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A review by caris96
The Retreat from Class: A New 'true' Socialsim by Ellen Meiksins Wood
5.0
“Have the divisions among workers really been more remarkable than their many common struggles?”
Among other adjacent issues, this is the central question Ellen Wood addresses throughout this work. The late author was arguably one of the foremost proponents of Marxist orthodoxy in contemporary socialist theory. Or, to be more specific, she has defended the centrality of the working class and dialectical materialism in socialist projects amidst liberal theoretical divergences in the last fifty years.
In this book, Wood writes at the height of Thatcherism in the UK, during miners’ strikes, and just before the fall of the Soviet Union; these of course presented socialist theorists at the time with challenges to Marxism from a neoliberalizing West. Most notably, this marked the historical emergence of a strain of academic leftism that Wood ironically calls the “New ‘True’ Socialism” (in reference to its proponents). She advances some scathing criticisms of these new socialists — Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Raymond Williams — and it was by chance that I’ve read many of them already. Because of its dense writing and winding strung-together sentences, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with some of these thinkers, as well as Marx, in advance.
***
Wood begins by outlining the logical progression of New ‘True’ Socialism:
“1) The working class has not, as Marx expected, produced a revolutionary movement. That is, its economic situation has not given rise to what was thought to be an appropriate corresponding political force.
2) This reflects the fact that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics in general. Any relation between class and politics is contingent. In other words, ideology and politics are autonomous from economic (class) relations; and there are no such things as ‘economic’ class interests that can be translated a posteriori into political terms. [Wood later identifies this as the non-correspondence principle].
3) More particularly, these propositions mean that there is no necessary or privileged relation between the working class and socialism, and indeed that the working class has no ‘fundamental interest’ in socialism.
4) Therefore, the formation of a socialist movement is in principle independent of class, and a socialist politics can be constructed that is more or less autonomous from economic (class) conditions. This means two things in particular:
5) A political force can be constituted and organized on the ideological and political planes, constructed out of various ‘popular’ elements which can be bound together and motivated by purely ideological and political means, irrespective of the class connections or oppositions among them.
6) The appropriate objectives of socialism are universal human goals which transcend class, rather than narrow material goals defined in terms of class interests. These objectives can be addressed, on the autonomous ideological and political planes, to various kinds of people, irrespective of their material class situations.
7) In particular, the struggle for socialism can be conceived as a plurality of ‘democratic’ struggles, bringing together a variety of resistances to many forms of inequality and oppression. In fact, it may even be possible to replace the concept of socialism with the notion of ‘radical democracy’. Socialism is a more or less natural extension of liberal democracy; or at any rate ‘democracy’ as it exists, albeit in a limited form, in advanced capitalist societies is in principle ‘indeterminate’ and capable of extension to socialist democracy.
8) Some types of people are more susceptible than others to the universalist and rational discourse of socialism, more capable of commitment to universal human goals as distinct from narrow material – or what Bentham used to call ‘sinister’ – interests; and these form the natural constituency of the socialist movement.”
***
What much of NTS rests on is the non-correspondence principle: “the emancipatory impulses of socialism do not arise out of the interests of the working class as ‘agents constituted at the level of relations of production’; instead, that impulse is created by liberal-democratic discourse which ‘constructs’ various relations of subordination as oppressive. This means, among other things, that workers are capable of generating emancipatory struggles – and, indeed of perceiving their own subordination as oppressive – only insofar as they are instructed by liberal-democratic discourse, or, to put it another way, by bourgeois ideology” (pp. 126). In other words, economic or social conditions do not mechanically produce specific corresponding political forces—these forces are instead produced by discourse and ideology. Wood sets out, over conversations with the theorists mentioned above, to test the NCP against historical cases.
One of the problems with the NCP, Wood argues, is that the capitalist state is waging a war based exactly on what the NCP denies: the centrality of class politics (i.e. capital versus labour), which was no more explicit than in the platform of Thatcherism. The NTS rejects “the working class as the agent of social change” (pp. 32), all the while its oppressors admit that the working class is just that—the working class “is the only class whose own class interests require, and whose own conditions make possible, the abolition of class itself” (pp. 35). How then would a populist movement that decentres class succeed in the construction of socialism? Why would classes whose interests depend on the maintenance of class seek to abolish it?
