The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ and the sour aftermath of victory in Vietnam, the withering of Eurocommunist hopes, the emergence of ‘new social movements’ born of dissatisfaction with the limitations of traditional labour and socialist movements and parties, a growing disbelief in the capacity of the working class to be the agent of radical social change, and a consequent ‘crisis of Marxism’. More specifically for Britain, there is also what has for many been the trauma of ‘Thatcherism’ and, even more traumatic, its ability to win elections.⁷

      This last item points to a factor which may be the most immediately and specifically relevant one for explaining the NTS. The most obvious historical correlate of NTS development is the evolution of the ‘New Right’, especially in Britain and the United States. In very general terms, then, it might be correct to say that the NTS is a response to the growth of the New Right; but this in itself does not advance the issue very far. We would still need to know why this particular response. Since, for example, ‘Thatcherism’ is characterized by a perception of the world in terms of the class opposition between capital and labour, since the Thatcher government has had as its primary purpose to alter the balance of power between capital and labour which in their eyes has tilted too far in favour of labour, why should socialists respond by denying the centrality of class politics instead of confronting Thatcherism for what it is, theorizing it as such, and responding politically by taking the other side in the class war being waged by the Thatcherites? Why should socialists be more obsessed with the ideological trimmings of Thatcherism – its so-called ‘authoritarian populism’ – than with its real practice in prosecuting the class war against labour?

      Because the two trends are virtually contemporaneous, perhaps it would be better to regard the NTS not simply as a response to the New Right, but rather as a reaction to the same causes that produced the New Right. There can be little doubt that the immediate impulse for the development of the New Right in Britain came from the outbreaks of labour militancy in the 1970s, following the period of radicalism in Europe in 1968–69, particularly after the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, and the defeat of the Heath government. Thatcher emerged very clearly in the spirit of ‘never again’, and with a clear determination to fight and win the class war against organized labour. The ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79 added fuel to the fire. The evolution of the NTS has also coincided with these episodes of militancy, and has reached fruition during yet another dramatic moment in the history of working-class struggle, the miners’ strike of 1984–85. And each milestone of working-class militancy has been followed by further developments of NTS theory.

      It would not be unreasonable, then, to suggest that the growth of the NTS, bounded at both ends by dramatic episodes of working-class militancy and spurred on by each successive outbreak in between, has had something to do with the recent history of working-class struggles in the West, and in Britain in particular. In view of the historical coordinates, however, it would be difficult to maintain that the NTS and its rejection of the working class as the agent of socialist change represent a simple despair on the part of socialists at the quiescence of organized labour.

      How, then, to explain the irony that the theoretical expulsion of the working class from the centre of the socialist project was being prepared at the very moment when workers in several European countries were exhibiting a new militancy, and that especially in Britain it has reached new heights whenever militant workers have dominated the political scene? One possible explanation for this apparent paradox is that a new pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the working class has been engendered by precisely such displays of militancy, because they have failed to issue in a decisive battle for socialism. It is as if the only struggle that counts is the last one. At the same time, the ‘new social movements’ have drawn attention to various issues inadequately addressed by organized labour. There are, however, other possible factors that cannot be discounted, such as the lure of intellectual fashion, as ‘discourse’ becomes the style of the eighties; or perhaps even a certain fastidious middle-class distaste for – not to say fear of – the working class, and an indignant refusal of the discomforts occasioned by the withdrawal of service. The militancy eagerly awaited in theory becomes far less agreeable in practice.

      At any rate, if the specific historical causes of the NTS must remain a question for speculation, its theoretical provenance is a matter of explicit record. We can proceed, then, to an exploration of its antecedents.

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¹ The German Ideology, in Collected Works, New York 1976, vol. 5, pp. 455–7.

² Ibid., p. 467.

³ See especially Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review 150, March-April 1985. See also Ben Fine et al., Class Politics: An Answer to its Critics, London 1985, where the ‘new revisionism’ is called the ‘newer left’. The latter includes some prominent figures who have been excluded from this survey despite some important affinities with the NTS. Perhaps the most obvious omission is Stuart Hall, who by his own account has been substantially influenced by Ernesto Laclau and the politics of ‘discourse’. Hall’s theoretical statements are sufficiently ambiguous and his movements in an NTS direction are so often accompanied by qualifications and disclaimers that it is not always easy to know exactly where he stands. But it must be said that he does not explicitly deny the centrality of class politics, or even the organic connection of working-class interests and capacities to socialist politics, so much as insist, more or less pragmatically, on the costs and inadequacies of a purely class-based politics. (He has, incidentally, recently dissociated himself from Laclau’s latest work, ‘Authoritarian Populism: A Reply’, New Left Review 151, May-June 1985, p. 122). Eric Hobsbawm, who has gone at least as far as any other prominent Marxist in promoting a virtually unlimited cross-class alliance to defeat Thatcher, is a rather different case. He shows little interest in or sympathy for the ‘new social movements’, and his political approach is much more in the tradition of old Communist Popular Front strategies. Furthermore, there has been no sign of any explicit departure from Marxist theoretical orthodoxy as he has always understood it.

⁴ Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London 1983, pp. 40–55.

⁵ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London 1985, p. 4.

⁶ Miliband, p. 6.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 6–7.

       2

       The Journey to the New ‘True’ Socialism: Displacing Class Struggle and the Working Class

       I

      Class struggle is the nucleus of Marxism. This is so in two inseparable senses: it is class struggle that for Marxism explains the dynamic of history, and it is the abolition of classes, the obverse or end-product of class struggle, that is the ultimate objective of the revolutionary process. The particular importance for Marxism of the working class in capitalist society is that this is the only class whose own class interests require, and whose own conditions make possible, the abolition of class itself. The inseparable unity of this view of history СКАЧАТЬ