Politics & Power Quote by E. P. Thompson

Thompson opens by puncturing the very genre of “Sovietology”: the confident, managerial voice of experts who claim to have decoded an opaque system. “As many as the experts you speak to” is not just a shrug at complexity; it’s a jab at a Cold War knowledge industry built on selective access, ideological priors, and the comforting fiction that the USSR can be understood like a lab specimen. He’s warning the reader that analysis is already politics.

Then he pivots to a stance that’s deliberately unfashionable in a binary era. “In my view” matters: Thompson is staking a moral and methodological claim against both anti-communist triumphalism and apologetic leftism. The USSR, for him, is neither a monolith to be condemned from afar nor a project to be defended at any cost. It is a society - lived, worked, argued over - and therefore accountable to democratic demands.

The pairing “democratization and organization” is the tell. He isn’t calling for Western-style electoral theater dropped from above; he’s gesturing toward the labor movement’s older language of popular power: workplace democracy, civil liberties, independent institutions, genuine representation. Organization here is not bureaucratic tightening; it’s social self-activity, the infrastructure that makes democratization more than a slogan.

Contextually, this sits in Thompson’s lifelong quarrel with authoritarian communism after 1956 and his insistence on “history from below.” The subtext is a wager: if you treat people as historical agents rather than objects of expertise, the Soviet story stops being a chessboard and starts looking like unfinished politics.