Revisionism : revisited JULIAN ATKINSON Ellen Meiksins Wood, The retreat from class — a new 'true socialism, Verso, £6.95. SINCE THE early Seventies we have seen produce a right-ward moving ideology the working class in favour of new social
should the United States and their Korean
allies bother with the whole combersome
procedure of sending a civilian airliner to
overfly some of the most sensitive Soviet
military installations, when spy satellites
could do a much better job with much less
fuss, and in total secrecy.
The answer to that question is of course
the punchline of the book, and that part of
the story at least ! am not going to tell,
except to say that RW Johnson provides
irrefutable evidence of the surveillance
advantages to the US which could be
obtained from a deliberate and provoca-
tive overflight of Sakhalin island. But then
to give credence to the whole story you
have to be able to accept that the United
States would, in collusion with its allies,
deliberately endanger the lives of 269
civilians to obtain a military advantage
And who, besides the most hardened
leftist, is going to accept that?
RW Johnson argues, again with meticu-
lous attention to the facts, that it seems
certain that us naval vessels found KAL
007's flight recorder in the sea off Sakha-
lin island, but that knowledge of this has
been suppressed. Mr Johnson has himself
been the victim of suppression. His book
has been virtually ignored by the media
Television and radio interviews have
been almost invariably cancelled at the last moment. And Magdalen college has
been told by establishment figures that Mr
Johnson is not fit to be a don there.
But then, as a certain John Stalker found out recently, it can be very danger-
ous to uncover the facts, especially when they point the finger at intelligence agenCIes. movements and has set itself the task of establishing an alliance between the labour movement and other 'progressive' forces. Both eurocommunist and eurosocialist variants exist and in Britain the major forum for this current has been New Revisionism. Ellen Meiksins Wood more narrowly focussed, attack on these 37
forces. Wood calls her opponents New True Socialists and echoes the polemics of Marx against those 'true' socialists who rejected class struggle in favour of universals such as Truth and the interests of Man in general.
Wood carries out a searching analysis of the work of writers such as Laclau, Poulantzas, Mouffe, Hirst, Hindess, Kitching and Stedman Jones. She argues that these new 'true socialists (or revisionists),
Cof obvious differences, have in common a series of similar beliefs. The working class has not produced a revolutionary movement. This flows trom the fact that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics in general. Economic interests cannot be simply translated into political terms. The working class has no necessary or priviliged relationship to the attainment
Consequently the socialist movement is independent of class. The aims ot socialism are univesal human ones that transcend class and should be addressed to all people irrespective of their material class situations. The struggle for socialism is seen as the linking together of democratic struggles against various oppressions
inequalities. Socialism is radical democracy and can be extension of liberal democracy
This bald summary does violence to the detailed care with which Wood dissects the ideas of the various writers under scrutiny. In doing so she makes clear the theoretical basis that underpins the rightist political practice of new revisionists Take, for example, the attitude to a strike No socialist automatically endorses strike. When some dockers struck in support of Powell and immigration controls, socialists opposed the strike. But let us suppose a factory goes on strike for more money. We support it. Life is not as easy for a consistent new revisionist. The strike should not be supported if it were
merely a simple sectoral economist reaction of the working class. If, however, it fell within a popular democratic framework and was therefore relevant to the needs of people, then it would be
legitimate for a socialist to support this
particular strike. Obviously a properly
and independently held secret ballot
before the strike would be a useful
precuution if the workers concerned had
serious aspirations to win the support of
the editor of Marxism Today.
Most of the new revisionists believe in
the 'non-correspondence' principle. This
argues that material interests do not exist
independently but are _constituted by
ideology and politics. The process of
constitution has to involve the theoretical
'discourse of intellectuals. For something
to meaningfully 'be' political the new 3 8 revisionists have to theoretically propose
that it is. Wood makes the point about the mind boggling elitism of this theory. It has all the arrogant vanguardism of Lenin's theory of the party according to Beatrix Campbell. If non correspondenci: is cuiried to its logical conclusion, it incans that
class has a privileged interest in
All people have interest and so perhaps there may be no need for class conflict.
Some of the new revisionists lake this even further. The manual working class is so much under the constraints of econo mic necessity that it does not have either the leisure or the economic well-being of the progressive middle class that allons these layers to contemplute the general good of all society and to be periodically seized by attacks of altruism. These deficiencies of the working class mean that it has to have an alliance with the professional classes if it is to be rescued from narrow economist selfishness. Stedman-Jones insists that this alliance has to transcend the material interests of class and aspire to the distribution of non material goods such as knowledye, greater democratic control, a more healthy environment and a better quality of life
This is a very nice idea of socialism and should appeal to all truly nice people. On the assumptions that there are larger numbers of nice than nasty people, then it should be possible to assemble an electoral coalition that will sweep into power if, svernment brised , socialists can get away from class based narrowness. Kitching explains: 'To be a socialist is not to support the working-class's economic literests against those of the capitalist cluss. It is to believe in a particular conception of the general interest through abolishing classes themselves'.
It is a paradox that the new revisionists admire the Thatcherite 'ideology' and its populist overtones without relating it to its class-based Thatcherites are not squeamish about their references to class. Peregrine Worsthorne made the point: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious.
Wood makes a series of very valuable points about this new revisionist current. She highlights how many of the writers had a Maoist background and reminds us of the democratic deficiencies of both yesterday's red guards, playing sheep
dog to the masses, and of today's self
appointed field-marshalls of the electoral
alliance of all progressive peoples.
Wood also makes a very sharp analysis
of the evolution of this trend. Obviously
the defeats imposed on the working-class
in the immediate past have induced a
despair and a failure of nerve amongst
some of the left.
Wood, however, argues that new re
visionism is not solely a response to the New Right but is also a reaction to the same causes as those which produced the New Right. The miners' strikes of 72 and 74, the 79 'Winter of Discontent and the strike of 84-85 all pushed new revisionism further to the right and increased its insistence that the working class was not the agent of socialist change. Wood comments acidly, . 'The militancy eagerly awaited in theory becomes far less agreeable in practice! Certainly the response to the 84-5 strike by some of this current was half-way between Cassandra and carrion crow and strengthened their peverse judgement that class politics had come to its end
Wood has written a thoroughly useful book. This review can only hint at the rigour with which she has covered the books of the new revisionists. But I do have some criticisms. It is not sufficient to logically extrapolate the ideas of the new revisionists and show them to be absurd without also attempting to grapple with the real problems to which these false solutions have been given. Wood correctly hammers the new revisionists for demoting the working class to playing a bit part in the great alliance. She correctly refuses to go along with the 'workerism' that shrinks the working class to a rump of industrial manual workers who produce surplus value and are a small minority of society. But it is also necessary to carry out a concrete analysis of the changes that are occurring within the working class, to disentangle which are features of the current economic crisis and which are of long term structural change, and to realise that on a world scale the size of the working class is vastly increasing. The history of capitalism has also been one of perpetual change in the structure of the working class which produces necessary changes in a socialist intervention.
Not to engage in some of these problems actually gives credence to the new revisionists. Similarly not only do the new social movements have to be recognised as a part of the working class, but also it must be recognised that the integration of the whole of the working class requires a political fight against racism, sexism and other types of oppression. Wood allows
some awkward passages that appear to subsume new social forces as part of the health food movement.
The book focusses narrowly just on those writers that Wood sees as being thorough and complete practitioners of 'true socialism. This means that, unlike
Miliband, she does not deal with Hall,
Hobsbawm, Campbell etc. I can understand the necessity to take on the best coherent ideologists of this trend and to
draw out all the implications of their
theories. But there is also a problem if too
much time is taken on such household
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