The Retreat from Class

A New "True" Socialism

Ellen Meiksins Wood

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781859842706
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786630025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this classic study, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, Ellen Wood provides a critical survey of influential trends in "post-Marxist" theory. Challenging their dissociation of politics from class, she elaborates her own original conception of the complex relations between class, ideology and politics. In the process, Wood explores the links between socialism and democracy and reinterprets the relationship between liberal and socialist democracy.
In a new introduction, Wood discusses the relevance of The Retreat from Class in a post-Soviet world. She traces the connections between post-Marxism and current academic trends such as postmodernism and argues that a re-examination of class politics is a necessary counter to the current cynical acceptance of capitalism.

1

The New ‘True’ Socialism

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• 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