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4
Socialism
I see no reason to accept the political invitation of the "death of socialism"
rhetoric. To do so would be profoundly unhistorical. Such a verdict persuades
only if we accept the sufficiency of the crude Cold War opposition between East
European state socialism and West European Keynesian-welfare statist social
democracy, as if "between them, Stalinism and Neil Kinnock exhaust the
whole of human history."
Geoff Eley

Reassessing Socialism
To declare socialism dead following the demise of the Soviet Union, the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and other upheavals in Eastern Europe is to
misunderstand the significance of these events. The Cold War is over, and
that provides an opportunity to expand our political imaginations, to
explore the complexity and variety of socialist ideas. In doing so, our
attention shifts and our focus widens. The Russian Revolution becomes
one of many socialist experiments, not the paradigmatic case of actually
existing socialism. It may even represent a narrowing of socialist
possibilities. It was preceded by religious and secular socialist utopias,
accompanied by anarchosyndicalist and social-democratic movements, and
followed by anticolonial or national liberation struggles. Placed in
historical context, the death of socialism in its Bolshevik guise frees the
left to reassess its rich history. This is one reason to study socialism today.
A second reason is the continued importance of class conflict in

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contemporary politics. The working class Marx described, a revolutionary
proletariat representing the universal interests of mankind, never emerged.
Tensions remain between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in advanced
industrial societies and between the First and the Third Worlds. The
victory of liberal capitalismthe other side in the Cold Waris as doubtful as
the death of socialism. Yet some conservatives have declared victory, and
others continue to fight for it. In her discussion of Thatcher government
policy, Ellen Meiksins Wood quotes "one of the Right's most popular
journalistic spokesmen: 'Old fashioned Tories say there isn't any class war.
New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect
to be victorious.'" 1 In The New Class War, Frances Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward present a similar analysis of Reagan administration attempts to
dismantle the welfare state and disorganize the working class.2 Despite
the complexity of class relations (Do workers now wear white, pink, and
blue collars?) and political identities (How do gender, race, and sexuality
intersect with class?) today, economic and political power remain
intertwined. Class analysis helps disentangle the relationships between
them and may serve as a model for examining other forms of oppression.
A third reason why socialist ideas remain relevant is the vision of human
fulfillment that they offer. According to Joseph Chytry, Marx's greatest
contribution was neither his critique of capitalism nor his theory of
revolution. It was the recognition that "to be at home for a human [being]
means to contemplate himself in a world he or she has created."3 For
Marx, human creativity was primarily expressed, and under capitalism
denied, in the production of material objects. Marx's materialist argument
has aesthetic and spiritual origins in German Idealism and Romanticism.
At a deeper level, Marx tries to sustain the hope that human beings can
live meaningful lives. Eric Hobsbawm fears that this hope may be the
greatest loss if socialism is declared dead: "the fall of the Soviet-type
system, about which all illusion had long gone, is less significant than the
apparent end of the dream of which it was the nightmare version."4 More
dangerous dreams, for example, ethnic nationalisms, may fill the ensuing
vacuum.
A fourth and, for now, final reason for studying socialism is to distinguish
what is Marxian (Marx's actual ideas) from what is Marxist (ideas
espoused in his name).5 Interpreting Marx has long been a highstakes
game of politics. The result is a "string of doctrinal continuities" resulting
in the hyphenated and hypothetical person: Marx-Lenin-Stalin. Many
factors have contributed to such misrepresentations, including Marx's
insistence that theory be related to practice and Engels's simplifications of
Marx's ideas. My present point is simply that much

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of what we know is a "straw-Marxism." As Paul Thomas puts it: "if by
'the reception of Marx' we mean the accurate, disinterested appraisal of his
ideas, we can conclude that the reception of Marx has still to be achieved."
6
Such an appraisal is worth the effort. A commitment to intellectual
integrity regarding the history of socialism frees us to reconsider the
meaning of human creativity, to reassess class as a political force, and,
most important, to expand our political imaginations.

The Origins of Socialism

The origins of the term socialism are obscure. Some claim it was first used
in 1835 to refer to the utopian community, New Lanark, founded by the
English industrialist Robert Owen. In mid-nineteenth-century usage,
socialism referred to a "tribal state," "Christian socialism," "great demons
in morals and politics," "the real nature of man," and ''fairy tales." As
introduced by Owen (and Fourier, another utopian socialist),
"socialism . . . proposed that a society living together should share all the
wealth produced."7 Albert Fried offers a more comprehensive definition
that identifies socialists' common themes: "their conviction that each
person's obligation to society as a whole was the absolute condition of his
equality, that society was a brotherhood, not a collection of strangers
drawn together by interest (the usual interpretation of the contract), that
the individual derived his highest fulfillment from his solidarity with
others, not from the pursuit of advantage and power."8
The concept of socialism predates the term. The utopian schemes
proposed in Plato's Republic and Christ's "Sermon on the Mount" are
arguably socialist.9 Engels describes early matriarchal societies, like the
Iroquois Confederacy, as forms of primitive communism. Standard
histories of socialism usually begin in mid-nineteenth-century America
and Europe. During this period, many religious and secular socialist
utopias were founded. According to George Bernard Shaw, America in
the 1840s had more socialist communities than anywhere else in the
world.10 These early examples continued to guide the resurgence of
communal living that accompanied New Left politics in the 1960s.
A comprehensive history of socialism is beyond the scope of this chapter.
The ideas of Karl Marx, founder of modern socialism, are the major
emphasis here. Historians identify three major influences on the
development of his philosophy: (1) the utopian socialists, (2) Hegel and
the Left Hegelians, and (3) the British political economists. While
exploring these influences on Marx, we also consider aspects of the
socialism(s) that preceded him.

