Socio-economic Formation Research Articles

Foundation and Historical Evolution of Indian Constitutionalism

Indian constitutionalism is embedded in the culture, geography, history, sociology, and politics of the country. The Western Modernity and Indian Tradition have uniquely fused to engender this construct that has gone into the mixed cultural and socio-economic formations and political ideological spectrum that is contemporary India. Its constitutional foundations and democratic developmental state as well as strategies of development have been predicated on a middle path between bourgeois democratic rights, socialistically inspired economic rights and ecologically sustainable capitalist development. It is a measure of the resilience of our constitutionalism that it has made possible the transitions from a predominantly parliamentary regime driven by the prime ministerial executive to divided coalition/minority governments with widest possible federal power-sharing under a judiciary-driven political system. It appears to be a far cry from the Westminster-inspired parliamentary-federalism in the White Commonwealth and is somewhat reminiscent of the US American constitutionalism premised on separation of powers and checks and balances. Our constitution is based on the ideals of liberalism, welfare state, parliamentary federal government with a strong Centre, electoral and multi-party democracy. These ideals are enshrined in our Preamble, Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles of State Policy. The constitution also delineates the separation of powers of the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary. Constitutional values have been fortified by parliamentary amendments as well as by judicial interpretations and path breaking decisions on important issues like ‘basic structure of the constitution’ and powers of the Parliament to enact laws amending the constitution. However, this over-determinative federalizing effect on parliamentary component of government is aggravated due to party system decay, fragmentation, and regionalization. Collective responsibility of the Council of Ministers to the Parliament and individual accountability of ministers to the Prime Minister has become fragmented and transferred to the powerful chief ministers causing distortions. Party system reforms are imperative to reinvent authentic parliamentary-federal governance consistent with our constitution. It is also notable that a successful transition from state-led strategy of economic development to one with a gradually expanding role of the market forces—national and multinational—has also been made. Radical democratic decentralization of political power is making slow headway through constitutional amendments and grassroots and social movements.

Gambling and the Contradictions of Consumption

This article argues that the emergence of “problem gambling” as a distinct social phenomenon is the result of a particular convergence of discourses and socioeconomic formations that express the underlying contradictions of late-modern consumer societies. Although historically gambling has been criticized for undermining the ethic of production, today the notion of problem gambling is articulated in terms that are oppositional to the ideology of a “consumption ethic” based on the values of self-control, self-actualization, responsibility, and reason. This is related to wider socioeconomic trends whereby the decline of external forms of regulation is matched by rising demands for individual self-control, which is conducted through consumption. In the case of gambling, the liberalization and deregulation of the industry and the simultaneous expectation that individual players govern themselves express the tensions inherent in consumer capitalism and create the conditions for the emergence of the problem gambler as a unique historical type.

Produção de conhecimento

O presente estudo trata de um esforço para, a partir do que o próprio Marx descreveu como sendo o seu método e rastreando a aplicação que ele fez, explicitar as características gerais desse método, com o fim de contribuir para que sua aplicação possa se dar para aqueles pesquisadores, do campo marxista, que têm se dedicado a investigar a educação. Disso deriva que seu objeto de estudo não tem como foco o conhecimento, mas sim a produção de conhecimento, entendida como uma particular produção que compõe a produção em geral na atual formação econômico-social. De maneira sintética, busca-se exemplificar qual seria a natureza de uma aplicação do método em ciência da educação no que concerne à produção de conhecimento na prática científica e à produção de conhecimento escolar.

Introduction: The MIRAB model in the twenty-first century

Abstract: The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at a conference in February 2004, on the theme ‘Beyond MIRAB: The Political Economy of Small Islands in the Twenty-First Century’. Several of the papers in the collection point towards the emergence of a new three-way taxonomy of small-island socioeconomic formations, comprising MIRAB, PROFIT and SITE ideal-types. The key economic flows in the first are remittances and aid; in the second, jurisdictionally-related flows such as tax-haven and money-laundering transactions; and in the third, tourism revenues. All three ideal-types correspond to potentially sustainable temporary equilibria, but in all cases the existing set-up is path-dependent, and subject to regime switch if disturbed. Conceptualisation of the small-island world as a field of multiple equilibria and path dependence points to the future importance of event studies by island researchers. The collection includes also new research on the theory of remittances, and case studies of the MIRAB process and the transnational migrant diaspora.

