In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 Rethinking the Crisis of Socialism (with Randy Martin) Introduction T his chapter is one of a series of papers originally published in Socialism and Democracy that attempt to rethink the terms by which it has become possible to speak of a “crisis of socialism.” It addresses several features of what has become a complex debate over the significance of the political decline of the Communist parties to the prospects of the North American Left. Strategically, we have tried to provide some intellectual resources for disentangling different but conflated meanings of the word socialism . We argue that this conflation combines otherwise unrelated characterizations of different things in a total characterization of what, by virtue of the combination, appears to be a single and unambiguously identifiable thing. The totality constructed in this way supports a radical critique of socialism far too broad and polemical to allow for a selfcritical reflection on the social nature, one might say the socialism, of the activity of critique itself. Among the most important of these different meanings are process, project, site, and formation. The first has to do with the socialization of productive activity as an irreducible feature of the capitalist accumulation of wealth. The second refers to a historical practice that expresses a radical sociality both intrinsic to capitalist production and in contradiction with the dynamics of the price-making money market, that is with the project of universalizing exchange. The third, socialism as the site of certain practices (e.g., planning, coordinating), refers to the possibility of identifying boundaries—territorial, juridical, ethnic, etc.—within which one might speak meaningfully of “the Socialist world,” “actually existing socialism ,” “communism,” and “Communist nations or societies.” Finally, “Socialist formation” refers to something relatively fixed as a structure and contained within boundaries, a kind of content presumed, on the basis of selected features, to be unmistakably Socialist. Each meaning has its own discourse. The confusion of meanings brings the various discourses together in a debate that only appears to have found a singular object, socialism, and to have achieved the status of dialogue. As the debate developed after 1989, the focus of some participants changed from the empirical question of what actually happened in Eastern Europe and the USSR to yet more deeply controversial questions having to do with conceptualization and methodology. We believe that the reason for this is, in part, that the facts available are either hopelessly ambiguous or of an otherwise suspicious nature—because of their sources, because of their lack of representativeness in regard to what all have come to believe is a far greater picture, or because they seem often to have been taken out of a context that itself has never been satisfactorily comprehended. Whatever the case, it has become necessary at least for those studying this debate to situate its competing evaluations within more inclusive frames of reference—moral, political, or theoretical. This has raised a variety of disturbing but unavoidable issues. We believe that some of the most important of these have to do with (1) the types of theory that are appropriate for arriving at evaluations of events believed to be momentous, (2) problems that accompany attempts to identify events in contexts that are thought to be constitutive of those events but are themselves relatively undefined, (3) difficulties involved in attempting to disentangle those aspects of the debate that seem overly encumbered with the discourses of media and politics in which the events have found their most vivid and perhaps most compelling representations , (4) and the difficulty of regulating the use of available theoretical terms, analogies, and metaphors to avoid exporting meanings from one context where they are appropriate to others where they are not. This chapter is organized according to four topics. First, it discusses the relationship between critical studies in social science and our understanding of socialism as a theoretical concept. Second, it addresses and provides a critique of the types of language we have come to use in speaking of “the” crisis of socialism. Third, it examines theories of crisis in order to clarify the distinction between “conjunctural” and “historical” analyses. Finally, it attempts to give some terminological and conceptual focus to the discussion of the historical aspects of socialism from the point of view of the relationship between its national forms and global presence. We conclude with some remarks intended to explore some of the more controversial implications of our argument for further discussions of the relationship...

Share