THE THEME OF THIS VOLUME of the Socialist Register was first conceived I in 1975 with the following general question in mind as we approach the end of the millennium, what in to succeed the first great socialist project that was conceived in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and variously implemented and frustrated by communism and social democracy in the twentieth? We had no illusions that an answer to this question would be found by cudgelling the brains of however large a number of left-wing intellectuals. But we did think that the time had come to renew the left's vision and spirit and that the Register could hope to contribute something useful for this purpose. We wanted to break with the legacy of a certain orthodox kind of Marxist thinking which rejected utopian thought as 'unscientific just because it was utopian, ignoring the fact that sustained political struggle is impossible without the hope of a better society that we can, in principle and in outline, imagine. And we particularly felt that in face of the collapse of communism, as well as the rejection by 'third way' social democracy of any identification with the socialist project, there was now, especially in the context of the growing crisis of the neo-liberal restoration, an opening as well as a need for imaginative thought.
Our goals were relatively modest. We wanted to sample some of the elements of new socialist utopias that are already emerging from the rethinking and regrouping that has been taking place among progressives of many kinds -trade unionists, feminists, ecologists, scientists, philosophers, political economists, etc-since the 1980s. And we wanted to challenge our contributors -and our readers to reflect on how these elements might be combined to inform and inspire a new socialist project for the new millennium. The elements of this project are necessary in that the ideas and models they provide - or something like them are essential to any new socialist project worth fighting for some of them may even be necessary for the survival of the species. We also wanted to contrast these ideas and models with others that are being canvassed today and which are unnecessary, in the sense that on closer inspec tion they prove not to be utopias at all, but blind alleys. And re-imagining a humane socialist future is all the more required in light of the positively dystopian 'brave new worlds that the organic intellectuals of capitalism are promoting for the twenty-first century, such as those touted by the spin-doctors of the bio-engineering industry, on the one hand, and NATO on the other. Obviously we could not hope to be at all comprehensive, or even 'balanced" in our coverage (what exactly should be balanced with what?), but we could hope to help put the question of renewing the socialist goal back on the agenda. Above all, we hope this volume will contribute to loosening the grip that the narrow, alienated conception of 'reality' peddled by the neoliberals has had on too much left thinking in the past decade, and encourage people to refocus their imaginations and their political ambitions on the fundamental ideals that have inspired socialism throughout its history. It is time to refuse definitively the etiolated, increasingly hypocritical conception of democracy' which even social-democratic parties have come to accept and to insist on a far fuller and richer democracy than anything now available. It is time to reject the prevailing disparagement of everything collective as 'unrealistic' and to insist on the moral and practical rightness, as well as the necessity, of egalitarian social and economic relations. It is time to assert the attractions, as well as the necessity, of a society unhooked from subordination to 'growth based on production for profit, consumerism, sexism, militarism and the rest; and to spell out some of the conditions under which socialist goals can be realised above all the development of popular democratic capacities and the structures that nurture rather than stifle or trivialise them. And, taking even a slightly longer view, what could be more realistic than this?
It is sad that this volume, the thirty-sixth since the Register was launched in 1964, is the first one not to have been seen through every stage of its production by Martin Eve, the founder and publisher of Merlin Press, since its theme was very close to his heart. Martin died in October 1998 at the age of 74, after a twelve-year fight against cancer which gradually robbed him of his physical mobility, but never of his keen intellect, his wry sense of humour or his phenomenal personal courage.
A fascinating and moving book of memoirs of Martin and his work (Martin Eve Remembered, edited by Walter Kemsley) has now been published by Merlin, but his special relationship with the Register makes it more than just appropriate to commemorate him briefly here too. Having read volume 1 of Marx's Capital at the age of sixteen and in his own words, having 'got the general idea', Martin never subsequently departed from it; whether he was in the Communist Party or later, after 1956, in the Labour Party, for him 'it was always one line,' as he told his friend and Merlin author Istvan Meszaros, and the Socialist Register was very much its flagship.
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