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Utopian Socialism
Although Marx learned from their ideas, he was quite critical of the
utopian socialists. He portrays them as naive, even dangerous, because they
are oblivious to the laws of class struggle and the need for violent
revolution; instead, they advocate peaceful change. They believe that all of
societyrich and poorwill voluntarily join socialist utopias after observing
how they operate. Charles Fourier's fund-raising efforts for his model
communities, called phalansteries, exemplify their innocent optimism.
After placing an advertisment in a Paris newspaper, Fourier waited at a
café for contributions from wealthy donors. No one came, leaving him,
according to one source, to wonder how people could fail to see that
phalansteries represented the highest form of human existence.
Those who did form utopian communities were often members of an
educated, wealthy elite. Despite their good intentions and detailed plans,
most of the communities they founded were short-lived. They failed for a
variety of reasons, including their members' limited practical skills, internal
conflicts, and financial bankruptcy. A religious society, "The United
Society of Believers," or the Shakers, proves to be an exception to the rule.
Led from England to the United States by Mother Ann Lee, they
founded their first community, Niskeyuna, in 1776 near Albany, New
York. By the 1850s, eighteen Shaker colonies, composed of 150 to 600
members, ranged from New England west to Kentucky and Ohio. Today,
the remaining Shakers continue to accept new members at their
community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
According to the Shakers, Ann Lee represented God's second coming in
the form of a woman; she would redeem the sins of Eve. Their
communities were organized as celibate "families" of brothers and sisters.
They combined strict sexual taboos (when together, men and women
stayed five feet apart and women were not to whisper, wink, or cross their
legs) with sexual equality in government. Elders and Eldresses governed
Shaker "families," several of which joined together to form a larger
community. It was led, in turn, by a Holy Anointed Mother and Father.
The Shakers stressed simplicity in all aspects of daily life. They worked
prosperous farms and used modern technology, but the purpose of their
efforts was not to acquire wealth. They wanted to be self-sufficient and to
perfect themselves. Their goal was to create the Kingdom of God on
Eartha New Eden.
A discussion of religious utopianism may seem inappropriate here, since
Marx, a self-proclaimed atheist, condemned religion as the "opium of the
people." Nevertheless, religious movements are often socialist (liberation
theology is a good example), and spiritual themes are

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common in Marx's supposedly secular writings. Marx regarded religion,
especially Christianity, as politically conservative primarily because it
surrenders human destiny to divine powers. Denys Turner poses the
problem as follows: "insofar as Christianity is true to itself as religion, it
must be alienating politically, and insofar as it engages genuinely with the
revolutionary critical program of socialism, it must cease to be genuinely
religious." 11 Marx's account of labor under capitalism nonetheless
parallels the human condition after the Fall. In both cases, humans are
separated from essential aspects of their being, other people, and their
God. Socialism represents a reunion of sorts, a return to full humanity,
which is not unlike Paradise.12 Joseph Schumpeter describes Marx as a
secular prophet who espouses socialism as the millennium.13
The secular utopias of the British industrialist Robert Owen and the
French philosopher Charles Fourier are closer to Marx's self-
understanding. At New Lanark, the largest textile factory in Scotland,
Owen tried to demonstrate that efficiency and equality were compatible
goals in industrial production. He provided affordable housing, decent
wages, and good schools for his employees. To encourage worker
productivity, he took a fixed return on investments and returned additional
profits to the enterprise. The conviction that many evils result from the
effects of a harsh environment on human character fueled his efforts.
Against the Protestant Ethic, Owen claimed that by blaming the poor for
their fate, the rich escaped their own social responsibilities. In 1824, under
attack from the Anglican church and the Tory Party, Owen moved to the
relatively uncorrupted and undeveloped United States. He established an
Owenite community in New Harmony, Indiana.
Charles Fourier, another utopian socialist, probably had the greatest
influence on Marx. His major concept is passionate attraction. Fourier
criticizes philosophers who treat human passions as sources of social
discord that must be thoroughly controlled. Like Owen, Fourier argues
that the passions pose problems only in badly organized societies. To
create harmony, society should work with the passions, not against them.
They are God's gift to humanity, and God rules by attraction, according
to Fourier. Fourier's plans for his phalansteries are often bizarre. For
example, the little hordes, young boys who love to get dirty, collect the
garbage, and "filth . . . become[s] their path to glory."14 The butterfly
principle guides amorous relationships. Individuals "flit" from partner to
partner, since monogamy is unnatural.
Writing in Victorian England, Marx shied away from Fourier's sexual
schemes. He espoused monogamous heterosexuality as the natural

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form of sex love, though he attacked the accompanying dependence of
women on men. But Fourier's proposals for adapting industrial production
to human inclinations (e.g., by varying tasks and forming work groups)
shaped Marx's critique of capitalism. More generally, secular utopians
helped Marx reformulate social relationships between human beings.
Many of the tensions liberals struggle to resolve (e.g., between individual
and community, liberty and equality, property and justice) are not
universal "laws of nature." According to Marx, the very idea that social life
requires these "tradeoffs" is the product of a specificmodern
bourgeoissociety.
Hegel and the Left Hegelians
A second influence on Marx, Hegel and the Left Hegelians, illuminates
his theory of history. Marx uses two words to describe history: it is
dialectical and materialist. In the following passage, he suggests how they
are related and describes his relationship to Hegel: "With him [Hegel] it
[the dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up
again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."
15 By inverting Hegel's dialectic, Marx reveals the "secret"the materialist
basisof history. According to Marx, Hegel's greatest contribution was the
concept of history as a process of man's self-creation through the activity
of labor.16 The term dialectics refers to that self-creative historical process.
The familiar formulathesis versus antithesis equals synthesisfails
adequately to capture its meaning. Engels provides a fuller, richer
definition: ''dialectics . . . comprehends things and their representations,
ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and
ending."17 A dialectician sees the internal relationships between things,
the continuous motion of events, and the general patterns of historical
change.
Engels says that Marx adopts the "revolutionary side" of Hegel's
"dialectical method."18 Nevertheless, Hegel sees human creations as
vehicles for a higher powera self-manifesting and self-knowing Ideato
assume historical form. According to Marx, this is upside down. To turn
Hegel right side up, he draws on the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, a
Left Hegelian. Feuerbach argues that Hegel, by portraying humanity as a
manifestation of "spirit," denies humans real, material, sensuous existence.
For Feuerbach, "spirit," if it exists at all, is a human creation, more
precisely, a projection. "Spirit" embodies mans hopes of a better world,
one without conflict and pain, without evil and death. The problem,
Feuerbach argues, is that by projecting these qualities elsewhere, humans
deprive themselves of them, that is, humanity becomes not-spirit,
dependent, inferior, and passive beings.

