Socialist Theory
Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (NLB/Verso, £4.95) is recommended reading despite all its attempts at inaccessibility — the title, the price (for 106 text pages!) and Anderson's irritating habit of using a word on almost every page that would have university lecturers reaching for their dictionaries. Considerations on Western Marxism left Anderson depressed by bad news from the Parisian Left Bank, awaiting the arrival of the Fourth International cast in the role of the Fifth Cavalry. ITTOHM brings the story up to date: Anderson sharply dissects contemporary French structuralist and post-structuralist writing, arguing that its eclipse of the Latin Marxism that New Left Review did so much to bring to an English audience was due less to the strengths of structuralist theory, than the failure of these particular strains in Marxism to address the major substantive questions of socialist strategy. He locates the key centres of Marxist work in the eighties in Britain, Germany and the USA and delineates some of the key questions they need to confront. Anderson is a stimulating writer and one of the foremost Marxist thinkers in Britain today. A little more substance and prescription on his part would be better value.
Anderson pays particular attention to the need to construct a model of socialism that can reconstruct socialism as a desirable goal and rescue it from the grey image of Stalinism. He warmly welcomes Alec Nove's The Economics of Feasible Socialism (George Allen and Unwin, £5.95) for its brave attempt to address this problem. Whatever the merits of his book on this score (which will be reviewed in International next year), its credibility is not enhanced by Nove's apparent belief that profound social transformations can be achieved by right social democratic means in the present period.
Other noteworthy theoretical books of 1983 were Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (Basil Blackwell, £4.95, reviewed in International 8/4) and Norman Geras' Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (NLB/Verso, £2.95, reviewed in 8/5). Paul Thompson provides a useful and comprehensive introduction to Marxist writing on the capitalist labour process in The Nature of Work (Macmillan, £5.95) though the level of abstraction at which he of necessity writes does not exactly make the book bedtime reading. Cynthia Cockburn's study of printworkers in the newspaper industry, Brothers (Pluto Press, £5.95), on the other hand, is hard to put down. Her account of real labour processes and mental processes illuminates much about new technology and its impact, the sexual division of labour, and strategies for overcoming sectional interests in the trade union movement.
Anne Phillips' Hidden Hands (Pluto, £2.50) argues for demands which take account of women's lives and work to be given a central place in socialist economic policy. She shows why a considerable shorter working week and working day is the essential centrepiece of any such policy and rejects all variants of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) for their failure to countenance the kinds of radical changes women and men require to create a new life. The book is clearly written and requires little prior knowledge of economics. Like the rest of the Arguments for Socialism series this is a very short book (116 pages) and the author has obviously made a conscious decision that space does not permit her to link the policies she proposes to tackle the sexual division of labour with a broader strategy or agency for change. This is unfortunate (if understandable) not least because supporters of the AES usually use the argument that no other coherent strategy has been put forward apart from their own.
British Politics
The books of the year on British politics are clearly The Politics of Thatcherism edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (Lawrence and Wishart, £4.95, reviewed in International 8/4) which for all its political weaknesses is essential reading, and John Ross' excellent analysis of the British political crisis, Thatcher and Friends (Pluto, £2.50). Developments in British Politics edited by Henry Drucker, Patrick Dunleavy, Andrew Gamble and Gillian Peele (Macmillan, £5.95) provides a useful factual guide to recent changes and the ways political scientists have tried to make sense of them. Two extremely informative books on British and American nuclear policy are Defended to Death edited by Gwyn Prins (Penguin, £3.50) and the new revised edition of Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK (Granada, £2.95).
International Politics
Fred Halliday's The Making of the Second Cold War (NLB/Verso, £4.95) is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Despite some weaknesses it is the first sustained attempt to provide a clear and accessible Marxist account of the basic structure of international politics in the 1980s. Bob Sutcliffe's Hard Times (Pluto, £2.50) provides a solid basic introduction to the world recession and the attempts of the capitalist class to resolve it at all our expense. Gregor Benton's The Hongkong Crisis (Pluto, £3.50) is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the story behind the newspaper headlines of next year or the year after. Tariq Ali's Can Pakistan Survive? (Penguin Books, £2.95) provides the background to the impending crisis, while Fitzroy Ambursley and Robin Cohen's Crisis in the Caribbean (Heinemann Educational, £6.95) contains several important articles on Reagan's backyard; both books are reviewed in International 8/4.
