Читать книгу The Retreat from Class - Ellen Meiksins Wood - Страница 9

In the 1840s, Marx and Engels directed some of their most eloquent polemics against an intellectual current described as ‘true’ socialism. The ‘true’ socialists, they wrote in The German Ideology, ‘innocently take on trust the illusion … that it is a question of the “most reasonable” social order and not the needs of a particular class and a particular time…. They have abandoned the real historical basis and returned to that of ideology…. True socialism, which is no longer concerned with real human beings but with “Man”, has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind.’¹ ‘It is difficult to see why these true socialists mention society at all if they believe with the philosophers that all real cleavages are caused by conceptual cleavages. On the basis of the philosophical belief in the power of concepts to make or destroy the world, they can likewise imagine that some individual “abolished the cleavage of life” by “abolishing” concepts in some way or other.’² In the Communist Manifesto, ‘true’ socialism is summed up thus: since socialism had ‘ceased to express the struggle of one class against another, … [the ‘true’ socialist] felt conscious of … representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.’

In the 1980s, we seem to be witnessing a revival of ‘true’ socialism. The new ‘true’ socialism (NTS), which prides itself on a rejection of Marxist ‘economism’ and ‘class-reductionism’, has virtually excised class and class struggle from the socialist project. The most distinctive feature of this current is the autonomization of ideology and politics from any social basis, and more specifically, from any class foundation. Against the assumption, which it attributes to Marxism, that economic conditions automatically give rise to political forces and that the proletariat will inevitably be compelled by its class situation to undertake the struggle for socialism, the NTS proposes that, because there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics, the working class can have no privileged position in the struggle for socialism. Instead, a socialist movement can be constructed by ideological and political means which are relatively (absolutely?) autonomous from economic class conditions, motivated not by the crude material interests of class but by the rational appeal of ‘universal human goods’ and the reasonableness of the socialist order. These theoretical devices effectively expel the working class from the centre of the socialist project and displace class antagonisms by cleavages of ideology or ‘discourse’.

The NTS encompasses a variety of political stances and has found expression in various intellectual genres. Its exponents count among their number political and economic theorists, analysts of ideology and culture, and historians; they cover a broad range of interests and styles including, for example, Ernesto Laclau, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, and Gareth Stedman Jones. One of the major theoretical organs of the NTS in the English language is Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of British Eurocommunism, but, although the NTS has been closely tied, theoretically and politically, to the development of Eurocommunism on the Continent and in Britain, it has joined together a fairly broad array of socialists, from Communists to Labourites, and has found exponents on both sides of the Atlantic.

To a great extent, the NTS can be identified with what has been called the ‘new revisionism’³ but distinctions need to be made, if only to mark out those ‘new revisionists’ who support their political views with elaborate theoretical formulations which, while purporting to be part of the Marxist tradition, represent fundamental departures from it and indeed a rejection of its essential premises. In general, the ‘new revisionism’ represents a ‘spectrum of thought’ with certain shared political principles. These include most notably the rejection of the primacy of class politics in favour of ‘democratic struggles’ especially as they are conducted by the ‘new social movements’. For the NTS, these political principles demand a thorough reassessment of social reality or at least of the theoretical apparatus by which it is to be explained. It would also probably be true to say that those who have contributed most to this theoretical reconsideration tend to be situated at the far right of the new revisionist spectrum and have staked out positions which many of their comrades would find too extreme. Perhaps it might even be suggested that there seems to be a direct correlation between the extent of the rightward shift and the degree of theoretical elaboration and complexity, not to mention pretension and obscurity. In any case, the main object of the present study will be that part of the spectrum which is both devoted to theoretical reconstruction and located on the political right of the current.

Despite the diversity of this movement and the fact that not all its members are equally explicit about, or committed to, all the same principles, we can perhaps put together a kind of maximum construct, in the form of a few major propositions, to indicate the logic of the trend:

1) The working class has not, as Marx expected, produced a revolutionary movement. That is, its economic situation has not given rise to what was thought to be an appropriate corresponding political force.

2) This reflects the fact that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics in general. Any relation between class and politics is contingent. In other words, ideology and politics are (relatively? absolutely?) autonomous from economic (class) relations; and there are no such things as ‘economic’ class interests that can be translated a posteriori into political terms.

