Review by Choice Review
Rizzi was a practical man engaged in sales, but also a communist who wrote a number of pamphlets and books, the most original among them containing three parts, one of which constitutes the book now translated and informatively introduced by Westoby. Self-published in France in 1939 and then impounded, the book was hard to find. It contains the first clear assertions of intersystemtic bureaucratic convergence, of the tendency for the bureaucratic elite to grasp power, especially in the Soviet Union and in the fascist states, and of the universal character of the growth of the power of bureaucracy. The style is pamphleteering and repetitive, but the originality is greater than in Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Rizzi is justly critical of Trotsky and his disciples. The term ``new class'' appears here before Milovan Djilas's 1957 book under that title. Parasitic ``bureaucratic collectivism'' is asserted in the USSR, where bureaucratic power is found to be based on social ownership of property and on central planning. Rizzi is the precursor of A. Nove, G. Orwell, J. Burnham, and many others. Recommended for history of socialist thought, comparative systems, and institutionalist collections serving upper-division and graduate students.-B. Mieczkowski, Ithaca College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
