review

Andrew Gamble

Class Politics and

Radical Democracy

Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recent book, The Retreat From Class, is a

formidable and trenchant attack upon the arguments of what she calls
the New True Socialists.1 Marx applied the label ‘True Socialists’ to
those he accused of having fallen victim to the illusion that socialism
was ‘a question of the “most reasonable” social order’ rather than ‘the
needs of a particular class and a particular time’. Socialism no longer
had anything to do with the struggle of one class against another but
with advancing the cause of ‘Truth’, ‘Human Nature’, and ‘Man in
General’. Real cleavages were interpreted as conceptual cleavages. Con-
cepts had the power to make or destroy the world. Wood identifies the
new true Socialists of the 1980s as a disparate group of intellectuals,
many of them with a past in Althusserianism or Maoism, sometimes
both. They belong to no single party or faction, but they share a
common view of class and socialist strategy. Wood concentrates on
those who are on the political right of this current and who have done
most to develop the theoretical arguments underpinning it. But she sees
the current as a very broad one, embracing journals such as Marxism
Today and the New Statesman and becoming increasingly influential in
the Labour Party and the British Communist Party, as well as among
left-of-centre intellectuals.

This is not the first time this current has been identified. It has been
termed the ‘new revisionism’,2 ‘the newer Left’3 and, more broadly,
Eurocommunism.4 Wood’s target is rather narrower than this. She
leaves on one side those socialists who, though clearly sharing a

1 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class, Verso, London 1986.
2
Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review 150, March–April 1985. The
label ‘new revisionists’ will be used in preference to ‘new true socialists’ throughout this article.
3 Ben Fine, Laurence Harris, Marjorie Mayo, Angela Weir, Elizabeth Wilson, Class Politics, London

n.d.
4 In chapter 7 of Arguments within English Marxism, Verso, London 1980, Perry Anderson vividly

contrasts the theoretical and strategic approaches of Eurocommunism and revolutionary socialism to
the transition to socialism.

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Eurocommunist perspective, have not in her view abandoned the key
assumptions of the Marxist tradition about the nature of capitalism and
the socialist project. She regards Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm in
particular as occupying an ambiguous position. She finds fault with
their strategic judgements but notes that they still employ a framework
of class politics in their political analyses. The same is true of Nicos
Poulantzas. Wood argues that although he prepared the way for many
of the more radical later revisions, he himself never broke with Marxism.
Wood’s main purpose is to confront those socialists who have developed
new conceptions of agency, of democracy, and of socialism by explicitly
abandoning Marxism. What unites this new revisionist current is the
assumption that ideology and politics are autonomous and in no sense
the expression or product of any social basis, such as a system of class
relationships. Getting rid of classes is excised from the socialist project.
The working class is not seen as enjoying any special status within
capitalist society which gives it a privileged role in a socialist strategy.
The relationship between economic relations and politics becomes
purely contingent. Since social movements can be formed independently
of class, the struggle for socialism is redefined as a multitude of
democratic struggles in which no single one is in principle more
important than any other. Socialism becomes once again defined by
universal human goals instead of by material interests. This gives the
key role in defining the agenda for socialism to intellectuals.
Agency

