Socialism from Below (Revolutionary)

These essays by Hal Draper reflect his standing as a scholar, political journalist, and polemicist. The collection concentrates on what is of the greatest contemporary interest--his understanding of the meaning of socialism. In Draper's view, the divisions running through the history of the socialist movement between reformists and revolutionaries, authoritarians and democrats, were secondary; the important distinction was between those socialists who looked for some outside authority that would hand down salvation to the masses from above and those who saw the key to the reform of existing society in the struggle for self-emancipation from below.
The first part contains Draper's pamphlet, The Two Souls of Socialism, for over twenty years the most widely read and succinct statement of Draper's radically different view of contemporary politics, and also several historical studies showing how Marx was the only major nineteenth-century thinker to defend unequivocally the democratic movement from below. The second section, entitled "In Defense of Radicalism," contains Draper's main articles on the New Left of the 1960s. The final section, "Marxism and Its Critics," contains several polemical articles in defense of the Marxist approach. The last article in this section, describing the evolution of Marx and Engels from typical "New Leftists" of the 1840s to advocates of socialism from below, is an early version of what became several chapters in Draper's five-volume study of Marx's political theory and activity, and provides a fitting conclusion to this volume.