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What News from Genoa? Varieties of Anti-Capitalist Experience

Paul Thomas

For Barbara Lee and in memory of Michael Rogin.

What is the price of anti-capitalism in the twenty-first century? In answering this question, we should not allow the dramatic events of September 11, 2001 to overshadow or displace the drama of what happened in Genoa two months earlier. For one thing, July and September have already been joined, officially and authoritatively, from the right. John Ashcroft—not the first U.S. Attorney General for whom the sobriquet “dyed-in-the-wool” might actually have been coined—acted with all due dispatch retroactively to define and brand as a “terrorist” anyone who had taken to the streets in Genoa or Seattle to protest the G-8 Summit or the WTO (though not, of course, those who took to the streets in uniform to hunt them down). Add to this a reprise of the old McCarthyite logic—if you’re not against terrorism as we define it, you’re pro-terrorist—and what comes out is the no-less-ominous observation that while European communism may be a spent force, the American National Security State is alive and well. It’s an ill wind, as has frequently been observed, that blows nobody any good.

All of a sudden, the crowing triumphalism that attended the fall of European communism has started to look dated, shopworn, and distant. The line connecting the Battle in Seattle to Fortress Genoa, a line that passes through Gothenburg, Quebec, and Prague, shows that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not pull down with it the prospects of further anti-capitalist protest. To the contrary, it would appear that Genoa changed the rules of the anti-capitalist game (and perhaps the coordinates of capitalism itself) decisively and irreversibly. It is unlikely that the leaders of industrialized countries will be able to meet together any time soon other than in off-season, remote Canadian ski-resorts (with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon nearby, scanning the horizon nervously).

What was distinctive about Genoa was not that it was organized by email and cellphones (Seattle was too) but that both sides in the street battle were so amply prepared. The death of Carlo Giuliani was an unwelcome surprise, to be sure. But much of the rest was elaborately prepared for. Millions of dollars were spent on pre-Summit restoration, more than 16,000 soldiers, policemen, and Carabinieri assigned for the sake of “security,” a six-square-mile “red zone” within which the G-8 leaders could meet, and an airport closed for the duration of the Summit. The scale of the preparedness was impressive—the more so if we recall that the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) did not shut down Chicago in 1968 even for an afternoon. (I know, I was there.) And yet, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put the matter in their July 20, 2001 op-ed piece in the New York Times, “What the Protesters in Genoa Want”:

A new species of political activist has been born with a spirit that is reminiscent of the paradoxical idealism of the 1960s—the realistic course of action today is to demand what is seemingly impossible, that is, something new . . . One of the most remarkable characteristics of these movements is their diversity: trade unionists together with ecologists together with priests and communists. We are beginning to see a multitude emerge that is defined not by any single identity, but can discover communality in its diversity.

So defined, anti-capitalist protesters seem to fall all too neatly into the category of New Social Movements as these were celebrated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso, 1977). Here, the destabilization of identities and multiplication of politicized spaces tends toward the dissolution of what Mouffe and Laclau call “the differential positivity of the social” and the explosion of “the idea and reality . . . of a (singular) unique space for the constitution of the political.” New social movements, we are given to understand, multiply along the lines of intersection of various concerns and social forces or spaces; they are not regulated by any singular concept of political subjectivity, and, accordingly, do not occupy the space, the topos, of “politics” as conventionally defined. They have been critical in mobilizing opposition and alternative cultures within major capitalist states. Such mobilizations have been all too facilely labeled as self-destructive left-sectarianism by members of the erstwhile New Left (as in Todd Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams). Alternatively, they have been celebrated for being sporadic, discontinuous, fragmented, and jagged by observers of a “post-modernist” persuasion, observers who have a vested, anti-essentialist interest in such adjectives. It looks likely that NSMs, including anti-capitalist protesters, have gained their momentum and mobility from their transgressions of the normative divisions of political state and civil society in ways that are difficult for states to contain. As Paul Gilroy has remarked, where the new movements keep their distance from the institutions of the political system, the distinction between human emancipation and the formal freedoms guaranteed by politics is constantly underlined.

