Tony Blair says that his programme of making New Labour a "party of business" is the modern form of socialism, or, at least, "social-ism". The Chinese Communist Party says that fierce repression of workers' rights, together with fast and furious cutting of deals with capitalist multinationals and the open and avid pursuit of individual profit for the privileged, is socialism in a form suitable to China today. For others, socialism is what used to exist in the USSR and is now - to the sorrow of some, the joy of others - off the agenda. What is socialism? Even 150 years ago, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels marked off their working-class socialism sharply from a wide range of other socialisms, which they called reactionary socialism, bourgeois socialism, petty-bourgeois socialism, and utopian socialism. They had already criticised what they called the "crude communism" of levelling-down to equally shared poverty. Early radical socialists in Britain, people like William Morris, argued against anarchists but also saw a huge gulf between their own working-class politics and "state socialism", which they regarded as no better, or worse, than capitalism. Yet the accomplished fact often weighs heavier than a thousand good theories. The fact that state-owned industry gave the Stalinist USSR something approximately socialist in common with the heroic years of the revolutionary Russian workers' state after 1917 convinced many that there must be some real continuity. The USSR must, at the very least, be a distorted version of a system moving towards socialism, if not actually reaching it, and therefore deserved the loyalty of the labour movement. The events of 1989-91 put an end to all such hopes, and compelled many socialists to rethink. This book will be an immensely valuable contribution to that rethinking. It presents, with clear and informative commentary, the key "lost texts of critical Marxism" from a long-dispersed, long-marginalised, but brilliant, group of radical thinkers who demonstrated the fundamental conflict between working-class socialism and bureaucratic statism in the era when the USSR was at the peak of its political influence.

Well I've read this book and quite frankly, I wasn't particulary impressed. But you have to hand it to Mr Matgamna, he sure does know how to write an introduction! In many ways, the intro is more useful, though I would wholeheartedly disagree with many of the points made, than much of the "critical texts" included thereafter.

The fact is, Shachtman went over to the right wing at the end of his life afterleading the SWP for many years. I blame his views on the USSR and one notices how many ex-trots do this. Obviously their views on the USSR have a lot of factual basis to them , but it was the best we had and therefore worth defending to the hilt and fighting for. Stalinism was "actually exisiting socialism" and anyone who denys this, contradicts the actually existing state of play at the time up until the end of the Cold War, and in particular, up to the mid 1960s.

Any socialist who wants to be educated should read this book, and then argue with it!

The Fate of the Russian Revolution Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Vol.1 Edited by Sean Matgamna. Published by Phoenix Press London ISBN 0-9531864-0-7

This book opens with a quotation from Albert Einstein, stating the case for socialism. Einstein, like almost every great mind of the 20th century who concerned himself or herself with the welfare of the working people, wanted common ownership and a democratic planned economy. But Einstein was stumped by the enigma of the USSR. He saw that there "the planned economy" was "accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual" and so was "not yet socialism". It seemed to represent, on the one hand, a step in the right direction, because of the planned economy, but on the other hand, not a step that Einstein wanted to take.

Very few thinkers got anywhere near resolving the paradox. The greatest was Leon Trotsky. But Trotsky got no further than assessments of the USSR which he himself described as provisional and needing review if the system proved to have some solidity and viability, rather than being only a freak concatenation of counter posed forces.

When the Stalinist USSR showed that it did have that viability - by becoming the world's second superpower, in the 1940s - the task of reworking Trotsky's analysis had to be undertaken, not by well-provided professors in famous research institutes, but by tiny groups of Marxists harassed by the exigencies of day-to-day political activity in hostile circumstances. They have not become as famous as Einstein, or Trotsky. Their names - Max Shachtman, Joseph Carter, Hal Draper, C L R James - are largely unknown.

But the "lost texts" of those "critical Marxists" - here unearthed for the first time from dusty archives, and well-presented with a substantial introduction - are a central part of the intellectual history of the 20th century. Every educated person needs to know about them, just as much as he or she needs to know about Einstein's theory of relativity.

The term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is so obscured by its history of reversed meaning amid the semantic misfortunes it has suffered at the hands of all parties since its first limited usage by Marx and Engels, as to be a case study in semantic catastrophe. Hal Draper valiantly traces the way in which the early usages, in the generation of 1848, not at first counterposed to the term 'democracy, later become fatally misleading and are finally appropriated in the Leninist and final Stalinist versions. This actual history is so tricky that I would not contribute further to short clarifications perpetuating confusion by summarizing the book here, and one can only recommend reading the details, since short summaries and official corrections and clarifications trying to get the matter straight are themselves part of the confusion. Suffice it to say that Marx's occasional references were quite innocent of the later interpretations of the phrase. This book should be required reading for anyone attempting to plot against the government.

It's difficult to understand Marx's politics today. Not because there's anything so complicated about them. To the contrary, Marx's political views are remarkably straightforward and sensible, once stripped of 150 years of obfuscation. Draper's project is exigetical, restoring Marx's writings and practice to their original historical and political contexts, explaining them clearly and consistently. In the process he skewers any number of academic or ideological obscurantists, inventing the term "falsifiction" for the worst of them. This volume makes clear that the origins of Stalinism lie in the pre-Marxist ideologies of social revolution which Marx and Engels themselves opposed through their entire lives, particularly those of Lassalle and Bakunin. Not an easy read: detailed and small-printed. But fascinating and often very funny.