Socialist Renewal and the Labour Party

Abstract

To pose the question of the possibilities and problems of socialist renewal in the late twentieth century inevitably means bringing forward a series of difficult, even unnerving, questions. Do socialists have an adequate grasp of the economic, political and cultural dynamics of contemporary society? To the extent that they do, or can develop such a grasp, what are the social forces to which socialists can today hope to appeal? What are the felt troubles, the immediate aspirations, the identifiable interests of such social forces and how might socialists develop and advance a clearer understanding of them? What can be the ideological, symbolic and programmatic basis of a renewed socialist appeal in the short and long-term? What strategies of socialist mobilization can be envisaged and put into practice so that the socialist project can once again become a mass movement? And, lurking behind all such questions, stands yet another, no less important and no less difficult and unnerving, the answer to which often sets the parameters for the way in which each of the above questions is answered. It is the question of whether-and how-socialist renewal can be achieved within and through the institutional framework of those social democratic and communist parties which have heretofore dominated the history of socialist political practice in this century.