Socialism Unbound: Principles, Practices, and Prospects [Second Edition] 9780231527354

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface to the New Second Edition
Acknowledgments
1 The Democratic Legacy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
2 Karl Kautsky: The Rise and Fall of Orhodox Marxism
3 Eduard Bernstein and the Logic of Revisionism
4 Leninism and Beyond
5 A Bridge to the Present: Rosa Luxemburg and the Underground Tradition
6 Recasting the Project: Prologue for a Critical Theory of Socialism
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Socialism Unbound

Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History

Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History Dick Howard, General Editor

Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History is a series dedicated to exploring the possibilities for democratic initiative and the revitalization of politics in the wake of the exhaustion of twentieth-century ideological “isms.” By taking a historical approach to the politics of ideas about power, governance, and the just society, this series seeks to foster and illuminate new political spaces for human action and choice. Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, edited by Samuel Moyn (2006) Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, translated by Julian Bourg (2007) Benjamin R. Barber, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House (2008) Andrew Arato, Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq (2009) Dick Howard, The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolution (2010) Robert Meister, After Evil: Human Rights Discourse in the Twenty-first Century (2011) Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (2011)

Stephen Eric Bronner Second Edition

Socialism Unbound Principles, Practices, and Prospects

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2001 Westview Press, a Member of the Perseus Books Group Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Parts of the preface appeared in an earlier form in Stephen Eric Bronner, “Socialism in America,” Reader Supported News, July 21, 2010, and “Rosa in Cairo,” Reader Supported News, February 8, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org/ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bronner, Stephen Eric, 1949 – Socialism unbound : principles, practices, and prospects / Stephen Eric Bronner. — 2nd ed. p. cm. — (Columbia studies in political thought/Political history) Originally published: Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, c2001. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-15382-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15383-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-52735-4 (ebook) 1. Socialism. 2. Communism. 3. Socialism — History. 4. Communism — History. I. Title. II. Series. HX73.B76 2011 335.4 — dc22 2011004569

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents, Harry and Edith Bronner

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Contents

Foreword by Dick Howard  ix Preface to the New Second Edition  xi Acknowledgments  xxi

1  The Democratic Legacy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels  •  1 2  Karl Kautsky: The Rise and Fall of Orthodox Marxism  •  33 3  Eduard Bernstein and the Logic of Revisionism  •  55 4  Leninism and Beyond  •  77 5  A Bridge to the Present: Rosa Luxemburg and the Underground Tradition  •  123 6  Recasting the Project: Prologue for a Critical Theory of Socialism  •  145

Notes  185 Index  223

Foreword

“No political thought without political history” is the epigram that unites the works published in this series. Stephen Eric Bronner’s Socialism Unbound expands on this adage doubly. His book explores the relation between contemporary socialist theory and the tradition from which it emerges. It argues that a valid ethics is possible only within the framework of a socialist politics, but that there can be no socialist politics without ethical responsibility. What had previously “bound” socialism? Paradoxically, it was its vision of history as teleological that gave its adherents a blind faith in the material and moral inevitability of their victory. Relying on a one-sided reading of The Communist Manifesto, this teleological premise assumed that the long history of class struggles must move inexorably toward a final, titanic clash from which a true socialism will emerge freed from all conflict. This deterministic vision of history could be interpreted in diverse manners—as the chapters of Socialism Unbound illustrate. But the consequences were always devastating in theory as in practice. Above all, Bronner argues, this straightjacket binding socialism robbed it of both its experimental nature and its ethical conscience. What then is the socialism that Stephen Eric Bronner wants to unbind? It is explained by means of an undogmatic and pluralistic understanding of a tradition, similar to the way in which political traditions such as liberalism have been understood. Hobbes and Locke are seen as contributing to a unified stream to which contemporary thinkers as different as Rawls, Nozik, and Taylor are heirs. Similarly, the socialist tradition has been shaped by thinkers as different as Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, V. I. Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. None of them possesses the truth about socialism, but each illuminates a new aspiration and confronts a new set of practical problems. Each of them also illustrates the limits and the contradictions of socialism.

