Problems and Promise of Socialist Renewal

Abstract

The title of this Socialist Register might well have been extended to read 'Problems and Promise of Socialist Renewal East and West'. For while most of the articles in this volume do deal with problems, there is also implicit in them, and indeed quite often explicit, a promise of advance and renewal. This is most obvious in relation to the process of change now in train in the Soviet Union, which is discussed in the first five articles of the volume. But in ways which are perhaps less obvious, the problems which confront socialists in the West also harbour the promise-which does not of course mean the assurance-of advance. Problems and promise are intertwined: where there is the one, there is also the other. In a period in which the words most closely associated with socialism are words like crises, dilemmas, defeats and disasters, and in which socialists are declared, in many instances by socialists themselves, to be an endangered species, this dialectic of problems and promise needs to be stressed. It is this relationship that we propose to discuss in this introductory article, with reference to some of the specific issues which are analysed in the volume.