of these claimed, with varying degrees of justification, to have
produced ideologically improved versions of Marxism of their own.
Other Marxisms
As George Orwell (1949, 1968) observed, the language employed in
the totalitarian Marxist–Leninist regimes became increasingly
divorced from reality. Dictatorship was described as democracy.
Enormous differences in lifestyle were characterised as equality. The
repression of national movements (as in Hungary in 1956) was
described as maintaining peace and freedom and so on. Regimes
which were nominally revolutionary, were actually characterised by
bureaucratic conservatism and were increasingly seen as inefficient
as well as hypocritical.
In the inter-war period, and during the Second World War, many
European socialists tended to identify with ‘communism’. The
positive role of the Leninists in opposing fascism, and the achieve-
ments of the Soviet Union in terms of apparent economic growth and
positive welfare measures, impressed intellectuals. A degree of direct
financial subsidy to sympathetic West European parties and unions
was also influential. The major socialist movements in such countries
as France and Italy remained aligned with Moscow and continued to
describe themselves as communist even through the Cold War
period. Writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre in France continued to
describe themselves as communists despite increasing problems of
conscience in identifying with regimes which ruthlessly persecuted
their own dissenting intellectuals.
However, increasingly, Western Marxists began to take inde-
pendent intellectual stands apart from the rather stultifying ortho-
doxy of Marxist-Leninism as well as distancing themselves from the
Soviet regime. In particular the idea of rigid economic determinism in
history came in for re-evaluation. In Italy Gramsci (1969) stressed the
humanistic strands in Marx’s early writings and the role of ideology in
influencing the functioning of the modern state.
The British writer Ralph Miliband stressed the role of the state in
exercising a semi-autonomous role in history. He continued to take a
pessimistic view of the likelihood of a capitalist economic system
‘primarily geared to the private purposes of those who own and
control its material resources’ satisfying the needs of ordinary people
IDEOLOGIES 79