The Origins of Kondylis’ Political Thought, Part 1

By Sokratis Vekris

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I. The Problem of Skepticism in Post-War European Political Thought

The development of Kondylis’s philosophy cannot be properly understood without grasping the roots from which it sprang. He himself admits in multiple occasions that his experience with Marxism played a crucial role in shaping the direction of this thought.¹ His ideas were no doubt cultivated in Greek soil and carry within them the traces of such origins. However, as he began to follow the theoretical developments that were part of a broader Western discourse, his Greek origins fused with the international horizon of his time. While Greece in the 1950s and 1960s was a country deeply wounded by the scars of the Greek Civil War (1944-1949), and while the political and cultural hegemony of the victorious right-wing establishment reigned undisputed, the country did at the same time undergo a series of economic, social, and political changes which were aimed at the modernization of the country according to the standards of the Western liberal model.² Notwithstanding the peculiarities of the Greek case, we must first place Kondylis’s intellectual development within the context of post-war European political thought.

The 1950s and the 1960s have been described as a period of “consensus politics”, a time when the center expanded and extreme forms of political radicalism gradually faded away.³ The reason is plain enough: the rehabilitation of post-war European democracies took place ‘with an eye both to the immediate fascist past and to the claims their Eastern rivals were making to embody true democracy’.⁴ This double threat—fascist past on the one hand, Soviet danger on the other—led most European countries to establish some kind of compromise between liberal and socialist values.⁵ Kondylis would some years later state that the liberal ideal of typical equality was reinterpreted by the democratic ideal of material equality.⁶ The regulation of the economy by the welfare state, the accommodation of pluralism, and the construction of a supranational European identity in an era which had demographically and geopolitically experienced the ‘dwarfing of Europe’⁷ after centuries of economic and political dominance, became central issues on the political agendas of socialists, liberals, and conservatives alike.⁸ This consensual reigning attitude, psychologically driven by what Judith Skhlar has aptly termed as the ‘liberalism of fear’⁹ — that is, fear of the extremes, fear of totalitarianism—, animated, by and large, the overarching mental climate of these decades. In the field of political theory, the situation evoked several responses, ranging from a retreat to positivism to the call for a return to the natural law tradition of classical political thought.¹⁰

Finding themselves in this political landscape, a large portion of the most sensitive Marxist thinkers arrived at a serious political deadlock. On the one hand, they faced what seemed to them as an undesirable, reformist compromise between the ideals to which they had invested their spiritual energies and the liberal status quo, which for years had constituted their ideological archenemy. On the other hand, as it became increasingly visible—and the evidence did accumulate day by day—that the Soviet Union had not established socialism on earth, they could no longer maintain their uncritical support for it; historical reality confronted them with a set of new difficulties. Suffice it to recall that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech was leaked to the West in 1956 and caused understandable bewilderment among the leaders of the respective Communist Parties. The same year also witnessed the Hungarian Uprising and its subsequent crushing by the Soviet tanks.¹¹

Several other social and political developments were at odds with certain tangible historical predictions of Marx’s sociological schema: the emergence of a consumer society or what J.K. Galbraith named in 1958 ‘the affluent society’ straightforwardly contradicted Marx’s prediction that the development of capitalism would necessarily lead to the impoverishment of the working class. This led several Marxist political theorists such as Herbert Marcuse to declare ‘the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of social change’¹² and the subsequent need to reevaluate certain core aspects of the Marxian legacy. Furthermore, the decolonization revolutions in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam showcased once again the inadequacies of Marxian economic determinism in making sense of contemporary political developments.¹³ Last, but not least, the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 should have made apparent even to the most stubborn sympathizers that the communist cause was ‘neither a monolithic bloc nor a coherent alliance, let alone a viable alternative world order’.¹⁴

The result was a pervasive feeling of puzzlement. The age-old question among the radicals of the New Left was raised anew: what is it to be done? The first task at hand, which had already been taking place since the 1930s, was to determine what kind of society was the Soviet Union. This was a duty of existential importance, even for those individuals like Kondylis who very soon acknowledged the shortcomings of the Soviet experiment. It also signaled the only way through which a concrete understanding of their contemporary situation could be achieved. The second one, for those at least who were ready enough to admit the most blatant failures of “actually existing socialism”, was to begin looking for alternative research programs, which would salvage, if not Marxism itself, at the very least the idea of human emancipation. In short, something needed to be rescued: whether it was the idea of socialism from the writings of Marx, Marx from its Stalinist distortion, or, in the most extreme cases, the Soviet Union itself from its alleged Western propaganda, remained a matter of dispute and depended on the background, preferences, and commitments of the individual in question.

Notwithstanding the variety of responses, we should keep in mind that the political outlook of the New Left that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century differed substantially from the classical Marxist tradition. For to remold or even completely abandon central Marxist categories (such as the world-historical mission of the proletariat, the notion that history is governed by certain immutable law, etc.), essentially implied to question the very premises of the Marxian corpus — oftentimes to even question Marx himself. Not surprisingly, then, Leszek Kołakowski titled the third volume of his magisterial work, Main Currents of Marxism, which deals with the canon of the Western Marxist tradition and whose major theorists (the Frankfurt School, Lukacs, Gramsci, etc.) were the major source of inspiration for the New Left, as “the Breakdown” of Marxism. The different variations of Marxism that emerged after what Kołakowski refers to as “The Golden Age” reflect a historical disintegration of this tradition for the simple reason that these movements were not anymore in the position to support those elements of Marxism that once had imbued it with the vitality and optimism which enabled it to become an active motor of historical change. Kołakowski remarks: ‘Marxism […] would not be Marxism without its claim to “scientific knowledge”’ and without its ability to offer clear-cut historical prognoses’.¹⁵