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Feuerbach claims instead that the essence of humanity or our species-
being appears in our relationships with one another in society. Marx
agreed: "Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence,
but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations." 19
A reason to study socialism is to sustain the hope that human beings can
live meaningful lives. As an aesthetic and spiritual worldview, Marxism
bases that hope on humans' self-creative capacities. According to William
Adams, Marx traces human creations to the social "foundations of
economic life and revolutionary practice," instead of attributing them to an
external cause, be it God or Nature.20 For Marx, "the history of industry
and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of
man's essential powers."21 The capacity to create consciously distinguishes
human labor from the efforts of other animal species to survive. Because
they are self-aware, humans can potentially control what they produce and
how they produce it. People also can discover and express themselves in
their products and productive activities.
What, you might ask, distinguishes this approach to industry from
capitalists' praise for entrepreneurial activity and technological innovation?
To answer this question, we need to return to the rational kernel Marx
would extract from the mystical shell of Hegel's dialectic. At the same
time, we consider a third influence on Marx-the political economists.
The Political Economists
Despite the differences between Adam Smith, James Mill, David Ricardo,
and others, Marx criticizes political economists en masse for their concept
of civil (or liberal capitalist) society. In civil society, "the individual appears
detached from . . . natural bonds." Worse still, "the various forms of social
connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private
purposes, as external necessity." According to Marx, political economists
"tear apart" the dialectical relationships between individuals, societies, and
history. This allows them to achieve "the[ir] aim . . . to present
production . . . as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history,
at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the
inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded."22
Although the political economists are materialists, their materialism is
mechanical, static, or both. (It is only fair to note that Feuerbach made a
similar mistake. Marx accused him of talking "too much about nature and
too little about politics."23) Political economy begins with

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isolated individuals whose liberty depends on freedom from the
interference of other people. Instead, Marx argues that human beings are
social animals, who "can only individuate [themselves] in the midst of
society." 24 "Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as
much of an absurdity as is the development of language without
individuals living together and talking to each other."25 As people interact,
they develop their capacity to produce and eventually outgrow their
current society. Different societies reflect historical stagesAsiatic, ancient,
feudal, modern bourgeoisin the development of man's productive powers.
How does production shape society, according to Marx? Is Marx an
economic determinist? Marx's most succinct and famous statement of his
theory of history is this:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,
relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material productive forces. The sum total of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions
the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.26
Marx's basic distinction is between economic structure and superstructure,
but the latter is further divided into legal, political, and intellectual life.
Although Marx says that the superstructure "rises" on the economic base,
he also says they "correspond" to and "condition" each other. This suggests
an interactive relationship, rather than a causal one. Engels clarifies that
relationship when he says that "the ultimately determining element in
history is the production and reproduction of real life."27 According to
G.A. Cohen, the relationship between structure and superstructure is
functional, rather than causal.28 Specific relations of production require
certain class relations, state institutions and laws, and dominant ideas to
sustain and to stimulate further development. As productive capacities
continue to develop, what once was functional becomes dysfunctional,
resulting in economic crises, political unrest, and eventually social change.
This interpretation captures the complexity of historical processes better
than a simple cause-effect relationship can. It also creates a greater role
for human activity in historical development. Although Marx says social
relations are independent of human will, he does not mean that people
cannot affect them, only that they act within a context that limits their
options.

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In such a brief overview, we can only scratch the surface of Marx's theory
of history. Among the many topics that remain, the role of class conflict
in historical change is especially important. In The Communist Manifesto,
Marx declares that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles." 29 To assess this claim, we turn to Marx's critique of
capitalism, the focus of his most important work, Capital.

Class, Capitalism, and Consciousness

Classes are defined by relationships to the productive forces (raw
materials, labor-power machinery, etc.) of a society. It is important to
understand what does not constitute a class for Marx.30 The amount of
property people own, the kind of property they have, whether they sell or
buy commoditiesthese features do not suffice to determine class
membership. Only the structural relationship between its members and the
mode of production establishes a class. Class relationships are conflictual,
not symbiotic, because a dominant class systematically controls the labor
(and the products) of a subordinate class. For example, the classes in
conflict under capitalism are the bourgeoisie (those who own means of
production and purchase labor) and the proletariat (those who lack means
of production and must sell their labor to live). Marx recognizes that
conflict occurs not only between classes but also within them. He also
acknowledges that multiple classes exist simultaneously in a society. Yet he
maintains that in every society, a dominant class relation corresponds to its
relations of production.
Marx defines classes by objective relationships that are empirically
verifiable. We can determine who owns the factories, who works for
wages, and so on, in a society. Marx also uses class in another sense. He
distinguishes between a class in itself (objective) and a class for itself
(subjective).31 With his subjective concept of class, Marx raises the
question of class consciousness: how does a class, especially the proletariat,
become a revolutionary force? Recent studies of Marxism often focus on
the problem of class consciousness in modern societies. The emergence of
a service sector, the separation of stockholders from management, the
development of multi- and transnational corporations, and so forth, make
it much more difficult to define classes by relationships of ownership and
control. Classes are also divided by cultural, gender, and racial differences,
and new movements representing these identities are politically powerful
today. Was Marx's concept of a revolutionary proletariat a utopian vision?
Or, in conservatives' terms, a metaphysical abstraction? Did he assume too
close a connection between

