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

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

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 is an umbrella term for various kinds of left-wing political movements that opposed Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953. Th ...

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

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg (; ; pl, Róża Luksemburg or ; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party, ...

and her

critique of Leninism Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party as the political prelude to the establishme ...

. 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 majoritive portion of their collective wills. Laurat was one of the first to argue that Soviet society was neither capitalist nor socialist, but a bureaucratic oligarchy (see

Nomenklatura The ''nomenklatura'' ( rus, номенклату́ра, p=nəmʲɪnklɐˈturə, a=ru-номенклатура.ogg; from la, nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key admi ...

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 People from Vienna {{Austria-writer-stub