The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Exploring the connections between class, ideology and politics

In this classic study, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, Ellen Wood provides a critical survey of influential trends in “post-Marxist” theory. Challenging their dissociation of politics from class, she elaborates her own original conception of the complex relations between class, ideology and politics. In the process, Wood explores the links between socialism and democracy and reinterprets the relationship between liberal and socialist democracy.

In a new introduction, Wood discusses the relevance of The Retreat from Class in a post-Soviet world. She traces the connections between post-Marxism and current academic trends such as postmodernism and argues that a re-examination of class politics is a necessary counter to the current cynical acceptance of capitalism.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Economics

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 3 out of 5]

In THE RETREAT FROM CLASS: A NEW ‘TRUE’ SOCIALISM by Ellen Meiksins Wood one of her themes is that intellectuals hijacked Marxism, but the irony is that she’s an intellectual who writes in the dense prose of academia. Her arguments are in response to other Marxist and socialist academics who have moved away from the Marx and Engels of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO to a liberal democratic model. These intellectuals she criticizes believe that workers are not the instrument that will bring about revolution, but that the base must expand to include white collar workers and even management. Also, there’ll be no revolution. The process will occur peacefully through democratic means.

Wood calls bullshit on this, if I may use an academic term, saying it is only through class struggle, specifically the exploited working class, the only ones who have a reason to fight for change, that socialism will rise up and thrive. Democracy, though not without its merits, is too embedded in capitalism to bring about socialism. At least that’s what I think she’s means. It’s hard to unpack, especially as her arguments are built on a history and dialectic I’m fully ignorant of. Let me quote the two points in a paragraph from near the end of her book:

“Either we maintain that, because all human beings qua human beings have an interest in socialism — or in freedom from exploration, in democratic control, peace, security and a decent quality of life — they are all equally candidates for socialist commitment through persuasion; or else we have to admit that, even if at bottom and in the long run all human beings have such an interest, there are more immediate structures of interest and power standing massively in the way of its realization. If the latter is so, then socialism must still be conceived, in the first instance, not simply as an abstract moral good but as a concrete political objective, which mobilizes the social forces most immediately directed against the capitalist structure of interest and power. Socialism takes the form of such a concrete project, with identifiable targets and agencies — yet one which is at the same time capable of ‘connecting’ with the ‘general interest’ — only insofar as it is embodied in the interests and struggles of the working class.”

Add a star if you like this kind of prose style. I found it interesting, though it often lulled me into a waking sleep. Sort of like the famous quote about religion being the opiate of the people. Maybe academia is the opiate of the intellectual? Anyway, if you understand that quoted paragraph, then you may want to add two stars. If it gave you the willies, then detract a star, and if you’re a bloodsucking capitalist boss: fuck you!

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact that this book was written a fairly long time ago by now, it still has many relevant arguments to make. Although the ideology that Woods attacks here, Eurocommunism, hasn’t survived in one piece, its ideas still exert influence over major left wing parties today. Not only that, but the ideologues tackled by Woods are still frequently cited by leftwing intellectuals. Notably in the context of rising populism, thinkers like Chantal Mouffe are still looked to for inspiration.

The main question that the book deals with is the Eurocommunist theoreticians’ abandonment of class politics. In the Eurocommunist paradigm, there is no necessary correspondence between social class and politics. As a result, the working class loses its special position as the revolutionary agent under capitalism. Instead, the Eurocommunists argue, socialists should push to construct a narrative that unites broad layers of the population under the abstract banner of ‘the people’.

Woods tries to show that Eurocommunist theory is tied into the academic trend of postmodernism and a simple electoralism. Moreover she tries to refute the proposition that there is no correlation between politics and social class. She does so by engaging in debate over historical cases of class movements. Throughout the book she engages the arguments of various authors that she shares under ‘New True Socialism’.

This is a great book that equips readers with the necessary knowledge to better understand contemporary debates. Because it assumes a certain level of knowledge of socialist political theory, I would say this is somewhat of an advanced text. Nevertheless, this is one of the more important left-wing texts written in recent history.