3) More particularly, these propositions mean that there is no necessary or privileged relation between the working class and socialism, and indeed that the working class has no ‘fundamental interest’ in socialism.

4) Therefore, the formation of a socialist movement is in principle independent of class, and a socialist politics can be constructed that is more or less autonomous from economic (class) conditions. This means two things in particular:

5) A political force can be constituted and organized on the ideological and political planes, constructed out of various ‘popular’ elements which can be bound together and motivated by purely ideological and political means, irrespective of the class connections or oppositions among them.

6) The appropriate objectives of socialism are universal human goals which transcend class, rather than narrow material goals defined in terms of class interests. These objectives can be addressed, on the autonomous ideological and political planes, to various kinds of people, irrespective of their material class situations.

7) In particular, the struggle for socialism can be conceived as a plurality of ‘democratic’ struggles, bringing together a variety of resistances to many forms of inequality and oppression. In fact, it may even be possible to replace the concept of socialism with the notion of ‘radical democracy’. Socialism is a more or less natural extension of liberal democracy; or at any rate ‘democracy’ as it exists, albeit in a limited form, in advanced capitalist societies is in principle ‘indeterminate’ and capable of extension to socialist democracy. (It is worth noting that in the United States, the NTS exists above all in the form of this proposition, which has received quite elaborate development at the hands of writers like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis).

The declassing of the socialist project represents not only a redefinition of socialist goals, which can no longer be identified with the abolition of class, but also a rejection of the materialist analysis of social and historical processes. It should be evident that the logic of the whole argument requires a relegation of material production to at best a secondary role in the constitution of social life. As the socialist project is dissociated from any particular class, it is relocated in social collectivities – ‘popular alliances’ – whose identity, principles of cohesion, objectives, and capacity for collective action are not rooted in any specific social relations or interests but are constituted by politics and ideology themselves. Thus the NTS postulates historical forces which are not grounded in the specific conditions of material life, and collective agencies whose claim to strategic power and capacity for action have no basis in the social organization of material life. To put it more precisely, the possession of strategic power and a capacity for collective action are not treated as essential criteria in identifying the agents of social transformation.

The theoretical tendency to autonomize ideology and politics is, at its most extreme, associated with a drift toward the establishment of language or ‘discourse’ as the dominant principle of social life, and the convergence of certain ‘post-Marxist’ trends with post-structuralism, the ultimate dissociation of ideology and consciousness from any social and historical base. The flaws in this dissolution of social reality into language, the circularity and, finally, nihilism of this approach, have been forcefully exposed by Perry Anderson.⁴ What is important from our point of view is how this approach has been harnessed to a political strategy which assumes that social and political forces are constituted by discourse itself, with little foundation in social relations.

The typical subject of the NTS project, then, appears to be a broadly conceived and loose collectivity, a popular alliance, with no discernible identity except that which it derives from an autonomous ideology, an ideology whose own origins are obscure. And yet, it may not be entirely true that the subject of the NTS has no determinate identity. The new ‘true’ socialists seem to share the view that the natural constituents of socialism are what might be called ‘right-minded’ people, whose common ground is not crass material interest but a susceptibility to reason and persuasion. More particularly, intellectuals tend to play a very prominent role. In some cases, the primacy of intellectuals is made quite explicit; but it can be argued that even where it is not, the NTS project necessarily ascribes to intellectuals a predominant role in the socialist project, insofar as it relies on them to carry out no less a task than the construction of ‘social agents’ by means of ideology or discourse. In that case, the inchoate mass that constitutes the bulk of the ‘people’ still remains without a collective identity, except what it receives from its intellectual leaders, the bearers of discourse.

We can then add one final principle to our model:

8) Some types of people are more susceptible than others to the universalist and rational discourse of socialism, more capable of commitment to universal human goals as distinct from narrow material – or what Bentham used to call ‘sinister’ – interests; and these form the natural constituency of the socialist movement. (In this proposition, it is important to note the opposition, indeed antagonism, that is established between rational, humanitarian goals, on the one hand, and material interests, on the other.)

