to the twentieth century served as a direct inspiration for the German New Left and opened up new lines of scholarship and political debate in Germany and Western Europe. The 1989 translation coincided with a series of events (radical transformations in Eastern Europe, the bloody suppression of the democracy movement in China, and the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution) which once again pointed to the pertinence of Habermas's diagnosis of civil society for democratic theory and practice. The book deserves to be celebrated as a classic: It has stood the test of time, surviving the fortunes of mercurial literary tastes and changing intellectual seasons; and its new translation has widened markedly the author's circle of readers.

The article presents a discussion on liberal neutrality, pluralism, and deliberative politics. The central problem of democratic politics in modern society is to maintain diversity within civil society while creating some measure of unity, or bindingness, of political authority. This problem exists for any modern society characterized by a high degree of functional differentiation and cultural pluralism. However, the problem has become particularly acute during the past few decades in view of the changing boundaries of the political. On the one hand, with the new social movements beginning in the 1970s, the scope of the political has expanded so that a number of issues traditionally regarded as private are now considered public. At the same time, the nature of political issues has also changed: Politics is no longer oriented to more narrowly conceived interest-based issues that are relatively capable of compromise, but rather has become increasingly occupied with values and normative concerns that do not fit as easily into the traditional paradigm of politics. A frequent response by contemporary political liberalism to this new politics has been a policy of contraction or avoidance.

The article presents the author's response to two articles: "Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," by Seyla Benhabib and "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," by Judith Butler, which were published in the journal "Praxis International." Ostensibly, Seyla Benhabib's and Judith Butler's papers dispute the relationship of feminism to postmodernism. However, in the course of their exchange, a debate about modernity versus postmodernity is transmuted into a debate over the relative merits of Critical Theory and poststructuralism. Benhabib defends feminism rooted in Critical Theory and premised on concepts of autonomy, critique, and utopia. Butler's feminism, in contrast, rests on poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity, identity, and human agency that are at odds with Benhabib's. Moreover, Benhabib claims that postmodernist and poststructuralist views of subjectivity are incompatible with feminist politics, while Butler claims that views like Benhabib's imply an authoritarian foundationalism antithetical to the feminist project.

The article presents a discussion on the foundations of feminism and post-modernism. If post-modernism as a term has some force or meaning within social theory, or feminist social theory in particular, perhaps it can be found in the critical exercise that seeks to show how theory, and philosophy, is always implicated in power, and perhaps that is precisely symptomatically at work in the effort to domesticate and refuse a set of powerful criticisms under the rubric of post-modernism. The gesture of conceptual mastery that groups together a set of positions under the post-modern, that makes the post-modern into an epoch or a synthetic whole, and that claims that the part can stand for this artificially constructed whole, enacts a certain self-congratulatory ruse of power. It is paradoxical that the act of conceptual mastery that effects this dismissive grouping of positions under the post-modern wants to ward off the peril of political authoritarianism. A social theory committed to democratic contestation within a post-colonial horizon needs to find a way to bring into question the foundations it is compelled to lay down.

The article presents a discussion on feminism and post-modernism. Both feminism and post-modernism are not merely descriptive categories: they are constitutive and evaluative terms, informing and helping define the very practices which they attempt to describe. As categories of the present, they project modes of thinking about the future and evaluating the past. The author disagrees with the view of some feminist theorists that feminism and post-modernism are conceptual and political allies. A certain version of post-modernism is not only incompatible with but would also undermine the very possibility of feminism as the theoretical articulation of the emancipatory aspirations of women. This undermining occurs because post-modernism is committed to three theses: the death of man understood as the death of the autonomous, self- reflective subject, capable of acting on principle; the death of history, understood as the severance of the epistemic interest in history of struggling groups in constructing their past narratives; the death of metaphysics, understood as the impossibility of criticizing or legitimizing institutions, practices, and traditions other than through the immanent appeal to the self-legitimation of small narratives. Interpreted thus, post-modernism undermines the feminist commitment to women's agency and sense of selfhood, to the reappropriation of women's own history in the name of an emancipated future, and to the exercise of radical social criticism which uncovers gender in all its endless variety and monotonous similarity.