Socio-Economic Formations in Pre-Colonial Arunachal Pradesh: Myth and Reality

Socio-Economic Formations in Pre-Colonial Arunachal Pradesh: Myth and Reality

Spatial Integration and Geographic Modernization : Review of Theories and Synthesis

The main concern of this paper is to combine the process of spatial integration with that of geographic modernization. Spatial integration is defined as a process by which the combination of centrality and marginality forms the basic contradiction of the spatial dialectic: the spatial struggle. Whereas geographic modernization is a process related to the development and the mutual transformation of terrestrial space and socio-economic formations leading to new spatial forms. The paper argues that the underlying mechanism of spatial integration is the geographic transfer of social surplus product. Whereas geographic modernization is the outcome of the geographic mobility of productive forces.

Racial Variations in Males' Commuting Times in Atlanta: What Does the Evidence Suggest?*

Using a sample from the comparatively most privileged group of black males, those married and living with a working spouse, this article investigates how race-based residential locations and the spatial structure of labor markets affect commuting experiences. This research uses the most sophisticated commuting data available at the time the research was conducted, the 1990 5 percent Public-Use Microdata Samples for the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, and again confirms severe spatial mismatch problems for central-city blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, household formation, and access to automobiles. However, the situation with black males living in suburban areas differs significantly as those in the southern (predominantly black) suburbs show considerable evidence of spatial mismatch, whereas the northern (predominantly white) suburbs show no such evidence. *I am grateful to Luke Marzen, Joe Weber, and five anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback that has substantially improved this paper.

Genesis of feudalism in Western Europe and its influence to the globai process of history: The conceptions of L. Vasilyev and E. Gudavičius

The purpose of this article is to compare E. Gudavičius' conception of feudalism with the Russian orientalist L. Vasilyev's attitude to this issue. Both historians treat themselves as Marxists (in the Western meaning of it, i.e. supporters of the Asian mode of production). Consequently, their views on the development of the history of mankind are similar but not equal. In this article, feudalism is treated as a historical and socioeconomic formation and some stage of human development during which the feudal mode of production was dominating. L. Vasilyev describes the stage of feudalism in Western Europe as the age of orientalisation of social structure, i.e. as a regress. Only the rebirth of Antiquity bore capitalism. E. Gudavičius stresses that feudalism created an individual producer (peasant) farm and consequently it was an essential progress in the social development of the societies of Western Europe. The character of the social structure of Germanic kingdoms in the early Middle Ages differed essentially from oriental societies in the stage of early politogenesis. The reason for that was the alodization of Germanic society. So the prefeudal stage (the term of E. Gudavičius) as well as the feudal stage was unique in both chronological and geographical senses (as for this aspect, Western Europe is comparable maybe only with medieval Japan). In the early Middle Ages, a necessary condition of the feudalisation of the periphery of Western Europe was the influence of the neighbouring (already feudal) countries. Otherwise, the social structure of peripheral societies would have been developing like in the Orient. L. Vasilyev affirms convincingly that market relations in Germanic society in the early Middle Ages were suppressed by vertical (subordinating) and corporative connections. In this sense, Western Europe became similar to the Orient. Nevertheless, the main difference was that private property remained in Western Europe. Private property enabled the development of market relations when civilization and technologies were restored. Medieval cities and burghers undermined feudalism and were the first sprouts of the capitalist structure. L. Vasilyev's statement that capitalism is the consequence of a structural rebirth of Antiquity is not very convincing. The structural heritage of Antiquity was a primary stimulus during the process of the genesis of feudalism. Later, feudalism developed spontaneously and the part of the heritage of Antiquity was only auxiliary. It is very doubtful that the historical experiment of the structural synthesis took place in medieval Western Europe (according to L. Vasilyev's conception it also took place in the Hellenistic Orient and in the Byzantine Empire). Already, during the stage of the genesis of feudalism, a social mutation (i.e. qualitative change) took place in Western Europe. So, in general, there was no more structural synthesis but spontaneous development. On the other hand, the mentioned L. Vasilyev's conception was not adapted to much more prospective cases like the Philippines and especially Latin America.

