Socialism in Crisis?
Socialist Outlook1990sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Today there is an almost unprecedented crisis of socialist conviction - in Britain and in much of the world. The roots of this crisis are not hard to find. The collapse of the state 'socialism' in Eastern Europe, the crisis in the USSR and the events in China have created immense doubts about whether nationally-planned economies can ever be efficient or democratic. As a result, pro-capitalist ideologists have had a field day proclaiming that socialism is in retreat everywhere and that Marxism is 'dead'. The political move to the right in many Western countries has created doubts about the possibility of ever getting popular support for socialism. This is particularly true in Britain, where a decade of Thatcherism has shifted the whole political spectrum to the right: numerous former socialists seem prepared to accept Kinnock's sub-Thatcherite policies as the best that can be achieved. The feeling that our enemies are on the offensive and we are on the retreat has been compounded by the moves towards restoring capitalism in Eastern Europe. Even for the majority of the left who did not regard the Eastern bloc as 'socialist', it was seen as an obstacle to the West and imperialism, capable of aiding revolutions in the third world at least. Now that obstacle seems to be collapsing towards a final triumph of the West' - a perception reinforced by the spasm of frenzied imperialist militarism in the Gulf. This sea change in international and domestic politics has in part created, and in part combined with, a growing feeling among many socialists that our traditional theories and programmes do not have the answers to many urgent problems - the ecological crisis is just one example.
In this pamphlet we argue that an adequate socialist response to
the current crisis has to be based on two things. First, a refusal to be thrown into despair and to give up on socialism. Second, a determination to think through the questions posed by the new world situation, and to engage in a collective effort to update and renovate our theories and practical political responses. If socialism is confronted with major new difficulties, then the answer is most certainly not to collapse into a pro-capitalist stance. Whatever its contemporary successes, international capitalism shows no signs of being able to solve even the most basic needs of the hundreds of millions of desperately poor and exploited people in the world. Whatever is the answer, capitalism is not. On the other hand, knowing capitalism remains the viciously exploitative and predatory system it always was will not give us answers about the character of the world crisis. Socialism, to be a viable goal and a guide to action which can inspire millions of working people, always has to change and adapt. The great socialist thinkers - starting with Marx himself, indeed - were not great because they repeated by rote the received wisdom of generations of socialists. They were great because they innovated, because they thought through new problems and gave new answers, because they provided a socialist vision for their times.
Rethinking socialism is not in itself 'revisionism'. On the other hand updating socialist theory is not the same as jumping on the bandwagons of fashionable right-wing intellectual fads - 'post modernism, post-marxism, post-fordism' and the like. Respect for the basic materialist values of evidence and facts has to be our starting point. Those who throw away the Marxist baby with the Stalinist bathwater will soon enough end up either demoralised or defenders of the status quo.