[Evan Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive take-down of Laclau & Mouffe and some of the common arguments that circulate in the post-Marxist tradition. Her writing is incredibly sharp.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clarifying, in terms of academic and political reluctance to take up basic Marxist categories. Wood's main argument is against so-called 'post-Marxist' thinkers who try, in various ways, to minimize the importance of class interests and class struggle, or do away with it altogether. These theories (1) accept the autonomy of politics from economics, a division Wood sees as a key way capitalist societies perpetuate exploitation (2) argue, on these grounds, that socialism can be brought about not by class struggle, but by appealing to nice ideals and tinkering with liberal democracy. Wood takes issue with the elitist way this point is sometimes made (i.e. some claim that intellectuals are best suited to bring about socialism because they are less wedded to 'narrow material interests' and better able to appreciate humanistic ideals), and with the fact that it totally obfuscates the fact that only the shared interest of the working class is a powerful enough motivator to bring about the fundamental social change from capitalism to socialism. Appealing to vague 'democratic struggles' without specifying how capitalism prevents true democracy from coming about, and without confronting the 'river of fire' between democracy under capitalism and democracy under socialism is a dead-end politically and theoretically.

I found this book especially interesting in light of recent political events. At the end, Wood notes that when a political party abandons the working class, the working class is more likely to latch onto superficial appealing factors, which made think of how the Democratic Party has abandoned working class interests, enabling Trump to step in. Or of how Democrats try to build a coalition of 'right-minded' people (i.e. people who believe in the right, humanitarian goals) as opposed to building solidarity around actual, material interests.

[Caris · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Have the divisions among workers really been more remarkable than their many common struggles?”

Among other adjacent issues, this is the central question Ellen Wood addresses throughout this work. The late author was arguably one of the foremost proponents of Marxist orthodoxy in contemporary socialist theory. Or, to be more specific, she has defended the centrality of the working class and dialectical materialism in socialist projects amidst liberal theoretical divergences in the last fifty years.

In this book, Wood writes at the height of Thatcherism in the UK, during miners’ strikes, and just before the fall of the Soviet Union; these of course presented socialist theorists at the time with challenges to Marxism from a neoliberalizing West. Most notably, this marked the historical emergence of a strain of academic leftism that Wood ironically calls the “New ‘True’ Socialism” (in reference to its proponents). She advances some scathing criticisms of these new socialists — Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Raymond Williams — and it was by chance that I’ve read many of them already. Because of its dense writing and winding strung-together sentences, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with some of these thinkers, as well as Marx, in advance.

***

Wood begins by outlining the logical progression of New ‘True’ Socialism:

“1) The working class has not, as Marx expected, produced a revolutionary movement. That is, its economic situation has not given rise to what was thought to be an appropriate corresponding political force.

2) This reflects the fact that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and politics in general. Any relation between class and politics is contingent. In other words, ideology and politics are autonomous from economic (class) relations; and there are no such things as ‘economic’ class interests that can be translated a posteriori into political terms. [Wood later identifies this as the non-correspondence principle].

3) More particularly, these propositions mean that there is no necessary or privileged relation between the working class and socialism, and indeed that the working class has no ‘fundamental interest’ in socialism.

4) Therefore, the formation of a socialist movement is in principle independent of class, and a socialist politics can be constructed that is more or less autonomous from economic (class) conditions. This means two things in particular:

5) A political force can be constituted and organized on the ideological and political planes, constructed out of various ‘popular’ elements which can be bound together and motivated by purely ideological and political means, irrespective of the class connections or oppositions among them.

6) The appropriate objectives of socialism are universal human goals which transcend class, rather than narrow material goals defined in terms of class interests. These objectives can be addressed, on the autonomous ideological and political planes, to various kinds of people, irrespective of their material class situations.

