The Socialist Register 1990
Scialabba, George
SOCIALIST REGISTER 1990: THE RETREAT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, edited by Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch. London: Merlin Press. 365 pp. $16.00 (paper). Anyone who thinks that the collapse of the...
...The system of participation by volunteers in the working committees of legislative bodies, extensive nationwide discussion of proposed legislation, the required report back of representatives, the principle of collective leadership are among the formal achievements of socialist states...
...Palmer deplores the abandonment of historical materialism in favor of symbolic and "discourse" analysis, exemplified in the work of such current notables as Francois Furet on the French Revolution, Gareth Stedman Jones on Chartism, and Joan Scott on the working-class family in the nineteenth century...
...In the 308 • DISSENT Books book's lead essay, "Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism," Norman Geras shows that quite a few intelligent people have written quite a lot of nonsense lately about Marx or "classical Marxism" or "the Marxist tradition...
...It isn't, as Geras demonstrates in his exquisitely reasoned and phrased rebuttal...
...it's one of the best things that ever happened to Marxism and socialism...
...And yet, to paraphrase Yeats, too much of them can make a stone of the heart...
...The judicial systems with the demystification of the legal process and the development of peoples' and neighborhood courts is one such area...
...It bespeaks, it seems to promise only an angry isolation, an austere comradeship...
...As a (largely) neutral observer in this civil war, I can report that some, at least, of the sorties in Retreat of the Intellectuals are devastating...
...the very "notion of a radical alternative to capitalism has been correspondingly devalued in the eyes of many intellectuals who had previously been committed to it...
...Cammack reviews the rise of a literature within comparative sociology and political science that emphasizes the freedom of the state and other political institutions from direct ruling-class control, in apparent (though not real, he claims) contradiction to the expectations generated by Marxist theory...
...How this SPRING • 1991 • 309 happened is something that has to be studied very carefully...
...But Wood is unapologetic and her arguments forceful...
...left for its craven "liberal practicality" and discerns in the Rainbow Coalition "the first signs of a nascent mass-based class struggle...
...that for classical Marxism, "politics is an arena which simply reflects already unified collective political identities" (Stuart Hall...
...Eleanor MacDonald tries valiantly to pin down Derrida's politics...
...Many leftists consider them already dead and buried...
...Throughout, rigor and militancy are recommended, intellectual and strategic backsliding rebuked...
...Here again, it is important to reject simple caricatures...
...Second, that "while all oppressions have equal moral claims, class exploitation has a different historical status, a more strategic location at the heart of capitalism...
...There are a great many notes in the socialist register, and a great many more essays in this issue of Socialist Register...
...0 310 • DISSENT...
...The socialist army needs scouts, too, and slackers: hedonists (or even cowardly careerists) who can see the point of Socialist Register 1990 but also remind its contributors that a movement whose atmosphere was dominated by their scornful rigor and fierce militancy might well inspire not just occasional retreats but mass desertion...
...The Retreat of the Intellectuals goes back well before 1989, actually...
...In fact, the withering away of Soviet communism is not only one of the best things that ever happened...
...It's surely too much to expect a perfectly balanced rigor and militancy, equipotent in all directions...
...Some misunderstandings are, after all, easier to cope with than others...
...Its sixteen contributors have found evidence throughout the eighties of a "general retreat from socialism...
...It is not a simple matter of authorities suppressing discussion and bypassing the legal democratic structures...
...But to the targets of these essays, rudely interrupted while partying on Marx's grave, the volume will undoubtedly appear a hostile act: the revenge of the retros...
...If all this were true, then good riddance to Marxism...
...No doubt this ad hominem comment will seem, to the book's partisans, unfair...
...hence this volume of intellectual rectification, the latest of Socialist Register's annual surveys of the left or (occasionally) the real world...
...Bryan Palmer's "The Eclipse of Materialism" and Paul Cammack's "Statism, New Institutionalism, and Marxism" are the other two outstanding essays in Retreat of the Intellectuals...
...Socialist revolutions did bring large masses of people into political life as actors in history...
...we recognize that "constant reappraisal is essential for socialism to advance...
...In some cases, advanced political forms were established to allow for grass roots democracy of a kind much deeper than that of capitalist politics...
...or that Marx held out "the utopian hope of perfect reconciliation," of a conflict-free, "fully redeemed social order" (Martin Jay...