Interestingly, Wood identifies a certain compatibility between Maoism and Eurocommunism (NTS) in its use of the discourse of ‘the masses’. She asks a pertinent question: “What identity do the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ have? What would be the content of a revolution made by them ‘in their own name’?” And I think this is the very problem with populism—the identity they have is that assigned to them by its self-designated vanguard.
Paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe, Wood explains this populist movement thus: “some external agency, somehow uniquely and autonomously capable of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own inner resources, will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a collective identity and creating a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ where none existed before. […] So a democratic impulse and a plurality of ‘democratic struggles’ replace material interests and class struggle as the moving force of history, while socialist demands are merely ‘a moment internal to the democratic revolution’” (pp. 116–117).
Poulantzas argued similarly, that white-collar workers are more likely to accept capitalist ideology than blue-collar workers, and consequently, this poses an obstacle for developing class consciousness and solidarity. Wood acknowledges that this is an important consideration for socialist strategy, but it in no way constitutes the “decisive class boundary” that Poulantzas rests his democratic socialism upon. I would also add that here is where Althusser’s discussion on ideological state apparatuses is critical. It accounts for the different inclinations of subsets of the working class, granting that ideology and discourse are indeed crucial for revolutionary forces, but they do not displace the centrality of class—the working class—in the construction of socialism.
But Wood isn’t only capable of deconstructing the problems with NTS and its divergences from Marxism. She also leaves us with plenty to consider moving forward for the realization of socialism and effective strategy. First:
“If liberal democracy is at the core of capitalist class hegemony, it is presumably the task of socialist political theory to approach liberal-democratic theory ‘counter-hegemonically’. How the counter-hegemonic project is conceived, however, very much depends on what one means by ‘hegemony’” (pp. 257).
And more importantly:
“The very heart of socialism will be a mode of democratic organization that has never existed before – direct self-government by freely associated producers in commonly owned workplaces producing the means of material life” (pp. 280).
This vision is one that liberal democracy ignores—indeed, denies, because it needs to in order to maintain capitalism. The construction of socialism also requires a patience and a pragmatism that proponents of NTS refuse to cede: “the very people who decry what they take to be demands for instant socialism, and who envisage the transition in the most gradualist terms, also seem to dismiss as inconsequential any working-class challenge to capitalism that does not issue in the immediate establishment of socialism” (pp. 313).
There are a number of other criticisms of NTS, however, regarding not only its foundations and rejections of dialectical materialism, but with its goals as well, which Wood claims are both misinterpretations of the goals of Marxism, and also unsatisfactory goals in themselves: the NTS “depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society’ and argue that the freedom and equality characteristic of that society have simply been perverted by money, capital, etc. For Marx, the unfreedom and inequality of capitalist relations are, of course, not perversions but realizations of the form of freedom and equality implied by simpler forms of commodity exchange” (pp. 251).
Another problem is the class-neutrality of capitalism under liberal democracy, via its separation of producers from the means of production, which is also what makes capitalist exploitation so effective. Capitalist hegemony relies on maintaining two separate spheres of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, “which makes possible the maximum development of purely juridical and political freedom and equality without fundamentally endangering economic exploitation” (pp. 256).
And finally, NTS mistakes the means for the end; the object of class struggle is not to seize power, but to abolish class. And the seizure of power is only a necessary step in the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is an instrument and not the object.
One of the most entertaining things about Wood’s writing, however, is that she honours not only the rigour but the sarcastic humour of Marx in her criticism of her opponents: “Surely something is amiss when the Sunday Times is obliged to teach Marxists about class struggle and the nature of revolutionary forces.” Or, my personal favourite: “And so here we have it: In the beginning (and the end) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the ultimate Subject made incarnate in … Laclau and Mouffe?” When a text can be this dense and academic, I’m extra impressed when it can make me laugh my ass off.
This work is an excellent polemic against the shift from Marxism and communism in general among the Left. Whether due to the imperfections of past socialist projects, or the perceived unattainable utopianism of socialism in the present or future, the tendency for Leftists to cede ground to liberal democracy is a significant problem for socialist strategy. In my view, and that of Wood, we ought not shy away from proudly carrying the communist flag (so to speak). And Marxism—with the centrality of working class solidarity—simply offers us the path from the present to that future.
