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The New Political Economy: The Chronicle of Government and Opposition. Midsummer 1968 and After
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
1968 will remain in political history a memorable year, for at least two reasons. The first is of particular relevance to this chronicle of Government and Opposition. Not only was 1968 what could be called a highly politicized year, in the sense that the number and the pace of political events in most countries and continents were above average. But domestic political problems came to the fore (the French crisis, May 1968-April 1969, the crushing of the Czechoslovak revolution by the Soviet intervention) or ran parallel to some permanent international crisis (the possible impact on the Vietnam war of the change of American president, the transformation of the conflict between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties into an outright conflict between the two states). Moreover all these domestic political events had everywhere a common cause. They derived everywhere from the need for political modernization, with the special accent on participation, which has eluded both pluralistic-constitutional and communist states. The modern industrial or even post-industria1 society, seeking to adapt its politics to the rapid technological, economic and social changes, is in labour everywhere.
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References
* See for the first and second quarters of 1968: The Chronicle of Government and Opposition in this journal respectively Volume 3, number 3 and Volume 3, number 4, 1968. From now on it is proposed to publish The Chronicle only once a year, in the summer issue, and in the more comprehensive form adopted in this issue.
1 See lonescu, Ghiţa: ‘Politics in a New Key’, in This journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, summer 1968 Google Scholar in which the problem of political modernization was examined in general terms.
2 See for the impact of industrialization on political processes and institutions especially: Gellner, Ernest.: Thought and Change, London, 1965 Google Scholar; Shonfield, Andrew: Modern Capitalism, London, 1965 Google Scholar and Kenneth Galbraith, John: The New Industrial State, London, 1968 Google Scholar.
For the post-industrial society see Bell, Daniel.: ‘The Post-Industrial Society’ in The Public Interest, New York, 1967, nos. 6 and 7.Google Scholar
3 Arnold Toynbee used them in his unequalled prefaces to the yearly Surveys of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the 1930s. His unique contribution as a chronicler was perhaps underplayed in the well deserved homage paid to him as a philosopher of history on his 80th birthday in 1968. And yet those chronicles of the 1930s are now, by their prophetic grasp of current developments, fresher than many post-factum histories of that period.
4 The expression ‘aspect’ is preferred to ‘trend’ because the object of this chronicle is more to reconstitute developments than to forecast them. Forecasts should still be left to the futurologists. Yet it is odd to see that futurologists prefer to concentrate on the detection of future technical, economic and social trends of development, which they describe explicitly (see for instance the thirteen manifold trends in Kahn, Herman. and Wiener’s, Anthony J. stimulating The Year 2000, New York, 1967 Google Scholar) and treat the political trends only implicitly. This is even more surprising in the case of Jouvenel, Bertrand de who, as the author of the Art of Conjecture, London, 1967 Google Scholar, and in his activities as head of the Futuribles Institute and of its journal: Analyse et Prevision, Paris, SEDEIS, seems to part company with Bertrand de Jouvenel the political philosopher and author of: Du Pouvoir, De la Souveraineté and La Politique Pure.
5 For which Mill’s, John Stuart introduction to the ‘Principles of Political Economy’ and his polemic with Auguste Comte remain still the best formulation, London, 1848.Google Scholar
6 The following short and selective summary of events should be read together with the notes for the countries concerned in the Chronicle of Government and Opposition for the first two quarters of 1968, loc. cit.
7 See especially: Shoup, David (General): ‘The New American Militarism’, in the Atlantic Monthly, New York, 04 1969.Google Scholar
8 Direct: Algeria, Argentina, Burma, Burundi, C. A. R., Congo, Congo Republic, Dahomey, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Indonesia, Italy, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Thailand, Togo, U. A. R., Upper Volta.
9 Indirect or intermittent: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Laos, Dominican Republic, Peru, S. Vietnam.
10 Paraguay, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan.
11 ‘Yet even where, as in Soviet Russia, official ideology speaks another language than the facts, the étatism of the system as it works goes together with suppressive nationalism. Likewise, although Hegel’s rational concept of the state was different from the nationalist preoccupations of his time, his etatism invites its association with them in virtue of his anti-democratic and illiberal conception of Volk and Stoat. The criticism of their universal applicability is revealed in the partisan realization of the tenets of Lockean civil society. As has been said about America, “it is the paradoxical nature of its nationalism, its universalism which has created the nation, a state-nation or citizen-nation”’. Martin Seliger ‘Locke, Liberalism and Nationalism’ in Yolton, John W.: John Locke, Problems and Perspective, Cambridge, 1969 Google Scholar. For the USSR’s special brand of nationalism see also section III of this Chronicle.
12 Paris, 1967.
13 London, 1969.
14 This point of view has of course been argued before in Great Britain in Uwe Kitzinger’s books and in his Journal of the Common Market.