7) In particular, the struggle for socialism can be conceived as a plurality of ‘democratic’ struggles, bringing together a variety of resistances to many forms of inequality and oppression. In fact, it may even be possible to replace the concept of socialism with the notion of ‘radical democracy’. Socialism is a more or less natural extension of liberal democracy; or at any rate ‘democracy’ as it exists, albeit in a limited form, in advanced capitalist societies is in principle ‘indeterminate’ and capable of extension to socialist democracy.

8) Some types of people are more susceptible than others to the universalist and rational discourse of socialism, more capable of commitment to universal human goals as distinct from narrow material – or what Bentham used to call ‘sinister’ – interests; and these form the natural constituency of the socialist movement.”

***

What much of NTS rests on is the non-correspondence principle: “the emancipatory impulses of socialism do not arise out of the interests of the working class as ‘agents constituted at the level of relations of production’; instead, that impulse is created by liberal-democratic discourse which ‘constructs’ various relations of subordination as oppressive. This means, among other things, that workers are capable of generating emancipatory struggles – and, indeed of perceiving their own subordination as oppressive – only insofar as they are instructed by liberal-democratic discourse, or, to put it another way, by bourgeois ideology” (pp. 126). In other words, economic or social conditions do not mechanically produce specific corresponding political forces—these forces are instead produced by discourse and ideology. Wood sets out, over conversations with the theorists mentioned above, to test the NCP against historical cases.

One of the problems with the NCP, Wood argues, is that the capitalist state is waging a war based exactly on what the NCP denies: the centrality of class politics (i.e. capital versus labour), which was no more explicit than in the platform of Thatcherism. The NTS rejects “the working class as the agent of social change” (pp. 32), all the while its oppressors admit that the working class is just that—the working class “is the only class whose own class interests require, and whose own conditions make possible, the abolition of class itself” (pp. 35). How then would a populist movement that decentres class succeed in the construction of socialism? Why would classes whose interests depend on the maintenance of class seek to abolish it?

Interestingly, Wood identifies a certain compatibility between Maoism and Eurocommunism (NTS) in its use of the discourse of ‘the masses’. She asks a pertinent question: “What identity do the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’ have? What would be the content of a revolution made by them ‘in their own name’?” And I think this is the very problem with populism—the identity they have is that assigned to them by its self-designated vanguard.

Paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe, Wood explains this populist movement thus: “some external agency, somehow uniquely and autonomously capable of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own inner resources, will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a collective identity and creating a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ where none existed before. […] So a democratic impulse and a plurality of ‘democratic struggles’ replace material interests and class struggle as the moving force of history, while socialist demands are merely ‘a moment internal to the democratic revolution’” (pp. 116–117).

Poulantzas argued similarly, that white-collar workers are more likely to accept capitalist ideology than blue-collar workers, and consequently, this poses an obstacle for developing class consciousness and solidarity. Wood acknowledges that this is an important consideration for socialist strategy, but it in no way constitutes the “decisive class boundary” that Poulantzas rests his democratic socialism upon. I would also add that here is where Althusser’s discussion on ideological state apparatuses is critical. It accounts for the different inclinations of subsets of the working class, granting that ideology and discourse are indeed crucial for revolutionary forces, but they do not displace the centrality of class—the working class—in the construction of socialism.

But Wood isn’t only capable of deconstructing the problems with NTS and its divergences from Marxism. She also leaves us with plenty to consider moving forward for the realization of socialism and effective strategy. First:

“If liberal democracy is at the core of capitalist class hegemony, it is presumably the task of socialist political theory to approach liberal-democratic theory ‘counter-hegemonically’. How the counter-hegemonic project is conceived, however, very much depends on what one means by ‘hegemony’” (pp. 257).

And more importantly:

“The very heart of socialism will be a mode of democratic organization that has never existed before – direct self-government by freely associated producers in commonly owned workplaces producing the means of material life” (pp. 280).

