14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST a most succinct way Eduard Batalov points out that they include "the rejection of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries as the main driving force of the modern revolutionary process; a critical approach to Marxist-Leninist parties as 'integrated9 in the system of state monopoly capitalism and thus 'bereft5 of their former revolutionary functions; concentration on the Third World as the sphere in which a 'genuinely socialist society" is supposedly growing up; criticism of the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and attempts to create an 'up-to-date' revolutionary action based on a release of unconscious forces and aimed at shaping a new culture and a 'new man5; refusal to make use of the democratic institutions of bourgeois society as a mechanism of repression and manipulation, and the boosting of utopianism as a principle of revolutionary—critical action.551 Perspective on Historical Change All these features of the New Left movement can be discerned in the theoretical construction of Marcuse. His perspective on them can be fully grasped in the light of his orientation to history which is different from that of Marxism. Marcuse proceeds from the standpoint that capitalism and communism are varieties of a single industrial society, a standpoint similar in many respects to the one spelled out by Raymond Aron in his The Industrial Society (1967). Walt W Rostow in his The Stage of Economic Growth (1960), also subscribes to the view of the convergence of the capitalist and the communist systems. Marcuse points out that both the systems are marked by some common features: want of indivi" duation that stems from an excessive emphasis on technical efficieny, dehumanization of the individual, containment of dissent and protest, introjection of values, etc. He writes: "The most advanced areas of industrial society exhibit throughout these two features: a trend towards consummation of technical rationality and intensive efforts to contain this trend with the established institutions. Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization: the irrational element of its rationality.552 Marcuse launches his attack on the corporate capitalism of the US and communism of the USSR on the basis of the theory of convergence (it may be noted that the main target of his attack is the former). In their defence, Russian scholars contend that the technological similarities between the two systems are of a temporary nature at a particular stage of economic growth. Moreover, what the theory of convergence misses is the difference in value systems. "As the socialist countries marching towards com-