SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Harold Laski (1893-1950), outstanding political scientist, who taught at the London School of Economics for much of his life, was a member of the British Labour Party, and was elected its Chairman in 1945. Laski, who early in life came to see the state as functioning in the interests of the ruling classes, was an advocate of extensive social and economic reforms, until the crisis of the 1930s and the subsequent rise of fascism made him embrace Marxism. Despairing of the possibility of reforms within the system he came to view socialism as the only possible and available alternative to rising fascism. During the Spanish Civil War he was a strong advocate of a popular front of all the forces opposed to fascism. His Introduction to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto on the occasion of its centenary was a justly-celebrated piece and we publish it in the current number.
Together with these two classics we publish a contemporary reaction from Utsa Patnaik which introduces a much-needed third world perspective. The completion of 150 years by the Communist Manifesto is not an occasion for ritual celebration. To make it so by merely lauding the genius of its young authors would be an insult to their legacy, since both their world view as well as the rugged greatness of their personalities abhorred all ritual. They themselves would have wanted it to be an occasion for assessment, for a checking of theoretical bearings, for an unflinching appraisal, inspired not by scholasticism but by praxis, of the doctrine they set out in the Manifesto. The three pieces published in the current number, which are separated from one another by roughly 50 year intervals, which mark approximately the 50th, the 100th, and the 150th anniversaries of the Manifesto, and which are informed by very substantial differences in perspective, would we hope contribute towards this task of theoretical engagement with the Manifesto.