At the very least, the NTS all have one premise in common: the working class has no privileged position in the struggle for socialism, in that its class situation does not give rise to socialist politics any more naturally or readily than does any other. Some, however, would go further: the working class – or the ‘traditional’ working class – is actually less likely than other social groups to produce a socialist politics. Not only is there no necessity that the working class be revolutionary, its essential character is to be anti-revolutionary, ‘reformist’, ‘economistic’.

Here, however, there may be a contradiction in the argument. While the essential principle is the autonomy of politics and ideology from class, it now appears that at least in the case of the working class, economic-class situation does determine ideology and politics – only not in the way Marx expected. The only thing that might rescue this argument from annihilating itself is the idea that economic conditions themselves determine the degree to which other phenomena are autonomous from them, or – to adapt a favourite Althusserian formula – the economic determines in the last instance, only in the sense that it determines which ‘instance’ will be determinant or dominant; and some economic conditions determine that the economy itself will be dominant, while others determine that politics or ideology will be ‘relatively’ autonomous and dominant. Put in more traditional terms, the argument is that certain class conditions determine that people will be bound to material necessity, while other conditions allow greater intellectual and moral freedom, a greater capacity, in other words, to be ‘right-minded’ and therefore a greater susceptibility to socialist discourse.

People are therefore more amenable to socialist politics, the greater the degree of their autonomy from material conditions and hence their capacity to respond to rational, universalistic goals. What makes the working class a less appropriate constituency for socialist politics, then, is not simply that its material class interests tend to produce an ‘economistic’ or ‘reformist’ politics, but rather the very fact that it is driven by material interests at all. And so, socialist theory has been reconstituted on the basis of a classic conservative principle whose lineage is traceable back throughout the long history of political thought to the antidemocratic philosophy of Plato. But more on this Platonic Marxism later.

This, then, is the new ‘true’ socialism. Needless to say, there is a great deal in it which is hardly new. To a large extent, it is just another repetition of banal and hoary right-wing social-democratic nostrums. The idea that capitalist democracy need only be ‘extended’ to produce socialism, or that socialism represents a higher ideal of life capable of appealing to all right-minded people irrespective of class, would, for example, be perfectly at home with, say, Ramsay MacDonald, or even, for that matter, John Stuart Mill. What is new about the NTS is that its exponents insist that they are working in the tradition either of Marxism, or of some sequel to it (‘post-Marxism’). Even those – like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – who have departed most radically from the Marxist tradition and moved most emphatically to the rightward extreme of the NTS spectrum still claim Marxism as one of their principal constituent traditions, merely ‘scaling down the pretensions and the area of validity of Marxist theory …’.⁵ These claims account for some of the most characteristic features of the current, in particular its complicated, pretentious, and – it must be said – evasive theoretical contortions, which are in sharp contrast to the rather more open and unadorned opportunism of traditional social democracy which sought no elaborate theoretical disguises.

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.

What was happening around the mid-1970s which might account for these developments? We need to explain not just a general climate of despair or a failure of nerve on the left, but this particular retreat from socialism, in this particular form, and in these particular places: the English-speaking world and especially Britain. Enough has probably been said about the general reasons for ‘rethinking’ socialism, which Miliband has briefly summed up:

The experience of ‘actually existing socialism’, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the collapse of Maoist illusions, Cambodia and the sour aftermath of victory in Vietnam, the withering of Eurocommunist hopes, the emergence of ‘new social movements’ born of dissatisfaction with the limitations of traditional labour and socialist movements and parties, a growing disbelief in the capacity of the working class to be the agent of radical social change, and a consequent ‘crisis of Marxism’. More specifically for Britain, there is also what has for many been the trauma of ‘Thatcherism’ and, even more traumatic, its ability to win elections.⁷

This last item points to a factor which may be the most immediately and specifically relevant one for explaining the NTS. The most obvious historical correlate of NTS development is the evolution of the ‘New Right’, especially in Britain and the United States. In very general terms, then, it might be correct to say that the NTS is a response to the growth of the New Right; but this in itself does not advance the issue very far. We would still need to know why this particular response. Since, for example, ‘Thatcherism’ is characterized by a perception of the world in terms of the class opposition between capital and labour, since the Thatcher government has had as its primary purpose to alter the balance of power between capital and labour which in their eyes has tilted too far in favour of labour, why should socialists respond by denying the centrality of class politics instead of confronting Thatcherism for what it is, theorizing it as such, and responding politically by taking the other side in the class war being waged by the Thatcherites? Why should socialists be more obsessed with the ideological trimmings of Thatcherism – its so-called ‘authoritarian populism’ – than with its real practice in prosecuting the class war against labour?

