Introduction

During the 1990s the bulk of the Western intelligentsia, both the right and perhaps more surprisingly the left, responded to the collapse of East European Stalinism by declaring capitalism and representative democracy to be triumphant, and socialism dead. There were some of us, a minority even amongst the left, who counter-argued that the classical Marxist vision of socialism had never been more than fleetingly realised in Eastern Europe, that Stalinism did not constitute the practical implementation of classical Marxism. We further argued that capitalism, even in the most highly developed countries, continued to be mired in prolonged economic stagnation and mass unemployment, was generating growing inequality both within and between nations, and was compatible with only very limited forms of democratic governance. But making such arguments was not easy. To deploy a metaphor such as "swimming against the current," would be to thoroughly understate the point. In the class war being conducted at the theoretical level (in economic, social and political theory), our side was under heavy artillery fire, resulting in a serious depletion of our forces, and consequently we were forced to adopt a largely defensive strategy aimed at the preservation of the central core of our position within the wider intellectual landscape.