Is there a socialist path to socialism?

Abstract

In this article I explore some wider implications of the collapse of 'socialist development' in the Third World and its implications for the theory and practice of development in general and the politics of development in particular. I argue further that the current demise of 'socialism' on a world scale provides the opportunity for bringing the field of 'development studies' or Third World studies back into the mainstream of comparative social science (especially political science) where it belongs and from where it has been extruded for too long. For the history of these 'actually existing socialism(s) in diverse regions of the world has dramatically underlined the universality of the fundamental problems in politics everywhere, and especially the complex relationships between development, democracy, socialism, and (to use the unfashionable term) modernisation. The classical Marxist tradition 'Socialism is a protean concept', argues Gordon White. Any discussion of it in this context thus requires a clear distinction between the means and ends of socialism, that is between 'paths' for getting there and 'end-states'.2 It is clear that for Marx and Engels socialism was an end-state and presupposed certain prior conditions in the socio-economic and political structure of societies and in their associated intellectual cultures and normative systems. There is no basis in classical Marxist theory for a society to be socialist without these necessary preconditions first being fulfilled. Socialism, in this tradition, is a specific societal form constituting an advanced (and for some a final) stage in a developmental sequence. Like Adam Smith before him, Marx held (perhaps Eurocentric) assumptions about progress which were common in the 19th century.3 He regarded industrialisation as the irreducible and necessary basis and precondition for the building of socialism, and it is therefore clear why he thought that the painful processes of industrialisation could not be socialist processes. He and Engels were also contemptuous of European and other peasantries as potential agencies of historical change, comparing the structural characteristics of peasant society in France, for instance, to a 'sack of potatoes' and dismissing the 'idiocy of rural life' as a totally improbable context for socialism.4 He regarded with pitiful