Tagged "politics"

Cross posted from Nonsite.org.

Passages between brackets are drawn from the manuscript version of the essay and differ slightly from the published variant.

Published July 7, 1970

We on the democratic left are living through a real crisis. And precisely because I believe the Socialist Party has a very vital role to play in this period, I would like to say something about the problems we confront.

One aspect is that many people on the [so-called democratic] left today substitute psychology for politics. Now, I have no objection to a lifestyle, or how you wear your hair, or whether you eat pig’s feet[, or whether you want to dress so one cannot distinguish between male and female except upon very close inspection]. But to substitute this “how I feel, what my thing is,” for politics, is an extremely dangerous attitude which the Socialist movement must fight. In fact, the Socialist movement is one of the few movements which has the credentials for fighting it.

This brief writing belongs to the Introduction to Boris Kagarlitsky’s book “Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed”. The work is both a valuable reflection of, and look into, the tumultuous years following the dissolution of the USSR.

‘You can’t hammer in a bolt.’ This was among the slogans used by the pro-government political bloc Russia’s Choice in its campaign for the parliamentary elections of December 1993. Spokespeople for the bloc explained to voters: it’s pointless to dream of a just society, so you have to reconcile yourself to the new order. The slogan turned out to be unintentionally ironic. The attempts by Yelstin, Gaidar and the other Russian ‘reformers’ to construct liberal capitalism in a country where there is neither a normal bourgeoise, nor a market infrastructure, were a case of ‘hammering a bolt’.