...Terry Eagleton gratuitously raps Richard Rorty...
...Cheap shots and obsolete misunderstandings abound...
...and so on in this conciliatory vein...
...It might be just a bit easier now to get people to sit still for an explanation of why it suited the ruling classes of East and West alike to identify Soviet and Third World communism with genuine socialism...
...A wild man from Oregon, John Bellamy Foster, denounces most of the U.S...
...Anyone who thinks that the collapse of the Soviet and East European regimes discredited Marxism and socialism is—to put it charitably—having an off day...
...As a description of this epoch of woe, the above paragraph is not only not adequate, it is not decent...
...Rigor and militancy are glorious virtues...
...Then comes this appalling passage: The greatest failures of most contemporary revolutions have been in the area of building socialist democracy...
...First, that "formal democracy" (a.k.a...
...Democratic participation also requires . . . the overthrow of deeply rooted attitudes and beliefs, deference to authority, dependence on outstanding leaders, timidities that are built into the socialization of people in class societies...
...Palmer's and Cammack's essays are too specialized to persuade anyone but a professional...
...What does need to be said, though, according to the editors of Socialist Register 1990, is that a lot of left-wing intellectuals aren't being much help just now, either, having lost their bearings or in some cases their scruples...
...For all the intelligence and dedication of its contributors, there's something a little arid and doctrinaire about The Retreat of the Intellectuals...
...Better to be regarded by our potential audience as harmless fossils than as apologists for totalitarianism...
...George Ross fumes over the intellectual depravity of contemporary France...
...bourgeois democracy"), while unambiguously good, is nevertheless "a subtraction from the substance of the democratic idea, and one which is historically and structurally associated with capitalism...
...For example, that Marx thought "each individual . . . has all the capacities that any other has" (Jon Elster...
...As a specimen of how the beleaguered intelligence can lose its moral balance, consider what may be the most rigorous and militant essay in the book, "Eulogy Beside an Empty Grave: Reflections on the Future of Socialism," by Richard Levins...
...The Retreat of the Intellectuals makes a plausible case for one set of priorities...
...Still, they're dense and carefully argued, so anyone who cares to can learn a lot from them...
...better to be greeted with amused incredulity than with fierce indignation...
...The superiority of socialist democracy and the primacy of class are complicated notions and currently unpopular on the left...
...that Marxism "excludes the possibility . . . that there might be other modes of domination than socioeconomic class relations" (Jean Cohen...
...Life in Communist societies has so far ranged from merely oppressive to utterly nightmarish...
...But forms are not enough, and in many ways these forms eroded and lost real content...
...Amy Bartholomew discourses a bit bloodlessly about Marx and moral philosophy...
...Frederic Jameson natters on about "postmodernism and the market...
...It is fully as misleading as the "simple caricatures" it rightly rejects—and whose exasperating persistence and pervasiveness in American political culture is probably responsible, at least in part, for Levins's cold-blooded pseudoprecision...
...Yes and no...
...Ellen Wood's "The Uses and Abuses of 'Civil Society' " argues two theses...
...The editors say no, of course not, we welcome the many invaluable criticisms of the tradition made by our feminist and other comrades (it's unclear whether invaluable criticisms by liberals, social democrats, and other nonconrades are equally welcome...
...Everyone's energy and imagination are limited...
...But then—to adopt the editors' military metaphor—why should all intellectuals be in the vanguard...
...Is this an orthodox Marxist counterattack against recent revisionisms: feminism, deconstruction, the theory and practice of the "new social movements...
...Without these deeper social changes, the democratic forms become empty and a little bit of intimidation goes a long way...
...It is full of pungent and poignant writing, taut with moral indignation, studded with precise distinctions and compelling formulations...
...Perhaps it is, though it's certainly not meant dismissively...
...Needless to say, mainstream intellectuals won't be much help—if you're smart enough and scrupulous enough to make such inconvenient distinctions, you don't get into the mainstream...
...and class struggle may have a more universal reach, a greater potential for advancing not only class emancipation but other emancipatory struggles too...
...As Alasdair Maclntyre, no sympathizer, once observed: "The barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow [is] as irrelevant to the question of the moral substance of Marxism as the life of the Borgia pope was to that of the moral substance of Christianity...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
