Socialism from Below

by Hal Draper

These essays by Hal Draper reflect his standing as a scholar, political journalist, and polemicist. The collection concentrates on what is of the greatest contemporary interest--his understanding of the meaning of socialism. In Draper's view, the divisions running through the history of the socialist movement between reformists and revolutionaries, authoritarians and democrats, were secondary; the important distinction was between those socialists who looked for some outside authority that would hand down salvation to the masses from above and those who saw the key to the reform of existing society in the struggle for self-emancipation from below.
The first part contains Draper's pamphlet, The Two Souls of Socialism, for over twenty years the most widely read and succinct statement of Draper's radically different view of contemporary politics, and also several historical studies showing how Marx was the only major nineteenth-century thinker to defend unequivocally the democratic movement from below. The second section, entitled "In Defense of Radicalism," contains Draper's main articles on the New Left of the 1960s. The final section, "Marxism and Its Critics," contains several polemical articles in defense of the Marxist approach. The last article in this section, describing the evolution of Marx and Engels from typical "New Leftists" of the 1840s to advocates of socialism from below, is an early version of what became several chapters in Draper's five-volume study of Marx's political theory and activity, and provides a fitting conclusion to this volume.

Genres: Politics, Theory, History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on the history and meaning of the thought of Karl Marx.

Draper was a lifelong advocate of what he called "socialism from below", self-emancipation by the working class, in opposition to capitalism and Stalinist bureaucracy, both of which, he held, practiced domination from above. He was one of the creators of the Third Camp tradition, a form ("the form", according to its adherents) of Marxist socialism.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

Socialism From Below is a very good collection of essays by Hal Draper, focused mainly on the importance of revolutionary/system change coming from the 'mass-majority' - from 'below' as opposed to being lead by reformists and the 'intelligentsia'. More importantly he distrusts the sentiment that the 'mass-majority' is incapable of acting in its self-interest: Muta pecora, prona et ventri obedientia. [The herd is silent, submissive, and obeys its stomach.]

"What unites the many different forms of Socialism-from-Above is the conception of socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact. The heart of Socialism-from-Below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses “from below” in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history" (p.10).

[Josh Stark · Rating 5 out of 5]

57 pages read so far