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Farewell to Thatcherism? Neo-Liberalism and 'New Times'
“There can be no doubt that the Thatcher government over the last year or so has encountered a crisis of public confidence: some even believe the end of Thatcherism is nigh. Signs of impending doom were already discerned in June 1989 when the Conservative party suffered its first . . .” read more
Marxist Century, American Century: The Making and Remaking of the World Labour Movement
“In the closing paragraphs of the first section of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels advance two distinct arguments why the rule of the bourgeoisie will come to an end. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie ‘is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to . . .” read more
The Importance of Being Marxist
“I hope that the almost Wildean title of my lecture is not misleading. I intend to be totally serious. If there is a place for irony in today’s talk, then it is as one of those ‘ironies of history’ about which Isaac Deutscher wrote so prophetically. I have . . .” read more
Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?
“Some time ago, in the pages of the New Left Review, a claim was made on behalf of ‘rational-choice Marxism’ as ‘a fully fledged paradigm, which deserves to take its place beside the two other constellations of theory currently discernible within the broad spectrum ofprogressive social thought—namely, post-structuralism . . .” read more
The Upturned Utopia
“The catastrophe of historical communism stands literally before everyone’s eyes—the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born of the Russian Revolution, promising emancipation of the poor and oppressed, the ‘wretched of the earth’. The process of decomposition is continually speeding up, beyond anything predicted. This does not . . .” read more
'The Poetry of the Past': Marx and the French Revolution
“Like so many German intellectuals of his generation, Marx was literally fascinated by the French Revolution: in his eyes it was quite simply the Revolution par excellence or, more precisely, ‘the most colossal revolution that history has ever known’. We know that in 1844 he was intending to . . .” read more
Hillsborough, 15 April 1989: Some Personal Contemplations
“When news of the Hillsborough disaster began to reach me, I was still living in Ottawa, Canada—only two weeks before returning to take up an academic position in England. A phone call from a Canadian relative giving the bare outline of the events was followed by ever more . . .” read more
Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes
“The massacre in Tiananmen Square last June is unlikely to be the last violent expression of the deep and multiple crises—economic, social, political, ethnic, ideological, moral—which grip many Communist regimes, and which will in due course most probably grip them all. A vast ‘mutation’ is going on throughout . . .” read more
Gramsci and Marxism in Britain
“Outside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep or diversified an influence. Some of this has been channelled through the academic disciplines of history, political science and cultural studies, but much of it has worked directly upon the theory and practice of . . .” read more
The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?
“Any discussion of the character of an ‘exceptional’ state must presumably begin with a notion of what categorizes a state as ‘normal’. My own starting assumption is to accept Max Weber’s concept of the state: ‘an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation . . . . . .” read more
Beyond 1992: The Left and Europe
“The wave of publicity in preparation for the broad internal market of 1992 has struck a powerful chord throughout Western Europe, including in a traditionally introverted country such as Britain where opinion polls suggest that large sections of the population are considerably more enthusiastic than their government about . . .” read more
Taking Monarchism Seriously
“The institution of monarchy presents one of the most glaring paradoxes of British society and British history. It is a monarchy unique in the developed capitalist world in remaining unmodernized, undemocratized and utterly mystified. Elsewhere, in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the institution survives as a kind of hereditary . . .” read more
Meditations on a Theme by Tom Nairn
“In China an immemorial throne crumbled in 1911; India put its Rajas and Nawabs in the wastepaper-basket as soon as it gained independence in 1947; in Ethiopia the Lion of Judah has lately ceased to roar. Monarchy survives in odd corners of Asia; and in Japan and Britain. . . .” read more
Introduction to Hecht Interview
“Over the past quarter-century huge areas of Amazonian forest have been reduced to ashes. The conquest of the Amazon resembles more a scorched earth policy than development. The rate of deforestation has been close to exponential, and it has all been for nothing.” read more
Roberto Unger and the Politics of Empowerment
“The largest industrial power of the Southern hemisphere has recently completed one of the most protracted and divisive processes of constitution-making in modern history. The fruits of nineteen months of labour by the Constituent Assembly of Brazil have already aroused violent reactions. ‘Clauses on employment worthy of Cuba, . . .” read more
Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement?