In an unpublished essay from 1964, Kondylis, sensing the theoretical and practical set of difficulties at which Marxism had arrived, boldly claimed that Marxism ‘has been overcome as a revolutionary ideology’.¹⁶ He was one of the few of his generation to dispel so quickly and categorically what he thought to be an antiquated creed— but certainly not for the same reasons as his liberal or socialist contemporaries. At the same time, however, the gradual demystification of Marx’s writings led to the rise of a persistent political and philosophical skepticism. What seemed to be here at stake was not the failure of this or that political ideology to carry through its potential, but rather the ‘growing doubt about the ability of reason to provide absolute, universally valid foundations for moral and political values’.¹⁷ Behind the political failure of Stalinism lay a deeper philosophical one, which was connected to the collapse of the idea of progress that had constituted the backbone of both the Marxist and the liberal philosophies of history. The collapse of modernity’s grand narratives, famously enunciated by Francois Lyotard some years later, loomed large in the horizon. In the words of Shklar: ‘the urge to construct grand designs for the political future of mankind is gone. The last vestiges of utopian faith required for such an enterprise have vanished’.¹⁸ Kondylis’ philosophy is the product of this great disillusionment; his “descriptive theory of decision” stems out directly from this political deadlock.¹⁹

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II. Student Years and Political Activism

After graduating from Kifissia’s High School in 1961, Kondylis enrolled as a law student at the University of Athens only to realize that his chosen field of study could not satisfy his deeper philosophical inclinations, which had been gradually developing since his early adolescence. Consequently, he decided to interrupt his studies in law and to apply the following year to the university’s philosophy department to study classical philology. He ranked first among four thousand candidates in the rigorous—and notoriously psychologically torturous—Panhellenic exams and secured a scholarship from the Greek State Foundation (IKY) for the duration of his studies. During the next four years he attended lectures and seminars by esteemed Greek professors in the fields of classical philology, history, linguistics, and philosophy. Among his notable professors was the distinguished neo-Kantian and Platonist philosopher, Ioannis Theodorakopoulos (1900-1981), with whom Kondylis would some years later share his enthusiasm and discuss in private the subject of his doctoral dissertation.²⁰ Other notable professors whose lectures Kondylis regularly attended included the Byzantine historian, Dionysios Zakynthinos (1905-1993), the linguist Georgios Kourmoulis (1907-1977), the philosopher and pedagogist, Konstantinos Spetsieris (1899-1989), the philologists Georgios Zoras (1908-1982) and Konstantinos Vourveris (1899-1978), and the archeologist Spyridon Marinatos (1901-1974).

Parallel to his studies, Kondylis continued to independently explore numerous topics of interest, ranging from philosophy to politics, and from history to literature. Despite the diversity of his inquiries, history—-in the broad sense of the word—-emerged as the overarching backdrop that united his early intellectual pursuits. He developed a habit of transcribing extensive passages from classical authors in their original languages, be it ancient Greek, French, Italian, or German, while keeping copious notes on the marginalia. He kept a separate notebook for the examination of classical, historically-oriented writers, such as Thucydides, Montesquieu, Marx and Engels, and Benedetto Croce; he dedicated separated notebooks to the study of history proper, mainly using the multivolume book Histoire Générale des Civilisations by Andre Aymard and Jeannine Auboyer as his main source; another for the study of the towering figures of sociology; and lastly, he transcribed a vast array of articles from contemporary Greek journals that had piqued his interest.

Even though his extensive notes on Thucydides indicate quite clearly that Kondylis had, from the age of eighteen, formed a very basic sketch of what would later evolve into a comprehensive political theory—distinction between facts and values, ideology as an essential driver of human history, human nature as an anthropological constant—this did not immediately discourage him from becoming involved in a number of political activities of his time, which were part of the left democratic movement. This is entirely natural considering, first, that similar problems abound in the Marxian corpus as well, and second, that he had not yet matured intellectually to be in the position to make categorical dismissals.

Kondylis became a member of the student journal Panspoudastiki [All-Student], which was originally founded in 1956. He participated in the Fourth All-Student Congress, which took place on April 1963 and whose topic was educational reform. He was also a member of the Lambrakis Democratic Youth,²¹ a political organization which was triggered by the assassination of the political activist and member of the United Democratic Left (EDA), Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. Mikis Theodorakis, the renowned communist composer, was the leader of the movement. It should be noted here parenthetically that the period between 1956 and 1965 saw a shift in the parliamentary outlook of the country, which gradually—and as it turned out, only temporarily—led Greek politics to overcome its post-civil war heavy conservative leanings.²² The turning point of this shift were the 1961 elections, in which the political leader of the Centre Union, Georgios Papandreou (1888-1968) accused Constantine Karamanlis of committing electoral fraud. This chain of events, coupled by the increasing dissatisfaction of the Greek people, and especially of the student movement, with the “Cyprus Problem”, allowed for the first time a centrist party to rise to power in 1963, somewhat balancing the post-war right-wing conservatist monopoly of power and discourse. Kondylis saw this development positively.²³ In short, Kondylis became involved in political activism at a time when Greek politics were themselves, at least for a brief period, experiencing a moment toward the establishment of a more liberal parliamentary system, trying to leave its civil war wounds behind. This shift was also manifested, or even incited, by the growth, flourishment and political radicalization of the student movement,²⁴ in which Kondylis belonged and formed his first political experiences.

The Panspoudastiki journal maintained links with EDA since its inception, but gradually began to take on its own independent identity. In 1962, the year during which Kondylis also joined the organization, Stelios Ramfos (1939), a Greek intellectual and friend of Kondylis, who became the chief of the editorial board, implemented a series of changes related to its internal functioning and organization: the newspaper was aesthetically and technically updated; the editorial board was expanded to include individuals who were not affiliated with the Party; and the content was diversified, with issues related to culture and civilization becoming of prime importance.²⁵ Older renowned poets like Giannis Ritsos and Georgios Seferis, who, incidentally, represented vastly opposing political ideologies—the former being the poet of the Communist Party par excellence, the latter, a diplomat, representing the conservative establishment—, published their poems in the journal. The thing to remember about Kondylis’ involvement in this organization is that he became a part of a vibrant intellectual community that promoted dialogue and politicization, while opposing blind partisanship.²⁶ It was within this organization’s offices that he met several individuals, with whom he would maintain contact until the end of his life. These included the chief editors of Panspoudastiki, Stelios Ramfos and Giannis Kalioris; his future publisher at Kalvos publishing house, Giorgos Chatzopoulos (1938); the Greek psychiatrist Ioannis Tsegkos; and Kosmas Psychopaidis (1944-2004), a Greek social and political philosopher and student of Habermas, who later played a role in Kondylis’ decision to study in Frankfurt.

