What Happened to Socialism?

Abstract

This rich and substantial history of the left was, as Geoff Eley explains in his preface, researched and written across the great divide of 1989-91, when Communism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe collapsed. Social democracy also during this period, as Eley points out, found itself ideologically hollowed out, widely rejecting its eighty-year long aspiration to transform society. Instead, it came to terms with the necessity of capi talism, and settled for electoral survival and some mitigation of the insta bility and inequity of the market system. But while this decomposition of the earlier socialist project and its insti tutions was going on, new forms of democratic activity and challenge were emerging in European and indeed other societies. Eley identifies the strongest of these as feminism, but also includes 'anti-nuclear campaigning; environmental activism; peace movements; gay-lesbian movements and the wider politics of sexuality; local community politics; squatting and the creation of alternative scenes; left nationalist and regionalist movements; and, last but not least, antiracism ...' as movements which extend the boundaries of politics and democracy. These have had their revolutionary (or nearrevolutionary) moments in the great upsurges of 1968, among both students and workers. And also, in a different context, in the protest movements against Communist regimes which took place in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Poland (1980-81) and East Germany (1989). The earlier risings against these Stalinist states were still framed in reform-Communist terms. But Eley claims these democratic movements for the tradition of the left, even in the later years when socialist ways of thinking had become discredited in these countries and were no longer available to them as narratives of opposition, as they still were in 1956 and 1968. He describes the paradox (from this point of view) of Solidarity in Poland, perhaps the most wholly working-class revolutionary movement of any time, yet militantly hostile to the ideology of socialism as it had become. But not long after this in the mid 1980s, in a pattern of 'combined and uneven development', Mikhail Gorbachev set out to mobilize new demo cratic freedoms in the USSR to achieve what he came to see as a transition to social democracy, a project which however failed. In his book, Eley aims to link together these different phases and forms of democratic activity what we might think of as the socialist and the