Comprehension of rapidly transforming landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century

The article presents landscapes as natural, historical, cultural, social and political phenom-ena, and above all as a meaningful part of the environment. We will argue – by giving a contextual framework of landscape changes followed by four case studies from Central and Eastern Europe – that comprehen-sion of landscapes has declined in the 20thcentury. Along with urbanization, globalization and other societal processes rapidly varying socio-economic formations have caused alienation: changes in power result in changes in a society's values and thus some landscape elements are disintegrating, fading or disappear-ing and, as a result, these landscapes are taking on new, altered or modified appearances, functions and meanings. Every change in landscape needs some time to become accepted but if this re-coding of what is regarded as valuable is constantly changing, people become confused, with resultant physical conse-quences: land abandonment; illegal dumping; ill fitting infrastructures; inappropriate housing developments; etc. The main question is whether modern development, e.g. tourism, enhances the relationship between people and the landscape.

El Campaniforme en la región cantábrica: un fenómeno arqueológico en el seno de las sociedades calcolíticas del norte de la Península Ibérica

The aim of this article is to approach the Bell-Beaker phenomenon not as an isolated manifestation but as a cultural element integrated into the socio-economic dynamics of the Chalcolithic societies. We discard here the descriptive study of material culture, i.e. the typological-comparative approach, highly developed in an eminently empiricist tradition of research and furthermore unnecessary for the progress of this work. First, we examine the archaeological evidence focusing on find contexts in order to adequately characterize the Bell-Beaker presence in Cantabria. Subsequently, a consideration on the involvement of the Bell Beaker components in the exchange models and the funerary practices of the Cantabrian Chalcolithic allows us to suggest several hypotheses concerning its participation in the socio-economic change processes documented in this spatial- temporal realm. The aim is to offer an alternative interpretation of this archaeological reality, that, despite its undeniable distinctiveness, when regarded in this way loses that phenomenal character and turns out to be a part of the interacting elements within a socio-economic formation immersed in a process of change.

Immovable: Willa Cather’s Logic of Art and Place

IMMOVABLE: W lLLA C A T H E R ’S LOGIC o f A r t a n d P l a c e M a r í a C a r l a S á n c h e z After the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather received so many inquiries concerning the novel’s historical detail and her own compositional methodology that she addressed an open letter to the public in the Commonweal magazine. In the course of describing her visits to New Mexico and the inspiration she took from its people and architecture, Cather indulged in a slight digression: May I say here that within the last few years some of the newer priests down in that country have been taking away from those old churches their old homely images and decorations , which have a definite artistic and historic value, and replacing them by conventional, factory-made church furnish­ ings from New York?. . . All Catholics will be sorry about it, I think, when it is too late, when all those old paintings and images and carved doors that have so much feeling and indi­ viduality are gone— sold to some collector in New York or Chicago, where they mean nothing. (“On Death,” reprinted in Willa Cather on Writing 6) In fact, this sentiment matches one expressed by the novel’s protago­ nist, Father Latour, on his first night in the settlement of Agua Secreta. Admiring his hosts’ household shrine, Father Latour finds that its hand­ made wooden saints “were much more to his taste than the factorymade plaster images in his mission churches in Ohio— more like the homely stone carvings on the front of old parish churches in Auvergne” (Death 28). For Cather, urban and frontier spaces were marked not merely by differing geographic and socioeconomic formations, but also by differing types of aesthetic cultures. In her novel and letter, the urban figures both as the source of artificial, “factory-made” mass culture and as the site of legitimate culture’s ultimate market (the location of commerce and “collectors”). Chicago and New York emerge as no dif­ ferent in this formulation: in their cosmopolitanism and distance from the Southwest, the two cities are alike for Cather. Neither can appreci­ ate the artisanal crafts being hawked in its environs, nor can those items retain any of their intrinsic meaning. Whatever it is that consti­ tutes their “feeling and individuality,” their “definite artistic and historic 118 WAL 3 8 .2 Sum m er 2 0 0 3 value” inheres not only in them, but also in their original environment. Out of context, the beloved material elements of the Southwest cease to have any charm: one might imagine that they become as unremarkable and sterile as the factory replacements being purchased in their stead. As a writer who spent her career moving back and forth among geographic regions, and translating the societies and cultures of those regions to one another, Cather believed profoundly in an idea now often rejected and certainly rendered problematic: the ability of art to transcend social and temporal barriers. That transcendence compiemented her own devotion to literal and metaphorical movement, or, in Joseph Urgo’s terms, migration. Her well-known philosophies concern­ ing the nature of great art consistently reject any stylistic trait that, to her mind, burdens it with too much of the surrounding material world. In “The Novel Démeublé,” Cather took aim against journalistic, “overfurnished ” literature; her criticisms of realism’s excesses describe it as weighed down literally and figuratively (35). Cather’s investment in art’s transcendent capabilities remained constant throughout her life. Yet at times she expressed great pessimism concerning that transcen­ dent power; ironically enough, this expression often accompanied her writings about her beloved West and Southwest. To return to Cather’s Commonweal letter: why is it that the beauty of the Southwest’s “old paintings and images and carved doors” will not migrate perfectly to new homes in Chicago and New York? I suggest that the answer to this question lies not only in the racially tinged romanti­ cism with which Cather and many of her generation approached the Southwest and celebrated its senses of history...