This vision is one that liberal democracy ignores—indeed, denies, because it needs to in order to maintain capitalism. The construction of socialism also requires a patience and a pragmatism that proponents of NTS refuse to cede: “the very people who decry what they take to be demands for instant socialism, and who envisage the transition in the most gradualist terms, also seem to dismiss as inconsequential any working-class challenge to capitalism that does not issue in the immediate establishment of socialism” (pp. 313).

There are a number of other criticisms of NTS, however, regarding not only its foundations and rejections of dialectical materialism, but with its goals as well, which Wood claims are both misinterpretations of the goals of Marxism, and also unsatisfactory goals in themselves: the NTS “depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society’ and argue that the freedom and equality characteristic of that society have simply been perverted by money, capital, etc. For Marx, the unfreedom and inequality of capitalist relations are, of course, not perversions but realizations of the form of freedom and equality implied by simpler forms of commodity exchange” (pp. 251).

Another problem is the class-neutrality of capitalism under liberal democracy, via its separation of producers from the means of production, which is also what makes capitalist exploitation so effective. Capitalist hegemony relies on maintaining two separate spheres of the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, “which makes possible the maximum development of purely juridical and political freedom and equality without fundamentally endangering economic exploitation” (pp. 256).

And finally, NTS mistakes the means for the end; the object of class struggle is not to seize power, but to abolish class. And the seizure of power is only a necessary step in the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is an instrument and not the object.

One of the most entertaining things about Wood’s writing, however, is that she honours not only the rigour but the sarcastic humour of Marx in her criticism of her opponents: “Surely something is amiss when the Sunday Times is obliged to teach Marxists about class struggle and the nature of revolutionary forces.” Or, my personal favourite: “And so here we have it: In the beginning (and the end) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the ultimate Subject made incarnate in … Laclau and Mouffe?” When a text can be this dense and academic, I’m extra impressed when it can make me laugh my ass off.

This work is an excellent polemic against the shift from Marxism and communism in general among the Left. Whether due to the imperfections of past socialist projects, or the perceived unattainable utopianism of socialism in the present or future, the tendency for Leftists to cede ground to liberal democracy is a significant problem for socialist strategy. In my view, and that of Wood, we ought not shy away from proudly carrying the communist flag (so to speak). And Marxism—with the centrality of working class solidarity—simply offers us the path from the present to that future.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The argument is simple and practical enough: in short, building and maintaining working class politics is the most effective way forward for turning back the advances of reaction and conservatism and building the way towards democratic socialism. However, the argumentation she uses to get there is a little more tortured than necessary.

Meiksins Woods engages in a long polemic against "new true socialism" embodied in discourse theory, structuralism and the post-Marxism of Althusser, Laclau, and Mouffe. The parry in part strikes its intended target; in part it also sells short their gains and progress. The polemic, which takes up the majority of the work, argues that this bloc on the left has traded the hard and necessary task of building working class politics for a mess of pottage. In essence, she argues that they have traded a materialist political strategy for an idealist one; and in so doing, they have swapped the politico-economic struggle in capitalism between labor and capital for liberal democracy along with the attendant means of coalition building and the ends of winning electoral success.

The more recent battles with the Democratic Party and the Labor Party between Clintonism and the Third Way on the one hand and the Democratic Socialism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn on the other, mirror the debate played out in these pages. For many years, Meiksins Woods was out in the political wilderness with the Democratic Socialists. Paradoxically, the success of the Right more recently has been gained by capturing the loyalties of large swaths of the working class. The way out of the wilderness will, in part, be earned by fighting for the working class and gaining ground in the economic, social, and political fronts.

[Grimble Gromble · Rating 5 out of 5]

EMW, Marksist kuramı ve sosyalist politikayı, (new-leftist, post-marksist) pezevenklerin elinden (yine) kurtarıyor adeta.

Zihninin berraklığı ve kuramının netliği üslubuna da yansımış. Bir yudum su gibi ferahlatıyor okurken.

[Foppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, that very meticulously shows how the European/US communist party theorists shifted ever further to the right. The only serious shortcoming, I feel, is that she never really looked into the question what material conditions and (changes to) class interests of the authors accompanies this shift, as it seems to me highly unlikely that these vacuous theories would've been accepted as received wisdom otherwise. (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People does this very well for the Democratic party, if you want to see an example of this.)

[AHW · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a funny book. Wood opens with an impressively strong criticism of the reactionary social-democratic arguments of Eurocommunism and Post-Marxism. These arguments slam with full critical force into her own political commitments, which are a variation on many of the same Rousseauian, nationalistic, electoralist themes - but moved further left by her - theoretical and rhetorical, at least - commitment to class. She even manages to argue that no socialist movement that refuses engagement with parliamentary politics stands a chance in the “advanced” liberal-democratic countries. A very serious historian says this, only 2 decades after the explosions of the 1960s!

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Wood would be smarter, there would be a lot more kinds of fallacies in this book. Sadly, on the the more common sorts can be found in this text, starting with No True Scotsman in the title.

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

While written from 1984-85 and focusing mostly on British "new-Left" thinkers of the time, the arguments Wood lays out here are still depressingly relevant in critiquing social-democratic philosophy and political objectives. Her call for a focus on class, and political and theoretical objectives which advance the primacy of the working class as the only social agent capable of fundamentally changing relations of production and destroying capitalism is just as necessary now as it was then.

[Can Uğurpala · Rating 5 out of 5]

post-marksist yaklaşımlara ve marksizmin yerine ikame edilen kimlik politikasi vb tutumlarına sistematik bir eleştiri

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Today, their connections with Marxism are very distant and tenuous, almost invisible. People have, in their various ways, moved on, in directions that have very little to do with Marxism, or even socialism, except to repudiate it. It seems clear that post-Marxism was just a short pit-stop on the way to anti-Marxism.”

“There is an unbroken continuity between early post-Marxism and today’s postmodernism – with, among other things, their common emphasis on ‘discourse’ and ‘difference’, or on the fragmentary nature of reality and human identity”

“One of the constitutive contradictions of post-Marxism was that even those who insisted most emphatically on ‘difference’, and who most forcefully repudiated ‘essentialism’, ‘universalism’ and class politics, still professed a commitment to certain inclusive and embarrassingly ‘universalistic’ political objectives, including socialism”

“In particular, the post-Marxist concept of ‘radical democracy’, which was meant to replace or subsume the traditional socialist project, had to be defined in terms vague enough to serve as a kind of lowest common denominator among irreducibly ‘different’ emancipatory projects with no significant common foundation.”

“At its worst, and in default of a social foundation, the post-Marxist doctrine of ‘radical democracy’ assigned an inordinately large political role to intellectuals and their ‘discursive practices’, with positively anti-democratic implications”

“At its best, the social indeterminacy of ‘radical democracy’ made it politically vacuous”

“Postmodernists, to the extent that they remain committed to egalitarian goals or to some kind of social justice, have not entirely escaped this contradiction between emancipatory aspirations and the repudiation of any moral or political foundation to support them”

“The end result has been not only to repudiate socialism or any other ‘universalistic’ politics, but effectively to deny the very possibility of political action altogether. Postmodernism cannot offer a plausible ground for its own emancipatory commitments or, for that matter, its own radical pluralism”

“The younger New Left, raised in the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism and with a very different perception of capitalist normality, was at once deeply opposed to the ‘system’ and deeply preoccupied with its apparent success”

“but among the ideas that most deeply penetrated important sections of the student movement (under the influence of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse) was that the hegemonic grip of consumer capitalism, especially its grip on the working class, had permanently neutralized the old oppositional agencies. This apparently left the field to more liberated intellectuals”

“Yet many student radicals (and the mature academics they were to become) remained committed to one persistent idea: that students and their intellectual mentors would have to fill a historical vacuum left by the labour movement, and that class struggle in the traditional sense could be replaced by ‘ideological class struggle’ or the transmutation of theory into a ‘material force’.”