Wood’s argument against these ideas is a simple one. Recognizing the

importance of class is not optional but essential for any viable socialist
project. The working class has the central role not simply because it is
the most oppressed and exploited group in capitalist society but because
its structural position as the class that produces capital gives it a unique
revolutionary potential. For Wood it is this claim that distinguishes the
Marxist position from other socialist positions and which the new
revisionists wish to abandon. If the linking of socialism to the working
class depended on its being the most oppressed group in society, then
socialism would be left rudderless if large sections of the working class
no longer appeared to be the most oppressed group in society. Wood’s
argument is that the degree of oppression to which different groups are
subject varies historically, but exploitation is a structural characteristic
of the capitalist mode of production. The exploitation of the working
class, the extraction of surplus labour in the form of surplus-value from
wage-labourers, cannot be abolished without abolishing the capitalist
mode of production itself.
Wood challenges the new revisionists to lay out the alternative analysis
of capitalism which would allow them to say that the exploitative
relation between capital and labour is no longer central to the repro-
duction of capitalism as a mode of production. In fact, the new
revisionists show little interest in questions of political economy. The
thrust of their analysis denies the linkage between economic and politics
which classical Marxism proposes. If politics and ideology are auton-
omous in the way the new revisionists suggest, then there is no need
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to debate the character of the capitalist mode of production, since it
has no reality except as a theoretical device, and it cannot have real
effects. The ground for this shift, Wood argues, is prepared by Pou-
lantzas. In his various attempts at theorizing the capitalist state and the
problem of its relative autonomy he shifts the focus from the opposition
between capital and labour to the opposition between the power bloc
and the people. This then leads in his writings to the displacement of
classes and class struggle by political organizations engaged in party
contests.
These arguments, however, have been carried very much further by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and by Paul Hirst and Barry
Hindess. They reject classical Marxism on two main grounds: Firstly
the working class has no objective interests; secondly there is nothing
in the ‘logic of capitalism’ which guarantees the development of a united
working class. The first of these claims effectively denies that the
working class can be theorized in terms of its structural role within the
capitalist mode of production. Instead Laclau and Mouffe suggest that
the working class is largely a figment of the classical Marxist imagination.
What has existed historically is a fragmented working class, whose
identities have often borne little relation to class. Workers have had
many interests other than class, and there is no tendency for it to emerge
as the dominant factor; rather the reverse. This means that, except
during very brief historical periods, it is impossible to identify a working
class for whom pursuit of class interests is pre-eminent or to define its
political consciousness. This has only ever been true of small groups of
workers who comprise a minority of the class.
The working class therefore has always remained a latent rather than
an actual force in politics. For Laclau and Mouffe this is certainly not
an accident which will be remedied in the future. Class position will
never be the factor that mobilizes all workers or even a majority. For
Paul Hirst the reason is quite plain: the epistemology of these theories
is faulty. All social theories, including Marxism, which suggest that
there is an objective underlying reality causing social and political
phenomena are false. If general theories of causality are abandoned,
then entities like class dissolve. Instead the social analyst is confronted
with a myriad of particular circumstances and phenomena.
Wood claims justifiably that Laclau and Hirst are wrong to identify all
currents of Marxism with a belief in fatalism and the world-historical
mission of the working class. At times in the Marxist tradition such
metaphysical beliefs have substituted for social and political analysis.
Fatalism has its roots in some of the writings of Marx and Engels. But
if all Marxism had offered were a new form of revolutionary chiliasm
it could never have exerted the intellectual influence which it has. There
have always been other Marxist traditions which have never looked for
ahistorical or unscientific guarantees about the future course of history.
In particular both Laclau–Mouffe and Hirst overlook the historical,
sociological and political investigations that Marxists have conducted
into the structure of class, the nature of class divisions, and the capacities
for mobilization. The Leninist tradition has sometimes been prey to
illusions about these capacities, but some of the best writing on class
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structure has come from it. Hirst is right to suggest that a general
theory which acts as a substitute for analysis of the concrete is barren.
But so too is an empiricism unguided by any theory.
Wood criticizes Laclau and Hirst for abandoning central theoretical
propositions of Marxism without ever engaging in the kind of sustained
theoretical analysis that would be necessary to justify the alternative
they are putting forward. As with so many revisers and critics of Marx
in the past, the rejected theoretical legacy still provides both the context
and the major stimulus for their work.5 A Marxism that still has
something to say has to abandon all apriori guarantees about the future.
But that is not the same as abandoning the attempt to provide a
theoretical analysis of capitalism. If that were so it really would be the
end of Marxism and the death of socialism of which we hear so much
just now. Marxism has always been at its best when it is has been open
and critical about its own assumptions and theories. But that is rather
different from fleeing the attempt to make any assumptions or to
construct any theories.
Wood reasons that the classical Marxist emphasis on the indispensability
of the working class to the socialist project does not have to be an
article of faith. It derives from the special position of the working class
within capitalism. First of all it is the exploited class—the one that must
perform surplus labour under this mode of production. Secondly it is
the producing class, without which there would be no capital. Thirdly
its role as collective producer gives it an objective capacity to found a
new mode of production which abolishes exploitation.6 Wood is careful
to stress that none of these objective features implies any necessary
consequences for political organization or political consciousness.
Rather they focus attention on the organizational means and the modes
of ideological and political struggle by which the class might overcome
its internal divisions and become a united political force capable of
realizing its potential in the struggle for socialism.
Democracy