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The elimination of teleology and the reconstitution of a socialist tradition complement one another in Socialism Unbound. There is no single essence of socialism, no finally discovered form in which all contradiction is reconciled, no ultimate overcoming of individual and social alienation. Unbound from teleology and economic determinism, socialism becomes an ethical project undertaken in constantly changing social conditions. But this ethical project is not the product of a self-sufficient subject, living apart from the world and its vicissitudes. Such ethical purity separate from political responsibility refuses to recognize the weight of institutions. It becomes another teleological vision that seeks a utopia in which necessity is overcome and contradiction eliminated. Socialism Unbound might appear at first glance to be a book for militants, an excited manifesto announcing new terrain to conquer, promising to unleash hidden forces that had lain dormant as existing types of socialism stagnated and finally went to their graves. But its readers will not unearth a true socialism that, like the “old mole” that Marx liked to invoke, has been silently digging its gallery of tunnels until capitalism has no solid earth on which to stand. The book is sober, critical of old verities, but unwilling to throw away the baby with the bathwater. That is why Socialism Unbound finds its place in the series Political Thought / Political History, alongside works by Claude Lefort (Complications), Pierre Rosanvallon (Democracy Past and Future), and Martin Breaugh (The Plebian Experience, forthcoming). Dick Howard

Preface to the New Second Edition

Socialism Unbound first appeared twenty years ago at a time when progressive intellectual tendencies were suffering aftershocks from the collapse of communism. The 1980s were dominated by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That decade came to be known as “the age of greed.” Not much changed in the 1990s, which were marked by tepid reform and liberal retrenchment. Industrial production made way for new information technologies. Fierce competition for business investment generated cost cutting measures and a radical assault on the welfare state. Capitalism turned truly global, and neoliberalism became the new gospel. Many embraced the then-fashionable belief in “the end of history.” The left moved right. Deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, and the dismantling of social programs became the points of reference for progressive policy. President Bill Clinton called for the “end of welfare as we know it,” and the social democratic parties of Western Europe followed suit. On the left, there was much talk about a postmaterialist politics, a new language for radicals, and the politics of a “third way” that would venture beyond the supposedly outdated conflict between capital and labor or left and right. Even socialists seemed to consider socialism a thing of the past, whether of the revolutionary or the reformist variety. More was to come. Soon after the second edition of this book appeared in 2001, the events of September 11 generated a new form of reactionary politics. Neoconservatism gained the upper hand and set the stage for new imperialist adventures, as well as an even more ferocious attack on the “socialist” trends associated with the 1930s and the 1960s.1 Socialism Unbound was apparently waiting for more propitious times. Those times have come. Eight years of the Bush administration produced the largest upward shift of income in American history. Two-thirds of the nation’s

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total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent, to the detriment of 19 percent of U.S. households.2 The last time anything like this occurred was during the 1920s. Immediately following September 11, President Bush and his neoconservative friends began strengthening the national security state and implementing an overtly imperialist foreign policy. This accompanied the domestic economic offensive. Policies introduced in the name of the capitalist class—there is no other meaningful way to say it—aimed to radically deregulate markets and banks, curtail social services, and prepare the conditions for legal judgments that would abolish limits on campaign spending. Following his election in 2008, and the outbreak of a stunning economic crisis, President Barack Obama responded with a very different set of policies that quickly turned his administration into the target of new attacks. Subsidies for homeowners with mortgages and college students with loans, environmental programs, extension of unemployment benefits, litigation against employers of illegal immigrants, and national health insurance legislation that covered 30 million new citizens all accompanied bailouts of the banks and oversight legislation for the stock market that was described by the New York Times as constituting “the most sweeping regulatory overhaul since the aftermath of the Great Depression.”3 It seemed that a counterattack by the left was underway. Were these policies “socialist” enough? Newsweek certainly thought so; its headline on February 16, 2009, ran “We Are All Socialists Now!” Powerful elements of the far right galvanized around this perception. Conservative organizations pilloried health care as a “secular socialist machine.” A huge billboard went up in Iowa displaying a photo of President Obama alongside photos of Lenin (“Marxist socialism”) and Hitler (“national socialism”). A phalanx of wildly popular and reactionary radio talk show hosts like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly now use socialism as a catchall term to castigate any policy that strengthens the social welfare function of the state. It is the same with the right-wing populist Tea Party. Antiwelfare, anti-intellectual, implacably opposed to immigration, and increasingly racist, its members are openly hostile to all proposals for equitably redistributing wealth. Oddly enough, however, right-wing fears about socialism are not completely unfounded. Polls by Pew, Gallup, and Rasmusson note that 29 percent of the American public views socialism in a positive light and 37 percent consider it superior to capitalism—and the former number rises to 43 percent among those between 18 and 30 years of age.4 But the polls also note, significantly, that the respondents were not necessarily clear about the meaning of terms like socialism. This book might prove useful in the context. Many leftist critics of the Obama administration simply use the socialist ideal to decry its shortcomings. Legitimate criticisms about misguided foreign policy concerning Afghanistan and Israel abound along with concerns about one “sell out” after another on the domestic front. Some leftist critics sug-