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economic relationships and political revolution? If classes for themselves
have not emerged spontaneously, what role, if any, should class analysis
play in socialist politics today? Wood argues that "class organization [is] a
political task . . . simply because the translation of common interests into
concerted action requires organization and coordination." She sees the
absence of class consciousness as a problem of logistics. 32 We return to
her argument after examining Marx's account of how class consciousness
develops in capitalist society.
According to Marx, capitalist societies have four major problems; each
contributes to the creation of a revolutionary proletariat. They are (1)
contradictions, (2) exploitation, (3) alienation, and (4) fetishism. Marx's
theory of history suggests that every society becomes obsolete when its
productive forces outgrow its relations of production. In Marx's terms, the
latter begin to "fetter" or to "contradict" the former, preventing people
from using them fully and developing them further. In capitalist society,
the very means the bourgeoisie use to increase profits result in their
eventual demise.33 According to Marx, capitalists' profits do not originate
in the market, that is, from buying low and selling high. Instead, workers
create "surplus value" for the capitalist during the production process.
Marx argues that every commodity has a value equivalent to the values of
the other commoditieslabor power, raw materials, and instruments of
productioninvolved in producing it. This is also how the value of workers'
labor power is calculated. A "fair" wage is determined by the amount of
money a worker needs to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate himself and his
family at the current standard of living in his society. Labor powerthe
workers' commodityhas a peculiar property: it can produce more than its
value.
Marx gives the example of a worker who sells his labor power for a daily
wage of three shillings, enough to meet his needs for a day.34 However,
this worker produces three shillings' worth of products in six hours. This
means that any products produced during a longer day become surplus
value (i.e., value above costs) for the capitalist. Capitalists, Marx argues,
pursue a number of strategies to increase their surplus value. Obviously, it
is in their interest to lengthen the working day. hey also can increase
productivity by speeding up and/or mechanizing the production process,
and they can introduce incentives, like piece-work, to motivate workers.
Mechanization has the added advantage of decreasing labor costs. By
creating unemployment, it increases competition, for jobs and drives wages
down. Mass production techniques also lower prices, allowing workers to
live better for less.
Capitalists pursue these strategies to compete effectively with one

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another (i.e., to survive financially). They are subject to economic laws too,
though self-interested ones. Marx says, "I paint the capitalist . . . in no
sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as
they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of
particular class-relations and class-interests." 35 Marx argues that
capitalists exploit workers, whether or not they pay a fair wage (i.e., the
full value of their labor power) because they do not make a reciprocal
contribution to production. Marx does not recognize investing money,
organizing factories, managing production, inventing technology, and the
like, as labor. These activities are important, but they do not create value.
Marx knows that this does not square with capitalists' self-understanding:
they think they work. Yet Marx insists that capitalists are parasites,
feeding on the bodies of dead and dying laborers.
Eventually, capitalism outdoesand undoesitself. Marx points to periodic
crises of overproduction and underconsumption when an all-too-
productive economy slows down or even stops due to limited markets.
Although surplus value originates in production, it is realized only through
exchange in the marketplace. In their efforts to increase surplus value,
capitalists decrease the purchasing power of the workers who buy their
products. Of course, by internationalizing production (i.e., by taking jobs
and goods overseas) capitalists can postpone the big crash. But only
temporarily. Eventually, "The development of Modern Industry, . . . cuts
from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces
and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces,
above all, is its own gravediggers."36
The revolutionary proletariat, the agents of social change, are its
gravediggers. In developing industry, capitalists bring workers together in
factories and build communication and transportation networks between
them. With every crisis, more small and medium-size businesses fail, more
workers are unemployed, and the ranks of the proletariat swell, at least by
objective indicators. According to Marx, the subjective conditions for
forming a revolutionary class are also present. Marx discusses how
capitalism "alienates" workers by robbing their lives of meaning and
destroying their sense of self-worth. Alienation takes four specific forms.
Under capitalism, workers are alienated from their products, which
capitalists appropriate; their productive activity, which becomes tedious
and dangerous; their fellow workers, who compete with them for jobs,
products, and wages; and their species-being by living less than human
lives. The combined effect is that the worker "no longer feels himself to be
freely active in any but his animal functionseating, drinking, procreating,
or at most in his dwelling and in

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dressing-up, etc., and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to
be anything but an animal." This is an inversion of the real relationship:
"what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal." 37
According to Marx, objective and subjective factors converge to create the
conditions for revolution. In other words, their relationship to production
gradually teaches workers that they have the collective capacity to change
society. This brings us to fetishism, a fourth problem in capitalist societies.
Most simply, a fetish is an object to which people impute special powers.
Hegel's "spirit," which Feuerbach criticized as a projection, is a
philosophical example. In capitalist economies, "the market" becomes a
fetish. When Adam Smith refers to an "invisible hand" that guides
economic relations by the "laws of supply and demand," he implies that
market relations involve processes beyond human control. For Marx, the
"mystery of commodities'' is that "a definite social relation between
men . . . assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between
things."38 He concludes that "the life-process of society . . . does not strip
off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated
men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled
plan."39 In other words, socialism attempts to return people to their
powersand their senses.

Communism and Socialism

Following Geoff Eley, I suggested earlier that a "single-minded focus on
the Bolshevik experiment as the main measure of revolutionary
authenticity" artificially narrows the range of socialist possibilities.40
Historically, there are at least two major strains of socialism: social
democracy and revolutionary communism. In Marx's sketch of the
revolution and its aftermath they exist in some tension. Unfortunately,
Marx provided only a sketch; on the revolution, he was notoriously brief
and vague. This is consistent with his insistence that "we call communism
he real movement which abolishes the present state of things."41
Communism can only be described as it is at present emerging from
capitalism. This strategy left later revolutionaries considerable room for
interpretation.
Marx presents a revolution in two stages. The initial phase, which he calls
proletarian dictatorship or crude communism, still carries the birthmarks
of capitalist society, and they account for many of its flaws. (Marx is often
his own worst critic!) Marx's descriptions of it vary. Sometimes a
proletarian parliamentary majority pursues legal reforms within the state;
sometimes the Communist Party leads the proletariat

