'Oligarchy’ as a heretic notion:
the uses of Marxism in pre-communist Romania
Dr. Victor Rizescu
Lecturer in Political Science, University of Bucharest
The theoretical controversies accompanying the split between social-democracy and communism in interwar Romania revolved around an issue that marked them off from ideological debates of the same sort taking place elsewhere in Europe at the time. According to the communists, social-democratic reluctance in truly embracing the working class’ interests had been rationalized with the help of an intellectual construction that unnecessarily revised Marxist sociological categories. Socialists maintained that one key difference between Romanian social landscape and that of the developed capitalist-industrial West was the conflicting relationship between two wings of the dominant class. The first was nothing else but the capitalist bourgeoisie, which standard Marxist wisdom indicated as the arch-enemy of proletarian emancipation. In the Romanian setting, however, this social group was to be treated by the Left as a progressive force and a temporary ally against the nebulous social entity of a non-capitalist—and yet non-feudalist—“oligarchy”, that was to be struggled against first. Tracing the origins and content of that notion enables us to disclose the surprising ways in which Marxism had been fused, in the preceding decades, with various strands of the surrounding cultural space and to make a brief analytical inventory of the main ideological uses of Marxism in pre-communist Romania. Also, tracing the posterity of the communists’ depiction of “oligarchy” as a theoretical heresy—instead of a meaningful intellectual tool for making sense of Romanian social peculiarities—reveals the larger cultural consequences of what could otherwise be considered as a minor ideological squabble of the late 1930’s.