The article focuses on the political situation in East Germany. Most German philosophers had been members of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany since the late 60s. They taught Marx's party line from 1845 that philosophy should not only interpret but change the world. The general situation of East German intellectuals was unique. As in all authoritarian societies the margin of allowable error was narrow. Either you walked the fine line of political correctness or you fell. The fall could be soft and pedagogical or hard and uncompromising. That was the usual range of threats. What was unique in this case, however, was that you could be sent to the West German paradise with a one-way ticket. The East German intellectual was also very German. As a true German thinker he or she was capable of perfecting life theoretically;3 and as a genuine product of a strong state he or she had learned to believe that the best chance to improve the social and political system of the German Democratic Republic was from within the corridors of communist party power

The article presents information on the meaning of recent social changes in Eastern Europe with special reference to Marxism. Dramatic and unpredictable changes took place in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union during the years 1989 and 1990. Communist parties lost power and more or less disintegrated in Eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary and in north-western parts of Yugoslavia, Croatia and Slovenia. They were transformed in Bulgaria, Romania and in the remaining four Yugoslav republics; they do no longer exist as Communist parties. Some of them now have modern and democratic programmes including guarantees for human rights, political pluralism, free press and free elections, independence of courts, and market economy. Marx said explicitly that communists should not have organized into a separate party, that they should stay together in a pluralistic organization of the entire working class which would embrace very different existing socialist orientations.

The article reports that protest and struggle for democracy in China has become an object of international appropriation. It is interpreted for one purpose in Hong Kong, where a strident mix of fear and ambivalent insistence on Chinese identity are central. It is interpreted in much of the West as an object lesson on the evils of totalitarian government and more specifically, if insidiously, the virtues simply of being Western. Each scholar or journalist who writes on the movement participates in this struggle to appropriate it. This is not altogether avoidable, but it is crucial to recognize it. It is crucial also to realize that the movement of Spring 1989 was not monological, did not speak with one voice, did not express one set of interests and did not point in one direction. It represented a confluence of forces as well as persons, and the complexity of that representation is the reason that it can and must still be struggled over. Seeing the easy collapsing of the movement into settled categories is disconcerting for one who observed it first hand and joined in discussions with its protagonists as they struggled to create and define it. The Western media and the Chinese diaspora alike have objectified the movement--or created a simulacrum of it--in international discourse.

The article reports that traditional new elite can be regarded as the starter engine of the radical political movements in Hungary. Yet at the same time still other political elites have emerged from the "great generation", primarily through the mediation of the new parties, and they also demand their share of power. Those members of the traditional new elite who are in spectacular power position for the time being have been mostly in their post for a short time. They are not significantly responsible for the present economic crisis. Yet probably part of them will have to leave their post now after the recent elections. This is the direction of the effect of the power aspirations and victory of the new political elite, and also of the sharpening struggle inside the traditional new elite whereby a scapegoat is sought because of growing economic tensions. The old party bureaucracy has disintegrated, and there have been significant changes of personnel within the state bureaucracy. The exact direction of the movement of "cadres" will only be possible to examine with precise empirical research.

The article aims to introduce Andries Sternheim to an international public and thus to do justice to a man who made a contribution to the development of critical theory in the thirties and who has been almost completely forgotten since.' A glance at the mainstream of critical theory through the looking-glass of the ideas of a minor member can also serve a more theoretical goal. It enables one to get a clearer idea of the theoretical assumptions which were shared by the central group and of their historical relativity. Andries Sternheim was neither a university graduate nor an academic philosopher. In many respects he was a self-made man who studied history, social science, statistics and economy outside the university. One can say that as a critical theorist he developed more or less on his own. He had been trained as a diamond-cutter in Amsterdam and he soon became a member of the "Algemene Nederlandsche Diamantbewerkers Bond", a politically and socially very interesting section of the Dutch Labour Movement. Here he received part of his education on the field of political and social science, following courses and undergoing different kinds of training.