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III. The Journal Martyries and the Paradox of Ideology

Within this atmosphere, Kondylis moved about, encountering people of diverse backgrounds at the university and other settings, and as a young student looking for answers, he ‘lended one’s ears to all kinds of heretical views’.²⁷ Sometime during the second year of his student years, the psychiatrist Ioannis Tsegkos, recognizing Kondylis’ intellectual acumen, introduced him to his friend and colleague, Marios Markidis (1940 – 2003),²⁸ with whom he thought Kondylis would have much to share. Markidis belonged to a group of intellectuals of leftist origins who had quickly recognized the impasses Marxism faced in the light of the Stalinist experience. Markidis recalls: ‘We, the politically suspicious sect of the 1960s! Leftists, but not so “ordinary” leftists’.²⁹ In other words, they represented a rather heretical undercurrent of the Left.

The intellectual platform that brought these individuals together to discuss their political and philosophical concerns was the journal Martyries [Testimonies], which was founded in 1961 and was active until the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in 1967. Although the influence of the journal on the broader public was rather limited, it nevertheless played a decisive role in introducing several previously unknown figures of the Western Marxist tradition to Greece. After the fall of the military junta in 1974, the individuals behind the journal Martyries founded a new journal, named Simeioseis [Notes], along with a publishing company called Erasmos, both of which remain in operation today. Some of the key figures within this group, who belonged to the same generation as Kondylis, included the translator and essayist, Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos (1936), the philosopher Stefanos Rozanis (1942), the poet Viron Leontaris (1932-2014), the poet Markos Meskos (1935-2018), and the lawyer Andreas-Kitsos Milonas (1938-2004).

Kondylis became associated with this group of people and participated regularly in heated discussions, which often departed from pure politics to delve into more fundamental philosophical questions underlying Karl Marx’s emancipatory project. These included the meaning and limits of human freedom, the biological and psychological conditions that determine the human condition, and the multiplicity of perspectives that have existed about such questions and may just as easily emerge in the future.³⁰ These are, in embryonic form, the central questions that would tantalize Kondylis until the end of his life. While politics remained the central axis around which the thought and discussions of the Martyries circle revolved, aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy formed an indispensable part of their understanding of it.

Ultimately, the journal Martyries became, in the 1960s, a platform for Marxist-inspired emancipatory thought, which was equally opposed to the crudest versions of Marxist orthodoxy and to the reigning liberal or conservative status quo. Describing the outlook of this group of people, Fotis Terzakis, an associated member himself of the next generation, concludes that the individuals composing this intellectual group was something akin to the Frankfurt School of the Greek intellectual world.³¹ Indeed, the thought of the core members of the Martyries group is characterized by what Judith Shklar has named ‘the romanticism of defeat’; that is, by an ‘aesthetic idealism [which] survives only in its negative form, as a basis for social criticism. Again, the dramatic view of life as struggle remains, but it is now a story of defeat’.³²

To better understand how the intellectual identity of this group was forged, it is necessary to take a step back and examine two figures from the Greek Trotskyist tradition, whose unresolved internal disagreement shaped the journal’s identity. The story leads us back to Agis Stinas (pseudonym for Spiros Priftis) (1900-1987), one of the most prominent figures in the history of Trotskyism in Greece. As it is well-known, Trotskyism, as a political ideology and movement rooted in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, was viewed as the nemesis of Stalinist orthodoxy.³³ Despite undergoing numerous transformations, Trotskyism maintained an internationalist outlook throughout its existence, rejecting Stalin’s idea of “socialism in one country” and perceiving the Russian worker’s state as the first act in a global proletarian revolution destined to unfold elsewhere. Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s acclaimed Polish biographer, who never concealed his unreserved sympathy for the Russian revolutionary, accurately asserts that ‘for a whole epoch Trotskyism was the sole revolutionary alternative to Stalinism’,³⁴ at least from the standpoint of the Left.

The status of Trotskyism in Greece was no different. Marginalized by the official line given by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), it fought its battle in the realm of ideas.³⁵ In the context of Greek politics, Stinas and other Trotskyists opposed both the capitalist establishment and the Stalinist leadership of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and argued for a more internationalist approach, in line with Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism and his pressing for “permanent revolution”. However, Stinas was forced to abandon his Trotskyist ideals after certain events that took place after the Second World War, which shattered his beliefs.³⁶ The Greek political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), a friend and comrade of Agis Stinas during that period, retrospectively described why the events that took place in Athens in December 1944, also known as “Dekemvriana”, could no longer be explained by typical Trotskyist or Marxist categories.³⁷

Out of these bitter disappointments, a tripartite schism emerged in Stina’s team in 1948.³⁸ The schism was later embodied by two charismatic individuals, who, despite their marginal role in shaping mainstream discussions, played a crucial role in shaping the mental climate animating the journal Martyries.³⁹ The first figure is Antonis Lavrantonis (1920-2023), a lawyer who began his political action as a Trotskyist and ended up developing—always orally—a theory of human affairs that doubted the very possibility of the betterment of human relations. A certain eerie sense of fatalism permeated the teachings of this man, who captivated the minds and irritated the ears of his young audience, and occasionally ‘transformed radically the universe of [their] ideas’. Markidis recalls:

Lavrantonis did not write; he spoke. And what he said transformed radically for most of us the universe of our ideas. It was not only that he grounded our various enlightened flights abruptly. The most important thing was that he placed the axioms of humanism itself within brackets, presenting it as a human-centered perspective, which, in order to realize its ideals, must subjugate nature – selfishly devour it and destroy it. Lavrantonis saw history as an expression of a fate that began before any political economy, before Marxism, perhaps with Darwin and Freud […] In this sense Lavrantonis was not in the mood for anticommunism. But he did not feel obliged to declare himself an antifascist either.⁴⁰

Lavrantonis’ influence on young Kondylis has been well-documented.⁴¹ His critique of various aspects of Marxist theory along with the development of a philosophical outline which provided an interpretation of the socialist failure, played a decisive role in forcing Kondylis to quickly abandon his emancipatory ideals. The second figure is Manolis Lambridis (pseudonym for Manolis Leontaris) (1920-2002), who was also a former Trotskyist and for years an employee of the National Bank of Greece, and the spiritual father behind the journal Martyries. Lambridis was also the first Greek Marxist who advocated—contrary to orthodox beliefs—for the autonomy of the aesthetic realm, mainly through the introduction of Lukacs’ ideas. He preferred the fragmentary nature of the essay form to convey his ideas, a practice that became characteristic for most members of this intellectual circle.