“A hundred and twenty-five years after Lassalle, and a hundred years after the founding of the Second International, the socialist and labour parties are at a loss as to where they are going. Wherever socialists meet they ask one another gloomily about the future of our movements. I . . .” read more
The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio
“In early 1848, within a few weeks of each other, two antithetical texts were published in London, on the eve of European revolution. One was The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The other was Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill. The former famously . . .” read more
Ex-Marxism Without Substance: Being A Real Reply to Laclau and Mouffe
“There is a discursive strategy commonly adopted by politicians, particularly at election time, in the face of discomforting questions. It consists of appearing to respond to a questioner but without actually answering her question. The thing has the external form of an answer but is not one. Practically . . .” read more
Marxism or Post-Marxism?
“Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Norman Geras’s lengthy review article (‘Post-Marxism’, nlr 163) raise issues which are at the heart of the ongoing debate on the stature and prospects of contemporary Marxist theory. Laclau and Mouffe’s major thesis is that the core . . .” read more
Capitalism and Human Emancipation
“Let me say something, first, about Isaac Deutscher, not just in some ritual tribute for the occasion but because it seems appropriate to what I am going to say in my lecture and the spirit in which I intend to say it. I did not know Isaac Deutscher, . . .” read more
Post-Marxism Without Apologies
“Why should we rethink the socialist project today? In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy we pointed out some of the reasons. As participating actors in the history of our time, if we are actually to assume an interventionist role and not to do so blindly, we must attempt to . . .” read more
Popular Capitalism, Flexible Accumulation and Left Strategy
“Three years ago we presented an anatomy of Thatcherism, but today we are witnessing Mrs Thatcher’s vivisection of the Left. Her third successive general election victory has intensified the crisis in the labour movement and is likely to precipitate both a merger and a split in the Alliance. . . .” read more
Class Politics and Radical Democracy
“Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recent book, The Retreat From Class, is a formidable and trenchant attack upon the arguments of what she calls the New True Socialists. Marx applied the label ‘True Socialists’ to those he accused of having fallen victim to the illusion that socialism was ‘a question . . .” read more
Introduction to Borge
“The interview was conducted at the Comandante’s residence, over breakfast, with the help of an old friend, Ileana Rodriguez, and a new friend, Daniel Alegría, whose stories—instructively different from the life trajectories of North American intellectuals—I hope to tell in another place. It was not a particularly propitious . . .” read more
Tomas Borge on the Nicaraguan Revolution
“The questions I want to ask basically concern the originality of the Nicaraguan revolution, which is very different from the Cuban revolution but in ways that are not altogether clear. We know that you don’t use the word socialism but the word Sandinism, but we don’t know . . .” read more
A Reply to Ellen Meiksins Wood
“Ellen Meiksins Wood’s review of my book Rethinking Socialism, in her recently published Retreat from Class, and her synthetic remarks on my political views in the concluding chapter are sufficiently well constructed and argued to be plausible, especially to those who have not read my work. I am . . .” read more
Post-Marxism?
