Class, the Working Class, and the Politburo

Abstract

The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nield do not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-based thinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands of the authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for human emancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presented enormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley and Nield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but their vague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics of overblown significance.