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Ellen Meiksins Wood. The Retreat from Class
The Retreat from Class
The Retreat from Class. A New ‘True’ Socialism
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the New Edition
1. The New ‘True’ Socialism
2. The Journey to the New ‘True’ Socialism: Displacing Class Struggle and the Working Class
3. The Forerunner: Nicos Poulantzas
4. The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics
5. The Randomization of History and Politics
6. Politics and Class
7. The Non-Correspondence Principle: A Historical Case
8. Platonic Marxism
9. Socialism and Democracy
10. Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism
11. Socialism and ‘Universal Human Goods’
12. Conclusions
Index
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with a new introduction by the author
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
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The obvious questions to be answered are why this trend has developed, why it is coming to fruition now, and why it has found such a particularly strong foothold in the English-speaking world. In very broad terms, of course, it is part of a larger trend which has affected the left in the past decade or so, undoubtedly conditioned by many defeats and failures of hope for socialists in various parts of the world. It must be stressed, however, as Ralph Miliband has remarked in his comments on the ‘new revisionism’, that this phenomenon ‘has assumed much more virulent and destructive forms in other countries, most notably in France, where it has constituted not a “new revisionism”, but a wholesale retreat into anti-communist hysteria and obscurantism, religious and secular.’6 The NTS in Britain has certainly not plumbed these depths; and from this point of view, its refusal to cut itself off completely from the Marxist tradition, no matter how misleading that refusal may be, could be construed as a positive statement, which expresses an abiding commitment to some kind of socialist values. Nevertheless, there has been a significant abandonment of vital socialist positions which still needs to be explained.
The period during which the NTS current has developed is roughly 1976–85, though its immediate theoretical antecedents, its roots in Althusserianism, go further back to a theoretical-political formation for which 1968 was a pivotal moment. As we shall see when we explore the theoretical background, a typical trajectory has been from the transplanted Maoism of 1960s radicalism, which was informed by Althusserian theory, to Eurocommunism and points to the right of it. The line from Althusser to Poulantzas to Laclau more or less charts the theoretical and political course of the NTS, with the mid-1970s marking a critical breaking point. In Britain, a paradigmatic path has been followed by Hindess and Hirst, for whom 1975–6 represents an important turning point as, in the space of two short years, they travelled the distance from the last vestiges of Maoist Althusserianism to the beginnings of a post-Althusserian right-wing Labourism. Others have taken similar journeys in somewhat different political surroundings, many of them, for example, remaining within the boundaries of British Communism. The current battles within the CPGB are testimony to this trend.
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