Albo Gregory - Class, party and revolution: a socialist register reader

CLASS, PARTY, REVOLUTION

2018 Socialist Register

Published in 2018 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-920-8

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

CLASS,
PARTY,
REVOLUTION

A SOCIALIST REGISTER READER

EDITED BY
GREG ALBO, LEO PANITCH, AND ALAN ZUEGE

SOCIALIST REGISTER CLASSICS
VOLUME 1

CLASS, PARTY, REVOLUTION:
AN INTRODUCTION

When Haymarket Books first raised the idea a number of years ago of publishing the classic essays that have appeared in the Socialist Register over the past five decades, we were obviously both flattered and enthusiastic. Other pressing commitments initially delayed bringing this to fruition, not least the work involved in planning, commissioning, editing, and publishing each new annual volume of the Register. But as interest in socialist ideas and politics surged in the current political conjuncture and as leading figures in this renewalfrom Jacobin in the US to Momentum in the UK and Syriza in Greecetold us how they were influenced by the Register, we realized we could delay no longer in making available to a new generation some of its key contributions over the years.

The Socialist Registers emergence in 1964 was itself a significant moment in the emergence of the New Left at the time. As the Registers founding editors, Ralph Miliband and John Saville, put it in their preface introducing the first Register as an annual volume of socialist analysis and discussion, they believed that the possibility for this proving fruitful was now greater than for a long time past. This indeed proved to be the case. Even before the mass radical political explosions of 1968, prominent essays in the Register sought to think through a way forward for socialists beyond the ideological bankruptcy and institutional sclerosis of both the social democratic and Communist parties. This was especially the case with the essay we have chosen to open this collection, one of the most famous and intellectually influential the Register ever published, Andr Gorzs Reform and Revolution, first published in the 1968 volume. It reads today as an epitaph to what happened with the Syriza government in Greeceand as a clarion call for what strategic preparations should already be in train to avoid a Corbyn-led Labour government in the UK experiencing the same fate.

Beginning from the insight, far ahead of its time, that it was already then the case that the Keynesian welfare states expanding social and collective services were no longer compatible with the pursuit of dynamic capitalist accumulation, Gorz posedperhaps more clearly than anyone sincethe stark choices facing any government with even reformist ambitions. New kinds of structural reforms were required, as Gorz understood so clearly, involving,

a more rapid development of social services and public intervention than in the past, demanding a much more extensive socialization of the economy, including nationalizations, collectivization of saving and the investment function, global (i.e., planned) public direction of the economy, and priority of collective consumption and services.

Since all of this is destined to make a political impact on the modes of development, consumption, and civilization, and on the style of life, the strategic preparation for this, which actually entails uncovering its possibility, needs to be seen as educational, ideological and cultural as much as, or more than, technical in the policy and administrative sense. Ensuring that a socialist strategy for structural reform would never be institutionalized (in ways that would blunt the advancement of popular and working class powers) requires the creation of centres of social control and direct democracy alongside the conquest of positions of strength in representative assemblies. Even though such a strategy carries with it the inevitable consequence of an intensification and deepening of the antagonism between the logic of social production and the logic of capitalist accumulation and the power of management, it involves a new sort of gradualism, oriented to creating the objective and subjective conditions to prepare the social and political positions of strength.

Written on the eve of May 1968, Gorzs essay may have struck many of its first readers as counseling undue strategic patience as opposed to looking for new insurrectionary possibilities. But by the time the 1969 Register appeared, Lucio Magris renowned reflection on The May Events and Revolution in the West helped to clarify that while reformist optimism, whether liberal or socialist, has come to an end, so did the May events teach us that the question of revolution in its highest form cannot just be taken up again at the point where it was interrupted in 1923. Insofar as the spontaneous movement was unable to do more than express an extraordinarily radical spirit of revolt, what this proved was that there had to be already an alternative social force active within the social body, with the capacity to illuminate the socialist perspectives within the present society. To be sure, Magri identified the leading role played by two types of workers who had never previously been outstanding in trade union struggleson the one hand, young unskilled workers condemned to the most repetitive and underpaid jobs and, on the other, young technicians skilled enough to perform delicate tasks but faced with the downgrading of the university degree and no managerial possibilitieswhich showed that a socialist strategy still needed to be seeded in this transformed working class.

What May 1968 also revealed was the profound gap [that] existed between the social movement that burst out in such a novel way and the strategy of the traditional revolutionary forces (the Communist Party and the left-wing groupuscules). Yet it was also the libertarian polemic against the party as such that disarmed the May movementcrucifying it on its own spontaneity. While recognizing that the very concept of the revolutionary party seen in terms of an organized vanguard with a well-defined ideology and a centralized leadership deserved to be fundamentally challenged, this called for a no less fundamental reappraisal of the relationship between the party and the movement. Since revolutionary praxis is many-sided, the party needed to be seen as a point of synthesis, of fermentation, where the universal is extracted from the particular. This means that it is not the movement that serves the party, but the party that serves the movement it is not the party that will hold state power, but the masses that use the party to prevent political power from ossifying.

For Magri, all this involved finally saying goodbye to the Jacobinism which characterized so much of twentieth-century revolutionary politics, and going back to the Marxian concept of the socialist revolution. This is in fact what the Socialist Register