What united these two figures was their shared recognition of a common political deadlock: the dispelling of the illusion that Russia resembled anything close to a socialist country. On this point both parties concurred. What separated them was the theoretical tools they employed to navigate and finally overcome this deadlock; on this point Lambridis and Lavrantonis spoke a wholly different language. The philosophical gulf separating them became apparent in a theoretical encounter which took place in the tenth volume of the journal Martyries in November 1964. We will discuss later the subject and the ethical predicament of the discussion—which would, thirteen years later, mutatis mutandis, be repeated, this time by Kondylis and Lykiardopoulos; the former echoing Lavrantonis’ position and the latter Lambridis’.

To comprehend the intellectual environment that Kondylis had knowingly or unknowingly entered, it is necessary to consider some of the critical points raised by Lavrantonis during that period. At the time Kondylis joined the group, Lavrantonis rejected several key notions of the Marxist-Leninist heritage: the concept of a Leninist avant-garde; the distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism; the feasibility of a transitional phase towards socialism; and the occurrence of a proletarian revolution in Russia (arguing instead that it was a popular revolution like many others in history). The last two points constitute central arguments of Labriola in his book Al di là del Capitalismo e del Socialismo [Beyond Capitalism and Socialism],⁴² which Kondylis was reading with great enthusiasm at the time. Particularly important must have been the central argument put forward by Labriola that ‘a connection between capitalism and socialism cannot be established’⁴³ since socialism pre-existed capitalism. Such an examination of socialism implied a radical dissociation of its content from any sort of evolutionary philosophy of history and necessitated an understanding of it as a constantly recurring historical phenomenon; the problem of socialism was in this way reduced to the schema: rulers and oppressed.

This is why Lavrantonis believed that while Marx’s anatomy of capitalism retained its contemporary relevance and, in this sense, remained a consistent materialistic doctrine, his eschatological and messianic elements, which were part and parcel of Marx’s vision of historical development, imbued his thought with an unmistakable idealistic component. Last, but not least, Lavrantonis consistently criticized those who conflated the economic category of “relations of production” with the legal category of “relations of ownership”, since he had observed that this conceptual confusion led many apologists of the Soviet Union to cling to the idea that the relations of production had been socialized in the Soviet Union, merely because the titles of ownership had become directed by the state.⁴⁴

The question concerning the social and political nature of the Soviet Union had been explored by various other prominent Marxists of the preceding generation. Trotsky himself was one of the first individuals to observe that communist Russia experienced the rise of a new “bureaucratic caste”, which had wielded political power and was in control of the state. Nevertheless, the Russian revolutionary insisted that since this “bureaucratic caste” did not have ownership rights over the means of production, it could not be classified as a new ruling class. Instead, he interpreted the emergence of this new bureaucratic class as a byproduct of Russia’s political and social backwardness.⁴⁵ In 1964, the journal Martyries released a brochure featuring Pierre Naville’s work titled “Bureaucratization”.⁴⁶ In this work, Naville criticized the work of two prominent figures: the Italian political theorist Bruno Rizzi (1901-1977) and the American political philosopher James Burnham (1905-1987).

It was through this publication that Kondylis first encountered the ideas of these two scholars. It is noteworthy to point out that both Rizzi and Burnham initially identified as Trotskyists. As a matter of fact, Burnham was a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the United States led by Max Schachtman, a member of the Fourth International, and had personally met Leon Trotsky.⁴⁷ Burnham’s influential book, The Managerial Revolution, first published in 1941, played a particularly crucial role in shaping some of his perspectives on the questions mentioned above. In fact, Kondylis was so captivated by Burnham’s arguments that he decided to translate a few sections of the book he deemed important, so that he could share them and discuss them with his friend Lavrantonis, who could not read English and had only second-hand knowledge of his ideas.⁴⁸ This was also the sample he shared some years later with his future publisher to prove his abilities in the art of translation.

Burnham’s book, significantly influenced by Rizzi’s La Bureaucratisation du Monde [The Bureaucratization of the World], published a few years prior, addressed for the most part the critical question related to the social and political nature of Russia. Burnham sought to determine whether Russia could be viewed as representing a socialist society in the making, a transformed form of state capitalism, or an entirely new historical phenomenon. While, as we saw, Trotsky insisted that the new “bureaucratic caste” could not be perceived as a new dominant, exploitative class in the traditional sense of the word, since the new legal framework had nationalized the means of production, Rizzi counterargued that the “bureaucracy” could indeed become the dominant class without requiring formal ownership titles provided that it retains control over the state and the management of production.

Through the manipulation of state mechanisms, the bureaucracy collectively appropriated all surplus value and participated in an organized and systematic exploitation.⁴⁹ To put it plainly, Rizzi’s argument is the following: state-directed control of production is something fundamentally different from the socialization of the relations of production. Hence, the bureaucracy represents a new ruling class in the very traditional sense of the word.⁵⁰ The natural and paradoxical conclusion stemming from such an understanding of Soviet Russia was, as Aron sarcastically remarks, that the ‘European Left has taken a pyramid-builder for its God’.⁵¹

Burnham embraced the key ideas put forth by Rizzi and aimed to further clarify the role and features characterizing this emerging ruling class. A crucial argument presented by Burnham is the shift from the traditional bourgeois capitalist, who owned and operated their business and was instrumental in the success of capitalism, to a new anthropological type he termed “the managers”. Burnham believed that the transition to the “managerial” society manifested itself more conspicuously in the Communist and Nazi regimes, but he was convinced that similar developments were taking place in the United States. The key to understanding this change was the separation of ownership and control of production.⁵² While the traditional bourgeois capitalist owns the means of production, the manager maintains an administrative position. The actual ownership of the means of production now resides with the stakeholders,⁵³ who lack the ethos of the classical entrepreneur—- they no longer retain ownership of a business in the conventional capitalist sense.⁵⁴ This is the major thread that runs throughout Burnham’s book, and which convinced Kondylis that the world was witnessing a social and political shift of global proportions.