This in turn entails a point made by David Lloyd and myself in our book Culture and the State (Routledge, 1997). We put forth the argument that the success of the modern, “hegemonic” state presupposed the acceptance not of “human” but precisely of “political” emancipation, much as Karl Marx had presciently outlined and juxtaposed these categories in his 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question.” Such untoward acceptance involved the retraction of democratic aspirations (which had been marked among the British Chartists) into the mere capacity “to be represented.” If this is so, then what we are witnessing today is a return of the repressed. The openings for social movements have multiplied, as civil society has become more porous. Diverse social spaces have opened up for alternative cultural formations that owe precious little to class membership or to political subjectivity as this is conventionally understood. The force, the élan, of these movements derives from the fact that they have not succumbed to pre-given differentiations. Laclau and Mouffe believe that the path to radical democracy “lies not in the abandonment of the democratic terrain, but, on the contrary, in the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state.” This forces Laclau and Mouffe to endorse the already-constituted political and social subject-divisions of liberal, representative democracy, the very subject-positions that NSMs themselves are engaged in transgressing. Struggles now seem to follow pre-given, and rather too constricted, lines of distinction (race, gender, class), and get represented by “anti” movements: anti-racism, anti-sexism, and, for that matter, anti-capitalism. Negative definition that takes its lights from what is to be opposed, and from nothing else, may be unhelpful or even self-defeating. Culture and the State suggested that social movements like Chartism were transgressive of such categories even before the spaces and subject positions associated with “the social,” “the economic,” “the political,” and “the educational,” had established themselves. This in turn would entail that, shorn of their connection with twentieth-century “identity politics,” new social movements may in fact not be so very new after all.

All the more reason, then, to take the broader view, armed in the certainty that there have been anti-capitalist movements and doctrines throughout the history of capitalism, from its very beginnings and even (on the part of those, like the French Sans-Culottes or the British Chartists, who read the writing on the wall) on the eve of the triumph of capitalism. It is these apparently kaleidoscopic responses and reactions that cry out for categorization and theorization. That they are kaleidoscopic but in no way random or scattershot can be seen more clearly if we acknowledge, right off the bat, the centrality of socialism in general—and Marx in particular—to their sequence and their patterning. Marx, of course, was not alone in having advocated revolution or in having believed in the need for drastic change in order to attain human autonomy, as the merest glance at the wonderland of nineteenth-century revolutionism will reveal. But his sense of the tension between the depravity and the promise of capitalism was unique. It is no doubt easier to imagine a world without Marx than a world without capitalism, communism, socialism, and revolution. But in the world we actually inhabit, these facts of life still have to be seen through Marx.

It is to Marx that we owe an entire vocabulary, consisting of proletariat, class (including class consciousness and class struggle), ideology, and alienation (including the fetishism of commodities). These terms were arrayed alongside the new economic vocabulary of use-value, exchange-value, surplus-value, and the falling rate of profit. The point here is not just that we owe to Marx the main elements of the method Engels and others were to term “historical materialism”—true and important though this is. It is that one would be hard put to analyze capitalist society—let alone oppose it—without recourse to the above inventory. Indeed, the very idea that effective opposition to capitalism must be rooted in a solid intellectual analysis of how capitalism works, from the point of production outwards, is an idea of distinctly Marxian provenance. It is hard to overestimate its importance. Marx’s central convictions, that “the production of material life,” the organization of productive activities, should have pride of place in the investigation of social structures and historical development, and that “the mode of production conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in general,” always have been, and still remain open to interpretation and disputation. But they cannot be ignored, or passed over rough-shod. It is for this very reason that even though there are elements in the compound of what came to be known as “historical materialism” that were not, strictly speaking, Marx’s at all—it’s worth remembering that we would have had capitalism, communism, socialism, revolution, and even the labor theory of value if Marx had not written a word—they continue to be elements on which Marx left his own distinctive imprint.

What stands out most distinctively about Marx is his unsurpassed sense of the enormous potential (alongside the actual depravity) of capitalism. This double-edged characterization was one that Marx could proffer without either lapsing into a purely moralistic critique or subscribing to the romantic attitude (one that was far from uncommon among Marx’s contemporaries) that capitalism had disrupted a pre-industrial idyll. It is to Marx we owe the insight that under capitalism the capacity to produce expands, and might exceed all known bounds, while ownership of the means of production contracts (relatively or absolutely). We are not yet done with the sheer usefulness of this insight into an asymmetry or maladjustment that is not accidental but built-in. It was Marx’s distinction of forces from relations of production that enabled him, and may still enable us today, to deny that physical production and material growth depend by their very nature on the maintenance and furthering of capitalism. Marx contended that if capitalism is not understood genetically—understood, that is to say, as it arose, when it arose, and at no other time—we have no way of accounting for its historical specificity. Capitalism would then be falsely and uncritically understood as the universal norm and standard by which all earlier modes of production could be judged, and found wanting. Conversely, these earlier modes of production would be, again falsely and uncritically, regarded as though they were nothing but early, immature, faltering, and tentative approximations of capitalism itself. While it is unlikely that more modern scholars will fall as neatly into this particular trap as did those “political economists” who were Marx’s near-contemporaries, the trap itself—the trap, that is, of falsely absolutizing capitalism as the summit of human endeavor or the be-all and end-all of human existence—has widened considerably over the span of time that separates us from Marx. Capitalism is not unassailable, whether or not what Marx called “revolutionary activity, practical-critical activity” will suffice as assailant. The chain of causality that undergirds capitalism, according to which human relationships have become phenomena of the market, can in principle (like the crust of custom) be broken. Capitalism, that is to say, has its enabling assumptions, and these in turn have practical effects; should these cease to operate, capitalism could not and (Marx hastened to add) would not persist.

