A Marxist would put it like this: Given similar technology and material conditions of life and work the people comprising a society tend to react in similar fashions; their demands become more and more similar; their methods of satisfying them become more and more similar.
This is the prickly phenomenon which Milovan Djilas, the dissident Yugoslav Communist, is really dealing with in his book called "the New Class." Djilas has looked at the evolving Communist society with the penetrating eye of an idealist participant. What he sees is a society which becomes more and more "bourgeois" as it develops. He interprets these manifestations as evidence that the Communist ruling clique has become a new "class" in the Marxist sense, like the feudal class or the bourgeois class.
In this conclusion he is almost certainly mistaken. What he calls a class almost certainly is a cadre, an elite, a command corps. But he is surely correct in the observation that Communist society is coming to look and act more and more like "bourgeois" society.
The radical appurtenances of communism long since have been tossed into the Moscow ashbins. Ask a Soviet Communist what life will be like under the perfect Communist state of the future envisioned in Marxist dogma and he will say something like this: Each person will own his own home. He will have a car, a TV set, a refrigerator. His children will go to college. His wife will have nice clothes. He will have money for a pleasant vacation. He will travel abroad when and where he likes. There will be no more fear of police. Factories will be clean and working hours short.
There will be good restaurants and no more queues at the stores.
The Communist dream is the bourgeois reality. The Communist heaven is the bourgeois life-on-earth.
The moment they relax a little from the eternal pressure of work, the Communists of Russia and Eastern Europe begin to take on bourgeois coloration. They act like the bourgeoisie; they dress like the bourgeoisie; they talk like the bourgeoisie—an old-fashioned, fin de siecle bourgeoisie but clearly recognizable. It turns out that what communism wants is not free love, but a stodgy Victorian marriage.
There are social and economic thinkers who feel that, with the continual absorption by Western capitalism of some Socialist methods, devices and solutions and the steady drift of Eastern communism away from its revolutionary shibboleths, a hundred years from now there will be little more difference between a "capitalist" state and a "Communist" state than there is, for instance, between the Republican and Democratic parties today.
This, to be sure, may not come about. But there seems to be an excellent chance that, for all the agony of the twentieth century, techniques and not ideology will pipe the tune of the future.
That, indeed, is the hope which is implicit in the cosmic beep of the Soviet satellite. Possessed of modern technology, the Soviet Revolution may in its middle age settle down to the enjoyment of the fruits of its newfound skills. If this be true, then the fortieth anniversary of Lenin's grand illusion may turn out to be a more epochal date in the calendar of mankind than that of the first October Revolution.