The future of post-socialism

The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens’ s Beyond Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David Miliband’s collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the […]

Clause 4

COMMENTARY Clause 4 Ted Benton , C o m e on lads – we all prefer nice things to nasty’: this desperate moral appeal, delivered above the chaotic mania of classroom rebellion, was the habitual resort of an old schoolmaster of mine. For those of us close enough to hear, it evoked peals of derisive […]

Ecologism and the Relegitimation of Socialism

Ecologism and the Relegitimation of Socialism Andrew Dobson Ever since 1974 – at least – and the publication of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, I the relationship between socialism and ecologism has been a source of contention. Sometimes this relationship has been one of outright hostility as the differences between the analyses […]

Value, Rationality and the Environment

Val ue, Rationality and the Environment Andrew Collier Today most people on the Left are aware that ecological damage, and the threat of ecological disaster, are among the foremost contradictions of capitalism, second only to the impoverishment of the Third World. In addition to ecology in the strict sense, the damage done to the material […]

The Meaning of Political Ecology

The Meaning of Political Ecology Tim Hayward ‘Political ecology’ is an expression which has become quite familiar in recent years, but does not appear to have acquired a clear and settled meaning. * Evidently it is used to point up some kind of connection between politics, or the political, and ecology, yet the project of […]

Looking for the Good Life

COMMENTARY Looking for the Good Life Bob Brecher It is almost impossible these days to stumble across anything like a vision of the good society lurking even in the background of a left position. From the intellectual void that is the Labour Party, to the labyrinthine morass of postmodern and postfeminist postponements that constitutes the […]

62 Editorial

EDITORIAL ~ /’~~ Socialism has typically presented itself as a project of human emancipation, based on a moral vision of the future, and on a critical diagnosis of the present – informed both by that vision of human possibilities, and by a theoretical grasp of what stands in the way of their realisation. It has […]

Ecology and Human Emancipation

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of necessity to one of freedom are rendered radically problematic from an ecological perspective. i As […]

István Mészéros: Marxism Today

Marxism Today An Interview with Istvan Meszaros /stwin Meszaros left Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He recently retiredfrom a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He established his reputation in the English-speaking world with his widely translated Marx’s Theory ofAlienation (1970), which was awarded the / saac Deutscher Memorial Prize. His […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

50 Reviews

REVIEWS I I I ~~~~~~t L———_ _ _ ~ ___ J THE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM DEBATE S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, 314pp., £29.95 hb. Derek Sayer, The Violence ofAbstraction: the Analytic F oundationsofHistoricaIMaterialism,Oxford,Blackwell, 1987,xiiiand 173pp., £22.50 hb. Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social […]

More on Market Socialism; A Level Philosophy: A Reply to Roche

Comment Soris Frankel More on Market Socia.lism I In Radical Philosophy 39 Alec Nove rejected my argument concerning the historical obsolescence of market soclallsm. Nove particularly emphasised that my lack of an alternative model was no substitute for his own ‘feasible soclallsm’ model. While I plead guilty to lacking an elaborate blueprint of the future […]

French Socialism and Philosophy Since May 1981

NEWS French Socialism and Philosophy Since May 1981 Has the new French Socialist Government made any moves to alter the position of philosophy in French education where (in spite of a diminution of the proportion of philosophy in the syllabus in the mid-seventies) philosophy still retains a role in school education not entirely unlike that […]

Preface to Rancière’s ‘Proletarian Nights’

Preface to ‘Proletarian Nights’ The article printed below is a translation of the Introduction (pp.7-l2) of Jacques Ranci~re’s La Nuit des Proletaires, which was published last year [1]. The book deals with some well known events of the l830s and l840s – the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Enfantin; the ‘Free Women’; the socialist […]

Statistical Democracy: An Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism

Statistical Democracy: an Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism John Burnheim 1 The Problem The central failure of socialist thinking in this century is its failure to produce a plausibly realistic and attractive conception of how a socialist society might operate. The two major contenders for the allegiance of socialist theorists are either unattractive or […]