Showing papers in "Socialist Register in 1968"

Theory and Practice in Gramsci's Marxism

Abstract: During the past decade there has been a growing interest among European socialists in those Marxist writers and activists of the period immediately preceding and following the October Revolution, whose theories grew out of the collapse of the Second International and the failure of the revolutionary wave which swept Europe in 1917-20. The emergence of reformist tendencies in the socialist parties in the pre-war period, the subsequent capitulation of the German SPD, the failure of the socialist leaderships to combat factional tendencies within their parties and their fatal inaction in the face of events immediately following the war, created a situation in which only radical new departures could create new theoretical solutions and hence new practical possibilities. Both Lukacs and Gramsci responded in different ways to this need, moving beyond the terms of the earlier "revisionist debate"-both "revolutionaries" and "reformists" had remained locked within the same basic problematic-carrying out a new diagnosis and prognosis from their experience of the postwar defeat, placing a renewed stress on the active, voluntary component of historical change, on the problem of agency in the making of a revolution.

Reform and Revolution

Abstract: The working class will neither unite politically, nor man the barricades, for a 10 per cent rise in wages or 50,000 more council flats. In the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes or armed insurrection in defence of their vital interests. But the bourgeoisie will never surrender its power without struggle, without being forced to do so by the revolutionary action of the masses. It follows that the principal problem of a socialist strategy is to create the objective and subjective conditions which will make mass revolutionary action and engagement in a successful trial of strength with the bourgeoisie possible.

Professor Galbraith and American Capitalism

Abstract: The intellectual defence of capitalism has long ceased to be confined to the simple celebration of its virtues; or even to the argument that, whatever might be said against it, it was still a much better system, on economic, social and political grounds, than any conceivable alternative to it. Such arguments are of course still extensively used. But they belong to an older school of apologetics; and for some considerable time now, many people, who see themselves as part of the "democratic left", as liberal and even radical critics of the existing social order, and as anything but its apologists, have argued that the question of alternatives to capitalism had been rendered obsolete by the internal developments of the system itself; capitalism, the argument goes, has been so thoroughly transformed in the last few decades that the need to abolish it has conveniently disappeared. The job, for all practical purposes, has been done by the "logic of industrialization", which is well on the way to erasing all meaningful differences between "industrial systems", whatever misleading labels they may choose to pin upon themselves. Dinosaur socialists will, no doubt, continue to peddle their unwanted ideological wares; for their part, serious men with a bent for reform will address themselves to the real problems of what Mr. Crosland long ago called "post-capitalist" societies.

Lessons of the Soviet Economic Reform

Abstract: The Soviet economic system as it existed on the eve of the September (1965) Plenum was basically the same as that created at the end of the 1920s It was created because the alternative system, the market economy of the NEP period, was incompatible both with the political and social objectives of the Communist Party, and also with the rapid development of heavy industry which the Party leaders aimed at The traditional Soviet economic system-"imperative planning" as it has come to be called-represented a rational answer to the problems which confronted the Soviet leaders at that time

The Centenary of the British Trades Union Congress, 1868-1968

Abstract: The occasion of the centenary of the British Trades Union Congress in 1968 draws attention to the unique position which the British body holds among central trade union organizations. In no other country has a central union organization survived for so long without either being displaced from its role as the prime national representative body for organized labour or experiencing permanent splits in its ranks. Of course, the length of the TUC's life can be explained in part by the fact that Britain was the first nation to industrialize and give rise to the necessary and sufficient conditions for trade unionism. The ability of the TUC to survive, however, cannot be explained by this fact. In most countries, except where central union organizations have not been protected and perpetuated by the use of state power, ideological divisions have produced two or three or even four competing bodies. In Britain there has rarely ever been the possibility that this might happen.