Because the two trends are virtually contemporaneous, perhaps it would be better to regard the NTS not simply as a response to the New Right, but rather as a reaction to the same causes that produced the New Right. There can be little doubt that the immediate impulse for the development of the New Right in Britain came from the outbreaks of labour militancy in the 1970s, following the period of radicalism in Europe in 1968–69, particularly after the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, and the defeat of the Heath government. Thatcher emerged very clearly in the spirit of ‘never again’, and with a clear determination to fight and win the class war against organized labour. The ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79 added fuel to the fire. The evolution of the NTS has also coincided with these episodes of militancy, and has reached fruition during yet another dramatic moment in the history of working-class struggle, the miners’ strike of 1984–85. And each milestone of working-class militancy has been followed by further developments of NTS theory.

It would not be unreasonable, then, to suggest that the growth of the NTS, bounded at both ends by dramatic episodes of working-class militancy and spurred on by each successive outbreak in between, has had something to do with the recent history of working-class struggles in the West, and in Britain in particular. In view of the historical coordinates, however, it would be difficult to maintain that the NTS and its rejection of the working class as the agent of socialist change represent a simple despair on the part of socialists at the quiescence of organized labour.

How, then, to explain the irony that the theoretical expulsion of the working class from the centre of the socialist project was being prepared at the very moment when workers in several European countries were exhibiting a new militancy, and that especially in Britain it has reached new heights whenever militant workers have dominated the political scene? One possible explanation for this apparent paradox is that a new pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the working class has been engendered by precisely such displays of militancy, because they have failed to issue in a decisive battle for socialism. It is as if the only struggle that counts is the last one. At the same time, the ‘new social movements’ have drawn attention to various issues inadequately addressed by organized labour. There are, however, other possible factors that cannot be discounted, such as the lure of intellectual fashion, as ‘discourse’ becomes the style of the eighties; or perhaps even a certain fastidious middle-class distaste for – not to say fear of – the working class, and an indignant refusal of the discomforts occasioned by the withdrawal of service. The militancy eagerly awaited in theory becomes far less agreeable in practice.

At any rate, if the specific historical causes of the NTS must remain a question for speculation, its theoretical provenance is a matter of explicit record. We can proceed, then, to an exploration of its antecedents.

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¹ The German Ideology, in Collected Works, New York 1976, vol. 5, pp. 455–7.

² Ibid., p. 467.

³ See especially Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review 150, March-April 1985. See also Ben Fine et al., Class Politics: An Answer to its Critics, London 1985, where the ‘new revisionism’ is called the ‘newer left’. The latter includes some prominent figures who have been excluded from this survey despite some important affinities with the NTS. Perhaps the most obvious omission is Stuart Hall, who by his own account has been substantially influenced by Ernesto Laclau and the politics of ‘discourse’. Hall’s theoretical statements are sufficiently ambiguous and his movements in an NTS direction are so often accompanied by qualifications and disclaimers that it is not always easy to know exactly where he stands. But it must be said that he does not explicitly deny the centrality of class politics, or even the organic connection of working-class interests and capacities to socialist politics, so much as insist, more or less pragmatically, on the costs and inadequacies of a purely class-based politics. (He has, incidentally, recently dissociated himself from Laclau’s latest work, ‘Authoritarian Populism: A Reply’, New Left Review 151, May-June 1985, p. 122). Eric Hobsbawm, who has gone at least as far as any other prominent Marxist in promoting a virtually unlimited cross-class alliance to defeat Thatcher, is a rather different case. He shows little interest in or sympathy for the ‘new social movements’, and his political approach is much more in the tradition of old Communist Popular Front strategies. Furthermore, there has been no sign of any explicit departure from Marxist theoretical orthodoxy as he has always understood it.

⁴ Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London 1983, pp. 40–55.

⁵ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London 1985, p. 4.

⁶ Miliband, p. 6.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 6–7.