This article presents information related to new factors in the political organization of youth in Hungary. In this article the author has to reckon with some new features of recent Hungarian political life. A new type of citizen activity is emerging which can be compared with the new social movements in western countries. The social base of social movements is constituted mainly by young people, especially students. There now exists a network of new social movements in Hungary, with some thousand people involved in it. Nonetheless, because mostly young people, especially students and young intellectuals, are active in these movements, they have some importance for the political organization of youth intellectuals who will someday be in part integrated into societies' power élite. Here the author tries to analyze the role of these new movements in the political socialization of young people in Hungary. Both in eastern and western countries in the seventies and the eighties, new features emerged in the political socialization of young people; the so-called alternative movements, or new social movements.

This article presents information related to new social movements in the United States and West Germany. Risks for which undisputed solutions are neither available nor visible in the near future, are the central problem of advanced industrial societies. In stark oversimplification one might say that the dominant way of "solving" the social problems of the 19th and early 20th century was the "social democratization" of capitalism. The "integration" of the working class, the establishment of the welfare state and the jurisdiction of social relations were the basis for the full unleashing of the productive forces and the immense accumulation of wealth in the Western hemisphere. No doubt, political cleavages, class antagonism, sexism and racism are still very much present in Western Societies. But none of these problems seems to translate into political struggles which attempt to change the path of modernization along the demands of the old social movements. Instead one might witness the defense of the established mode of welfare capitalism by organized labor rather than the abolition of capitalism and the pursuit of legal and social equality by the mainstream of the women's movement rather than the overthrow of patriarchal society.

This article presents information on matters related to modern life. It is becoming increasingly commonplace to hear that the conditions of modern life are being superseded or undermined in significant ways. The sources of this change and the character of the effect it is having are subjects of dispute, as are the labels which are chosen to specify this complex phenomenon. Some prefer the notion of a "post-industrial society," others that of an "informational mode of production;" still others speak in a broader sense of a "postmodern condition." The term "postmodern" has been most often associated with aesthetics and epistemology whereas the term "post-industrial" has been most often associated with changes in technology and society. The author will be using the term "postmodern" as a rubric under which to group all of these types of phenomena. The postmodern problematic is constituted by four phenomena: the increasing unpersuasiveness of metanarratives, the rise of new informational technologies, the growing awareness of new problems associated with societal rationalization and the emergence of new social movements.

The article presents a discussion on feminist consciousness in the nineteenth century. The author states that in the nineteenth century one sees the growth of certain movements rich in social upheaval. Such movements not only allowed women to collectively express their desire for equality, but also, in a revealing paradox. The nineteenth century, a cornerstone of an era, is the one in which the web of imprisonment was slowly being woven to enclose women within the family cell, the glowing hearth and the haven of peace for the bourgeois citizen. Until then, "traditional" history had not considered gender relations as a subject of study worthy of interest to researchers. Yet the status and the place of women in the nineteenth century were the subject of conflicts, the object of reflections, a constructed image before ending up as a separation of roles and sexes. Not that the nineteenth century is exceptional in this matter, but as in all fundamental historical periods in the course of which a new society is being formed, gender relations were redefined and the significance of the nineteenth century is to have reinforced considerably the division between public-private divisions.

The article discusses the possible implications of sociologist Seyla Benhabib's '"discourse ethic" for the collective, political struggles of social movements, including but not limited to the feminist movement. It states that the potential advantage of a discourse or dialogical ethic over what Benhabib has called a "universalist-formal" or monological ethic consists in the fact that the former, but not the latter, can allow for the situation described by the author. That is, a discourse ethic could take into account that dominant and subordinated groups stand in different and unequal relations to means of interpretation and communication. It could do this by maintaining a kind of suspicion or distance from any given vocabulary for interpreting needs, defining situations and pressing claims. It could keep open the possibility that it could come to pass that biases might become apparent in even what have been thought to be relatively neutral forms of discourse. Benhabib argues that in order to meet its own criteria of universalizability and reversibility, "universalist-formal moral theory" must abandon the monological model of moral deliberation in favor of a dialogical model.

