Socialisms: Old and New

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Blairite propaganda, April 20, 2008 By  M. A. Krul (London, United Kingdom) – See all my reviews
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Tony Wright, historian and Member of Parliament, originally wrote “Socialisms: Old and New” as a short introductory history of socialism for his students. But in this edition it has been thoroughly rewritten to be in accord with New Labour’s programme for the elections of the late 1990s. The result is an astoundingly stupid medley of Blairist vagueness, poorly argued “common sense” arguments against left-wing opponents, historical selectivity, and cheap shots.

The tone is set by the introduction, written by the Rt. Hon. Anthony Blair, whose analytic insight is as deep as his policies are socialist. We are treated subsequently to a series of historical analyses on the part of Tony Wright, where although Marx is praised, anyone who actually supported Marx after his death is considered a hopeless ideologue, where Lenin is described as an “unhelpful consequence” of refusing to drop Marxism for social-democracy, where the Communists in Germany are blamed for Nazism, where neoliberalism is self-evidently wrong but all concrete propositions on Wright’s part could well have been written by John Major. Tony Wright constantly defends his “ethical socialism” (basically New Labour in a historicizing jacket) by arguments in the style of “since everyone knows central planning doesn’t work…” and “it being obvious that this view has no future” and “of course the only credible solution is” and so on, in lieu of actually providing any substantial argument in his favor. No surprise then that a professional opponent of reality like Paul Hirst could so easily switch from being an Althusserian ultra-orthodox to describing this as “an extremely valuable book”!

The only thing that keeps me from giving this the lowest rating is the historical overview of political developments in socialism, which is decent at a popular level if one removes Wright’s insipid editorial line, and because not all of the author’s criticisms are off mark. The chapter “Futures” is the best (and only remotely worthwhile) part of the book, because it correctly criticizes the way in which much modern day Marxism is good at analyzing the world, but supremely bad at actually building any political movement out of their analysis, something that has been a problem with Marxism as politics from the start. This ‘professiorial Marxism’, to which I myself should probably be counted, indeed often deserves mockery as being “an expert in the art of predicting the past”. Not, of course, that Wright has any useful solutions to this problem, except abandoning any substantial socialism altogether and instead receding to “ethical, universal socialism”, essentially putting us at the level of the ‘True Socialists’ Marx agitated against. Therefore, I heartily recommend against spending any money or time whatsoever on this book, let alone the ridiculous cover price.