Narrating Socialism - Four Voices

Abstract

One of the notions I find most delightful and compelling within the Marxian tradition, especially among Trotskyists and ultra-Leftists,¹ is the idea of the ‘ balance-sheet’. In Marx’s time, the balance-sheet appears to have been just that: balance-sheets from the minutes of the First International detail various contributions, costs for books and stationery, rent and gas, refreshments to delegates at conferences and so on. But, within later Leftist currents, there’s a shift from the ‘ balance-sheet’ as designating that very capitalist task of rationally accounting for profits and losses, and the term is appropriated and transformed into a minor Marxian theme — a drawing up of the situation, an assessment of the forces in play, the results of struggles and the prospects for socialism. From 1933, the ‘Midnight of the century’, Bilan (‘ Balance-sheet’) was, for instance, the ‘Theoretical Bulletin of the Left Fraction of the PCI [Italian Communist Party]’, the exiled Bordigists, within which a sustained attempt was made to ‘draw a balance-sheet of the post-war events … to establish the conditions for the victory of the proletariat in all countries’ (ICC, 1992: 70).