Wood adheres to the orthodox Marxist view that capitalism is an

economic and social order which has created both the conditions
(increasing socialization of the production process) and an agency (the
working class) for the realization of a society whose relations and
institutions reflect a true ‘general interest’. The general interest claimed
for previous political arrangements has been false because classes have
not been abolished. Such claims therefore serve as a cloak for the
dominant class interest masquerading as a general interest. Only the
emancipation of the working class can bring the abolition of all classes
and only the working class can be the agent of its own emancipation.
For Laclau–Mouffe and Hirst, since there is no simple relationship
between material interests and either ideology or politics, no issues or

5
Recognition of this may explain why so many of the new revisionists still accept the label ‘Marxist’.
6
See Francis Mulhern ‘Towards 2000 or News from You-know-Where’, New Left Review 148,
November–December 1984, pp. 22–3, whom Wood quotes in making these points.

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areas of struggle are automatically or intrinsically socialist. The struggle
to realize a true general interest need not depend on the working class.
It is a democratic rather than a class struggle. Class struggles may often
be important in the fight to extend democracy but they are not essential
to it. Other forms of struggle may be more important.
In recent years, an increasing number of socialists have begun to define
socialism as the extension of democracy rather than the emancipation
of class. Apart from Laclau and Mouffe, and Hindess and Hirst, Wood
also cites Gareth Stedman Jones, Gavin Kitching, and Samuel Bowles
and Herbert Gintis. All of them tend to see a strong link between liberal
democracy and socialist democracy, treating the latter as an extension
of the former. The idea that socialism is the fulfilment of liberalism
rather than its negation is theorized in a number of ways. Bowles and
Gintis, for example, distinguish between a democracy that emphasizes
rights in property and one that emphasizes rights in persons. Laclau
places emphasis on the importance of the democratic revolution in the
modern era, which created for the first time the discursive conditions
for transforming social relations to achieve freedom and equality on a
universal basis. The specific demands associated with socialism are
subsumed within this discourse. The emergence of a particular class or
a new mode of production is of much lesser significance than the
creation of new political and ideological structures.
Wood strongly attacks these notions. She argues firstly that there is no
such thing as a democratic revolution; secondly that there is a chasm
between the socialist conception of democracy—which defines it as
popular power—and the liberal conceptions for which it means the
opposite. Under liberal democracy every effort has been made to defuse
the radical potential of popular sovereignty and to create an institutional
structure which reduces participation and insulates the decision-making
machinery of the state from popular control. The new revisionists have
an optimistic view of the ability to use the existing state to achieve
socialist objectives; and a pessimistic view of the potential of the
working class. They put their hopes not in extra-parliamentary class
struggles but in a broad social alliance that will win an electoral majority
and use the legislative machinery of the state to extend individual and
social rights.
Strategy

The differing perceptions of democracy underlie major disagreements

on strategy. Laclau’s position has recently been set out with great clarity
in Marxism Today, where he argues that in the last hundred years the
socialist tradition has produced four visions of the way in which
socialism might be achieved.7 The first of these—accepted by many
Marxists and even non-Marxists in the first half of the twentieth
century—sees socialism as the product of the development of the
productive forces to the point where capitalism can no longer provide
a framework for further advance. As the economy becomes more
socialized, so capitalism declines as a viable mode of production and
7
Ernesto Laclau, ‘Class War and After’, Marxism Today, April 1987, pp. 30–33.