On Globalization: Capitalism in the 21st Century

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Formations Internationalization and Capitalism: From Dualism to Marginalization The World Economy and Capitalism: Capitalist Globalization of the Economy and Technology Capital Accumulation in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century: the End of Development The Metamorphosis of the Firms: National, Multinational, Transnational Globalization and European Integration: Eurocentrism and Westernization Social Class and Political Power: Authors, Actors and Institution Alternative Policies to Globalization: A Polycentric View Toward Mediterranean Co-development Bibliography Index

The Troubled Triangle: Populism, Islam and Civil Society in the Arab World

Civil society in the Arab world has revitalized itself in the last two decades due to internal, regional, and international factors. Internally, new socio-economic formations have been growing steadily, as the autocratic and/or populist regimes have no longer been able to accommodate or completely suppress them. Regionally, protracted armed conflicts have weakened the state, exposed its impotence in managing such conflicts, and drained its resources. Meanwhile, other regional developments have unwittingly empowered new and old constituencies within each Arab state. Internationally, the patron-client relationship between Arab regimes and the two superpowers has either ended or been greatly altered. The global wave of democratization has also had its marked demonstration effect on the expanding Arab middle class. The responses by Arab regimes to their civil societies indicate as many prospects for further democratization as against it. The modernizing monarchies, namely of Jordan and Morocco, have impressively engineered a smooth transition toward more democratic governance. Their example may tilt the balance toward greater democratic prospects in the entire region, prospects that promise to enhance the peaceful settlement of some of the region's protracted conflicts while also growing in strength from such settlements.

The politics of religion in Postcommunist Russia*

Russians lost a state and a ruling party in 1991. But more than this, they lost a belief system that had defined their entire existence. Whether or not they had internalised its values, Marxism-Leninism explained the place that Russians occupied in the world in which they lived: their place in their own society, and the place of the USSR itself in a wider process of global change. It had been the official ideology for more than two generations; and by 1989, when the last Soviet census was conducted, fewer than 10 per cent had been born before the October Revolution and fewer still had any conscious memory of a different society. I Official theory suggested that, as time went on, religious superstitions would die out along with other attitudes and values that arose from presocialist socioeconomic formations that were contrary to the principles of communist morality. Western social scientists, for their part, agreed that a regime was likely to have established itself firmly once it had become the predominant influence upon the political memory of more than half of its adult population, a condition the USSR had satisfied by the 1960s.

