Otto Maschl (1898–1973), better known as Lucien Laurat, was an Austrian

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

and author, mostly known in the English-speaking world for his book ''Marxism and Democracy''. He was part of the

Anti-Stalinist left The anti-Stalinist left encompasses various kinds of Left-wing politics, left-wing political movements that oppose Joseph Stalin, Stalinism, neo-Stalinism and the History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), system of governance that Stalin impleme ...

In ''Marxism and Democracy'' Laurat provides an examination into the views of

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...

and her critique of Leninism. He examines the way she describes the changing roles of governing forces away from simply imposing their will to maintain power to a system of enlightening the masses and becoming a function of their collective or a major portion of their collective wills. Laurat was one of the first to argue that Soviet society was neither capitalist nor socialist, but a

bureaucratic Bureaucracy ( ) is a system of organization where laws or regulatory authority are implemented by civil servants or non-elected officials (most of the time). Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments ...

oligarchy Oligarchy (; ) is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people. Members of this group, called oligarchs, generally hold usually hard, but sometimes soft power through nobility, fame, wealth, or education; or t ...

(see

Nomenklatura The ''nomenklatura'' (; from , system of names) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: ...

Publications

*
Marxism and Democracy
', London, 1940 * ''Staline: La linguistique et l'impérialisme Russe'' 'Stalin: Linguistics and Russian Imperialism'' Paris: Les Îles d'Or, 1951 * ''Le drame économique et monétaire français depuis la libération'', with , Paris: Les Îles d'Or, Paris, 1953

References

Austrian communists Communist Party of Austria politicians Marxist writers 1898 births 1973 deaths Anti-Stalinist left Writers from Vienna {{Austria-writer-stub