The article presents the reply of the author related to an article by sociologist E.P. Thompson. Authors of the author drew out the theoretical implications of a position paper of Thompson's that predicted in effect the Soviet manipulation of certain one-sidedness in the peace movement as well as a right-wing outcome in the West. They stated that Thompson, it seems, might have only wanted his article to be used tactically. He appears not to be interested in the theoretical generalization of its main point, especially in a new and entirely different tactical situation. His original article was meant to reinforce the hand in the movement of what he now calls a "lesser tendency" that links disarmament and civil rights. Having failed to do so, but wanting to maintain his position in the movement, it may be the case that he no longer wants to be too closely identified with his own earlier considerations. In this article, authors chose to reflect on dilemmas of the peace movement in part, because they we considered it to be one of the very few self-reflective and self-critical pieces coming out of that milieu.

The article comments on the "Social Movements, Civil Society and the Problem of Sovereignty," by A. Arato and J. Cohen, published in an issue the journal Praxis International. The article welcomes Arato and Cohen's stance, which is one of implicit optimism. They are warning the actors in "social movements" (including the peace movement and the Greens) as to the dangers which would ensue if these movements were to press the demand for the "autonomy" of "civil society" (sometimes defined as "society" tout court) from "the state" to the point at which the very integument of democratic society (representative institutions and the law) was itself threatened. But they issue these warnings from an affirmative stance: that these movements could and should contribute to a "dualistic strategy for democratization"--a project, which they endorse, and which they presume to be historically present as possibility. The article further adds that it is true that, in the event of our resistance being successful, there would be significant new social openings. But this would be a half-unintended consequence. It would arise because of the specific character of state power today, which had encountered an immovable object in popular will and had been subjected to a salutary check. And in that moment of check new democratic opportunities would open up.

The article sheds light on the model of the Great Republic. The article adds that it was conceived in Europe, east of the Elbe. The article deliberately refrains from using the term "Eastern Europe" for the tradition of the Great Republic is shared by certain Central-European societies and only some East-European ones. Further, there is no one single model of the Great Republic but several ones. However, all have certain basic features in common, indeed sufficient to warrant our calling them models of the Great Republic. In addition, all of them have been formulated by thinkers who had been brought up east of the Elbe, or carried and motivated by political movements belonging to the same region. The model of the Great Republic though, has never made an appearance in the modern history of Great Britain; the American model has always been deeply rooted in its own tradition (the only democratic tradition one can mention); French postwar social movements, especially those of May 1968, have borne very little resemblance to the Great Republic.

The article states that social movements have raised the theme of autonomy and self-defense of civil society against the state. It examines this problem in three steps, by specifying what is new in the new social movements, focusing on the general political context and on the issue of social identity, by posing the problem of the relation between movements and reform and by focusing on the question of the limits to societal democratization vis-à-vis the state. The author briefly sketches some general features of advanced welfare-state capitalist systems, necessarily abstracting from specific political cultures and national traditions. He states that it is now a commonplace that the formally democratic political system seems unable to provide collective identities or to generate a common political will. In the process of becoming catch-all, vote-maximizing organizations, political parties have lost any intrinsic connection with social movements and have abandoned commitment to worldviews or motivating, action-orienting ideologies.

The article discusses new social movements and political culture in West Germany. Up to now, the prevailing interpretation of "new social movements" is the one expressed by naming them so. They are seen as basically social phenomena, originated by material conflicts in the context of the class structure of West German society. Two variants can be distinguished in this line of interpretation. One, departing from its dominantly new middle-class origins, especially in the field of social services, professionally linked to the non-profit-oriented and non-active sectors of society. This gives the "new social movements" a distinct non-working class composition, yet still in some way related to the classical proletariat as its closest social equivalent. This "belt" of social actors, tentatively named "new plebeians" or "postindustrial neo-proletariat," would appear as the historical successor of the proletariat as the subject of emancipation, after the domestication of workers' movement. According to others, therefore, this cluster of actors is not just the next best placed to the proletariat to feel effects of capitalist domination, but these effects have changed qualitatively in a way that makes these non-working strata the first and originary victims of present-day capitalism and the best placed to strike back at its weakest flank.

