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From International Socialism (1st series), No.50, January-March 1972, p.41.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Socialist Register 1971
Edited by Ralph Milliband and John Saville
Merlin, £1.00
This is the eighth appearance of this annual and, as always, it contains some articles of great interest. It is also, as always, something of a ragbag of assorted topics and standpoints without any central axis of political commitment. This has had its advantages. Certainly no organisation in Britain has the combination of intellectual resources and political priorities that would lead it to produce a ‘committed’ annual Register. In these circumstances Milliband and Saville perform a service to the movement by the regular production of their stimulating, if eclectic, selections
The present ones are of very uneven value. A brief contribution by L. Kolakowski effectively demolishes the pretensions of the Althusserians. His review of For Marx and Reading Capital concludes
‘These two books of Althusser provide a disagreeable example of empty verbosity which ... can be reduced either to commonsense trivialities in new verbal disguise, or to traditional Marxist tenets repeated with no additional explanation, or to wrong historical judgements. In understanding Marx, or Hegel, or political economy, or the methods of social science, they give us nothing except pretentious language’.
On the other hand, Jeff Coulter in Marxism and the Engels Paradox treads a well worn path. Victor Kiernan’s piece on us imperialism is original and informative but essentially non-marxist whereas Hal Draper’s The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels is impeccably orthodox but, to me at any rate, banal to the point of tediousness. And yet there is a fundamental difficulty here. Some contributors show by their essays that they either do not
understand or that they do not accept such a central element of marxism as socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class.
Draper’s article stands next to Rossana Rossanda’s Mao’s Marxism, which is written from the standpoint of pre-marxian utopianism dressed up as a ‘practical and theoretical reconstruction on the grand scale’. The need is for a direct confrontation and debate. Of course the difficulties of achieving this in an annual are very great. They may not, however, be the only problem.
From its inception the Socialist Register has managed to straddle the divides between reform and revolution on the one hand and Stalinism (or rather sophisticated defences of Stalinism) and anti-Stalinism on the other. In the 1970 edition Monty Johnson advocated the ‘parliamentary road, strategy of the western communist parties. In 1971 Daniel Singer (The French Left Since 1968) demonstrates conclusively the conservative role of the French CP. But again no confrontation, no debate. I suspect that part of the reason is the reluctance of the editors to advance beyond their original New Left eclecticism and to identify themselves with the revolutionary movement.
Nevertheless the Register remains the best annual we have. Between the opening article by Istvan Meszaros on Alienation to the concluding one by Hamza Alavi on Bangla Desh (which is particularly good) there is some dross but also a deal of ore.
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Last updated on 22.6.2008