A01=Carl Boggs
Author_Carl Boggs
capitalist development
Category=JP
Civil Society
Comisiones Obreras
Communist parties
Cor Poratism
CPSU Leader
crisis of legitimation in Western Europe
Cur Tailment
Democratic Road
Direct Democracy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eurocommunist Parties
Eurocommunist theoreticians
Forcible Destruction
General Incorporation
International Monetary Fund
Italian Capitalism
Italian Working Class Movement
Leninist ideology
Marxist theory
Mediterranean capitalism
Middle Strata
Ordine Nuovo
parliamentary socialism
Pci Leadership
political democratization
Seventh Comintern Congress
social division of labor
structural reformism
traditional Marxist ideology
West Germany
Western European Communist Parties
Product details
- ISBN 9780367308469
- Weight: 500g
- Dimensions: 148 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2021
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The major Communist parties in Western Europe claim a commitment to a "democratic road to socialism." Often this is a genuine evolution of traditional Marxist/Leninist ideology based on the assumption that political and economic power can be obtained through gradual change rather than revolution and through the utilization of democratic processes. How well is this strategy working? Not very well, concludes the author of this book. Carl Boggs bases his analysis on a theoretical assessment of the historical and strategic development of Eurocommunism — of those par ties and movements (notably in France, Italy, and Spain) that seek a transition to socialism based on the democratization of existing political and economic structures (the so-called parliamentary road to socialism). After examining the logic and premises of this conception, he moves to a critique of the major Eurocommunist theoreticians—e. g., Togliatti, Berlinguer, Ingrao, Napolitano, Carrillo, Marchais, Elleinstein, Poulantzas, and Claudin. He concludes that their ideas fail to resolve the historic Marxist conflict between democratization and rationalization (understood here in terms of the drive toward statism, bureaucratization, and further refinement of the social division of labor under capitalism). In fact, says Dr. Boggs, Eurocommunism will probably represent a sort of historical resolution of legitimation and production crises within Mediterranean capitalism that extends rather than overturns hierarchical social and authority relations, the capitalist state, and the social division of labor. Such a resolution might broadly parallel the function of social democracy in Northern Europe in a previous phase of capitalist development.
Carl Boggs is a visiting professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Southern California. He has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Boggs has conducted field research in Italy and is the author of Gramsci's Marxism.