Preface to the New Second Edition  •  xiii

gest that finance reform will not affect banks that are “too big to fail”; others insist that health care reform requires a single-payer plan or a public option; still others demand greater emphasis on job creation. Certain of these charges are undoubtedly legitimate—and neoliberal tendencies are growing stronger. Referring to the more radical elements of the New Deal, FDR famously told the unions of his time, “Make me do it.” Shortly following his election, President Obama uttered the same words. Yet the difference in context is striking. In contrast to the 1930s, the foot soldiers in the battle for economic equality are far fewer in number. A significant number of Congressional Democrats are ideologically conservative. Only in February 2011 did major mass-based protests erupt in Wisconsin and neighboring states in opposition to drastic cuts in state benefits and employment proposed by right-wing governors and attempts to abolish basic rights like collective bargaining. There had previously been little organized action from below to force the hand of the current president on issues relating to foreign or domestic policy (including nationalizing the banks and a single-payer health care system). Socialism Unbound highlights the limits of an “ideology of compromise” as well as the mistaken belief that one reform simply builds on another in some linear expression of liberal progress. Frustration on the far left with tempered reforms has produced apocalyptic visions, nostalgia for authoritarian “lost causes,” justifications for fanaticism, notions of resistance stripped of organizational referents, and utopian preoccupations with a “communist hypothesis.”5 Such thinking mirrors the kind of romantic populism that has gained such ground on the far right in the United States.6 There is the same sensationalism, the same lack of meaningful historical reflection, and the same irrationalism. What made socialism so important was its ability to pit what Marx termed “the political economy of labor” against “the political economy of capital.” This involved forwarding programs and ideas intent on rendering institutions accountable, contesting the structural imbalance of political and economic power, and offering new options for individuals to make life easier. For all the emphasis on ethics, unfortunately, many left-wing radicals show little concern with any of this. That is perhaps only logical given the lack of any practical desire to connect with existing institutions, movements, and ideologies. Even while a certain popular enthusiasm for practical socialist politics is growing, the fashionable intellectual vision of socialism is becoming more esoteric and abstract. Socialism Unbound is informed by a theory of practice. Real class divisions are becoming sharper, which makes it ever more important for those on the left to discuss existing legislation in socialist terms, either approvingly or disapprovingly. But that is rarely the case. Either it is because most leftist intellectuals are afraid of the socialist label or because they identify socialism with some sectarian or utopian ideal. Ignoring socialism leaves progressive forces in the position of identifying with liberalism (the notorious “L-word”)