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in seizing state power. Historical context clearly shapes revolutionary
strategy. Marx concedes that electoral success is more likely in America
and England, whereas India and Russia probably require violent
revolution. Different means also suit different ends. A ten-hour workday
can be legislated more easily than the confiscation of private property!
This variety suggests to Eley that "the most impressive movements
combine both impulses, lending the stability of centrally directed
permanent organization to the maximum scope for rank-and-file
resurgence." 42
Marx does not juxtapose dictatorship and democracy, as many liberal
democrats would. He harkens back to an earlier concept of democracy as
rule of the people and recognizes that even democracy can be and, at
times, must be tyrannical. What distinguishes proletarian dictatorship from
other class states is that the proletariat acts on behalf of humanity; its state
no longer represents class interests. The transition to socialism involves
removing all residues of class conflict, including transforming a
competitive, individualistic human nature. Marx recognizes that this
transition will be a painful process. After the revolution, when expectations
are high, production is to be collectivized and distribution is to be
equalized. The community, Marx says, becomes a universal capitalist, and
every citizen becomes a common laborer.43 Under these conditions, equal
right or bourgeois justice is fully realized. But "equal right is an unequal
right for unequal labour" and "therefore, a right of inequality, in its content,
like every right."44 Genuine equality requires treating different individuals
differently, instead of measuring everyone by the same formal standard
(e.g., hours worked). Only with the next transition, from proletarian
dictatorship to socialist society, can the bourgeois standard of equal right
be replaced by the socialist principle: ''from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs!"45
Politically, the dictatorship of the proletariat also represents a transitional
state. Marx's political theory is relatively undeveloped, perhaps to his peril.
His most developed remarks about political institutions after the
revolution occur in a discussion of the Paris Commune. There he praises
the Communards for pursuing the following measures: (1) replacement of
standing armies by the armed people; (2) introduction of universal
suffrage, immediate recall, and workers' wages for government officials; (3)
integration of executive and legislative powers in a single body to clarify
responsibility; (4) separation of church and state; (5) provision for
universal public education; and (6) decentralization of power in a federal
structure.46 Such a state, Marx argues, will gradually "wither away."
Eventually, it will cease being a political power, an in-

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stitution seemingly standing above society yet actually ruling for a specific
class. As Marx puts it, central authority persists to coordinate society, but
the "administration of things" supersedes the "domination of people." 47
This condition fits Marx's definition of freedom: "freedom . . . can only
consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating
their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common
control. . . . ''48 Once the state withers, a tremendous blossoming of
human potential will follow.
Today, Marx's revolutionary schemes can be regarded only with
considerable skepticism. There is much to rethink here, for example, the
dangers of violent revolution and the extent of state power, the
possibilities of democratic alliances and the formation of class
consciousness. The process of revising socialism began during Marx's
lifetime, well before the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1870s, debates
between democratic socialists, revolutionary communists, and social
anarchists undermined Marx's efforts to create an international proletariat.

Revisionism
Social Democracy and Revolutionary Communism
In 1864 Marx gave the inaugural address for the International
Workingmen's Association, or the First International. His address praised
the growth of cooperatives, like Owen's New Lanark, the expansion of the
trade union movement, and the political reforms that accompanied it (e.g.,
the victory of the Ten-Hours Bill in England). But he stressed that the
proletariat cannot rest content with using the bourgeois state; it must
ultimately conquer political power. The International serves this end two
ways: it combines revolutionary forces, emphasizing the proletariats'
strength in numbers; and it encourages opposition to "bourgeois wars," by
blurring national boundaries.49
Yet trouble quickly arose in the International. In 1872 the General
Council, led by Marx, passed a circular condemning the social democrats
and the anarchists, whom we discuss in the next chapter. Marx outlines his
objections to social democracy in an 1879 "Circular Letter" to Bebel,
Liebknecht, and Bracke, leaders of the German Social Democratic Party.
In strong language, he accuses them of representing the "petty
bourgeoisie":
Instead of determined political opposition, general mediation;
instead of struggle against the government and the bourgeoisie, an
attempt to win over and persuade them; instead of defiant
resistance to ill treatment from

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above, humble submission and confession that the punishment was
deserved. Historically necessary conflicts are all interpreted as
misunderstandings, and all discussion ends with the assurance that
after all we are all agreed on the main point. 50
Obviously, not. What ideas of the social democrats did Marx regard as
mistaken?
Eduard Bernstein is widely regarded as the major theoretician of the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Bernstein's central concern was
the gap between socialist theory and practice, more specifically the tension
between revolutionary rhetoric and electoral strategies. In his Evolutionary
Socialism, Bernstein revises Marxist theory and, some argue, rejects its
central concepts. Bernstein argues that history proceeds, not through
dialectical contradictions, but through organic evolutionism. Liberal
capitalism steadily moves toward democratic socialism. He regarded the
SPD's electoral gains (by 1890, they were the largest party in the
Reichstag, controlling one-quarter of the total votes) and the success of
reform legislation (Germany, under Bismarck, had the most extensive
social welfare programs in Europe) as evidence. Marx, Bernstein argues,
was too materialist and too deterministica "Calvinist without God."
Bernstein concludes that it is neither possible nor desirable to give
socialism "a purely materialist foundation."51 Socialism rests on ethical
factors; it is a result of conscious human choice.
Bernstein bases his argument on more than the SPD's stunning successes.
He claims that the economic contradictions Marx anticipated have not
emerged. Marx envisioned increasing polarization of classes as a result of
increasingly frequent and severe economic crises. Bernstein identifies
opposing factors: the presence of small and medium-size businesses
alongside large monopolies, the dispersal of property through joint-stock
companies, a general improvement in standards of living, the fluidity,
diversity, and increased cooperation of classes. In addition, capitalism has
created counterweights, for example, flexible credit, a world market,
cartels and monopolies, communication and transportation networks, to
manage and stabilize economic markets. What Marx saw as economic
crises, Bernstein portrays as trade cycles. Periods of overproduction and
underconsumption are mechanisms by which the market adjusts to
socioeconomic changes. They do not indicate fatal flaws in the basic
structure of capitalist economies.
Many of Bernstein's critics sustained Marx's theory by arguing that the
"big crash" simply had not happened yet. Bernstein responded that Marx
meant his theory to describe his own times. Since capitalism had not
collapsed and socialism had not triumphed, it was time to admit