World View 1984, Pluto Press' radical yearbook (£7.95), is a great advance on last year's version. Particularly welcome are the improved maps and tables. The chronology of world events in 1983 and its detailed coverage of countries and regions are [the] book's greatest strength though its coverage of trends and debates and developments behind the news is considerably less ephemeral than last year. The weirdest thing about the book is [the sug]gestion in the cover blurb that the ideology of video games and the rise of feminist fiction are two (out of seven) of the year's key issues! But every trade union and Labour Party branch if not every household would benefit from buying a copy.
Social Welfare
Bob Deacon's Social Policy and Socialism, The Struggle for Socialist Relations of Welfare (Pluto, £6.95) is a brave and wide-ranging attempt to assemble the elements of a socialist and feminist welfare strategy and measure its objectives against what has been achieved (or not achieved) in 'actually existing socialist' societies. Though it is very informative at a factual level and in drawing together classical and contemporary Marxist ideas with feminist ideas about welfare, in its project of clarifying and advancing the struggle for socialist relations of welfare it must be counted a failure. This is largely a problem of method, of putting the cart before the horse. Marxism is about the real movement of history, not the construction of abstract schemas against which real history can be given marks out of ten. Deacon's approach is to tabulate criteria for socialist and communist welfare policies and relations drawn from the writings of theorists and then assess [the reality against them. I have no] quarrel with his conclusions: that the first three countries despite their relative underdevelopment are more socialist in their social policy than the others, that the Russian Revolution period was more progressive in the welfare field than the present, that socialist means of welfare delivery tend to arise out of struggle and be stifled by bureaucratic interests. But the book tells us little about how these are to be understood and acted upon. Surely it would have been better to start by looking at the forms of welfare and welfare-related demands that have emerged in the course of different revolutionary struggles and the real history of their development and [illegible].
Ken Jones' Beyond Progressive Education (Macmillan, £4.95) critically examines the traditions of educational strategy of social democracy and libertarian progressivism and their challengers from the Left. (The book's conclusions are developed in an article by Ken Jones on Thatcher in International 8/3.)
Ideal for Christmas presents (complete with gory Punch cartoons of street crime in the 18th century) is Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears by Geoffrey Pearson (Macmillan, £5.95). Pearson shows with considerable humour how respectable opinion-formers of every generation — politicians, journalists, writers (and more recently police chiefs) have always believed that the delinquency of their youthful contemporaries represented a fall from the mythical grace of social peace that existed '20 years ago'.
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally (Coronet, £2.95) is a non-fictional novel based on the apparently true story of a Polish industrialist who risked his own life and diverted his wealth and profits to save hundreds of Jews from death in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Nazi occupation. It is compulsive reading and more reassuring about the possibility of creating a better world than any treatise against the evil fixity of human nature. And then of course there is the 1984. And the best Xmas laugh will undoubtedly be found in Steve Bell's If Chronicles (Methuen, £2.50).
Fiction
Marge Piercy's Braided Lives (Penguin, £1.95) is a really good read but also for my money has more to say about the dilemmas of sexual politics and everyday life than anything else [I] read this year. 1983 was not a great year for new fiction so I am unashamed to mention Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Picador, £2.50) despite the fact it first appeared in paperback in 1982. Rushdie's new book Shame should be paperbacked in 1984.
Coming Soon
Pierre Frank's Long March of the Fourth International is currently selling in Collet's London bookshop for £1.75, and the excellent Alexander Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks Come to Power, hardback, on sale at the Economist Bookshop for just £3.95.
Remainders
Michael Farrell's Arming the Protestants (Pluto Press, approx £7.95) tells the story of how Britain armed, financed and legalised Protestant paramilitaries in the 1920s and how the government of the Irish Republic cut off its support for the IRA and reached a rapprochement with the Protestant ascendancy. The Face of the Ruling Class and The Day of Reckoning (Allison and Busby, approx £2.50 each) are collections of George Grosz's satirical drawings of German society and politics under the Weimar Republic.