The article discusses the impact of the Italian Women's Movement on cultural and social change. It states that for Italy one phase of the Women's Movement is over, while new outlooks and new kinds of presence are being devised. A spirit of freedom of choice prevails, almost an entrepreneurial spirit, while, at the same time, small organizing bodies have been growing as strong as in American feminism. Today "corporativism" is a possible outcome in Italy, too. By that the author means, the defense of those areas of society, which women have been taking over in the last ten years. At the same time, the new aspect of the Women's Movement is a revealing symptom of a transformation of politics. Today politics is made by isolated practices or sectorial actions directed towards obtaining specific benefits. This corresponds to a displacement of politics into the social. There is no longer an exclusive center for the diffusion of politics, which is localized in the state and parties and in their apparatus. Politics is everywhere. It is widespread in the social body, fragmented in a plurality of practices and sectorial issues which manifest themselves in a plurality of places.

The article focuses on current trends in American Marxism and socialism. The major strategic debate of all serious American Marxists, organized or not, has focused on the issue of American exceptionalism. Whichever version of American exceptionalism one chooses to accept, serious problems were posed for Marxists in attempting to deal with the consequences of this exceptionalism. Again, the responses were predictably vague and not convincing. The early Marxists, the CP-at least until the 1930s, and the Trotskyists tended to work with an implicit assumption of America's backwardness, that is, they treated the absence of a mass class-based socialist movement in America as a question of a cultural lag which would be solved in time. America then would catch up with the European experience. Many American Marxists claim that today in the U. S. an analogous situation exists to the one of the 1930s, where the official labor movement proves incapable or unwilling to reach out and organize the new layers of workers outside of the traditional industries.

The article focuses on the views of the author about social movements in Europe. A movement is under way in various countries of Protestant central and northern Europe, a movement which the likes to call the ecology and peace movement, but which by virtue of its inherent dynamic is a movement for conversion in the metropolises, for a transformation that goes right through to the material and mental foundations of European culture. This movement is at a formative stage, and naturally corresponds with similar tendencies in all other parts of the world. The distinction between fundamental and long-term interests on the one hand, and immediate and short-term interests on the other, becomes more important than the distinction of different class interests. Within the metropolitan countries, which have as a whole an exploiting position, the class contradiction has only a relative importance, and is always based on immediate and short-term interests, as a general rule it fuels the characteristic dynamic of material expansion.

Since the mid-sixties, there has been a growth of neo-conservatism in both the United States and West Germany. The economic, political, and cultural development of Western industrial societies has not corresponded to the affirmative picture of development that has been held by many Western social scientists and philosophers. The growth of neo-conservatism has emerged from this disappointment. But there are significant differences in the character of neo-conservatism in the United States and West Germany. In the United States many of the neo-conservatives have been former liberals. Confronted with the defeat in Vietnam, the loss of authority of institutions, new social movements, bureaucratization and a growing sense of crisis, they have claimed that the causes of the present crisis are due to the destruction of the moral foundations of society in cultural modernity, the growth of an "anarchistic" life style, and in the affirmation of unlimited self-fulfillment that undermines the discipline of everyday bourgeois life. They have attacked intellectuals - the new "hostile" class - as being responsible for this crisis. And they call for a renewal of religious consciousness in overcoming secularized culture, and in strengthening bourgeois society against external and internal enemies. Neo-conservatives in West Germany have a different background. There is a greater continuity of the conservative spirit with its emphasis on traditional national values of obedience, duty, and sacrifice. After 1945, conservatives accepted modernity as a technological program and the need for continued capitalist growth, but they have not accepted the idea of modern culture based on principles of the Enlightenment. The "new" intellectual class is accused of attempting to establish its domination: radical humanistic ideas are declared to be passe. As a remedy for the moral crisis, they call for a return to a traditional consciousness, uneducated common sense, and a revitalization of religion. Although U. S. and German neo-conservatives have different origins, draw on different sources, and have different emphases, they do reach similar conclusions. Neo-conservative analyses suffer from a confusion of causes and effects of the present crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues related to the social movement in Poland during 1980-1981. Everything that took place in Poland between August, 1980 and December, 1981 was a classical libertarian pattern of man-making history. A conscious determination to belong to the movement, personal commitment, enthusiasm and the manifestation of personal responsibility for every single act constituted a substantially new dimension of a mass movement. It was the base that became the center and protagonist of the movement, contrary to the conception that the masses can be only the driving fuel of a revolution since they lack a self-consciousness of the movement's ends. Therefore self-consciousness is to be imputed from without, and ends are to be doctrinarily postulated in order that actions of amorphous masses can be articulated. It is characteristic of all workers' movements so far, except populist and anarchist movements, that they have been elitist. The Polish Solidarity movement, which was begun by workers who made up its majority, is a novelty in twentieth century history.