“With certain adjustments – above all, the disappearance of ‘class’ from ‘class struggle’ – an unbroken thread, from ‘ideological class struggle’ to the academic politics of ‘discourse’, connects some strands of 1960s student radicalism with today’s intellectual fashions (and even some varieties of Western student Maoism with today’s academic postmodernism: from ‘cultural revolution’ to textual deconstruction).”

“In the new post-left theories, there is no alternative to capitalism, and there is even less room for class politics than there was in post-Marxism. So there is a deep historical paradox here: an intellectual trend that began with a strong oppositional impulse in the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism has come to fruition as a surrender to capitalism, at a moment when the system’s flaws and contradictions are more visible than at any other time since the Great Depression”

“Nothing in the current fashions on the left has prepared them for this.”

“Some of the most fashionable figures in today’s academic pantheon – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, for instance – are showing signs of chafing against the theoretical and political constraints imposed by anti-universalist, anti-class, and anti-Marxist dogmas.”

“Why then return to the debates surrounding a dead and more or less forgotten post-Marxism”

“At least then the debate was still about class politics, before the turn that took class out of our line of vision altogether, along with socialism and even the critique of capitalism”

Ellen Meiksins Wood
Spring 1998

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still extremely relevant in the way class gets consistently marginalized in academic accounts. Being someone who studies and writes about media activism, it never ceases to amaze me how class often remains absent as academics celebrate the allegedly democratic nature of recent digital technology, which more often than not is utilized by middle-class people of privilege.

Similar, the author’s insistence to take a materialist approach in analysis is sound advice where often interviews reign supreme and scholars wrongly assume that people’s accounts of their actions are identical with those actions themselves.

A must-read for anyone who wants to engage in historically-grounded, Marxist analysis.

[Samppa Sirnö · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tämä on Ellen Meiksins Woodin kirja klassisen marxismin puolesta post-marxilaista eettistä sosialismia kohtaan. "Tosi sosialismi" viittaa Marxin hyökkäykseen eettistä ei luokkapohjaista sosialismia kohtaan Saksalainen ideologia teoksessa. Tämä Woodin teos on varsin hyvä ortodoksisen marxismin puolustus nykyajan tosi sosialisteja vastaan.

[Gianmariabr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gigante. Sicuramente una delle più grandi storiche marxiste degli ultimi cinquant’anni, poco à la mode proprio perché lucida, severa e talvolta cruda nel puntare il dito e indicare la direzione. Una continua ispirazione, da leggere e rileggere.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The initial chapters focused on Althusser, Poulantzas, and Laclau/Mouffe are engaging, as these thinkers continue to have a substantial intellectual impact on the left. However, the remainder of the book seems outdated, addressing specific positions of figures who are largely irrelevant today.

[Ziikii · Rating 5 out of 5]

masterpiece. da metterne 1000 copie in ogni sede di ogni partito che si definisca di sinistra in italia.

make socialism great again

[ferro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wood un kitabı gerçekten harika güncel sosyalizm tartışmalarına çok iyi bir giriş

[John NM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise, sophisticated argument for going back to the basics. Still a much needed corrective (sadly).

[Kaan · Rating 3 out of 5]

1- çok büyük kısmı polemik, o yüzden diğer yazılanlara da bakmak gerekiyor.
2- sosyal demokratlarla ve reformistlerle polemiğin yazıldığı tarihte bir değeri varmış ama bugün pek ilgili çekici değil

[nsgna · Rating 2 out of 5]

While her critique of “the new ‘true’ socialism” (EMW's label for mocking post-Marxism) is not as in-depth, well-grounded and thorough as one would expect from the title – but overall rather repetitive or even circular. The second part of the book where she explores the relations between ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ is where her analysis truly shines. And some of the issues problematized there are still (with little extrapolation) very much relevant and up for revision (for the left) today.

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A product of its time, but still some valuable insights about electoralism. Chapters 9 and 10 on democracy, the state, and liberalism are evergreen and should be required reading for any Marxist