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that Marx had been mistaken. Bernstein claimed that changing events
compelled a consistent historical materialist to rethink Marx's theory.
(This argument supports a plurality of Marxisms with a fuzzy line between
what is Marxist and Marxian.) To this pragmatic argument, Bernstein
added a more principled one. He insisted that socialism must occur
through democratic meansor not at all. Revolutionary rhetoric not only
alienated bourgeois allies and falsified historical events but it also denied
workers' real needs:
We cannot demand from a class, the great majority of whose
members live under crowded conditions, are badly educated, and
have an uncertain and insufficient income, the high intellectual
and moral standard which the organization and existence of a
socialist community presupposes. We will, therefore, not ascribe it
to them by fiction. 52
For all these reasons, Bernstein concluded that "a greater security for
lasting success lies in a steady advance than in the possibilities offered by a
catastrophic crash."53
Many of Bernstein's critics have argued that subsequent events (e.g., the
SPD's support for the German war effort and its failure to govern under
the Weimar Republic) disprove his theory. In Germany, class
collaboration led to fascism, not socialisma topic to which we return in a
later chapter. Lenin's critique of social democracy also contributed to the
eclipse of Bernstein's ideas. In 1903 Lenin declared, "The Economists
have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull
in the other directionand that is what I have done."54 His What Is to Be
Done? written during Russia's 1905 revolution, provides a program for
organizing a revolutionary socialist party. In comparing Bernstein and
Lenin, it is important to remember their different historical contexts. At
the turn of the century, Russia's economy was primarily agricultural and
roughly 80 percent of the populace were peasants. These were hardly the
preconditions Marx outlined for a socialist revolution. Late in his life,
Marx began to study Russia to explore the possibility of skipping a
historical stage by transforming feudal villages directly into socialist
communes. Lenin's efforts took a different form. He focused on the
Communist Party, more specifically, its revolutionary vanguard, as the
mechanism for transforming society during an extended dictatorship of the
proletariat.
Lenin distinguishes two forms of proletarian consciousness. Of its own
accord or spontaneously, the proletariat can only develop trade union
consciousness, a form of bourgeois ideology that limits its demands to
bread-and-butter reforms. The task of the Communist Party

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is to bring revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat from without, to
lend the economic struggle a political form. According to Lenin, the
Communist Party cannot be a broad democracy without making itself
vulnerable to suppression. A party vanguard, a small, secret, conspiratorial
band of professional revolutionaries, connected to the masses by a series of
transmission belts (e.g., unions, cooperatives, soviets, youth groups), is a
more realistic organizational strategy. 55 Lenin refers to this as democratic
centralism, but the stress is on centralism. Although Lenin vehemently
opposed personality cults, his organizational scheme is easily abused by a
powerful leader. Leon Trotsky, a Menshevik (the name of the Russian
social democrats), identified the danger early: "In inner-party politics,
these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization
substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for
the [party] organization, and, finally, a 'dictator' substitutes himself for the
central committee."56
Lenin's rationale for a party vanguard appears in his State and Revolution,
written in 1917 at the height of the Bolshevik revolution. Although he is
committed to revolution "with people as they are now," he recognizes that
means "people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and
'foremen and accountants.'"57 During the dictatorship of the proletariat,
the party uses the state as a special repressive force to transform society. It
simultaneously destroys feudal and capitalist values in order to develop an
advanced industrial economy. Paradoxically, only after the revolution,
through the rule of a party state, does Russia realize the preconditions for
socialism. Only then does the proletarian dictatorship "wither away.'' A
society that approximates Marx's vision of socialism replaces it.
Late in life, Lenin wrote about the failure of his plans. He recognized that
a small popular base forced repression of opposition parties and soviets,
that his nationalization program created a "bureaucratic swamp," and that
workers had little voice in the Bolshevik state, though it supposedly
represented their interests.58 Some of these problems are linked to the
failure of the international proletariat to support the Russian Revolution.
In his theory of imperialism, Lenin argued that revolutions in less
developed countries would cut off capitalists' sources of cheap labor, raw
materials, and force them to exploit their indigenous proletariat to the
breaking point, precipitating the worldwide revolution Marx anticipated.
Instead, the Bolsheviks faced the economic and political pressures
associated with sustaining socialism in one country.
Another, more serious problem of revolutionary communism is shared by
social democrats. Marx and Engels offer some cautionary thoughts on it.
In 1879 Marx agreed with the social democrats that the

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proletariat should work with the bourgeoisie, until the latter wanted to
stop the revolution short. Then the proletariat should oppose its previous
allies and conquer state power to. "make the revolution permanent." 59 In
1895, however, Engels presents violent revolution as an increasingly
dangerous strategy, given the layout of modern cities and modern military
technology. Using Paris as an example, he describes how a modern army
can march down broad boulevards destroying all protesters in their path.
Current conditions, he suggests, require workers to arm themselves with
votes, to fight via the ballot box, to pursue nonviolent revolution.60
It seems that the greater scale and power of the modern state poses
problems for social democrats and revolutionary communists. On the one
hand, Soviet communism leaves an ugly legacy of a command economy, a
corrupt bureaucracy, and a centralized stateof political oppression. On the
other hand, the co-optation of social democratic parties makes it difficult
to distinguish their reformist policies from welfare state liberalism. I
quoted Geoff Eley to the effect that "the most impressive movements
combine both impulses [i.e., permanent organization and mass
participation]." The question remains whether they suffice, even in
tandem. Or, is socialism dead?

