A flawed critique

A flawed critique Ellen Meiksins Wood, The retreat from class: a new 'true' socialism, Verso, London 1985, pp202, pbk £6.95.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, a Canadian professor of political science, has written a useful critique of the school of academic Marxism closely associated with Eurocommunism. She notes that the advance of reaction under Reagan and Thatcher has encouraged a new intellectual attack on Marxism, the effect of which is ultimately to deny the possibility and necessity for the overthrow of capitalism.

She identifies the separation of politics from economics, the contention that the class conflict generated by workers subordination to capital has no necessary relationship to the struggle for a new society, as the central theme of the new revisionism. Indeed some of the radical critics of Marxism examined by Wood go so far as to conclude that, because the working class is committed to winning a better deal out of the present system, it is most unlikely to lead the anti-capitalist struggle.

The strength of Wood's critique is that it reveals a basic grasp of Marx's analysis of capitalist society which is singularly lacking among most academic Marxists. She explains that under capitalism the distribution of social labour takes place spontaneously through the operation of the law of value, and that the state plays no direct role in the regulation of economic life. Hence the political institutions of capitalist society appear to be above the conflict between classes that arises from the economic sphere.

103 • Reviews The separation of politics from economics gives the state an appearance of neutrality, even though it is the ultimate enforcer of capitalist relations. Struggles in the economic sphere — trade union disputes — appear to have no relation to political conflicts over issues such as women's rights, racism, or war. Wood rightly identifies the failure to appreciate that the apparent autonomy of the political sphere is inherent in capitalist society as a key weakness of academic Marxism. Wood labels today's academic Marxists as the 'new "true" socialists' after Marx's characterisation of the utopian socialists of the 1830s, who regarded socialism as the outcome of the spread of progressive ideas rather than the result of the class struggle. The new revisionists share the old utopians' disdain for a working class apparently more concerned about winning higher wages than getting involved in wider political issues. Indeed when it comes to women, blacks or war, many workers seem to adopt backward views. Hence the radical academics put their faith for the future in the liberal middle classes and their progressive democratic values.

They consider that these ideas, if properly presented, can win the support of a majority of reasonable people, irrespective of their class background Gavin Kitching, for example, considers that the construction of socialist societies and a socialist world will take a very long time (probably centuries) and that an essential prerequisite of such a world coming into being is a high degree of material prosperity and a citizenry of considerable skill, knowledge and intellectual sophistication.' He concludes that 'the central task of the left in the current situation is to help restore boom conditions as quickly as possible.' For Kitching, workers lack the sophistication required to build socialism, and working class action is not merely irrelevant, but a barrier to the measures needed to revive the capitalist economy. Wood argues with conviction for a Marxism which recognises that the working class is. the only viable agent of social transformation. She points out that there is no direct path from democracy to socialism. Democracy is limited by the requirements of capital, and the class struggle will inevitably reach a stage where

Reviews • 104 the workers' movement is forced either to recognise the need to overthrow the capitalist state, or to accept the restrictions it imposes on society. While the capitalist state can grant formal rights to all its citizens, social inequality will persist as long as the capitalist class owns the means of production. All rights granted by the state remain provisional and restricted, and the coercive power of the most democratic state is always ready to be used if the capitalist order comes under threat.

So far so good. However, when Wood comes to consider the questions of fascism and dictatorship, she abandons her earlier insistence on the necessity to recognise the relation between politics and economics. Here she considers that a case can be made for the principles of the Popular Front and a corresponding ideological strategy in which the continuities between liberalism and socialism take precedence over the discontinuities." Wary of the consequences of this position, Wood pleads that she is not falling into the trap of putting the defence of democracy before the fight against capitalism. She acknowledges 'the risks of a strategy that seems to suppress class struggle, subordinate the interests and independent action of the working class, and postpone the struggle for socialism'. But Wood cannot have her cake and eat it. She cannot reconcile her approval for the Popular Front against fascism and her polemic against the separation of politics from economics, of which the Popular Front is a classical example. Most of the theoreticians against whom this book is directed — Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst — trace their intellectual origins to the international communist movement in its Popular Front phase. In the late thirties the Stalinists reduced the choice facing the working class to capitalist democracy or fascism.

The Marxist view that fascism was the outcome of capitalist social relations was abandoned, together with the strategy of fighting fascism by struggling to overthrow capitalism. The result of separating political forms from the relations of production which gave rise to them was disaster for the working class movement. It is a pity that, after going so far in revealing the weaknesses of the

105 • Reviews revisionists, Wood ends up succumbing to them.

The area where Wood appears to have the greatest difficulty is in establishing the exact relationship between the conflict between workers and their employers and the struggle for socialism. She clearly recognises the need for some sort of working class political organisation which aims to destroy the existing state machine and institute a regime based on workers' power. She also accepts that workers will not spontaneously come to an awareness of the historic role of the working class through their involvement in workplace disputes. Such struggles reveal the possibility of a united workers" movement, not its inevitability. Realising this potential requires the conscious intervention of political leadership in the class struggle.

Wood rightly criticises left-wing organisations which abdicate the responsibilities of political leadership and give a low priority to theoretical matters. Yet Wood fails to draw the organisational conclusions of her own critique. She writes as a political scientist working in a university, rather than as a scientific politician engaged in the class struggle.

She is critical of the electoralism and consensus politics of the British Labour Party tradition. Yet she endorses the views of British intellectuals such as Perry Anderson and Ralph Miliband, both of whom have rejected the Leninist project of building a revolutionary workers' party as irrelevant to the British working class.

Wood's analysis of the new revisionists contains many insights and it makes stimulating reading. But, like many of her colleagues on the editorial board of the New Left Review, she has yet to escape from the tradition she seeks to attack.

Keith Tompson