117
the socialist organization of society and politics becomes more necessary,
and indeed inevitable. The second perspective was rather less confident
of the inexorable triumph of socialism. Born from the struggle in the
1920s and 1930s between democracy and fascism, it sought to arrest the
descent of capitalist states into barbarism by organizing popular fronts
of democratic forces. The working class would actively seek allies from
other parties and social groups in order to safeguard democracy against
fascist attack and to preserve the possibility of an advance towards
socialism. The third perspective identified the key struggle for socialism
as the conflict between imperialist and oppressed nations. Socialism
would be achieved by the triumph of national anti-imperialist revol-
utions, wars of liberation. By breaking the chains of imperialism at their
weakest points, the capitalist world system would disintegrate and
revolution could become once again a possibility in the capitalist
metropolis. The final perspective is that of social democracy. Particularly
prevalent in Western Europe, this has envisaged the advance to socialism
through the steady enlargement of public enterprise, collective provision
of welfare and regulation of the economy.
Laclau believes that the contemporary crisis of the Left has arisen
because the basis for all these perspectives has been eroded to the point
where it is hard to believe in any of them any more. This has led to an
acute malaise and lack of direction. What is common to all four
perspectives is that they place faith in the working class. But to abandon
this centality of the working class, Laclau argues, has become the
essential step in renewing the socialist project. What, he asks, is the
working class now central to? As a sociological description, the notion
is increasingly less acceptable because of the numerical decline and
economic fragmentation of the working class. As a political notion it
is ‘far from evident’ because of the growing importance of other types
of struggle which are not primarily working-class struggles. This means
that the working class is ‘a social agent limited in its objectives and
possibilities and not the universal class of the Marxist tradition, the
necessary agent of global emancipation.’8
If the working class is limited as an historical agent for achieving
socialism, how is this limitation to be overcome? Laclau outlines three
ways in which the problem has been tackled but rejects each in turn.
The idea of the popular front, which lies at the heart of the strategic
thinking of Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm, still conceives socialist
strategy in terms of alliances between the working class and other groups.
A second approach, particularly common in the 1960s among some
currents of the New Left, was to write off the working class as a possible
revolutionary agent and to substitute another agent, such as students
or third world liberation movements, which would fulfil the same role.
A third alternative has been to abandon the notion of any single
privileged agent, to accept the fragmentation and autonomy of radical
single-issue movements.
The last position might be thought very close to Laclau’s own, but he
rejects it in favour of an approach that emphasizes the need to link the
8
Ibid., p. 30.

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various struggles he sees as important—such as the anti-racist, feminist
and green movements. The means for doing this is a political movement
that can transcend the particular struggles of different groups by making
its supreme objective the struggle for a radical democracy. Laclau picks
out three crucial dates in the last two hundred years in the struggle for
democracy: 1789, which saw the principle of equality emerge in the
public sphere; 1848, which extended this principle to embrace socialist
demands; and 1968, which marked the proliferation of new movements
and demands that constitute the contemporary terrain of democratic
struggles. The year 1917 is conspicuously absent.
Socialism becomes subsumed as a moment within the wider struggle
for radical democracy. In Laclau’s new vision, however, there is no
blueprint of what a future socialist society might be like. The expansion
of democratic egalitarianism, he argues, does not prejudge the direction.
In struggling for it there are no longer any ‘privileged points’ for
politics. In place of the statist visions of socialism propounded by
communist and social-democratic traditions in the past, Laclau offers
the ideal of a self-regulated society in which the state is reduced to
limited and precise functions.
This is perhaps one small point of contact with Wood. She sees the
main value of the liberal democratic tradition lying in its liberal rather
than its democratic aspects; the placing of limits upon public power
rather than the encouragement of participation. Her objection to Laclau
is that he has retreated to a position that is entirely within liberalism. The
socialist project turns out after all to be a subordinate and increasingly
outmoded phase of the liberal project. Wood’s position has great logical
force. Why should we wish to continue to label as socialist projects
which in fact abandon most of what socialism has traditionally been
associated with? Laclau and others put a very strong and persuasive
argument for radical liberalism. But Wood is quite right to insist that
socialism is something else.
Wood argues, against Laclau, that class politics remains indispensable
for the socialist project. Take class away and socialism dissolves into
liberalism. Wood cites the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain as clear
evidence that fundamental class struggles retain all their capacity to
shake the social order and to pose alternatives. She finds it odd that in
a period of intensified class struggle, when the ruling class has identified
its objectives with great clarity, so many socialist intellectuals should
be willing to abandon a class perspective and to argue that the struggle
against Thatcherism is primarily political and ideological.
Class Politics and Labourism