Is Socialism Dead?
The best response to this question may be to ask another: in what sense?
Certainly, Marx's ideas continue to influence many forms of social
critique, far more than we can begin to consider in this final section.61
Critical theorists, known as the Frankfurt School for their origins in 1920s
Germany, contribute greatly to our understanding of mass culture and
mass psychology. Their writings range from Theodor Adorno's study of
the authoritarian personality, to Walter Benjamin's work on mechanically
reproduced artwork, to Jürgen Habermas's efforts to resurrect democratic
discourse. In addition, French structuralists and poststructuralists analyze
the unique forms power assumes in modern states. Here too is tremendous
variety, including Louis Althusser's analysis of ideological state
apparatuses; Jacques Derrida's studies of language, identity, and difference;
and Michel Foucault's genealogies of carceral institutions such as asylums,
factories, and prisons.
Marxist ideas also continue to influence political action, especially in the
Third World. Post-Leninist and, in some cases, anti-Leninist adaptations
of Marxism to national liberation struggles range from the mass line of
Chairman Mao, to Latin American dependency theory and

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guerrilla warfare, to African tribal strategies. We also cannot forget
European and American socialism, especially the New Left of the 1960s.
Although it is fashionable to criticize yesterday's hippies as today's
yuppies, many student radicals remain political activists. They are often
members of new social movements fighting for civil rights, ecology,
feminism, and peace, though with a toned-down rhetoric of class struggle.
A stronger criticism of the New Left is that it confused resistance with
revolution, that it lacked a coherent program for social change. The broad
goals and vague language of such documents as "The Port Huron
Statement" seem to support this claim. In The Agony of the American Left,
Christopher Lasch uses the free speech movement as a case in point:
At Berkeley the students might have capitalized on their free-
speech victory by pressing on to . . . other issues. Instead they
celebrated the triumph of free speech by proclaiming the stirring
political slogan: "Fuck." Why should free speech have issued only
in "fuck"? The new slogan could be counted on, presumably, to
provoke the administration into reprisals; had that become an end
in itself? 62
Lasch concludes that many of the radicals were so "deeply alienated from
American society" that institutions "embody[ing] values transcending the
present political system" seemed impossible.63 Only "nihilistic gestures"
and ''hysterical militancy" remained as available options.
Hobsbawm's fears about the future of any society without hope resurface
here. The Western socialism that, as Lasch puts it, "oscillates between
capitulation and a mindless revolutionary militancy based on irrelevant
models," has died.64 Will worse ideals fill the ensuing vacuum? Ironically,
the transformation of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may
increase this danger. According to Hobsbawm, Stalinism wasmore irony
here"good for the West." "All that made Western democracy worth living
for its peoplesocial security, the welfare state, a high and rising income for
its wage-earners, and its natural consequences, diminution in social
inequality and equality of life-changeswas the result of fear."65
Hobsbawm overstates his case and underestimates capitalists' ingenuity.
Nevertheless, it may prove harder to create a gentler and kinder America
without a serious Soviet threat.
Perhaps hope is still to be found somewhere in the socialist tradition. But
a socialism that styles itself as anticapitalism cannot survive in the post-
Cold War era either. Its proponents also need to rethink their

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ideas. Writing in the shadow of recent events, socialists are questioning
their standard dichotomies. They also recognize that stereotypes, such as
markets versus plans, democracy versus bureaucracy, even revolution versus
reform, ignore or minimize the complexity of modern politics. Although
socialist responses to their new context differ, widespread relief
accompanies the demise of actually existing socialism. I would like to
conclude by discussing three problem areas that socialists are rethinking.
The first is how to reinvigorate the politics of class struggle, absent all
claims of a materialist base, even an "ultimately determinant" one. Some
scholars, like Ellen Meiksins Wood, argue that class struggle has
continued under conservative governments. Many socialists have missed
this because they sought a different revolutionary subject, an "idealized"
proletariat. In keeping with her stress on logistics, Wood argues that
connections between class interests and socialist politics must be carefully
developed and nurtured. A new labor movement will be built only by
organizing around the "political impulses'' already present in working class
struggles. Eric Bronner proposes a similar strategy, though from a slightly
different perspective. His "socialism unbound . . . rests on little more than
an ethical commitment to a set of unrealized ideals." 66 Those ideals
include internationalism, political democracy, and economic justice.
Although class remains a unifying point under capitalism, Bronner
recognizes that identities and oppression take many forms. For him, more
than for Wood, the central issue is not what party to join but what values
to pursue through any feasible organizing strategy.
A second problem area, and one that the above authors tend to neglect, is
state power. Wood tries to reorient socialism from seizing the state to
eliminating class conflict, arguing that electoral strategies contribute to
capitalist hegemony only when political issues are detached from class
relations.67 Bronner would avoid the dilemma of reform versus revolution
by assessing the ability of the system to tolerate reform and pressing it to
its limits.68 Neither approach is worked out in enough detail.
Jürgen Habermas offers a more complex approach to current tensions
between economic and political systems. Money and power, respectively,
control these systems. That distinguishes them from the lifeworld, the site
of civic discourse and the source of civic values, shaped by political
discourse. As Habermas sees it, in late capitalist societies politicoeconomic
systems increasingly colonize the lifeworld. Communication processes
increasingly involve strategically motivated attempts to gain money, power,
or both. Nevertheless, Habermas

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claims that politicoeconomic systems ultimately cannot meet the demands
for economic prosperity and equal rights that they generate. Nor can they
produce new meanings that they could more successfully satisfy. Habermas
concludes that citizens eventually will withdraw their support for the
system, resulting in a crisis of legitimacy.
For Habermas, human beings' basic need to communicate with one
another generates an alternative to politicoeconomic systems. In his ideal
speech situation, Habermas outlines the characteristics of a more humane
society. Decisions reached under conditions approximating ideal speech
represent an uncoerced consensus. Although politicoeconomic systems
persist, the decision-making processes of ideal speech potentially allow
citizens to reassert lifeworld control over them. Habermas regards new
social movements, which arise at the seam between system and lifeworld,
as indications that political transformation remains a realistic possibility.
69
According to Habermas, these movements "resurrect"he uses the biblical
termcitizens' hopes of living meaningful lives.70 This brings us to a third
problem area, which can be addressed by returning to where we began, the
recent revolutions in Eastern Europe. For Vaclav Havel, writing in
Czechoslovakia, Habermas's systemic or structural approach to meaning is
much too easy, too simple. It misses the internal effects of the tensions
between dominant systems and human lives. Havel argues that post-
totalitarian states force individuals to split themselves. Publically, to
varying extents, citizens accept the system though they sense its falsity: to
get along, they willingly "live within the lie." To live in harmony with
oneself, to "live within the truth," is to be ''thrown" into a dissident role.
Dissidence takes many forms, none of them traditional. It includes efforts
to make the law real, to develop alternative or parallel institutional
structures, to differentiateas Habermas doesexisting structures, creating
free spaces betweeen them. For Havel, however, "the most intrinsic and
fundamental confrontation between human beings and the system takes
place at a level incomparably more profound than that of traditional
politics. . . . "71 It occurs in individual efforts to be honest in our daily
lives. Such efforts are not limited to citizens of post-totalitarian states. Of
events in Eastern Europe, Havel says, "and do we not in fact stand
(although in the eternal measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a
kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?"72
Although Havel would probably be appalled (for him, Bolshevism is
socialism), I want to suggest that there is a socialist impulse or intuition in
this remark. It is perhaps the socialist tradition's best moment. In a recent
essay, Habermas described socialism as the commitment to