Among other adjacent issues, this is the central question Ellen Wood addresses throughout this work. The late author was arguably one of the foremost proponents of Marxist orthodoxy in contemporary socialist theory. Or, to be more specific, she has defended the centrality of the working class and dialectical materialism in socialist projects amidst liberal theoretical divergences in the last fifty years.
In this book, Wood writes at the height of Thatcherism in the UK, during miners’ strikes, and just before the fall of the Soviet Union; these of course presented socialist theorists at the time with challenges to Marxism from a neoliberalizing West. Most notably, this marked the historical emergence of a strain of academic leftism that Wood ironically calls the “New ‘True’ Socialism” (in reference to its proponents). She advances some scathing criticisms of these new socialists — Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Raymond Williams — and it was by chance that I’ve read many of them already. Because of its dense writing and winding strung-together sentences, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with some of these thinkers, as well as Marx, in advance.
***
Wood begins by outlining the logical progression of New ‘True’ Socialism:
“1) The working class has not, as Marx expected, produced a revolutionary movement. That is, its economic situation has not given rise to what was thought to be an appropriate corresponding political force.
2) This reflects the fact that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics in general. Any relation between class and politics is contingent. In other words, ideology and politics are autonomous from economic (class) relations; and there are no such things as ‘economic’ class interests that can be translated a posteriori into political terms. [Wood later identifies this as the non-correspondence principle].
3) More particularly, these propositions mean that there is no necessary or privileged relation between the working class and socialism, and indeed that the working class has no ‘fundamental interest’ in socialism.
4) Therefore, the formation of a socialist movement is in principle independent of class, and a socialist politics can be constructed that is more or less autonomous from economic (class) conditions. This means two things in particular:
5) A political force can be constituted and organized on the ideological and political planes, constructed out of various ‘popular’ elements which can be bound together and motivated by purely ideological and political means, irrespective of the class connections or oppositions among them.
6) The appropriate objectives of socialism are universal human goals which transcend class, rather than narrow material goals defined in terms of class interests. These objectives can be addressed, on the autonomous ideological and political planes, to various kinds of people, irrespective of their material class situations.
7) In particular, the struggle for socialism can be conceived as a plurality of ‘democratic’ struggles, bringing together a variety of resistances to many forms of inequality and oppression. In fact, it may even be possible to replace the concept of socialism with the notion of ‘radical democracy’. Socialism is a more or less natural extension of liberal democracy; or at any rate ‘democracy’ as it exists, albeit in a limited form, in advanced capitalist societies is in principle ‘indeterminate’ and capable of extension to socialist democracy.
8) Some types of people are more susceptible than others to the universalist and rational discourse of socialism, more capable of commitment to universal human goals as distinct from narrow material – or what Bentham used to call ‘sinister’ – interests; and these form the natural constituency of the socialist movement.”
***
What much of NTS rests on is the non-correspondence principle: “the emancipatory impulses of socialism do not arise out of the interests of the working class as ‘agents constituted at the level of relations of production’; instead, that impulse is created by liberal-democratic discourse which ‘constructs’ various relations of subordination as oppressive. This means, among other things, that workers are capable of generating emancipatory struggles – and, indeed of perceiving their own subordination as oppressive – only insofar as they are instructed by liberal-democratic discourse, or, to put it another way, by bourgeois ideology” (pp. 126). In other words, economic or social conditions do not mechanically produce specific corresponding political forces—these forces are instead produced by discourse and ideology. Wood sets out, over conversations with the theorists mentioned above, to test the NCP against historical cases.
One of the problems with the NCP, Wood argues, is that the capitalist state is waging a war based exactly on what the NCP denies: the centrality of class politics (i.e. capital versus labour), which was no more explicit than in the platform of Thatcherism. The NTS rejects “the working class as the agent of social change” (pp. 32), all the while its oppressors admit that the working class is just that—the working class “is the only class whose own class interests require, and whose own conditions make possible, the abolition of class itself” (pp. 35). How then would a populist movement that decentres class succeed in the construction of socialism? Why would classes whose interests depend on the maintenance of class seek to abolish it?
