Читать книгу Marxisms in the 21st Century - John Saul - Страница 6

Michelle Williams

Karl Marx’s writings on and ideas about social transformation have figured prominently in the Global Left imagination for more than 150 years. Regardless of political hue, scholars, activists and politicos, on the Left and the Right, have engaged with Marx’s and Marxists’ ideas in some form or another. Marxism’s extraordinary influence has been twofold: as a set of analytical ideas and as an ideology influencing the practices of political movements. History is littered with examples of Marx’s impact on the world: Marxist-inspired working-class organisations in Europe and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European socialist and communist parties’ lineages of Marxism, Marxist–Leninist political organisations of the twentieth century, Latin American dependency theory’s influence on development, Marxism–Leninism in the Soviet Union and Marxist-influenced anti-colonial struggles (for example, in Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique). Whereas Marxist ideas have clearly had enormous impact on the world, many of these experiments have inglorious histories, culminating in the demise of the Soviet Union. At the end of the twentieth century a number of factors seemed to converge to mark the end of Marxism’s influence on the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese and Vietnamese move to market capitalism, the shift away from class-based issues to the dominance of identity politics in social movements, and the rise of postmodernism in academia with its anti-Marxist conceptions of power, alienation and marginalisation. As a result, by the late twentieth century the relevance of Marxism was under question.

Neoclassical economists and liberal political theorists were triumphant in the post-cold-war 1990s, not only declaring Marxian ideas dead but that there was no alternative to neoliberalism. Unlike what Marx (and the classical Marxists of the Second International) had predicted, the stages of history did not lead to an emancipated communism, but rather perambulated from capitalism to an even fiercer form of capitalism (for some this journey went via ‘state socialism’). Thus, by the turn of the century, it seemed clear that Marxism was, if not already dead, clearly dying an ignominious death. Neoliberal capitalism and the concomitant penetration of the market into all spheres of social life seemed well entrenched for the foreseeable future.

The triumphalism of neoclassical economists was, however, relatively shortlived as their prescriptive ideas wreaked havoc on the global economy as well as on the livelihoods of the vast majority of peoples around the world, helping to reinvigorate Marxist scholarship in the twenty-first century. Not without irony, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, even mainstream economists – who normally disdain Marxian ideas – publicly acknowledged that Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism has much to teach us (for a fuller discussion see Hobsbawm 2011). There is now widespread agreement that Marx offers a sophisticated and trenchant analysis of capitalism. For example, the tendency toward the concentration of capital has been vividly demonstrated over the twentieth century:

In 1905, the fifty largest US corporations, by nominal capitalisation, had assets equal to 16 per cent of GNP. By 1999, the assets of the fifty largest US industrial companies amounted to 37 per cent of GNP. [For] the UK’s ten largest industrial companies, the rise was from 5 per cent of GNP in 1905 to 41 per cent in 1999 (Therborn 2008: 13).

Just as Marx had anticipated, this concentration of capital came with a massive increase in global industrial unemployment, leaving the vast majority of the world’s peoples on the margins of economic activity and creating a ‘reserve army’ of labour (18–19).

It is not just the analysis of capitalism that has captured the left imagination. Marx’s ideas about a future post-capitalist order have inspired political movements for much of the past century and a half. Despite the chequered history of experiments in the name of Marxism, the revival of Marxism is finding new sources of inspiration that revolve around four primary factors: (i) the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project; (ii) the ecological limits of capitalism; (iii) the crisis of global capitalism and (iv) the lessons to be learned from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. The recent revival of Marxism, then, is not simply a return to nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of Marxism. Rather, the twenty-first century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anti-capitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism and indigenous traditions (Renton 2004). Thus we have movements led by indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Hugo Chávez’s ‘twenty-first century socialism’ that involves the rural and urban poor in Venezuela, radical democratic decentralisation in Kerala, participatory budgeting in Brazil, the World Social Forum, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity movements in Spain and Greece and the Arab Spring. These movements do not seek a coherent ideological blueprint, but rather share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’ through democratic, egalitarian, ecological alternatives to capitalism, built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive; rather, it is open, searching, dialectical, humanist, utopian and inspirational. Central to these movements is the importance of radical, direct and participatory democracy in forging an alternative to and an appreciation for the limits of fossil-fuel capitalism.

Whereas there has been a flowering of creativity around the world, in South Africa the main party of Marxism, the South African Communist Party (SACP), has gone the other way by retreating into a scientific, dogmatic Marxism-cum-Soviet communism of the twentieth century.¹ In the new millennium, the SACP has turned away from its open Marxism of the 1990s – which was characterised by deep searching for new Marxist approaches to social transformation rooted in radical democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism – to more orthodox understandings of historical materialism and scientific Marxism. Political education in the SACP focuses on the writings of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and the empirical reference points include the former Soviet Union and increasingly the Chinese Communist Party (SACP 2012: 15). For the SACP, democracy can be reduced to vanguard democracy in which the Party plays the pivotal role. Radical democracy and egalitarianism have become rhetorical devices, giving way to populism and authoritarian organisational practices and leaders’ elite consumption habits. Unlike many of the movements around the world that look to Marxist theory for assistance in analysing the world and re-finding utopian possibilities, the Marxism of the SACP has retreated to Marxism as a rigid ideology prescribing the laws of history.

Outside of the SACP, there is also a strong Marxist tradition that has been heavily influenced by Leon Trotsky’s writings. Trotsky’s continued influence on Marxism is unquestionable. His concepts of combined and uneven development, permanent revolution, and his understanding of Bonapartism, for example, are important sources of inspiration for Marxist analysis. Alex Callinicos’s (1999) work perhaps best characterises the important and lasting influence of Trotsky’s ideas on Marxism. In addition, many movements draw inspiration from his writings. However, in South Africa, like the SACP, many Trotskyist Marxists have been marred by dogmatic certainty. Neither tradition of Marxism – communist or Trotskyist – has grappled sufficiently with the deficiencies of Marxism as a theory, especially with reference to democracy and the changes in world capitalism, as both remain committed to the paramount role of vanguard parties (tied to traditional and limited notions of the ‘working class’) as the crucial historical agent. The two traditions have also not adequately reflected on the failures of historical experiences, not even the Marxist experiments in Africa, and have not had a thorough-going engagement with democracy, tending to dismiss it as liberal (‘bourgeois’) democracy and to argue, rather, in favour of ‘revolution’ and vanguard democracy in which the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, together with the Party, play the leading role in society.

Despite these traditions within the South African context, there has also been a renewed interest in Marxism that seeks to explore new politics grounded in democratic, egalitarian and ecologically sensitive alternatives to capitalism. This renewed interest in Marxism and its intersection with other anti-capitalist traditions has inspired us to produce an edited volume that introduces some of these contemporary approaches to Marxism and explores some of the ways in which Marxism has been engaged in Africa. I now turn to a discussion of the remaining chapters in the volume, which challenge us to see Marxism in often unfamiliar ways by exploring themes such as democracy, globalisation, feminism, critique, ecology, historical lessons and agency, each chapter offering novel and creative approaches to the Marxist tradition. While the range of perspectives in the following chapters might lead some to wonder what is left of ‘Marx’ in these positions, I would argue it is precisely the plurality of approaches that is the strength of current Marxist theorising and practice.