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If Labour Wins . . .

Prognosis of the incoming Wilson administration. With Conservative defeat all but assured, a prescient assessment of the likelihood of a structural economic shift or foreign policy reconfiguration. The party’s historical tendencies and present balance of forces—what hope that it could answer the desire for change in the country at large?

The Plausibility of Socialism

“Socialism itself must be viewed as part of a democratic movement which long antedates it, but to which socialism alone can give its full meaning. The idea of democracy has been drastically narrowed in scope and substance in capitalist societies so as to reduce the threat it posed . . .” read more

Harold Laski: An Exemplary Public Intellectual

“Before proceeding with this review, I should, as they say, declare an interest. I came to know Harold Laski as a student at the London School of Economics (then evacuated in Cambridge) between 1941 and 1943; and I was fairly close to him after I came back to . . .” read more

Fukuyama and the Socialist Alternative

“Since Francis Fukuyama’s essay takes up some key themes from his book The End of History and the Last Man, I think it would be useful for the purposes of this symposium if I were to focus part of my comments on that work itself. The core of . . .” 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

The New Revisionism in Britain

“Since the late seventies, and particularly since the arrival in office of the Thatcher government in May 1979, a vast amount of writing has been produced on the left to account for the troubles which have beset the Labour Party and the labour movement as a whole. The . . .” read more

State Power and Class Interests

“Work done in the last fifteen years or so by people writing within a broad Marxist perspective on the subject of the state in capitalist society now fills a great many bookshelves; and however critical one may be of one or other article, book or trend, it is . . .” read more

Bettelheim and Soviet Experience

“In the preface to Les Luttes de Classes en URSS 1917–1923, Charles Bettelheim notes that he has been studying the ussr for some forty years; and that until some time after the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, he saw no reason, as he puts it, why the . . .” read more

Poulantzas and the Capitalist State

“One or two preliminary remarks about this review-article may be in order. In New Left Review 58 (November-December 1969), Nicos Poulantzas wrote a very stimulating and generous review of my book The State in Capitalist Society; and in the following issue of nlr, I took up some . . .” read more

The Capitalist State--Reply to N. Poulantzas

“I very much welcome Nicos Poulantzas’s critique of The State in Capitalist Society in the last issue of NLR: this is exactly the kind of discussion which is most likely to contribute to the elucidation of concepts and issues that are generally agreed on the Left to be . . .” read more

Draft Proposal for Socialist Centres

“Surely when it was faced with a tacitly hostile Establishment in Whitehall and an actively hostile press in Fleet Street it (the Labour Government 1945–51) should have felt the need for a politically conscious and educated rank and file, such as was beginning to emerge in the . . .” read more

C.Wright Mills

“I mourn the death of C. Wright Mills, bitterly and personally. We had, in the last five years of his life, become close friends. I am not minded to write a detached appraisal of his work and thought. But I think I can write about the man he . . .” read more

Revolutionaries by Half

“The Girondins, by M. J. Sydenham:” read more

Footnote to Labourism

“Lord Morrison of Lambeth. An Autobiography:” read more

The Sickness of Labourism

““It is a very difficult country to move, Mr. Hynband, a very difficult country indeed, and one in which there is more disappointment to be looked for than success.”” read more