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or plain democracy—though this tactic has done nothing to dispel conservative attacks. Preserving a doctrinaire understanding of socialism, by contrast, renders it politically irrelevant. Better to embrace a form of critical solidarity and highlight the “socialist” elements of existing proposals that seek to regulate capital and redistribute wealth. Articulating criteria for judging this or that piece of legislation while targeting and then pressuring conservative “allies” is part of the challenge facing contemporary socialists. Commitment to ideals should not excuse refusing to engage what exists. The need has never been greater for a rational radicalism.7 Socialism Unbound put forward a new socialist ethic in liberating the idea of socialism from its authoritarian and parochial shackles. The book rests on the political heritage of the Enlightenment.8 Little wonder then that it should have been challenged by those still infatuated with Leninism or an overly romantic view of workers’ councils. To be sure, Lenin offered innovative insights on revolutionary organization and new interpretations of imperialism and national self-determination. He and his comrades confronted new problems in new ways. But the brutality of the communist experiment, its corrupt inefficiency, its stultifying cultural atmosphere, and its cynical exploitation of genuine revolutionary commitments are undeniable. More is involved than the devastating historical conditions in which the communist experiment took place or some later betrayal of Lenin’s revolutionary outlook. The weaknesses of the communist tradition derive from an ethic in which individual conscience is subordinated to the organization and in which little institutional concern is shown for the accountability of the party-state to its citizens. Leninism may perhaps not always lead to totalitarianism, but that is not the point: it has always proven authoritarian. Some scholars have tried to highlight the connection between Leninism and workers’ councils. But the communists crushed these democratic remnants of 1917 in 1921. Then, too, the workers’ council has its own tradition that extends back beyond the Spanish Civil War to the Russian events of 1917 and 1905 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Romanticizing participatory democracy, however, doesn’t help matters. Workers’ councils have historically proved wanting.9 All of them have been short-lived, administratively disorganized, incapable of assuring civil liberties, often provincial in their cultural attitudes, and unable to deal with normal matters pertaining to sovereignty. Few contemporary advocates can explain how these decentralized organizational forms might coordinate industries in an increasingly complex market and why—perhaps above all—working people should wish to attend an endless array of meetings. The workers’ council might have a new role to play within a parliamentary state; nevertheless, the liberal republic is the state form in which socialists will need to operate for the foreseeable future. Nowhere has this become more apparent than in the Middle East. Meaningful revolution in that region of the world has trumped the utopian dreaming

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about communism in ours. Rebellions of differing magnitudes have gripped Tunisia, Bahrain, Jordan, Algeria, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and—above all—Egypt. It’s almost as if the events of 2011 constitute a replay of 1989 in the Middle East. Mainstream commentators, however, have had as little of substance to say about the former as about the latter. Transnational revolts fueled by workers, sparked by young radical intellectuals, and joined by everyday people have left our political experts baffled. Their inability to provide an interpretive context, their narrow focus, their obsession with personal stories, and their reliance on the obvious has had political implications. Our intellectual vacuum has been filled with the hot air of conspiracy theories by right-wing media pundits. Neoconservatives, meanwhile, only added fuel to the fire. Their priorities were never clearer than when they worried over the new threats to Israel and the abandonment of “reliable,” long-time authoritarian allies of the United States. All the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy in the Arab world, which served to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was forgotten. Real democracy didn’t appeal to them: it apparently imperils our way of life. Clinical paranoia and hypocrisy are to be expected from the usual parochial purveyors of prejudice. Mainstream pundits generally prove more prudent. Their endless interviews with everyday people were followed by supposedly deeper discussion about the causes for the uprisings. Always important was the role of “poverty”—as if poverty had not always gripped the masses of the Middle East and as if economic conditions had not been worse at other times. Then, too, mainstream reporters always provided the obligatory reference to bureaucratic corruption and the lack of democracy—as if corruption and dictators were recent inventions. The yuppies especially liked to emphasize the new organizing power of the Internet—as if transnational revolutions from below didn’t occur prior to the invention of the computer. And that, essentially, was that. Of course, all of these factors did come into play. But they provide no sense of historical specificity, radical tradition, or cosmopolitan pedagogy. Even leftists were overly preoccupied with elites, media, and conspiracies. They, too, showed a woeful ignorance of what Ernst Bloch termed “the underground history of the revolution.” Lacking was any discussion of political agency and a structural framework for understanding the revolutionary chain reaction that was taking place. Where should we look for an analytic framework? The socialist tradition might be a good place to start. Early in my career I edited and translated an edition of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and a short biography, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times. Rosa would surely have been thrilled by what has transpired in the Middle East. A libertarian socialist of exceptional charisma and charm, a powerful intellectual, and a genuine celebrity in the international labor movement, Luxemburg was brutally murdered by proto-Nazi thugs in 1919 when she was forty-eight. Masses still gather in

