Intended by its editors to be ‘the first of a series of annual volumes of socialist analysis and discussion’, The Socialist Register 1964footnote1 is an event in socialist publishing in Britain of great importance. Not only are certain articles likely to stand as permanent contributions to the development of socialist thought, but a good proportion of the more ephemeral articles are only more ephemeral inasmuch as they are more axed to the situation we find ourselves in now: some of them pose problems of the utmost urgency to us in Britain today. Particularly encouraging is the editorial conception of the range of phenomena with which British socialists should be concerned—as is the manner in which these subjects are treated. Only a minority of articles are devoted exclusively to British affairs: and the internationalism of the volume stretches to the point at which Egyptian and Chinese experience is considered as well as that of Latin America and—a bit nearer home—West Germany and Italy. Not only is the geographical range more extended than one might expect, but also its theoretical bent. With only a few exceptions, the articles deal with their empirical material—nationalization in Britain, Italian Communism, and so forth—in a theoretically enlightening way. This apart, of course, from the explicitly theoretical articles of Hamza Alavi on ‘Imperialism Old and New’ and Ernest Mandel on ‘The Economics of Neo-Capitalism’ whose theorizing is both clear and related to the empirical material with which it is concerned—unlike the verbosity of the article on Marxist ethics.

The task of singling out particular articles from a selection is, of course, difficult. Isaac Deutscher’s analysis of the origins, background and outlook of Maoism comes first in the volume and is, as might be expected, the most original and illuminating, comparing and relating the course of the Chinese Revolution with that of the Russian Revolution, noting in particular the reasons for its relative lack of internal repression and Stalinization and in general discussing the implications for Marxist theory of a Communist Party in an overwhelmingly rural society. This is, undoubtedly, a major essay.

Abdel-Malek’s article on ‘Nasserism and Socialism’ is an attempt to evaluate the Egyptian régime, in which the puzzling and theoretically odd characteristics of Nasser’s regime are given full—some would say too much—weight. Taking into account the ‘third revolution’ of 1963 —after the first two stages of the régime between 1952–55, and 1956–61—it attempts to discuss the significance of this ‘socialism without socialists’, in which the strategic sectors of the economy are in the hands of the Establishment which runs the State but in which the Marxist Left has been subject to ever-increasing repression—despite its critical support of the régime. Although it leaves the issue perhaps too open—to talk of a ‘highly concentrated technocratic Establishment (which) sits astride the bureaucratic pyramid’ or of ‘an advanced, independent autocratic State-capitalistic planned economy’ is, properly speaking, to begin the discussion rather than to end it—we can at least be grateful to Abdel-Malek for raising it undogmatically. We await an English translation of his book on Egypt with interest.