![]() ![]() ![]() We too have to deal with this contrast or be defeated. It seems to me that a similar contrast is our tragedy right now and we have to face with the same balance the fact that there are strong and promising emancipatory impulses at work, but that they may not be active at the core of capitalist society and may not free us from its oppressions. If you do not deal with this contrast, you will be defeated.’ Speaking to American students at the height of student activism in the 1960s, Deutscher delivered a not altogether welcome message: ‘You are effervescently active on the margin of social life, and the workers are passive right at the core of it. ![]() We also have to bring the same judgment to the means and agencies of socialist transformation as to its ends. It is just this kind of balanced judgment that we badly need today, and this means understanding not only the ways in which socialism is not the end of history, not the end of human emancipation, but also the ways in which it is the beginning. He said once that socialism was not ‘evolution’s last and perfect product or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history’. I think this stability had something to do with Deutscher’s measured vision of socialism, which recognized its promise for human emancipation without harbouring romantic illusions that it would cure all human ills, miraculously making people ‘free’, in Shelley’s words, ‘from guilt or pain’. Or the stability which kept him working as a Marxist intellectual through periods of muted class struggle, while so many others gave up and went off in pursuit of various intellectual and political fashions. Like many others, I have been impressed in particular by the stability and balance of his commitment to socialism-and I say stability quite deliberately, to convey not a stubborn dogmatism but, on the contrary, the kind of balanced, independent and critical judgment which allowed him, for example, to praise without apology the achievements and promise of the October Revolution while never disguising the horrors of its deformations, at a time when so many others were swinging wildly between blind worship and abject recantation of socialism altogether. I did not know Isaac Deutscher, but I have formed a pretty strong impression of the kind of man he was, and the kind of political voice he represented and it seems to me precisely the kind of voice we need a lot of now. ![]() L et me say something, first, about Isaac Deutscher, not just in some ritual tribute for the occasion but because it seems appropriate to what I am going to say in my lecture and the spirit in which I intend to say it. ![]()
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