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Berlin to commemorate the day of her death, and her name has been used for the research institute of the Left Party in Germany. Luxemburg was a Marxist and a socialist of the old school. There was nothing special about her commitment to republicanism and economic equality. What made her unique was the emphasis she placed on the role of democratic consciousness and what might be termed a cosmopolitan pedagogy, whereby one exploited community learns from another in an ongoing revolutionary process. Socialism Unbound highlights just these themes. Indeed, they proved to be seminal in the rebellions that have cascaded from one nation to another in the Middle East. With far greater historical specificity than other approaches, Luxemburg’s Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions (1906) explored the dynamics of transnational revolution. It was inspired by a series of spontaneous protests that began in Baku in 1902, spread to Kiev and St. Petersburg, and ultimately engulfed the entire Russian Empire in 1905. The first parliament in Russian history resulted from these uprisings, whose spontaneity tended to obscure years of underground work by unionists and political activists. Luxemburg saw in the mass strike a justification for privileging the institutional aims of the socialist movement as well as the untapped democratic capacities of the disenfranchised and the exploited. In her world, which was almost everywhere still ruled by monarchies, this meant—above all—highlighting the prospect of a republic. Luxemburg believed that the mass strike would first express itself locally in the towns and cities and then spread to the countryside; local forms of democratic action, particularly on the part of the working class, would blend with the national and transnational demands for regime change. The mass strike has much to teach about international solidarity, radical democracy, and a meaningful notion of class politics. Luxemburg’s analysis provides links with the past, insights into the present, and inspiration for the future. The mass strike does not offer a full explanation of recent events in the Middle East, but this much-neglected element of the socialist tradition does give us a place to start making sense of those events. It should be remembered that three thousand labor protests took place in Egypt between 2004 and 2011. Democratic revolutionaries surely reflected on them as well as on the failed (if still simmering) “Green Revolution” in Iran and the other uprisings in neighboring countries, even while chanting, “Tunisia is the solution!” In socialist terms, and from a cosmopolitan point of view, these “jasmine revolutions” take their place within an explicitly political tradition of human rights that has its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolutions that ensued. Similar aims informed the spate of protests and strikes against communist tyranny that culminated in the events of 1989. Uprisings fueled by liberal aims also attempted to introduce democracy into everyday life through communes, town meetings, and workers’ councils. But these experiments soon failed. Socialism Unbound argues that the state can best temper the whip of the market and the liberal republic can best secure civil liberties.

Preface to the New Second Edition  •  xvii

European social democracy once used the parliamentary state to resist tyranny and the exploitative excesses of the free market. The labor movement mitigated inequality (though it is now again on the rise) and turned the worker into a citizen.10 Perhaps the vision of socialist democracy has become a victim of its own success. Talk of its death, however, is premature. The “invisible hand” is a fiction, capitalism cannot regulate itself, and (in the face of oil spills, potential nuclear leaks, and natural disasters) it cannot guarantee the security of its citizens. Contemporary socialists still find themselves engaged in battles concerning what priorities the interventionist state will serve and what political role private corporations will play. Capitalism still tends towards concentrating wealth in fewer hands, is still ridden by periodic crises of immense proportions, still evinces class conflict, and still generates decisive structural imbalances of economic power that have dramatic social and political implications. Liberalism has no answer for these problems, and consequently, socialism remains on the agenda. But this says nothing about socialism’s political character or its ideological connotation and appeal. Socialism has been blended with religion, nationalism, and racism, and in what has become a labyrinthine maze of competing definitions, actualizations, and possibilities, socialism is no longer identifiable with any particular institution, policy, or program. Abstract definitions from times past no longer make sense. There is no socialism. There is only the socialist project intent on confronting inequality, its impact on the real-life choices of individuals,11 and the arbitrary exercise of institutional power. Socialism Unbound seeks to reawaken the transformative enterprise by introducing new categories that deal with current issues. Contemporary activists no longer have the luxury of assuming that the working class is inherently progressive. No organization can claim a monopoly on the truth of the historical process. Ideologies, identities, and interest groups compete with one another for supporters and resources. The left—broadly speaking—now comprises less than the sum of its parts. New issues have emerged that highlight the relation between liberalism and socialism, class politics and the new social movements, democratic empowerment and institutional imperatives, and globalization and religious fundamentalism. Talk of ethics without reference to these matters is little more than an indulgence in metaphysics. A socialist ethic distinguishes itself by linking the ideal with the real, the normative with the practical, and the principle with the concrete. This means taking seriously the structural imbalances of power deriving from the capitalist accumulation process; it means taking seriously the state and the different ways of responding to its governance; it means taking seriously the role of a new cosmopolitan sensibility. It also means providing an institutional context for normative claims and discussions of agency. Categories are necessary that can help coordinate the competing factions and interests that comprise the left. The “class ideal” is one of them. Its articulation is less the province of philosophers than

