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In this volume we explore Marxism as a set of analytical ideas and as an ideology inspiring political movements. Thus, we take stock of various Marxisms today and ask questions about their potential for helping us navigate alternatives. The chapters span a wide range of issues and perspectives, all having to do in some way with Marxism. Part One democratises and globalises Marxism by situating Marxism in debates about democracy (Michelle Williams), reperiodising Marxism along three waves of commodification (Burawoy) and globalising Gramscian Marxism (Satgar). Part Two looks at Marxism’s engagement with left politics such as Marxism as critique (Ahmed Veriava), Marxism and feminism (Jacklyn Cock and Meg Luxton) and eco-Marxism (Devan Pillay). Part Three investigates Marxism and socialism in Africa (Daryl Glaser, John S. Saul) and South Africa (Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane and Mazibuko K. Jara).

Part One situates Marxism in global capitalism today. In chapter one Williams explores the way in which twentieth-century debates have bifurcated democracy into either liberal or vanguard democracy. Williams shows how mid-twentieth-century scholarship – both liberal and Marxist – promoted either representative democracy or vanguard democracy as the only organising mechanism in society, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy. In recent movements, however, Williams finds new sources of inspiration that are explicitly looking to the importance of direct democracy for twenty-first-century alternatives.

Turning from an explicit attention to democracy, the next two chapters focus on globalising Marxism. For most of the twentieth century, Marxism largely confined itself to national developments. However, with the changing and global nature of capitalism today, we have to rethink our Marxism to speak to this global capitalism. In his chapter, Burawoy eloquently challenges us with the simple yet provocative claim: as the world changes so must Marxism. For some this might seem an obvious claim, but for many Marxists it is a fundamental challenge. He suggests that the anti-Marxist euphoria that followed the Soviet Union’s demise and China’s transition to capitalism (or what the Chinese Communist Party calls market socialism) must be met by a sociological Marxism that seeks neither to immortalise Marx and Friedrich Engels as all-knowing gods whose ideas are laid out in their scriptures, nor to bury Marxism as anachronistic theories for a bygone era. Burawoy is not interested in reconstructing Marx and Engels (and others such as Lenin, Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Franz Fanon and Mao Zedong) as theorists of ‘eternal truths’, nor does he wish to discard their ideas as irrelevant to understanding our times. Rather, he argues for ‘Marxism as a living tradition that enjoys renewal and reconstruction as the world it describes and seeks to transform, undergoes change’. Thus, as globalisation increasingly defines our reality, Marxism too must take on a global character, which requires ‘rethinking the material basis of Marxism through the lens of the market, but not in terms of its geographical scope (since markets have always been global as well as local), nor even in terms of neoliberal ascendancy (since markets have always moved through periods of expansion and contraction) but in terms of the novel modes of commodification’.

Suggesting a totally new periodisation of Marxism, Burawoy maps the history of new configurations of Marxism onto three waves of marketisation in which labour, money and nature were commodified. Each wave of commodification engenders a countermovement which corresponds to a new configuration of Marxism – ‘classical Marxism based on the projection of an economic utopia; Soviet, Western, and Third World Marxism based on state regulation; and finally, sociological Marxism based on an expanding and self-regulating civil society’. Burawoy is essentially analysing the historical development of Marxism, based on waves of commodification. Thus, as labour was commodified, Marxism responded with visions of breaking free from the chains of exploitation; as money was commodified, Marxism envisioned state regulation of the economy; and, as nature was increasingly commodified, Marxism responded with notions of a fully realised and global civil society shaping governance, production and consumption. Indeed, Burawoy tells us that as ‘the state seems to be ever more in thrall to the market, the defence of an independent “civil society” seems to become all the more necessary … third-wave Marxism constructs socialism piecemeal as an archipelago of real utopias that stretch across the world’. In short, Burawoy argues that the third wave of Marxism, the current period, is characterised by transformative projects anchored in concrete experiments in a myriad of local spaces that rely on fundamentally participatory democratic processes. Burawoy is thus providing a radically novel periodisation of Marxism that shows how its evolution has been integrally linked to the essential commodification of labour, money and nature.