Burnham’s book is crucial in understanding the evolution of Kondylis’s thought for several reasons. First, it offers a subtle sociological explanation that delineates the differences between traditional bourgeois capitalism and what Burnham terms “managerial” capitalism, a concept also referred to by other writers as “state-capitalism”, “bureaucratic collectivism”, and so on. Second, it links this sociopolitical transformation to broader structural changes taking place in Western societies, thereby providing a comprehensive theory of historical change, which, however, is devoid of the eschatological presuppositions of the Marxist framework. The transformation of a given political structure must surely find its corresponding manifestations in the socio-economic and intellectual fields. Years later Kondylis would offer a much more nuanced and comprehensive theory of this historical change in his The Decline of Bourgeois Civilization. In a small article which summarizes some of the positions of this book (and of his book on conservatism), he states:

This process [the emergence of mass-democracy] was accompanied by an extensive democratization in all areas and the emergence of new elites in business and politics, which largely displaced or replaced the old bourgeoisie; incidentally, their own composition in personnel changes much faster compared to earlier ruling groups due to the generally increased social mobility. Managers, technocrats, and yuppies are sociological types and functionaries that are fundamentally different from the bourgeois; today, when considering the overall picture, bourgeois lifestyle fulfills the same picturesque-mundane tasks that once were carried out by some survivors of aristocratic families.⁵⁵

Third, Burnham’s theory aligns with overarching conclusions from political theorists like Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, who, since the end of the nineteenth century, posited that historical experience teaches us that the “iron law of oligarchy” and the “circulation of elites” are inevitable outcomes of any historical phenomenon, democratic ones included. The doctrine stemming from the writings of these theorists was both anti-Marxist and anti-liberalist: they reproached both traditions for unjustifiably making the economic factor the centerpiece of their conceptual analysis, whereas they believed that politics is an autonomous realm.⁵⁶ Fourth, Burnham, much like Kondylis, perceived scientific activity as a “descriptive” rather than a “normative” endeavor.⁵⁷ More generally, it must be underlined that Burnham’s political thought, although later regarded as a typical specimen of American conservatism, had its roots in the empiricist and historicist tradition rather than the tradition of natural law, which was typical of other representatives of American conservatism.⁵⁸ This explains why his analysis resonated so deeply with Kondylis. Indeed, in his introduction Kondylis defends Burnham’s book from various critics precisely by invoking its ability to draw convincing historical analogies.⁵⁹

While Rizzi and Burnham were arguably the first to forcefully argue that the Russian “bureaucratic” class was a new dominant class, albeit with different characteristics, the debate continued to echo throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. In Greece, Cornelius Castoriadis, the pupil of Agis Stinas, wrote in 1950 an article with the title “The Relations of Production in Russia”, which directly criticized the alleged socialization of the relations of production in this country.⁶⁰ Since 1945, the Greek philosopher had similarly come to the conclusion that the ‘nationalization of the means of production are not related to socialism’⁶¹ and that the Soviet Union had saw the emergence of a new dominant bureaucratic class, which clearly took advantage of its position of power, despite not having itself the ownership of the means of production.⁶² This led Castoriadis to the conclusion that Russia is a class society, in which the bureaucracy had taken the role of the bourgeoisie and that the ‘basic distinction of all contemporary — Eastern and Western—societies is not anymore the division between owners and not owners of the means of production, but rather the division between managers and executors’.⁶³ Given the close relationship between Stinas and Lavrantonis, it is reasonable to assume that Kondylis was aware of Castoriadis’s critique and that it provided further grounds for his critical disposition towards the Soviet Union.

Another at least partially disillusioned Marxist, George Lichtheim, commenting on the contemporary situation of socialism in Europe during the time Kondylis was translating Burnham’s book, also realized the importance of the shifts taking place on a global level due to the rise of such bureaucratic sociopolitical structures:

What is the relevance of this “bureaucratic collectivism” to the so-called “new class” of managers or administrators? First of all, what is called managerialism obviously relates to all types of advanced industrial society; whether capitalist or socialist, democratic or authoritarian, pluralist or one-party, Western or Eastern. In other words, being a global phenomenon associated with what may be termed bureaucratization, it cannot be pressed into service for purposes of argument in a controversy between liberals and socialists.⁶⁴

This novel understanding of Russia and the subsequent “bureaucratization” of the world delivered the final blow to the Marxist philosophy of history, as it managed to expose several predictive inconsistencies of the Marxian schema, the most important one being that socialism was not necessarily the historical stage following capitalism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had experienced its own Thermidorian Reaction, which turned out to be even more nightmarish: a bureaucratic Leviathan whose new ruling class ‘would resemble the ancient nobility rather than the bourgeoisie, for it would combine military, political, economic, social, and cultural functions—something the European middle class never managed to do on a national scale’.⁶⁵ Trotsky’s “betrayed revolution” offered for a few years a theoretical antidote to the paradoxes arising from Stalin’s brutal regime. In the 1950s and the 1960s, however, historical reality could no longer be ignored: the majority of Western Marxists began to gradually understand that uncovering what went wrong with the Soviet Union necessitated digging even deeper and examining flaws within Marx himself. Not coincidentally, committed Trotskyists like Isaac Deutscher regarded the entire discussion on the “managerial revolution” or “bureaucratic collectivism” with clear hostility.⁶⁶

This radical critique of the U.S.S.R. and the subsequent understanding of Marxism as an eschatological philosophy of history brought to the fore the problem of ideology with renewed urgency. If Marxism had been used and was still being used to justify the crimes and atrocities of an authoritarian regime, its examination as an ideology and not as a “science” (or, at the very least, as a science and as an ideology) was a matter of paramount importance. As mentioned above, within the circles of Martyries, the need for this reexamination took place in 1964, when Lavrantonis and Lambridis published two articles on the concept of ideology. In what was meant to be the sole piece of published writing of this mysterious individual, Lavrantonis titled his essay “The Revolutionary Ideology and its Adventures”, while Lambridis named his own as “The Problem of Ideology”.⁶⁷

The common ground that both shared was an understanding of ideology as ‘false consciousness’. However, Lavrantonis counterposed ideology with the notion of scientific research.⁶⁸ Lavrantonis argued that the contemporary social democratic movement—in all its different guises—is merely a transformation of a primordial human longing to retrieve a Golden Age free from evil, a longing common to all religious doctrines and countless myths created throughout human existence. Every time this notion of emancipation emerges, notes Lavrantonis, it ‘stumbles upon the insurmountable objective conditions that this prevent its fulfillment’.⁶⁹ Since the recovery of a human paradise, where exploitation of man by man will ceases to exist, is deemed de facto impossible, i.e., a utopia, all that remains is a scientific understanding of the deeper mechanisms perpetuating the human condition.