The advocates of class politics make two key claims: (a) that the core
elements of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a class mode of production,
the materialist conception of history, remain valid; and (b) that socialism
can only be achieved through the agency of the working class because
no other group has equivalent interest or potential leverage. The first
claim continues to find wide support among socialists, and Wood rightly
points out that no other satisfactory characterization of capitalism has
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been proposed. For all the modifications and developments that have
been incorporated within it, Marx’s original theoretical conception
continues on balance to promote rather than to stifle research and to
encourage new insights into the nature of modern capitalism.9

The second claim lies at the heart of recent controversy. In those parts
of the Marxist tradition that have rejected fatalism and determinism,
there has always been a disjunction between analysing capitalism as a
functioning mode of production and establishing the necessity of its
overthrow by the working class. Wood agrees that nothing in the
way capitalism develops makes socialism and the radicalization of the
working class inevitable. The question is whether the potential for
revolution can be realized by adequate modes of organization and
leadership.

This does raise major problems which Wood never really confronts in
her book. In pursuing class politics, can one avoid the dominant form
that it has assumed up to now in advanced capitalist societies, the
politics of labourism? Labourism involves using the independent organ-
izations of the working class to defend working-class living standards
within capitalist society without challenging the nature of that society.
This position is presented with great relish and venom by David
Selbourne, who perhaps deserves a chapter to himself in a future edition
of Wood’s book.10 He argues that the private interests of labour bind
it indissolubly to capital, and make socialist hopes for the development of
revolutionary consciousness a grievous delusion. Labourism promotes
compromise and integration. Only an organized labour movement could
hope to overthrow capital; but once organized, labour movements have
found that the advantages of cooperating with the capitalist order have
generally outweighed any gains from subverting it. The private interest
of organized labour lies in the continuance of capitalism not its destruc-
tion. This undermines any politics based on the idea of using the
independent organizations of the working class to achieve socialism.
What the Left cannot understand, argues Selbourne, is that Thatcherism
is not successful through some ideological sleight of hand by which it
has confused workers as to their real interests. It actually gives many
workers what they most want, which their own unions can no longer
deliver. It actively satisfies their real ‘objective’ interests. That is why
so many supported it in 1979 and 1983. Selbourne’s position is stated
in extreme terms and has been little debated on the left. Yet it mirrors
a major Left perspective on class politics—the critique of Labourism
and the limits of social-democratic politics. Selbourne differs from Left
critics of Labourism because he believes that class politics can never
transcend Labourism. The mass of the workers will never consent to
be led by a revolutionary party to overthrow capital.

Much of the Left critique of Labourism has concentrated on showing

how in practice social-democratic parties have always collaborated with
capital and never confronted it. Their perspective has always been
9
The most recent example is what Alan Carling is calling ‘rational choice Marxism’. See New Left
Review 160, November–December 1986.
10
David Selbourne, Left Behind: Journeys in British Politics, Jonathan Cape, London 1987.

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economic–corporate rather than hegemonic, and election to office has
always been the occasion for postponing radical change rather than
introducing it.11 Many of these analyses have been extremely detailed
and persuasive critiques of the shortcomings of social-democratic par-
ties. But they always avoided pessimism by implying that there was an
alternative strategy for socialist parties. They could adopt a genuine
socialist programme, campaign for its acceptance by the electorate, and
be prepared to carry it through in office. Such an alternative depends
on the possibility of developing a radical class politics within the
constraints of a parliamentary regime. It is this possibility that is
rigorously explored in Adam Przeworski’s analysis of social democ-
racy.12 What he argues with exceptional clarity is that while social-
democratic parties will never establish socialism through a gradual
process of reform, the chances of achieving mass support except through
the programmes and organizations of social democracy are slim. Social
democracy continues to founder on the reefs that Rosa Luxemburg
identified: either abandonment of the movement’s mass character or
abandonment of its final goals.

