Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("SOCIALISM UNDER ANY OTHER NAME: REMAKING THE LEFT?" "Without traditional labor movements and their class-political identities, collectivists ideals were hard to sustain. Socialism began as the ambition to abolish capitalism, to build an egalitarian democracy from the wealth that capitalism endowed. Such hopes lasted for many years. While the insurrectionary dream of 1917-1923 were never reenacted, the belief in socialism as a reachable destination, as a stage of history clearly distinguishable from the capitalist present, still inspired socialist thinkers. But after defeats and disappointments, socialists settled for more modest aims of civilizing capitalism, stressing democracy, social citizenship, and rights at work. By the 1990s, socialism was an even more diffuse ideal, an abstract political ethics based on social justice. Even the strong social democracies of Scandinavia revised their language. Norwegian Labor's ideals moved from 'a socialist society' in 1969, through 'the generic values [of] freedom, democracy, and equality' in 1981, to individualism by 1989. Scandinavian parties slid inexorably toward the generic predicament: 'mass unemployment, pressures to contain inflation, the end of centralized bargaining, a flexible labor market, the collapse of the manufacturing sector, the loss of national control over the economy.'" "The main sociopolitical changes in capitalist Europe since the 1960--the post-Fordist transition--steadily undermined the socialist Left. These far outweighed Communism's collapse in their demoralizing effects. The USSR had long ceased being an inspiration, apart from shrinking minorities of Moscow loyalists.... The headlong rush to marketization confirmed their beleaguered isolation. They doubted the scope for specifically socialist policies." "Yet the end of the Cold War cleared some vital space. The 'End of Communism' meant the end of anti-Communism in a potentially liberating way.... When the Soviet imperium ended, anti-Communist mechanisms no longer worked as before. In principle, a 'third space' opened between the old polarized alternatives of Stalinism and right-wing social social democracy--not as a ready-made 'third way' but as a new set of parameters where Left initiatives might form." "This is where new social movements had disproportionate effect. Between the West German Greens and Belgian Ecolo in the 1980 and the eastern European Green parties of 1988-90, each country acquired new parties calling themselves Green...." "Greens belonged in a broader hybrid category of radical parties after the 1960s, around which which 5-10 percent of the electorate to the left of the main socialist parties gathered...." Id. at 483-486.).
Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs, with an Introduction by Eric Hobswawn (New York: NYU Press, , 1988, 1999, 2000.).
Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, Translated from the German and with an Introduction by Fred Halliday (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1970, 2008) ("Just as political action is not rendered unnecessary by the economic action of a revolutionary class, so intellectual action is not rendered unnecessary by either political or economic action. On the contrary it must be carried through to the end in theory and practice, as revolutionary scientific criticism and agitational work before the seizure of state power by the working class, and as scientific organization and ideological dictatorship after the seizure of power. If this is valid for intellectual action against the forms of consciousness which defines bourgeois society in general, it is especially true of philosophical action. Bourgeois consciousness necessarily sees itself apart from the world and independent of it as pure critical philosophy and impartial science, just as the bourgeois State and bourgeois Law appear to be above society. This consciousness must be philosophically fought by the revolutionary materialistic dialectic, which is the philosophy of the working class, This struggle will only end when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice, and this consciousness had been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. 'Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized.'" Id. at 97. From the backcover: Marxism and Philosophy is Karl Korsch's masterwork. In it he argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of Hegelian dialectic and a commitment to revolutionary praxis. Although widely attacked in its time, Marxism and Philosophy has attained a place among the most important works of twentieth-century Marxist theory, and continues to merit critical reappraisal from scholars and activists today.").