The military take-over in Poland means the defeat of communist society and its central principle - the control of social life by the political ideology of a party which considers itself the expression of workers. The conflict between the Party and society was apparent during the Stalinist era and the repression of popular and intellectual movements in the last two decades, but the Party was not simply a ruling elite. It claimed to represent the needs of society and the workers' interests. Many insisted on the common hopes of the Party and the mass of Solidarity members. But by the middle of 1981 the gap widens. As Solidarity leaders leave the Party and workers return their Party cards, Solidarity appears as a huge national and social movement, the expression of the Polish population outside the Party. By resorting to military force the Party has lost the foundations of its totalitarian power - it cannot claim to speak for society and history. The Polish situation is contrasted with that of Czechoslovakia and Kadar's Hungary. Increasingly in Poland, as in Rumania, political power plays a repressive role, faced with the growing hostility of the main workers' groups. For a long time popular movements fought an ancien régime on behalf of progress, but Solidarity has clearly shown the new thrust of a popular movement opposed to a productivist modernizing regime, in the name of human rights and freedoms. The military coup signals the defeat of a totalitarian party and a direct confrontation between power and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical materialism that does not commit one either to the subordination of the feminist struggle, to the class struggle or to the complete separation of the one from the other. The widely held view is that the socialist struggle is a struggle to re-appropriate the product of the worker, to end exploitation, or to end control of the means of production by a few. On this view it is natural that the socialist and the feminist struggles should be viewed as separate. Even if feminism and socialism, understood in this limited way, were victorious at roughly the same time, this would result from coincidence rather than integration of the struggles. Cognizance of the common economic framework and of the limits it imposes leads to the recognition of areas for cooperation between the feminist and class movements. Historical materialism has often been appealed to precisely in order to eliminate or blur the autonomy of struggles against oppression. Historical materialism can be used in this way when it is the view that economic changes are the stimulus for the coming to be of whatever else there is.

The article reports of current practical struggles for liberation and democracy throughout the world and learnings from the social movements in Poland. Since all forms of democracy have their own forms of exclusion, only the co-existence of different, even competing forms of democracy can be genuinely democratic. Such seems to be the political theory striven for by the radical left of the Polish movement, important in itself in spite of the minority position of those who would profess it, whose strategic project of general democratization plays more of a regulative than constitutive role for the movement as a whole. If developed, this type of political theory would not be the least contribution of the democratic intellectuals in Poland to movements for emancipation, East and West. After the failures of 1956 and 1968, of revolution and reform we now know that a third alternative-structural reform from below is at the very least possible in the societies of the Soviet type. Given the irrelevance of revolutionary and the exhaustion of étatistic reform alternatives in the West it is worth asking whether such a model could contribute to the self-interpretation of our new social movements as well.

The article focuses on history of Marxism. History of Marxism, both as a corpus of theory and as a social movement, discloses an underside, a body of proletarian thinking that, whether suppressed or merely ignored, is eminently worthy of recapture. Marxist intellectuals have an obligation to surges of working class rebellion wherever they occur that transcends their fidelity to their own mental labor. Historians were discovering oversights and explaining suppressions long before psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud appeared and, it might be added, Marx himself can be quite useful as a guide to explaining suppressions of pertinent evidence. The Marxian precept excludes that function one ordinarily calls leadership. Perceived at the time, the syndicalists at the symposium on the Marxian revolutionary movement, were certainly the enemy of social democratic party bureaucracies as well as vanguard party conceptions of their time. Yet they preserved a Marxian accent on self emancipation that had all but disappeared among orthodox Marxists.