The Red and the Green

Raymond Williams

• Socialism and Survival by Rudolf Bahro, translated by David Fernbach
  Heretic Books, 160 pp, £6.95, December 1982, ISBN 0 946097 02 X
• Capitalist Democracy in Britain by Ralph Miliband
  Oxford, 76 pp, £8.95, November 1982, ISBN 0 19 827445 9
• Socialist Register 1982 edited by Martin Eve and David Musson
  Merlin, 314 pp, £8.50, November 1982, ISBN 0 85036 292 X

Some very important changes in socialist ideas are now beginning to come through in Europe. Yet at the surface of politics they are invisible in Britain, even though there are those here who have contributed to them. Where they have become visible at the surface, as most notably in the rise of the Green Party in the German Federal Republic, they are still commonly interpreted as a local ‘ecological’ variation, without long-term effect on the main body of socialist institutions and ideas. Similarly, the difficult argument about relations between the Left and the popular campaigns for nuclear disarmament – description of these as the Peace Movement raises the precise point – is often displaced to the idea of a ‘single issue’, which leaves the main body of politics intact.