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of activists who are intent on rendering concrete the needs of working people within each of the various political interests and social movements without privileging any of them. Neither its utility nor its democratic promise, however, is guaranteed. Teleology is a thing of the past. Dialectics will not magically resolve contradictions between freedom and necessity, liberty and authority, individuality and solidarity. Judgment is always required, not only with respect to an action’s prospects for success, but also to its moral legitimacy. Freedom may ultimately rest on what Hegel and Marx would have termed the “insight into necessity.” Socialist theory today rests on the ability to create a plausible—not an absolute—connection between ends and means. Years of ideological neglect and intellectual ignorance have produced a lack of clarity about socialism that is so debilitating precisely because its reinterpretation for the future depends on a critical engagement with its past. The more articulate the connection between means and ends the greater the moral appeal of the action in question. The quality of socialism’s concepts is intimately connected with the quality of its practice. Socialism still has much to offer but what it has requires cultivation. Working on Socialism Unbound—my favorite among all my books—helped me clarify my political outlook: perhaps it can help clarify that of others as well.

Notes 1. A comprehensive overview for this development is provided in Michael J. Thompson, ed., Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 2. Arloc Sherman and others, Poverty Rose, Median Income Declined, and JobBased Health Insurance Continued to Weaken in 2008 (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, September 10, 2009). 3. David M. Herszenhorn, “Bill Passed in Senate Broadly Expands Oversight of Wall Street,” New York Times, May 20, 2010. 4. Charles Derber, “Capitalism: Big Surprises in Recent Polls,” CommonDreams. org, May 18, 2010, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/18-3. 5. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), and In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009); Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Use of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010); Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2008); Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010). 6. A sober antidote to the new romantic views on authoritarian leftism and the communist heritage is provided by Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

Preface to the New Second Edition  •  xix 7. See the collection dealing with my work in general and socialism in particular: Michael J. Thompson, ed., Rational Radicalism and Political Theory: Essays in Honor of Stephen Eric Bronner (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010). 8. For a more extensive discussion, see Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 9. Note the collection of classic writings by “left-wing communists” in Hermann Goerter, Anton Pannekoek, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Otto Ruehle, Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers’ Councils (St. Petersburg: Black and Red Publishers, 2007). 10. See the fine discussion by Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010). 11. Note the statistics offered by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

Acknowledgments

There are many to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Samuel Assefa and Joel Rogers offered extensive comments on the original manuscript. I also received valuable insights from Rosalyn Baxandall, Steve Best, Judith Grant, Larry Hartenian, Bertell Ollman, Charles Noble, James Orsini, Diana Owen, Robert Rocklein, Ann Sweeny, Peter Wagner, and Linda Zerilli. Douglas Kellner often caused me to rethink my positions, and this was also the case with Michael Forman, Micheline Ishay, and Manfred Steger. John Ehrenberg, Christian Fenner, Carola Frege, Kurt Jacobsen, and Ulrike Knotz offered some valuable insights for this second edition. I also owe a genuine debt to my German translator, Eva Gruenstein-Neumann. The Rutgers Research Council offered its support for the project. Without Victoria Irmiere, Karen Sullivan, and my editor at Routledge, Maureen MacGrogan, this book would probably not have seen the light of day. As for Leo Wiegman and David McBride of Westview Press, let me just say how much I appreciated their enthusiasm for bringing out this new edition. Finally, I would like to offer a special thanks to my wife, Anne Burns.

Socialism Unbound