National Narratives, Postnational Narration

National Narratives, Postnational Narration Donald E. Pease (bio) For Homi Bhabha This is my final impression. The meanest mariners, renegades, and castaways of Melville’s days were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing. These know everything. —C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways If what Jean-François Lyotard has called the postmodern condition entailed the dismantling of the Enlightenment’s grand narratives, the nation, as the surface on which those master narratives were inscribed, also names the space in which that condition has become pervasive. The metanarratives nations fashioned out of them constituted the historically effective mechanisms whereby the Enlightenment’s ideals of freedom and equality were transmuted into universal “rights” rather than local demands. But in the era of postcolonialism and globalization, the once hegemonic narrative of the nation has been unseated. These asymmetrical but interdependent socio-economic formations share responsibility for the demotion of the nation-state to the status of a residual unit of economic exchange in the global economy. Once believed crucial for membership in the world system, the [End Page 1] nation-state has been recast as a tolerated anachronism in a global economy requiring a borderless world for its effective operation. 1 Both globalization and postcolonialism begin with the assumption that while the nation-state may not be dead exactly, it has undergone a drastic change in role. The world economy requires socially and territorially more complex organizations than nation-states, which have subsequently become splintered rather than developmental in form. The time bound and enclosed nation-state whose institutional form once foreclosed other possibilities has given way to more complex patterns of interdependence grounded in the belief that the local and international are inextricably intertwined. Global tribes with widespread diaspora networks, epistemic communities with transnational allegiances, migrant labor forces, and radically pluralist groups now construe nation-building as a provisional and highly unreliable linkage between universalism and territorial exclusion. 2 Although globalization and postcolonialism have both emerged at the site of the postnational, however, they differ radically in the significance they associate with the nation’s change in status as well as the grid of intelligibility whereby they would calculate it. Were they to be construed as narratives, these formations might themselves be conjoined in the observation that while postcolonialism “narrates” the processes whereby anti-imperial nationalisms speak back to transnational capital in the name of disparate “peoples,” globalization narrativizes the processes whereby transnational capital manages national populations in the name of the state. As this antithetical formulation would suggest, the postnational designates the complex site wherein postcolonialism’s resistance to global capital intersects with the questions the global economy addresses to the state concerning the nation’s continued role in its management. The category of the “narrative” has been invoked at this juncture to represent heuristically the distinction between these discursive formations and to bring into focus the topic that organizes the contributions to this special issue of Modern Fiction Studies; namely, the role that narratives played in national formation and the deformations of the postnational. In what follows, the term postnational will function in different registers—postnational narratives, national narrativity, postcolonial narration—that I hope thereafter to transmute into the variables [End Page 2] grounding its terrain. It names the site in-between the nation and the state that is traversed by these multiple and heterogeneous acts of narration. These narrative activities inscribe “national peoples” within a space that is neither organic nor contractual, neither the origin nor the end of the nation, but in-between the national and these different acts of narration. National and Postnational Narratives With the intention of demonstrating that they authorize very different narrative protagonists, a distinction between national and postnational narratives might be provisionally drawn at the line demarcating the temporal from the critical inflection of “aftering.” Postnational narratives might, as a consequence, be understood either to constitute belated accommodations to global capital or to narrate forms of resistance. The narrative of global capital is accomodationist in that it simply recasts the state in the diminished role of manager. It redefines national narratives as instruments of state rule through the reproduction of the collective illusion that the state is an...

Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827 (review)

396 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 of Berglund's book as the symbol of eighteenth-century female wish-fulfilment, does not constitute Austen's final word on the subject. Perhaps the largest problem with this work is its historical arbitrariness and cultural vacuity. The introductory survey of the position of middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth century certainly explains the interest of these writers in the social and psychological dimensions of domestic space, but it does not account for (or even recognize) a much longer, larger cultural interest. It is as if house imagery bloomed suddenly among these three women writers in response to new or sharply felt social conditions. The houserepresents -owner (or-ought-to) theme, of course, goes back through Palladio to Vitruvius, and its literary history is rich: elaborately treated in the works of Roman poets, revived in England with the country-house poems of Jonson, Donne, and Marvel, re-idealized by Pope, Fielding, Smollett, and Byron, and surfacing in many less obvious works from Defoe 's A Journal of the Plague Year to Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, the image of the house has been a standard fixture of English literature. Berglund's rather mechanical dichotomy between male and female experiences of confined space (for men "there is never any doubt ... that confinement is bad and liberty good. ...[PJersecution ... comes from outside their family circle," pp. 16, 102) pays no attention to the literary works of Defoe (and only briefly mentions Richardson), or to the critical work, among others, of W.B. Camochan and John Bender. Although Berglund cites Mark Girouard's indispensable Life in the English Country House, she makes no comparable use of his rich historical background to contextualize the apparently dramatic debuts of her chosen authors . Woman's Whole Existence follows the boundaries of gendered literary space; it does not push them. Cynthia Wall University of Virginia Gary Kelly. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ? + 328pp. £35.00. ISBN 0-19-812272-1. The political importance of women's writing, and particularly women's fiction, in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is now well established. Among the critics who have contributed over the past twenty years or so to our developing understanding of this literature, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey, Terry Lovell, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd, and Patricia Meyer Spacks spring immediately to mind. So does Gary Kelly. Alongside the work of these female and feminist commentators, Gary Kelly's studies of fiction in the Revolutionary period—The English Jacobin Novel (1976) and English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)—scrupulously map the interventions made by novels in political debate and ideological struggle. In doing so, they inevitably engage with the importance of women's writing; and in Kelly's recent book on Mary WoUstonecraft , Revolutionary Feminism (1992), and now in Women, Writing, and Revolution, that focus on the revolutionary role of women has become explicit. In the preface to Women, Writing, and Revolution Kelly presents his method of "historical enquiry" as having "much to offer" both to "women's literary studies" and to "Uterary and cultural studies in general" (p. vi). And he enlists strong feminist support for this unexceptionable position, quoting both Rita Felski and Laurie Finke on the importance of investigating the particular meanings of gender and feminism within specific cultural and REVIEWS 397 socio-economic formations. Thereafter, KeUy confines his engagement with current feminist analyses to footnote references and concentrates on offering the results of his own "historical enquiry." His study is divided into two equal sections: "Women and Writing in the Revolutionary Decade" focuses on the 1790s; "Women, Writing, and the Revolutionary Aftermath" deals with the remaining thirty years of his chosen period. Both sections follow exactly the same pattern: a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period is foUowed by chapters on the careers of three individual women—Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton. Through these case-studies of women who, in very different ways, "challenged discursive , generic, and stylistic orders that subordinated women and their writing" (p. vi...