Lambridis, on the other hand, while animated by a spirit of ‘tragic humanism’,⁷⁰ had no time for the fatalism characterizing the tone of his interlocutor. He argued that although communism may have distorted the writings of Marx, this distortion does not negate Marx’s ultimate message. Hence, Lambridis, following Lukacs, counterposed ideology with the notion of class consciousness. Ideological is a form of thought that distorts and conceals class interests; only the ruling class has an ideological consciousness, not the oppressed one. The contemporary consciousness of the proletariat is not identified with the members of a specific class, but with humanity as a whole.⁷¹ All in all, Lambridis criticized contemporary civilization without ‘looking forward to some definite result, but as the only means to salvage his existential integrity, even within conditions of a predetermined collapse’.⁷²

After this heated discussion, Kondylis wrote an unpublished paper titled “The Revolutionary Ideologies and Marxism”, in which he declared the bankruptcy of Marxism as an ideology, he identified a thread necessarily connecting its major historical protagonists—Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin⁷³—and described the four historical stages that all revolutionary ideologies essentially undergo: first, the emergence of a spontaneous and unsystematic revolutionary ideology; second, the systematization of the revolutionary ideology, which is now supplemented by an organized worldview; third, the distortion of the ideology’s meaning by the ideological epigones, who are forced to act according to practical historical needs; and fourth, the complete ideologization and conservatization of the revolutionary theory.⁷⁴

Where does all of this lead us? In one of his interviews, Kondylis explains that his experience with Marxist theory was crucial in at least three main respects.⁷⁵ First, he understood very quickly that at the heart of Marx’s theory lies what he calls the interweaving of Being and Ought. This means that a noble hope or ethical imperative (the classless, non-antagonistic society) is presented as constituting reality itself: economic and historical determinism become, in the works of Marx and his successors, laws of universal validity, the Being of society as such. This drove Kondylis to adopt a scientific imperative: the radical disjunction of Is and Ought, of fact and value, of descriptive and normative judgments. This is, for Kondylis, the conditio sine qua non of scientific activity—even if (or perhaps precisely because) it is in principle almost impossible to fully achieve. This realization also led him to construct a genealogy of this phenomenon, tracing the interweaving of Being and Ought through four major worldviews: the ancient, the Christian, the bourgeois, and the mass-democratic. He then identified their common enemy, with which Kondylis wholeheartedly—and somewhat provocatively—identifies: the specter of value-nihilism.

Second, the problem of ideology (or, more broadly, of the ‘metaphysical need of man’) became for him an issue of central importance. Immersing himself into the writings of German historicism, Weber, Mannheim, Nietzsche and a handful of other thinkers, led Kondylis to realize that ideological forms of being constitute the natural human condition. Human society cannot do away with either ideology (of the ruling class) or utopia (of the oppressed class). Both are expressed in terms of value preferences and are thus stricto sensu metaphysical. Moreover, when utopian yearnings succeed in gaining historical and political prominence, they are automatically transformed into a new ideology. For Kondylis, there is no way out of this vicious cycle; history records no utopia achieving the liberating ideals set at the outset of its process, as the example of the Soviet Union forcefully showcased. Utopians of all sorts are future candidates for power. However, the fact that ideologymconstitutes such an all-encompassing aspect of human reality did not lead him to embrace a paralyzing form of skepticism, but rather it motivated him to seek a viable epistemological solution that would incorporate the polytheism, clash, and incompatibility of different values and worldviews in it.

Third, after rejecting the economic determinism common to both the Marxist and liberal schemas, he concluded that it is not the economy but politics—the Political—that is the engine that drives human history. The bourgeois illusion that the economy will supplant politics and eliminate war and human suffering can only be understood if we recognize that such a development was employed by specific individuals as a weapon in their struggle for political power. The predominance of the economyin modern capitalistic society—the economization of the political— is neither a neutral nor a “natural” phenomenon. Nor does it have the final say in the unfolding of history.

1. Panagiotis Kondylis, “I am surprised when someone agrees with me”, in: Διαβάζω, vol. 384 (April 1998), pp. 124-125

2. For a comprehensive introduction to post-war Greek economic, social, and political situation see David H. Close, Greece Since 1945: Politics, Economy, Society (Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2002), pp. 44-114

3. Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 143; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 291

4. Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 5. See also, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien: Eine Gesichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982), pp. 274-275

5. Peter Furth, Massendemokratie: Über den historischen Kompromiss zwischen Liberalismus und Sozialismus als Herrschaftsform (Lüdinghausen: Manuscriptum, 2015)

6. Panagiotis Kondylis, Η Παρακμή του Αστικού Πολιτισμού [The Decline of Bourgeois Civilization] (Athens: Themelio, 2007), pp. 213-231, especially p. 215, 218. In the context we are discussing he states: ‘the way anticommunist social democracy operated during the last couple of decades in Western Europe, could be […] considered as an important variation of the democratic reinterpretation of liberalism’. p. 223

7. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 65-92

8. Noël O’ Sullivan, European Political Thought Since 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1-19

9. Judith Skhlar, “The Liberalism of Fear”, in: Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum, (Cambridge, Massachutetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 21-38

10. Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom on Cold War Liberalism”, in: European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (1), p. 50

11. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 1994), p.397. See also the relevant remarks by Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe, trans. Stephen Cox (1979; reis., New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996), pp. 25-26

12. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1964), p. xiii. To be sure, a couple of Western Marxists, Marcuse included, continued searching for a surrogate revolutionary subject. Marcuse thought he had found it in the student movement of the late 1960s, while Lucien Goldmann attempted to define the emergence of a “new working class”. But the very fact that this had become a ‘search of’ suggested that the traditional Marxist formula of the proletariat had lost its credibility.

13. Giorgos Karabelias, Panagiotis Kondylis: A Journey (Athens: Enallaktikes Ekdoseis, 2018), p. 23

14. David S. Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 39

15. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P.S. Falia (1976; reis., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), p. 1207

16. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Revolutionary Ideologies and Marxism”, in: Panagiotis Kondylis, Μελαγχολία και Πολεμική [Melancholy and Polemics] (Athens: Themelio, 2001), p. 209

17. Noël O’ Sullivan, European Political Thought Since 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 3

18. Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1969), p. vii

19. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), p. 22

20. Letter to Theodorakopoulos 04.01.1980 in: Archive of Ioannis Theodorakopoulos at Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation. Kondylis sent his professor some German reviews of his dissertation and Theodorakopoulos enthusiastically asked him to meet to discuss it privately.

