In Memoriam - Ellen Meiksins Wood 1942-2016
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 January 2016 03:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1208 .... January 19, 2016
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In Memoriam - Ellen Meiksins Wood 1942-2016
The death of Ellen Meiksins Wood on January 14, 2016 represents an immense loss for socialists everywhere. As a frequent contributor to the Socialist Register since her first essay in 1980, special co-editor of the 1995 volume on Why Not Capitalism, and a member of the Register’s editorial collective from 1996 to 2009, her depth of socialist commitment, theoretical originality and profound insight may best be gauged from this excerpt from her essay on "The uses and abuses of ‘civil society’" in the Socialist Register 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals.
The Uses and Abuses of ‘Civil Society’
Ellen Meiksins Wood
We live in curious times. Just when intellectuals of the Left in the West have a rare... opportunity to do something useful, if not actually world-historic, they -- or large sections of them -- are in full retreat. Just when reformers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are looking to Western capitalism for paradigms of economic and political success, many of us appear to be abdicating the traditional role of the Western left as critic of capitalism. Just when more than ever we need a Karl Marx to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist system, or a Friedrich Engels to expose its ugly realities ‘on the ground’, what we are getting is an army of ‘post-Marxists’ one of whose principal functions is apparently to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism... Despite the diversity of current theoretical trends on the left and their various means of conceptually dissolving capitalism, they often share one especially serviceable concept: ‘civil society’... However constructive its uses in defending human liberties against state oppression, or in marking out a terrain of social practices, institutions and relations neglected by the ‘old’ Marxist left, ‘civil society’ is now in danger of becoming an alibi for capitalism...