Bronze age at San Fernando. A peripherral socio-economic formation in the atlantic coast of Cádiz

We show a summary about Bronze Age in the island of San Fernando. Archaeological basis are analyzed to study the societies of the midle of the second millennium B.C. They are peripheric communities who live in the island, where they use natural resources, fundamentally molluscs, which generate an important agriculture, so there is a clear relation of dependence with regard to a nuclear center in the interior contrysides.

A Return to Civilization or "Formational Isolation"?

The crisis of the theory of socioeconomic formations has recently become clearly apparent in our social philosophy. Earlier as well, the formational approach, with its presumption that the new order has decisive advantages, caused perceptible epistemological difficulties associated with the effect of inverted perspective. It followed from the theory that socialist Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cuba were a whole epoch ahead of the USA and other developed countries of the West that had preserved the outmoded capitalist order.

Environmental Exploitation and Social Structure in Prehistoric Southeast Spain

Our main concern is not only to understand past environments and societies, but also to consider the present dramatic aridification process which threatens large parts of the southeast of the Iberian peninsula and North Africa. The introduction of a more technical 'archaeology' in recent years has produced a growing body of palaeo-environmental data. Its interpretation proceeds in a rather mechanical and isolated way, producing monolithic 'histories' of different aspects of the same reality. Our proposal for an archaeological theory is based on three factors which interact to form a totality (termed the socioecological system): the socioeconomic formation, the social exploitation of natural resources and the natural environment. The dialectical relationship between the socioeconomic formation and the natural environment takes place by means of social exploitation. As the empirical evidence in the archaeological record is the result of the interaction of these three factors, we analyse as a case study the eco-archaeological implications of the material record from Gatas, a Bronze Age settlement in southeast Spain.

New 'True' Socialism

In her recent book entitled The Retreat From Class, Ellen Meiksins Wood suggests that the last decade witnessed a revival of what she terms socialism. She points out that the principal feature of this 'true' socialism is the fact that it prides itself on a rejection of Marxist 'economism' and 'class-reductionism,' and as a result has virtually excised class and class struggle from the socialist project. In consequence, Meiksins Wood continues, the distinctive feature of this current is the autonomization of idealogy and politics from any social basis, and more specifically from any class foundation.1 The Retreat From Class is constructed around a series of case studies each of which closely analyzes the way in which a prominent philosopher, sociologist or historian sought to adopt and develop an approach of this kind.2 In each case, Meiksins Wood demonstrates how the attempt to 'autonomize' the instances of the ideological and state superstructures from any direct relation of determination by the economic infrastructure, is complemented by an argument which views these instances as in turn exercising a greater or lesser degree of determination over the economic base. The most important implication that may be drawn from these studies, she suggests, concerns how the school of 'true' socialism understands the working classes' role in the process of transition to a postcapitalist society. Briefly stated, by denying any necessary connection between the economic infrastructure of society and the instances of the ideological and state superstructures, these theoreticians effectively deny the Marxian view of the working class as the principal agents in the revolutionary struggle. Rather, because the development of a consciousness for social change no longer depends on the agent's direct relation to the economic infrastructure, it becomes possible to argue that the fight for a more 'just' and 'equitable' society may incorporate any group (for example, the women's movement, ecology groups, minority rights associations, and so forth) that expresses a desire to bring about changes to the current socio-economic formation. The traditional workers' movement for the attainment of a socialist mode of production is emptied of its class content and replaced by an eclectic struggle to implement, what