21. Gisela Horst, Panajotis Kondylis: Leben und Werk – eine Übersicht (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019), p. 46. For the origins and structure of the organization see Ioanna Papathanasiou et al, Η Νεολαία Λαμπράκη την δεκαετία του 1960 [The Lambraki Youth in the Decade of the 1960s] (Athens, Institute of Modern Greek Research, 2008). An interviewed member of the Lambrakis Youth recalls the active presence of Kondylis in p. 483

22. For the ideology of the Greek state during the post-civil war period see, Meletis Meletopoulos, Ιδεολογία του Δεξιού Κράτους 1949-1967 [Ideology of the Right-Wing State 1949-1967] (Athens, Papazisi, 1993)

23. Gisela Horst, Panajotis Kondylis: Leben und Werk – eine Übersicht (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019), p. 38

24. Kostis Kornetis, Children of Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the “long 1960s” in Greece (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 10-32

25. Giannis M. Kalioris, Εκ του Συστάδην [Close Encounters] (Athens: Armos, 2020), p. 376

26. Ibid, p. 374

27. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), p. 22

28. Marios Markidis, “Kondylis and Us: The Paths we Took”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 53 (Athens, July 2000), p. 28

29. Ibid, p. 26

30. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), p. 29

31. Fotis Terzakis, “An Example: The Journal Simeioseis in Greece”, in: Η Εσωτερική Εξορία: Ο Κύκλος του Περιοδικού «Σημειώσεις» και οι Συνομιλητές του στην Ελλάδα της Μεταπολίτευσης [The Internal Exile: The Circle of the Journal “Simeioseis” and its Interlocutors in Post-Dictatorial Greece] (Athens: Panoptikon, 2018), pp. 15-27

32. Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 108. See also Viron Leontaris’ famous essay “The Poetry of Defeat” in: Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης [Epitheorisi Texnis], vol. 106-107 (Oct-Nov. 1963), pp. 520-524. There he states: ‘Today’s man emerges defeated from a loss that not only marks indelibly modern Greek reality, but is generally a defeat of humanity, a defeat of civilization […] The origin and roots of the poetry of defeat can be traced back to the ideology of resistance. Poetry of defeat is essentially a profound critique and perhaps the end of resistance ideology and resistant poetry... Today, this belief has been shaken.’ Indeed, the entire tradition of the so-called Western Marxist tradition is characterized by such a pessimist outlook. Anderson writes: ‘For, no matter how otherwise heteroclite, they share one fundamental emblem: a common and latent pessimism […] In this respect, between 1920 and 1960, Marxism slowly changed colors in the West. The confidence and optimism of the founders of historical materialism, and of their successors, progressively disappeared’. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso Books, 1979), pp. 88-89. In a similar vein, see Russel Jacobi, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

33. For a brief overview of the fate of the Trotskyist movement and its purge by the communists see Stéphane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 306-312

34. Isaac Deutscher, “Trotsky in Our Time”, in: Marxism in Our Time (London: Ramparts Press, Inc, 1972) p.51

35. Marios Emmanouilidis, Αιρετικές Διαδρομές: Ο Ελληνικός Τροτσκισμός και ο Β’ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος [Heretical Routes: Greek Trotskyism and the Second World War] (Athens: Filistor, 2002)

36. Agis Stinas, Αναμνήσεις: Εξήντα Χρόνια Κάτω από τη Σημαία της Σοσιαλιστικής Επανάστασης [Recollections: Sixty Years under the Banner of the Socialist Revolution], vol. II (Athens: Vergos, 1977), pp. 168-183. The source of his disappointment was the fact that other Trotskyist movements in Europe had actively participated in their respective national resistance movements – a practice that was opposed to Stina’s revolutionary defeatism, which advocated for the transformation of imperialistic wars into civil wars. See also Meletis Meletopoulos, Η Μαρξιστική Σκέψη στην Ελλάδα [Marxist Thought in Greece] (Athens: Enallaktikes Ekdoseis, 2023), p. 480

37. Cornelius Castoriadis, Το Επαναστατικό Πρόβλημα Σήμερα [The Revolutionary Problem Today] (Athens: Ypsilon, 1984), pp. 11-13. He is referring here mostly to the realization that if KKE had risen to power, it would have created a new oppressive, non-socialist, political structure. The mass execution of many leftist dissidents (Trotskyists, socialists, and anarchists of all shorts) by the Organization for the Protection of the Popular Struggle (OPLA) had made clear the intentions of those in charge.

38. Giannis H. Karytsas (ed.), Άρθρα-Κείμενα-Επιστολές του Εργατικού Μετώπου («Ομάδα Στίνα») [Articles-Texts-Letters of the Workers Front (“Team Stinas”) (Athens: Ardin, 2016), pp. 59-62. We are here going to disregard the origins and history of the schism, whose protagonists were Lavrantonis, Castoriadis, and Stinas, and focus instead on its relevance to the journal Martyries specifically.

39. Fotis Terzakis, “The Theoretical Legacy of Manolis Lambridis”, in: Η Εσωτερική Εξορία: Ο Κύκλος του Περιοδικού «Σημειώσεις» και οι Συνομιλητές του στην Ελλάδα της Μεταπολίτευσης [The Internal Exile: The Circle of the Journal “Simeioseis” and its Interlocutors in Post-Dictatorial Greece] (Athens: Panoptikon, 2018), pp. 47-51

40. Marios Markidis, “Kondylis and Us: The Paths we Took”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol.54 (Athens, Dec. 2000)

41. First and foremost, see: Markidis, “Kondylis and Us” and Lavrantonis “The Formative Years” op. cit; Giorgos Evangelopoulos, “Power and Decision: Antonis Lavrantonis Before Carl Schmitt”, in: Σύγχρονα Θέματα [Synchrona Themata], vol. 150-152 (June 2021), pp. 151-159, where there is also discussion of the correspondence between Kondylis and Lavrantonis.