Przeworski defines socialism in classical Marxist terms as a society in

which labour time is reduced to a minimum, class is abolished, and
human beings are emancipated from all avoidable constraints. He argues
that this remains a utopia which is not a practical alternative within
existing politics. Social-democratic policies are never socialist in this
sense. They aim to improve capitalism through the pursuit of full
employment, equality and efficiency. This, says Przeworski, is a second
best but the best that is possible. Class politics under the constraints of
capitalist social relations and the rules of a parliamentary regime will
lead not towards socialism but to the improvement of the material
conditions of the working class within the capitalist order. Whether the
position of workers as buyers and sellers of commodities in a commercial
society is best satisfied through individual or collective means is a
practical question full of significance for electoral politics but of little
account for socialism. Socialism, argues Przeworski, if it means anything
must signify the abolition of the pursuit of profit, wage slavery and
class divisions. Socialism is not yet another social order. It is the end
of all social orders, a society free of alienation. The problem for socialists
is that it is not easy to demonstrate that capitalism generates a need for
freedom which could make possible and plausible a political transition
towards socialism. The advocates of class politics have traditionally
argued that the struggle for immediate material improvements will
grow into a revolutionary struggle for emancipation and the abolition
of class. But so far in the parliamentary regimes of advanced capitalism
it has shown little likelihood of doing so. The struggle to make
capitalism more efficient and humane has not brought socialism any
closer.

11
Major contributions to this critique include Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, London 1973;
David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism, Cambridge 1975; Tom Nairn, ‘The Nature
of the Labour Party’, in Perry Anderson, ed., Towards Socialism, London 1965.
12
Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, Cambridge 1985; and ‘Social Democracy as a
Historical Phenomenon’, New Left Review 122.

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Przeworski’s logic seems to me compelling. The struggle for full
employment and greater equality that characterizes social democracy is
a necessary but also a limited project, which carries no likelihood of
transforming capitalism into socialism. Those on the Left who wish to
dispute the central role of the working class and make the pursuit of
radical democracy and social justice the primary goal of the Left are
engaged in an argument not about socialism but about social democracy.
They are attacking the particular mode in which social democracy has
operated hitherto. But it would be wrong to suggest, as Wood tends
to do, that it is a simple matter to reject Labourism as the new
revisionists do yet still make class politics central. The dilemma for
socialists is that if social democracy manages capitalism successfully
then the workers’ movement loses its radicalism and becomes reconciled
to capitalism. If it is unsuccessful, it becomes marginalized in electoral
politics and socialism as an idea becomes discredited. Both outcomes
can be observed in advanced capitalist countries at the present time.

What this means for socialists is that either we settle for being radical
liberals and seek the best available means to reform capitalism, or we
try to keep alive the socialist project by constructing a much wider
movement of opposition to capitalism than a Labourist movement
can sustain. In a creaking ancient régime like Britain’s, certain basic
constitutional reforms, including electoral reform, would be needed to
facilitate the emergence of such a new political movement. There is no
guarantee that it would triumph. But at least it would hold open the
possibility of a radically different society which Thatcherism and other
forces of the New Right are doing their best to obliterate.

Thatcherism is unquestionably a form of class politics, dedicated to the

reconstruction and strengthening of the capitalist order. But part of its
success is that it fights the class war on the terrain of national–popular
issues. A successful Left class politics, whether oriented towards social
democracy or socialism, has to win on that terrain too. Wood is wrong
not to recognize the novel elements in Thatcherism that have helped
restore the hegemony of the ruling class in Britain and enabled it to
wage the class war with such ruthlessness and energy. But she is right
to emphasize that Thatcherism makes little sense abstracted from a class
analysis of the British social formation.

Wood’s book is timely for focusing sharply the issues which socialists
in Britain and elsewhere have had to confront as they seek ways of
escape from the debilitating legacy of Labourism. Readers of this review
do not need reminding of that legacy. Wood poses the issue sharply as
a choice between the radical democracy of the new revisionists and the
socialism of class politics. But the real way forward may well lie in
combining insights from both. The growth of a socialist movement
may first require the radical reforms to extend democracy which the
British ancien régime, usually with the full support of the Labour Party,
has always resisted. Only then perhaps, with the withering away of
Labourism, might class politics in the broad sense conceived by Ellen
Wood and others begin to generate the kind of socialist movement
which would challenge capitalism rather than sustain it.
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