More Reading about Socialism

Four more to whet your appetite - 

Towards Socialism ed Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (NLR 1965)

An amazing collection of essays from some of the original thinkers of the 1960s – including Anderson, Balogh, Blackburn, Coates, Crossman, Gorz, Nairn, Titmus, Westergaard and Williams

Arguments for Socialism Cockshott and Zackariah (2012)
a series of fairly hard-left essays. Not recommended 

Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie

Mudge (2018) – from the Intro

Insofar as left parties are checks on plutocracy, they are also lynchpins of democracy writ large. Without left parties, in other words, democracy is in trouble. Indeed, standard theories in historical political economy—in particular, those of Karl Polanyi—are quite clear on what we should expect of a world in which there is no longer any democratically imposed limit on the expansion of market society: the rise of an unpredictable populist and extremist politics marked by protection-seeking rebellions against the march toward homo economicus, grounded in a volatile mix of class politics, ethno-racial and nationalist resentments, and basic human responses to disruption, risk, uncertainty, anxiety, and boundless competition. Around the turn of the twentieth century the French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to this state of affairs; by the time of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), the fate of the whole Western political order hung in the balance.

There is now good reason to see the 1990s as the eve of a new Polanyian moment that is very much with us still. To my mind, if we are to grasp these troubling times, the story of the third ways requires a careful, analytical, historical retelling. This retelling needs to be clear-eyed about the self-justifications of third way spokespersons, but, at the same time, it should avoid the “logic of the trial”—in the phrasing of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—in which the more or less explicit question is where, or with whom, blame lies.7 Third wayers need to be situated and historicized, not frozen in time or rendered one-dimensional. If the aim is to shore up left representation not for parties’ sake but for democracy’s sake, then we need to grasp the forces that shape how left parties “see,” informing political debates rather than feeding the divorce of politics and reason.

To this end I adopt a historical, cross-national, and biographical approach focused on parties and their spokespeople. Essential here is the juxtaposition of third way leftism, and the people who gave it form and substance, with the leftisms (and spokespersons) who came before it. Starting from this premise, my analysis centers on left parties’ cultural infrastructure—that is, the organizations, social relations, persons, and devices through which parties organize how people see and understand the world. Instead of asking whether party change is “top-down” or “bottom-up,” I ask how left parties have shaped the very meaning of what it is to be an American “liberal,” or to be “Labour” in Britain, or to be a “social democrat” in Sweden or Germany. I also ask why a strikingly uniform cross-national identifier—“progressive”—has now supplanted all of these terms. To ask these

questions is to acknowledge that, like the umbrella terms “left” and “right,” monikers like “liberal” or “social democratic” do not have the same meaning, or describe the same kinds of people, across times and places. There is also variation in such terms’ territorial reach, and indeed whether they travel across national boundaries at all.

And so, to understand Western leftism’s reinventions, I focus on four parties: the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. I punctuate a long historical view, ranging from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, with emphases on three moments: the 1920s–1930s, the 1950s–1960s, and the 1980s-1990s.

Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist transformation ed M Brie 

and C Thomasberger (2018)

The last two decades have been marked by a renewed interest in the work of Karl Polanyi. Spreading resistance to the neoliberal agenda and the deepening crises of the last 25 years, which culminated in the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, are viewed as a strong support for the main theses of Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi was quoted by leading intellectuals and in the editorials of the main newspapers around the world as one of the most influential thinkers in the time of crises. But reception of his work remains largely restricted to the so-called “double movement” of commodification vs. social regulation. Polanyi is typically regarded as a social reformer supporting an increased social state, welfare intervention, and a broader national and international regulation of the financial markets. Or he is depicted as a theorist who gives legitimacy to various social associations and organizations which develop in the niches of current society. Both interpretations fail to address the depth of Karl Polanyi’s analysis and alternatives which are linked to his understanding of socialism as a new and different type of civilization.

The socialist intention behind The Great Transformation, and indeed of the totality of his work, is not widely understood. The first reason is that a large part of his oeuvre concerning his understanding of socialism has, until now, not been published in english. Some important texts noted down in the 1920s and 1930s as well as some of his Hungarian writings have been published only recently (Polanyi 2014, 2016b, 2016c, 2017, forthcoming). To bring his unpublished writings to a wider public, we include in this book first-time translations of some of Polanyi’s most significant papers from the 1920s. A second reason is the depth and complexity of Polanyi’s analysis. The Great Transformation strives neither for a sociological theory of social development nor for a blueprint of a new great transformation. It aims primarily at an explanation of the disasters which, starting with the great war, caused the european civilization of the 19th century to collapse. It lays bare the roots of this historic cataclysm. In “The Great Transformation” Polanyi makes the attempt to reveal the meaning of this unique and singular event. He searches for a true understanding of the reasons which caused the horrors of two world wars, the great Depression, the rise of fascism and Auschwitz so as to prevent the repetition of disasters which threatened to extinguish the legacy of the west.