Interestingly, Wood identifies a certain compatibility between Maoism and Eurocommunism (NTS) in its use of the discourse of ‘the masses’. She asks a pertinent question: “What identity do the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ have? What would be the content of a revolution made by them ‘in their own name’?” And I think this is the very problem with populism—the identity they have is that assigned to them by its self-designated vanguard.
Paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe, Wood explains this populist movement thus: “some external agency, somehow uniquely and autonomously capable of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own inner resources, will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a collective identity and creating a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ where none existed before. […] So a democratic impulse and a plurality of ‘democratic struggles’ replace material interests and class struggle as the moving force of history, while socialist demands are merely ‘a moment internal to the democratic revolution’” (pp. 116–117).
Poulantzas argued similarly, that white-collar workers are more likely to accept capitalist ideology than blue-collar workers, and consequently, this poses an obstacle for developing class consciousness and solidarity. Wood acknowledges that this is an important consideration for socialist strategy, but it in no way constitutes the “decisive class boundary” that Poulantzas rests his democratic socialism upon. I would also add that here is where Althusser’s discussion on ideological state apparatuses is critical. It accounts for the different inclinations of subsets of the working class, granting that ideology and discourse are indeed crucial for revolutionary forces, but they do not displace the centrality of class—the working class—in the construction of socialism.
But Wood isn’t only capable of deconstructing the problems with NTS and its divergences from Marxism. She also leaves us with plenty to consider moving forward for the realization of socialism and effective strategy. First:
“If liberal democracy is at the core of capitalist class hegemony, it is presumably the task of socialist political theory to approach liberal-democratic theory ‘counter-hegemonically’. How the counter-hegemonic project is conceived, however, very much depends on what one means by ‘hegemony’” (pp. 257).
And more importantly:
“The very heart of socialism will be a mode of democratic organization that has never existed before – direct self-government by freely associated producers in commonly owned workplaces producing the means of material life” (pp. 280).
This vision is one that liberal democracy ignores—indeed, denies, because it needs to in order to maintain capitalism. The construction of socialism also requires a patience and a pragmatism that proponents of NTS refuse to cede: “the very people who decry what they take to be demands for instant socialism, and who envisage the transition in the most gradualist terms, also seem to dismiss as inconsequential any working-class challenge to capitalism that does not issue in the immediate establishment of socialism” (pp. 313).
There are a number of other criticisms of NTS, however, regarding not only its foundations and rejections of dialectical materialism, but with its goals as well, which Wood claims are both misinterpretations of the goals of Marxism, and also unsatisfactory goals in themselves: the NTS “depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society’ and argue that the freedom and equality characteristic of that society have simply been perverted by money, capital, etc. For Marx, the unfreedom and inequality of capitalist relations are, of course, not perversions but realizations of the form of freedom and equality implied by simpler forms of commodity exchange” (pp. 251).
Another problem is the class-neutrality of capitalism under liberal democracy, via its separation of producers from the means of production, which is also what makes capitalist exploitation so effective. Capitalist hegemony relies on maintaining two separate spheres of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, “which makes possible the maximum development of purely juridical and political freedom and equality without fundamentally endangering economic exploitation” (pp. 256).
And finally, NTS mistakes the means for the end; the object of class struggle is not to seize power, but to abolish class. And the seizure of power is only a necessary step in the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is an instrument and not the object.
One of the most entertaining things about Wood’s writing, however, is that she honours not only the rigour but the sarcastic humour of Marx in her criticism of her opponents: “Surely something is amiss when the Sunday Times is obliged to teach Marxists about class struggle and the nature of revolutionary forces.” Or, my personal favourite: “And so here we have it: In the beginning (and the end) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the ultimate Subject made incarnate in … Laclau and Mouffe?” When a text can be this dense and academic, I’m extra impressed when it can make me laugh my ass off.
This work is an excellent polemic against the shift from Marxism and communism in general among the Left. Whether due to the imperfections of past socialist projects, or the perceived unattainable utopianism of socialism in the present or future, the tendency for Leftists to cede ground to liberal democracy is a significant problem for socialist strategy. In my view, and that of Wood, we ought not shy away from proudly carrying the communist flag (so to speak). And Marxism—with the centrality of working class solidarity—simply offers us the path from the present to that future.