What Marx bequeathed to his followers was a revolutionary doctrine and movement, as well as a method of social, economic, political, and historical argument. While the combination was nothing if not fertile, it could be argued, of course, that doctrine, method, and movement have never yet found their proper mix (if indeed there is a proper mix to be found). To adjudicate this question we must proceed at this juncture to a consideration not of the centrality of Marx in particular but of the centrality of socialism in general to the continuum of anti-capitalist movements.

The word “socialism” first appeared in Robert Owen’s Co-operative Magazine in 1827, “le socialisme” in the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe in 1832. It meant a projected socio-political alternative to capitalism, not a political movement or demand. In early socialist doctrine there is not a word about the proletariat, the class system, or revolution. While John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) regarded socialism and communism not as political movements but as theories, Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) identified communism as a movement that would render socialism utopian in the sense of being impracticable. It was communism, not socialism, that carried with it the idea of revolutionary struggle and human agency. A new and better society could not be wished or legislated into existence by benevolent doctrinaires, but had to await the advent of a politically conscious labor movement.

Years were to pass before Marx and Engels dropped the communist label and consented to having their cause described as “socialist.” A politically oriented labor movement that was self-consciously socialist did emerge in Marx’s name later in the nineteenth century, by which point the meaning of socialism had changed. Today, the word can mean a social or political doctrine or a political movement or system. In view of this latitude, it is not surprising that “socialism” in social-science literature often becomes a noun qualified by an adjective—as in utopian socialism, scientific socialism, state socialism, revolutionary socialism, evolutionary socialism, Fabian socialism, democratic socialism, parliamentary socialism; or as in actually existing socialism (until recently) or market socialism. Similarly, the adjective “socialist” can act as a pendant qualifying or characterizing a noun, as in socialist internationalism, socialist economics, socialist realism, or socialist feminism.

These junctures are not just convenient subdivisions, but successive attempts at spot-welding that can readily be arrayed in historical sequence. Utopian socialism dates from the 1830s, Fabian or evolutionary socialism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Guild socialism from the period between the world wars. Socialist internationalism peaked, then bottomed out, in the period before 1914; socialist realism (like socialism in one country) belongs to the Stalinist period; socialist feminism to Western scholarship of a later date. Each instance of spot-welding affected the coordinates of its successors. Anarchism, syndicalism, and their offshoots (whether revolutionary or not) are kinds of socialism that were elaborated in opposition to state socialism. Engels contrasted scientific with utopian socialism. Lenin defined Bolshevism, then communism as he understood the term, against the parliamentary, reformist socialism of the pre-1914 German SPD (and by extension the Second International). His successors proceeded to counterpose Soviet socialism in one country against the socialist internationalism that the First and Second Internationals had espoused.

All in all, it is not the tidiest of pictures. But there is a patterning to the galaxy, with Marxism as its lode star. Leszek Kolakowski’s ambitious survey, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1979) rightly calls attention to “the surprising diversity of views expressed by Marxists in regard to Marx’s so-called historical determinism.” What is “surprising,” however, is not this diversity itself but Kolakowski’s pontifical belief that he could “schematize with precision the trends of twentieth-century Marxism.” Kolakowski’s failure to attain the desired precision serves as a salutary warning to anyone attempting to characterize the broader and much more diverse terrain of socialism, of which Marxism—nineteenth- or twentieth-century Marxism—is itself but a “main current.” Whether or not present-day anti-capitalist protesters would describe themselves as Marxists or socialists, and whether or not they are aware of their own ancestry, they have distinguished precursors. It has long been distressing to see the same tired labeling of Marx’s thought as determinist and authoritarian by certain feminists, ecologists, radicals, community activists, and opponents of racism and imperialism—some of the very people who would have most to gain from a constructive, open-ended encounter with his real legacy. Jean-Paul Sartre commented that so many attempts to move beyond Marx end up occupying a position not ahead of but behind Marx. This admonition has not yet lost its pertinence or its poignancy.