42. Lavrantonis in his article wrongly attributes the authorship of this book to Pareto; the Italian sociologist never wrote a book bearing this title. Moreover, Kondylis in his unpublished essay “The Revolutionary Ideologies and Marxism”, not only makes use of Labriola’s book, but also cites several sources cited in the book of the Italian theorist. Gisela Horst in her biography reiterates Lavrantonis’s mistake, Panajotis Kondylis: Leben und Werk – eine Übersicht (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019), p. 54

43. Arturo Labriola, Au-Delà du Capitalisme et du Socialisme, trans. Stefan Priacel (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1932), p. 17, 19 and passim.

44. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), pp. 22-25

45. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Introduction”, in: James Burnham, Η Επανάσταση των Διευθυντών [The Managerial Revolution], trans. Panagiotis Kondylis (Athens: Kalvos, 1970), p. 13

46. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), pp. 33-34

47. Samuel T. Francis, “Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham”, in: The Political Science Reviewer, vol. 12 (July 1982), p. 268

48. Antonis Lavrantonis, “The Formative Years of Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Σημειώσεις [Simeioseis], vol. 54 (Athens, Dec.2000), p. 34

49. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Adam Westoby (1939; reis., New York: Macmillan, 1985), p.69. For the approving remarks of this line of thought by Kondylis see “Introduction”, in: James Burnham, Η Επανάσταση των Διευθυντών [The Managerial Revolution], trans. Panagiotis Kondylis (Athens: Kalvos, 1970), p. 15

50. Ibid, p. 16. Rizzi’s main thesis is the following: ‘In our sense, the USSR represents a new type of society, ruled by a new social class: that is our conclusion. Property, collectivized, effectively belongs to this class which has installed a new–and superior– system of production. Exploitation passes from the level of the individual to that of the class’. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Adam Westoby (1939; reis., New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 54

51. Cited in Tony Judt, “The Peripheral Insider: Raymond Aron and the Wages of Reason”, in: The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 153

52. Burnham was convinced that this shift was taking place in the United States mainly by the arguments put forward in the following book: Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932; reis., London: Routledge, 1991).

53. Burnham developed a subtle analysis of the new stratifications and divisions emerging out of these bureaucratic structures, which are not of primary importance here.

54. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Introduction”, in: James Burnham, Η Επανάσταση των Διευθυντών [The Managerial Revolution], trans. Panagiotis Kondylis (Athens: Kalvos, 1970), pp. 17-18

55. Panajotis Kondylis, “Die Antiquiertheit der politischen Begriffe“, in: Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), p. 100

56. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (London: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 306

57. For a short analysis of the similarities between Burnham’s and Kondylis’ methodological postulates see Athanassios Kaisis, “Panajotis Kondylis als Übersetzer”, in: Deutschland und Griechenland im Spiegel der Philosophiegeschichte, Jannis Pissis & Dimitris Karydas (ed.) (Berlin: Editions Romiosyni, 2018), pp. 232-235

58. Samuel T. Francis, “Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham”, in: The Political Science Reviewer, vol. 12 (July 1982), p. 266

59. For instance, when Thomas Bottomore raises the sensible objection that the managers and the owners retain close ties with each other and that thus Burnham’s rigid distinction does not correspond to reality, Kondylis counterargues that Burnham has already pointed out that similar temporary alliances were forged between the bourgeois capitalists and the feudal lords. Kondylis states: ‘Bottomore and many others forget these historical analogies because they are under the wrong impression that the displacement of an exploitative class by another one ought to have the same characteristics with the displacement of every exploitative class; they are unconsciously identifying every revolution with the socialist revolution’. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Introduction”, in: James Burnham, Η Επανάσταση των Διευθυντών [The Managerial Revolution], trans. Panagiotis Kondylis (Athens: Kalvos, 1970), pp. 21-22.

60. Cited in Giorgos Karabelias, Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης: Μια Διαδρομή [Panagiotis Kondylis: A Journey] (Athens: Enallaktikes Ekdoseis, 2018), p. 25. Karabelias, who belonged to the same generation with Kondylis, remembers that Castoriadis’ text introduced many Greek leftists to the notion of “bureaucratic collectivism”.

61. Cornelius Castoriadis, Το Επαναστατικό Πρόβλημα Σήμερα [The Revolutionary Problem Today] (Athens: Ypsilon, 1984), p. 11

62. Ibid, p. 13-15

63. Ibid, p. 17

64. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (London: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 308

65. Ibid, p. 309. The idea that the European bourgeoisie never managed to achieve such wide-ranging political dominance is adopted also by Kondylis in his Η Παρακμή του Αστικού Πολιτισμού [The Decline of Bourgeois Civilization] (Athens: Themelio, 1992) who attributes it to the fact that the ‘bourgeois class was the first in history that connected its own claim to dominance with the programmatic demand for the opening of society and the free unfolding of its competing forces. The ostensible paradox was that bourgeois dominance was possible only within the context of a pluralistic society from an economic, social, and ideological point of view’, Ibid, p. 99. The origins of this idea can be traced back to Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942). A similar explanation of the bourgeois paradox is provided by François Furet in his Le Passe d’une Illusion : Essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris : Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 17-48.

66. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929-1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 463-477. Deutscher is more favorable towards Rizzi since the Italian political theorist at least regarded “bureaucratic collectivism” as a ‘historically necessary’ stage and ‘to some extent progressive’. Ibid, p. 472. His remarks on Burnham and Schachtman, on the other hand, are full of contempt.

67. Fotis Terzakis, “The Theoretical Legacy of Manolis Lambridis”, in: Η Εσωτερική Εξορία: Ο Κύκλος του Περιοδικού «Σημειώσεις» και οι Συνομιλητές του στην Ελλάδα της Μεταπολίτευσης [The Internal Exile: The Circle of the Journal “Simeioseis” and its Interlocutors in Post-Dictatorial Greece] (Athens: Panoptikon, 2018), p. 48

68. Ibid, p. 49

69. Ibid, p.49

70. Ibid, p. 48

71. Ibid, p. 50

72. Ibid, p. 48

73. Panagiotis Kondylis, “The Revolutionary Ideologies and Marxism”, in: Panagiotis Kondylis, Μελαγχολία και Πολεμική [Melancholy and Polemics], ed. Kostas Koutsourelis (Athens: Themelio, 2001), p. 213

74. Ibid, p. 211

75. Panagiotis Kondylis, “Talking with Panagiotis Kondylis”, in: Νέα Κοινωνιολογία [New Sociology], vol. 25 (Spring, 1998), pp. 18-19