The Battle for Socialist Ideas in the 1980s

Abstract

I talked first of all about what I think are some of the principal inhibitions to the advance of socialist ideas. The problems that stand in the way of getting socialist ideas rolling again as a popular force in society. I think they are profound. I think-one has to confront them head on-but with socialism which is without guarantees. That is to say which does not believe that the motor of history is inevitably on its side. One has to fasten one's mind, as Gramsci said 'violently' onto things as they are: including, if things are not too good, the fact that they are not too good. . . So that is why I started with the negative. In the more positive part, I have tried to talk about where socialism needs to begin to grow again. Not yet in terms of programmatic demands but, in terms of the root values, the root concepts, the root images and ideas in popular consciousness, without which no popular socialism can be constructed. If you have working people committed to the old ways, the old relations, the old values, the old feelings, they may vote for this and that particular reform but they will have no long term commitment to the hard graft of transforming society. And unless socialists understand the strategic role of this level of struggle-the struggle to command the common sense of the age in order to educate and transform it, to make common sense, the ordinary everyday thoughts of the majority of the population, move in a socialist rather than a reactionary direction, then our hearts may be in the right place but our relation to the task of putting socialism back on the historical agenda again is not all that different from that of the besieging armies at the city of Jericho who hoped that seven times round the city wall, a blast on the trumpet and a quick prayer to the gods would bring that ancient 'Winter Palace' tumbling to the ground.