ABSTRACT

Post-Stalinist discussion on the nature of the putative ‘transition’ in the European genre, though richly varied, was nonetheless, inevitably, highly contradictory. Few Marxian debates have been as dreadfully tedious, despite their portentous implications for the subaltern orders living under socialist regimes, as the matter of the ‘correct’ modality of a transition to socialism. In plain fact, the real crux of the issue, astonishingly overlooked by all commentators in the discourse, is that Marx had more to say on the nature of the transition than on the constitution of socialism itself, particularly its all-critical political form(s). Individual delinking from social norms can just as easily initiate social change, as much as the vaunted Marxian faith in mass conscious class action. Both Marxists and capitalist planners wish only to ‘lead’ the less privileged, or the more gullible, ‘masses’, like to many cattle, into pre-selected social corrals where they are permanently dispossessed of the will and capacity for self-determination.