Towards a New Socialism: New preface, 3rd draft

This book was written during the late 1980s and first published in English in 1993 under the title Towards a New Socialism. It is marked by the conjuncture in which it was written, the Gorbachev period. The Soviet system still existed but was clearly in crisis. Reforms introduced by advocates of market socialism were already begining to disrupt the economy and giving political encouragement to social groups who wanted a complete restoration of capitalism. In Britain, the extreme right-wing Thatcher government was in power. For a decade her government had been systematically destroying the social gains made by the working class under previous social-democratic governments. Stateowned industry was being privatized, repressive legislation was introduced against trades unions and the poor were being deprived of their right to vote by the Poll Tax. Thatcher’s program for rolling back socialism and entrenching the power of the rich was justified by the school of economic thought subsequently labelled neo-liberalism. Its leading theorists, people like Hayek and Friedman, advocated unrestrained free markets, minimal social welfare, and an economic role for the state that was reduced to the control of inflation. The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile had given the neo-liberals their first chance to put their ideas into practice; Thatcher’s regime was their second experiment. Their next economic triumph was to be Yeltsin’s Russia. A century ago, pressing for the establishment of the Russian communist party, Lenin wrote that “without revolutionary theory there could be no revolutionary movement”. We can generalize this to say that without adequate theoretical understanding no social group can constitute itself as a class in the political sense. One and a half centuries ago, on the foundation of the German communist party Marx wrote that “the immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class”. The formation of the Russian and German workers into classes was linked to the propagation of the revolutionary interpretation of political economy in Marx’s Capital. The social democratic parties that grew to strength in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had Capital as their bible. It was not, of course, read by every member, but through the mediation of party intellectuals its outlook shaped the social democratic press and the speeches of socialist politicians. Socialist educators, such as John Maclean in Glasgow, taught Marxist economics to workers in Labour Colleges.