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The Retreat from Class
The Retreat from Class
A New ‘True’ Socialism
with a new introduction by the author
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
First published by Verso 1986
© Ellen Meiksins Wood 1986
Revised edition first published by Verso 1998
© Ellen Meiksins Wood 1998
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-85984-270-6 (PB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-003-2 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-002-5 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
To my father and Elsie
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the New Edition
1The New ‘True’ Socialism
2The Journey to the New ‘True’ Socialism: Displacing Class Struggle and the Working Class
3The Forerunner: Nicos Poulantzas
4The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics
5The Randomization of History and Politics
6Politics and Class
7The Non-Correspondence Principle: A Historical Case
8Platonic Marxism
9Socialism and Democracy
10Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism
11Socialism and ‘Universal Human Goods’
12Conclusions
Index
In the original acknowledgements, I thanked Peter Meiksins, Neal Wood, Neil Belton, Robin Blackburn, and especially Gregory Meiksins and Perry Anderson, for criticisms and suggestions. I would now like to add Sebastian Budgen for his helpful comments on the new Introduction.
Introduction to the New Edition
An author is bound to look back with a certain unease at a book published more than a decade ago, especially a book written at a particular political conjuncture and in response to a very specific and short-lived intellectual current. There are the inevitable regrets about this or that formulation or judgment. Some personalities and ideas that seemed important then are likely to have virtually disappeared. And the sense of distance will seem even greater when the intervening years have seen a major historical rupture – in this case, one of the greatest epochal shifts in modern times: the collapse of Communism.
The Retreat from Class belongs to its time. Yet I think it had, and still has, something to say beyond its critical commentary on a now defunct intellectual tendency. It was certainly intended as a theoretical reflection on larger questions which are at least as current today as they were then – questions to do with class, ideology and politics, socialism and democracy. But I also like to think that even as intellectual history its significance has outlived its subject. Post-Marxism may be yesterday’s news, but its progeny is very much alive in today’s intellectual fashions – and I think the book can claim the virtue of having, on the whole, seen where things were going.
On the face of it, a lot has changed in the intellectual life of the left since 1986, and in the wake of 1989. For instance, when The Retreat from Class was first published, the term ‘post-Marxism’ was still just establishing itself. These days it hardly means anything any more. Those who might once have described themselves in these terms would probably disavow that self-description now, at least in its original meaning. After all, when the phrase was coined, it was meant to convey that, while its exponents felt they had moved well beyond Marxism, they still acknowledged their roots in, and their debt to, that tradition. Today, their connections with Marxism are very distant and tenuous, almost invisible. People have, in their various ways, moved on, in directions that have very little to do with Marxism, or even socialism, except to repudiate it. It seems clear that post-Marxism was just a short pit-stop on the way to anti-Marxism.
Still, it would be a mistake to attribute this trajectory solely, or even primarily, to the dramatic events of the late 1980s. For that matter, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the changes in the intellectual and political configuration of the post-Marxist left ‘after the fall’. There is an unbroken continuity between early post-Marxism and today’s postmodernism – with, among other things, their common emphasis on ‘discourse’ and ‘difference’, or on the fragmentary nature of reality and human identity. Those continuities are, if anything, more remarkable than the changes, and their roots can be traced even further back, to the 1950s and 60s, to the formative years of the post-Marxist luminaries.
To put those continuities in perspective, let us first consider the changes. One of the constitutive contradictions of post-Marxism was that even those who insisted most emphatically on ‘difference’, and who most forcefully repudiated ‘essentialism’, ‘universalism’ and class politics, still professed
