The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood

      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

       Acknowledgments

      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 a commitment to certain inclusive and embarrassingly ‘universalistic’ political objectives, including socialism. In the presence of so much ‘difference’, and in the absence of a unifying social base like class, these universalistic objectives compelled post-Marxists to rely on very general and socially indeterminate political principles. In particular, the post-Marxist concept of ‘radical democracy’, which was meant to replace or subsume the traditional socialist project, had to be defined in terms vague enough to serve as a kind of lowest common denominator among irreducibly ‘different’ emancipatory projects with no significant common foundation.

      The ‘democracy’ in ‘radical democracy’ was, in any case, always deeply ambiguous. At its worst, and in default of a social foundation, the post-Marxist doctrine of ‘radical democracy’ assigned an inordinately large political role to intellectuals and their ‘discursive practices’, with positively anti-democratic implications. The real democratic struggles to which post-Marxism professed to be committed – struggles, for instance, against racial or sexual