ABSTRACT
Many European Marxists are increasingly aware of the deficiencies of Marxist political theory and of the need to adjust theory and programmes to the conditions of struggle in Western Europe. This has produced a new openness toward the propositions of the ‘classics’ and a willingness to re-think political lines. This new openness is not the exclusive possession of one party or one theoretical ‘school’ in modern Marxism but is widely shared among different and diverse political and philosophical orientations, from Carrillo to Poulantzas. It involves the registration of certain basic political conditions as the starting point for theory and policy; these are:
(i) that there are no prospects for an insurrectionary road to power in contemporary Western capitalist countries, and that the working classes of the different countries remain socially and politically fragmented, with substantial portions of manual workers continuing to support non-socialist or even reactionary political parties; (ii) that, therefore, the classic opposition between revolutionary Marxism and the social democratic ‘parliamentary road’ can no longer be sustained, the Leninist conception of a vanguard party must in consequence be rejected; instead Marxist and socialist forces must work to build parliamentary majorities around programmes capable of winning mass electoral support, and these programmes must necessarily involve political compromises and work through strategies of ‘structural reform’ (at least in the initial stages); (iii) that conventional parliamentary politics are insufficient, parliamentary representation and struggles need to be coupled with an active mass movement; (iv) that this mass movement must involve an alliance between the traditional socialist forces (parties, trade unions, militants, etc.) and the new groups engaged in a range of specific struggles but which can (given the right kind of socialist politics) join in a broad anti-capitalist alliance, notably the ecological and the feminist movements.
