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