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be more human than one's society allows. 73 Hobsbawm makes a similar
point less cryptically: "Socialists are there to remind the world that people
and not production come first. That people must not be sacrificed."74 If
socialism in this sense is dead, then we all should share Hobsbawm's fears.

Notes
1. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New "True" Socialism
(London: New Left Books, 1986), 182.
2. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The New Class War (New
York: Pantheon, 1982).
3. Joseph Chytry, The Aesthetic State (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), 244.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, "Lost Horizons," New Statesman & Society, 14
September 1990, 16.
5. Terrell Carver makes this distinction in "Reading Marx: Life and
Works," in The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. Terrell Carver
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 122.
6. Paul Thomas, "Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now," in Carver,
Cambridge Companion, 32.
7. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. "socialism."
8. Albert Fried, "The Course of American Socialism: A Synoptic View,"
in Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third InternationalA
Documentary History, ed. Albert Fried (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992), 3.
9. I am indebted to Isaac Kramnick with whom I first studied political
ideologies for this insight.
10. Eric Hobsbawm, "Out of the Ashes," in After the Fall: The Failure of
Communism and the Future of Socialism, ed. Robin Blackburn (London:
New Left Books, 1991), 316.
11. Denys Turner, "Religion: Illusions and Liberation," in Carver,
Cambridge Companion, 329.
12. See Dennis Fischman, Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the
Jewish Question (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).
13. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3d ed. (New
York: Harper, 1950).
14. Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, trans. and ed.
 Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971),
320.
15. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed.
Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 302.
16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 112.
17. Friedrich Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 696.

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18. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Age of Classical German
Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works (New York:
International Publishers, 1968), 610.
19. Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader,
145.
20. William Adams, "Aesthetics: Liberating the Senses," in Carver,
Cambridge Companion, 24674.
21. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 89.
22. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 223, 225.
23. Karl Marx, "Letter to Ruge (March 13, 1843)," in Selected
Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1956).
24. Marx, Grundrisse, 223.
25. Ibid.
26. Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 4.
27. Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Bloch" (September 2122, 1890), in
Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 760.
28. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978).
29. Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Tucker, Marx-Engels
Reader, 473.
30. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
31. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 608.
32. Wood, Retreat from Class, 196.
33. I use profit and surplus value interchangeably here, bypassing the
extensive controversy over how Marx derives prices from valuesor the
"transformation problem." Although Marx recognizes in volume 3 of
Capital that supply and demandor market relationsaffect prices, he
continues to assume that commodities enter into the production of other
commodities at their value. This may invalidate the labor theory of value
as a quantitative measure of exploitation under capitalism. I would argue,
however, that it continues to illuminate the quality of human relationships
in capitalist economies.
 34. Marx provides this example in Capital, vol. 1, chap. 6.
35. Marx, Capital, 1: 297.
36. Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 483.
37. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 74.
38. Marx, Capital, 321.
39. Ibid., 327.
40. Geoff Eley, "Reviewing the Socialist Tradition," in The Crises of
Socialism in Europe, ed. Christine Lemke and Gary Marks (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 34.
41. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 162.
42. Eley, "Reviewing the Socialist Tradition," 43.
43. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 83.

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44. Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," in Tucker, Marx-Engels
Reader, 530.
45. Ibid., 531.
46. Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France," in Tucker, Marx-Engels
Reader, 62728.
47. Karl Marx, "After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin," in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 545.
48. Marx, Capital, 441.
49. Karl Marx, "Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International
Association," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 51219.
50. Karl Marx, "Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke," in Tucker, Marx-
Engels Reader, 553.
51. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation,
trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York: Stockholm Books, 1961).
52. Ibid., 221.
53. Ibid., xxviii.
54. Quoted by David McLellan, Marxism after Marx (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1979), 88.
55. V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C.
Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975).
56. Quoted in McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 79.
57. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, in Tucker, Lenin Anthology, 344.
58. V.I. Lenin, "Better Fewer, but Better," in Tucker, Lenin Anthology,
73446.
59. Karl Marx, "Address to the Communist League," in Tucker, Marx-
Engels Reader, 50611.
60. Friedrich Engels, "The Tactics of Social Democracy," in Tucker,
Marx-Engels Reader, 55673.
61. For a basic collection of socialist writings, see Marxism: Essential
Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
62. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf,
1967), 185.
63. Ibid., 186.
 64. Ibid., 211.
65. Eric Hobsbawm, "Goodbye to All That," in Blackburn, After the Fall,
122.
66. Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York: Routledge,
1990), xxiv.
67. Wood, Retreat from Class, 193.
68. Bronner, Socialism Unbound, 180.
69. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Life-world
and System, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987),
374403.
70. Jürgen Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The
Revolutions of Recuperation and the Need for New Thinking," in
Blackburn, After the Fall, 2546.
71. Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State

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in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1985), 89.
72. Ibid., 3839.
73. Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today?" 45.
74. Hobsbawm, "Out of the Ashes," 324.

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