rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_95a14e43-0099-5031-b16a-f4cee7c9588f">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