“Times change and people change. Their ideas change; develop, progress—and regress. There can be gradual change within a more or less stable intellectual framework. And there can also be sharper breaks, mutations of outlook in which one thing is renounced and another embraced. But each person has to . . .” read more
Marxism and Methodological Individualism
“It is often held that Marxism embodies distinctive methodological doctrines which distinguish it from ‘bourgeois’ social science. The difference has been characterized in various ways: Marxism is scientific and materialist, bourgeois theory ideological and idealist; Marxism is holistic, bourgeois theory is individualistic; Marxism is dialectical and historical, bourgeois . . .” read more
Restructuring the State
“This article contrasts two strategic options for the Labour Party and the Left in the approach to the next election in Britain. One, the option chosen by the Labour leadership, is to seek to recapture the votes lost to the Alliance parties since 1981 by occupying their political . . .” read more
The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two
“The primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history is one of the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism. In societies divided into different social classes, such relationships are perforce class relations. History is thus explained, in the final analysis, as a . . .” read more
Beyond the Boundary Question
“Class politics, once the unquestioned centre of the socialist project, has became the object of intense controversy. There have been many reasons for this startling development—the appearance of the so-called new social movements and the continued failure of traditional Left parties to effect fundamental social change are just . . .” read more
Thatcherism and the Politics of Hegemony: A Reply to Stuart Hall
“We are glad that Stuart Hall regards our article in nlr 147 as a significant contribution to contemporary debates on Thatcherism. In that article we examined his work on authoritarian populism (hereafter ‘AP’), sketched an alternative approach to Thatcherism in terms of its two-nations effects, and outlined . . .” read more
Crisis in British Communism: An Insider’s View
“The Communist Party of Great Britain is in the throes of a severe crisis. Political scissions and antagonisms between different tendencies, struggles for control of the Party machine and its publications, expulsions of leading militants, forced suspension of the work of major structures present a dramatic spectacle of . . .” read more
Strategic Aspects of Asia in the Global System
“Capitalism, born in Europe, utilized the continent of its birth as a launching pad to colonize the rest of the world. World economics in the shape of the global market paved the way for world politics. Expansionist capital created the conditions for wars and revolutions on an unprecedented . . .” read more
Introduction to a Speech in Tashkent
“The speech published below was delivered in Tashkent, ussr, during the last week of April 1985, at a conference on ‘Peace and Security in Asia’ jointly organized by the United Nations University in Tokyo and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Such events are not new, but the . . .” read more
The Greens at the Crossroads
“The West German political scene of the 1980s has been transformed by the emergence—for the first time since the foundation of the Federal Republic—of a socially radical force with a significant electoral following in the society at large. The Greens have changed the map of the traditional party . . .” read more
Revolution Against 'Progress': Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism
“Walter Benjamin’s style of thinking is unique and resists classification, but it can be better understood and explained if related to the cultural atmosphere of Mittel-Europa at the beginning of the century, and to certain religiouspolitical undercurrents among German-speaking Jewish intellectuals of this period. Neo-romanticism, as a moral . . .” read more
Historical Materialism, Answer to Marxism’s Crisis
“Has any period since Marx’s death been marked by weaker conviction among Marxists than our own? Doubts and doubters have been with us for as long as Marxism itself, but those of today no longer face a compelling politicaltheoretical field of force, dominated by an individual, movement, party, . . .” read more
Authoritarian Populism: A Reply
“In nlr 147 Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling contributed a long and important article ‘Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism’. This article took issue with ‘authoritarian populism’ (hereinafter, alas, ap) and the use of that concept in my work on Thatcherism; and proposed some wide-ranging alternative . . .” read more
Thatcherism and British Manufacturing
“In the broadest sense we are dealing with an old phenomenon. Carthage fell, Rome fell; now it is Britain’s turn. More narrowly it is a new phenomenon, the first instance of the threatened absolute decline of a fully capitalist social formation. The last phase of the internationalization of . . .” read more
Towards 2000, or News From You-Know-Where
“Calendars are never innocent, but in recent times they have become positively lurid. Even the soberest temporal reckoning is open to the suggestions of political numerology, which fascinates by its very lack of reason. The year now ended was for a generation the deadline for the most widely . . .” read more
The Miners' Strike in Easington
“In the summer of 1983 the newspapers were filled with the rumour that the new Chairman of the National Coal Board would be Mr Ian MacGregor. MacGregor had been head of the US mining company Amax which, after its strike-breaking activities at the Belle Ayr open cast mine . . .” read more
The British Women’s Movement
“A complete overview of British feminism would require a book rather than an essay. Within the context of a brief history of the movement we therefore aim in this article at an assessment of the developments within one section of the movement, socialist feminism, since the second half . . .” read more
Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations, and Thatcherism
“Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative . . .” read more
Marx and History
“We are here to discuss themes and problems of the Marxist conception of history a hundred years after the death of Marx. This is not a ritual of centenary celebration, but it is important to begin by reminding ourselves of the unique role of Marx in historiography. I . . .” read more
The Threat of War and the Struggle for Socialism
“Several times during the last three years the threat of a third world war seemed to loom large. Impressionist commentators did not hesitate to draw this conclusion. In fact a panic wave arose. The powerful and promising anti-war movement, which is growing today in the imperialist countries, was . . .” read more