Title: Socialists, Social Movements and the Labour Party: A Reply to Hilary Wainwright
Abstract: In assessing the prospects for an independent socialist party in Britain in the 1995 Socialist Register, Hilary Wainwright draws on her long and extensive experience of left politics. She has set herself an exacting task: to update Ralph Miliband's review of the progress made in creating a new political formation between 1956 and 1976. He envisaged a left-wing party 'able to attract a substantial measure of support and hold out genuine promise of further growth', but he concluded that after twenty years there was still nothing to show for it. In contrast, Hilary examines the last two decades and claims that the prospects for a new party are now promising. My counter argument rests on the open acknowledgement that the socialist movement is in crisis - and insists that this crisis is as severe for those outside the Labour Party as it is for those who belong to it. Although the humanitarian case for socialism is stronger than ever and even though opportunities are emerging, the dramatic demise of Communism and the more prosaic decline of social democracy have seriously damaged the whole of the left. This is true whether we agreed with either of these dominant traditions or whether our political lives have been spent contesting some of the harm that they have done.
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-03-18
Language: en
Type: article
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