advance any revolutionary circuit between theory and practice. In these conditions, some of the major minds of Western Marxism — Lukács, Althusser, Della Volpe — chose to remain formal members of their respective parties, while developing as far as they could a discourse remote from official dogmas, in coded opposition to them. Others, like Sartre, attempted to theorize the practice of these parties from a position outside them. Others again, like Adorno in post-war Germany, abstained from any direct relationship to politics whatsoever. But none of these capitulated to the status quo, or ever embellished it, through the worst years of the Cold War.
This long and tantalizing tradition — so I argued — was finally becoming exhausted at the turn of the seventies. There were two reasons for that. The first was the reawakening of mass revolts within Western Europe — indeed right across the advanced capitalist world — where the great wave of student unrest in 1968 heralded the entry of massive contingents of the working class into a new political insurgency, of a kind not seen since the days of the Spartacists or the Turin councils. The May explosion in France was the most spectacular of these, followed by the tide of industrial militancy in Italy in 1969, the decisive miners’ strike in Britain which overthrew the Conservative government in 1974, and then, a few months later, the upheaval in Portugal, with its rapid radicalization towards a revolutionary situation of the most classic type. In none of these cases did the impetus for popular rebellion derive from the established parties of the Left, whether Social-Democratic or Communist. What they appeared to prefigure was the possibility of an end to the semi-secular divorce of socialist theory from mass working-class practice, which had left such a crippling mark on Western Marxism itself. At the same time, the protracted post-war boom came to an abrupt halt in 1974, for the first time in 25 years putting the basic socio-economic stability of advanced capitalism in question. Subjectively and objectively, then, conditions seemed to be clearing the way for another sort of Marxism to emerge.
My own conclusions as to its likely shape — conclusions that were also recommendations, lived in a spirit of reasoned optimism — were fourfold. Firstly, I reckoned that the surviving doyens of the Western Marxist tradition were unlikely to produce any further work of significant moment, while many of their immediate disciples were showing signs of veering towards what would be a disastrous fixation with China as an alternative model of post-revolutionary society to the USSR, and an exemplar for socialist explorations in the West. Secondly, I suggested that the reopening of a loop between Marxist theory and mass practice in the advanced countries could recreate some of the conditions that had once formed the classical canon of historical materialism in the generation of Lenin or Luxemburg. Any such reunification of theory and practice would have two consequences, I thought: it would inevitably shift the whole centre of gravity of Marxist culture towards the set of basic problems posed by the movement of the world economy, the structure of the capitalist state, the constellation of social classes, the meaning and function of the nation — all of which had been systematically neglected for many years. A turn to the concrete, a return to the preoccupations of the mature Marx or Lenin, seemed to impose itself. Such a change would necessarily revive that dimension which above all else had been missing from the Western Marxist tradition since the death of Gramsci — namely, strategic discussion of the ways in which a revolutionary movement could break past the barriers of the bourgeois-democratic state to a real socialist democracy beyond it. Once there was any renewal of strategic debate, I speculated, it was likely that the major oppositional tradition to Stalinism that had survived in direct, if radically marginalized, continuity from classical Marxism — that which descended from Trotsky — would tend to acquire a new relevance and vitality, freed from the conservatism in which its defence of a vanquished past had often tended to congeal it.
Thirdly, I predicted that any renascence of a more classical cast of Marxist culture would be virtually bound to involve the spread of the latter to the Anglo-American bastions of imperialism, which by and large had resisted historical materialism so successfully in the epoch of ‘Western’ Marxism itself. It was in the UK and USA, after all — the oldest and the most powerful of capitalist states, respectively — that the most testing problems for socialist theory had always been posed, and left perforce unanswered. The campus revolts of the late sixties, whatever their other limitations, appeared to hold the promise of a future socialist intelligentsia capable of surpassing in quantity and quality anything either society had known in the past. Fourthly, and finally, I argued that any further development of historical materialism would not only have to re-examine, tranquilly and firmly, the heritage of the classical thinkers, from Marx and Engels through to Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, seeking to identify, criticize and resolve their characteristic omissions or confusions. It would also have to come to terms with the fundamental gains made by Marxist historiography — above all in the Anglo-American area — since the Second World War, which had hitherto always lain outside the central perimeter of Marxist theory, dominated as it was by the discipline of philosophy. The confrontation and integration of the two would involve a reconsideration of the whole statute and significance of the past, in a system of thought geared overwhelmingly, at a day-to-day level, to the present or future; and it would leave neither history nor theory unchanged in the encounter between the two.9
Such were my conjectures at the time. How have they fared, against the actual course of events? Their most general surmise, it seems to me, has been confirmed — though, as we shall see, in a way that gives no cause for comfort or complacency. That is to say, the grand Western Marxist tradition — with its epistemological or aesthetic, sombre or esoteric tonalities — has effectively come to an end, and in its stead there has emerged, with remarkable celerity and confidence, another kind of Marxist culture, primarily oriented towards just those questions of an economic, social or political order that had been lacking from its predecessor. The productivity of this Marxism has been formidable, leaving little doubt that we have been witnessing a period of overall growth and emancipation. Within this broad perspective, however, history had — as usual — prepared some disconcerting surprises and ironies for the guesses hazarded at the time. Let us look at this in more detail.
The conviction that the Western Marxist tradition had essentially run its course was, as I have said, proved correct. This was not an especially difficult development to foresee. In part, the sheer biological toll of the generation of elders was bound to play its part. Between the watershed year of 1968 and the time of my essay, death caught up with Della Volpe, Adorno, Goldmann, Lukács and Horkheimer. By the end of the decade Bloch, Marcuse and Sartre had followed. But the process of exhaustion at work had other sources as well. The two youngest of the theorists I had discussed were Althusser and Colletti, both of whom were still in their prime in these years. Yet, much as anticipated, neither produced any work of substance thereafter, declining into repetition or denegation. By and large, a line could be drawn below the original Western Marxist experience by the middle of the seventies.
What succeeded it? A sudden zest, a new appetite, for the concrete. If we pass in review those key topics which had remained most ignored by the Western Marxist tradition, and on whose enumeration I had insisted in 1974, we can see that in the majority of cases they brought forth concentrated theoretical activity, often yielding notable syntheses, in the next years. The laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production as a whole — which, if we except Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, with its quasi-Keynesian framework, had been fallow ground for Marxist enquiry since Grossmann’s theorization on the eve of the Great Depression — were now explored by three decisive bodies of work: firstly, Ernest Mandel’s path-breaking Late Capitalism, followed by his studies on The Second Slump and Long Waves in the History of Capitalism; secondly, Harry Braverman’s great book on the transformation of the labour process in the twentieth century, Labor and Monopoly Capital; and thirdly, the French economist Michel Aglietta’s ambitious and original Theory of Capitalist Regulation.10 With works like these, Marxist discussion of contemporary capitalism has once again reached, and in some vital respects surpassed, the level of the classical epoch of Luxemburg and Hilferding. Concrete historical investigations have at the same time been accompanied by a renewal of intense