15 Op. cit., p. 243.
16 For the opposite thesis see Miliband, Ralph: The State in Capitalist Society, London 1969.Google Scholar
17 Here again two books bring the problem of regional decentralization up-to-date and offer to the reader a general view of the subject. The study of the Centre Européen de la Culture: Naissance de I’Europe des régions, Geneva, 1968, with two outstanding contributions by Jean-Louis Quermonne and by Denis de Rougemont, cuts across the national problems of the European nation-states and sees in the birth of the regions the only real hope for a European federation, which, according to these authors, must be started now against the states. Mr Mackintosh’s, John more neutral book on The Devolution of Power, London 1968 Google Scholar, concentrates only on Britain and considers also the forms of devolution and not only those of decentralization.
18 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Neiv Industrial State, London, 1967.Google Scholar
19 ‘By the same token the commissions de modernisation fit into the corporatist approach to planning….[This] approach eschews whenever possible the use of direct governmental intervention, and places its reliance instead on the corporatist formula for managing the economy. The major interest groups are brought together and encouraged to conclude a series of bargains about their future behaviour, which will have the effect of moving economic events along the desired path.’ Shonfield, Andrew, Modern Capitalism, the Changing Balance of Public and Private Power, London, 1965.Google Scholar
20 Keynes, J. M., ‘The End of Laissez-faire’, in Essays in Persuasion, London, 1931.Google Scholar
21 The 1962 CPSU programme stressed even more than before that ‘The period of full-scale communist construction is characterized by a further enhancement of the role and importance of the Communist Party as the leading and guiding force of Soviet society.’.
22 Louis Althusser.: Montesquieu, la politique et I’histoire, 1959 (particularly interesting to read now in retrospect). Manifestes politiques de Feuerbach, textes choisis (1960) Pour Marx (1965) Lire le Capital (1968) Lénine et la pbilosopbie (1969), Paris. See also: Les cahiers du Centre d’Éudes Socialistes: Dialeetique marxiste et pensee structuraliste, Paris 1968 and Aron, Raymond: D’une Sainte Famille à l’autre, Paris 1969.Google Scholar
23 ‘We can call by their names the theoretical deviations which led to the great historical failures of the proletariat, and above all that of the Second International. These deviations are called: economism, evolutionism, voluntarism, humanism, empiricism, dogmatism, etc’Lenine et la philosopbie, p. 32, loc. cit.
‘Althusser defines Marxism as theoretical anti-humanism and humanism as an ideology…As an ideology humanism has still a promising future even if it were only a smoke screen for the real problems arising for instance from destalinisation.’ Jean Claude Forquin: Lecture d’Althusser in Dialeetique Marxiste et pensée structuraliste, loc. cit.
The fundamental passages in Althusser’s work on Marxism as anti-humanism are to be found in Pour Marx, pp. 225–35 and in Lire le Capital, pp. 150–1, where from this formulation: ‘Theoretically speaking, Marxism is, at the same time and because of its unique epistomological rupture by which it is born, an anti-humanism and an anti-historicism. I should even say an a-humanism and an a-historicism. And it is not too early to fight back the humanist and historicist attack, which for now almost forty years has constantly threatened Marxism. It was around the German Left, first around Rosa Luxemburg and Mehring; [and then] around theoreticians who played an important part like Lukacs, or very important, like Gramsci, that were set the themes of a revolutionary humanism and historicism.’.
24 ‘We have to understand Marxism in a radically non-anthropological way: man is not the subject of the economic process, and his consciousness of this process, or of the spontaneous perception he gets from it, is necessarily distorted…With Marxism the determination of needs becomes historical and structural, and no longer anthropological. The production relations are the real subjects of the economic process (distributors and definers of positions and functions).’ Forquin, loc. cit.
25 Forquin, loc. cit. Also: N. Geras, a paper on Althusser and Structuralism, at a Manchester University Government Department Seminar on ‘The Left’, 1969.
26 Lénine et la philosophie, p. 34.
27 Lénine et la philosophie, p. 47.
28 Aggravated now by the ominous interest of the more reactionary leaders (for instance Zhivkov, who presents it as a new interpretation) in cybernetics and automation.
29 The contradictions could be also found in three major texts of Lenin: What is to be done ? as read against State and Revolution and the big speeches during the debate on the Workers’ Opposition.
30 The following quotation gives the explanation of this form of nationalism in the guise of internationalism. ‘Polish patriotism is organically linked to internationalism, that is to say the Polish state and Free Polish nation have a vital interest in linking themselves with the interests of other nations and of other states….The centre of this bloc is the Soviet Union.’ K. Hrabyk: ‘The Nation, the State and Socialism’, in Zycie Warzawy, 23 October 1968.
31 11 and 16 September 1968.
32 Sartori, Giovanni., ‘Political Development and Political Engineering,’ in Montgomery, John D. and Hirschman, Albert O., Public Policy, Vol. XVIII, Harvard, 1958.Google Scholar