Moving from the commodification of labour, money and nature and the concomitant shifts in Marxist theory and practice, Satgar looks to Gramsci to take forward our renewal of Marxism. Satgar powerfully demonstrates how Gramsci’s Marxism is renewed by bringing it into discussion with international relations and the global political economy. In his contribution he shows how Gramscian interpretations have reduced Gramsci’s theoretical legacy either to a narrow Western Marxist tradition or to that of an Italian thinker. In this framing, Gramsci’s Marxism was married to a political economy bounded in the national space. Satgar shows, however, that over the past three decades Gramsci’s Marxism has been globalised, which has disrupted the dominance of classical Marxist understandings of imperialism and neo-Marxist approaches to hegemony within the world system. Thus Satgar challenges the version of Gramscian thought that locates Gramsci within Western Marxism or even more narrowly, as an Italian thinker, and he places neo-Gramscian scholarship within Burawoy’s third wave of Marxism. Through the efforts of a Gramscianinspired, transnational historical materialism a new approach to global political economy has emerged. This scholarship has added to critical theory, introducing a new way of understanding power and how social relations constitute global capitalism. In particular, Satgar highlights that a historicised understanding of global capitalist restructuring, the emergence of transnational classes, the disciplining role of transnational neoliberalism, the forms of neoliberal rule evoked by transnational classes (neoliberal constitutionalism and passive revolution) and the importance of counter-hegemonic resistance are some of the crucial themes emerging within a transnationalised neo-Gramscian Marxism to understand, explain and transform the current dynamics of global capitalism. Central in Satgar’s embrace of a neo-Gramscian global political economy is the challenge of characterising and understanding post-apartheid South Africa’s neoliberalisation as the making of a ‘passive revolution’. Satgar concludes by challenging some of the limits within a transnationalising Gramscian Marxism, in particular the need to posit a new analysis of the crisis of global capitalism, the need for a stronger ecological perspective and for greater engagement with anti-capitalist politics and alternatives. Satgar thus provides us with an innovative and creative approach to understanding the global character of capitalism and the importance of resistance.

Having provided new and exciting ideas about the periodisation of Marxism, democracy and global relevance in Part One, in Part Two of the volume we look at the engagement of Marxism with left politics. Here the emphasis is on ‘redeeming’ Marx through critique, social reproduction and ecological awareness. In the first chapter of this section, Veriava recovers the dying tradition of critique and powerfully argues that at the heart of Marx’s ideas about social transformation is the importance of critique. Veriava argues for critique that is ‘self-consciously, and militantly, directed at a positive, or better, constitutive task’ and asks how critique might play this ‘constitutive task’ that is required for politics today. He explores this question through the work of Michel Foucault and Marx and ultimately shows how central a component of modern political theory and political practice critique has been historically, and still is, to our understanding of transformative politics today. By reminding us of the importance of critique, Veriava has reinserted a fundamental aspect of political theorising and practice that is often neglected.

Moving from the importance of critique for left politics, Cock and Luxton trace the history of feminist engagement with Marxism, showing how the ‘women’s question’ was seen as a problem of capitalism by classical Marxists, including Engels and Lenin. Cock and Luxton show how later attempts by feminists to integrate feminism with socialism tended toward dualistic and essentialist analyses of the modes of production and patriarchy. They argue that the success of the current Marxist revitalisation hinges on a more equal relationship and that ‘this integration is best described as a socialist feminism based on the understanding that “the liberation of women depends on the liberation of all people”’. They trace the debate on domestic labour to the broader concept of social reproduction, which sees society as a totality in which social reproduction is central. Cock and Luxton suggest that gender is no longer collapsed into capitalism nor are there attempts to ‘appropriate Marxist concepts of value or productive and unproductive work and apply them uncritically in an attempt to establish the value of domestic work’. They conclude that Marxists must confront the specificity of different women’s oppression in specific historical contexts. Cock and Luxton provide an innovative approach, resting on the idea of social reproduction, to bring Marxism into dialogue with feminism.

While Cock and Luxton argue for creative synergies between Marxism and feminism, we also find similar innovative thinking in the dialogue between Marxism and ecology. Pillay introduces the idea that Marx had a deep appreciation for ecology and was not the anti-environmental theorist that many have suggested. Pillay situates the discussion in an analysis of the recent crisis of capitalism that is both a crisis of accumulation and a crisis of nature. Indeed, the economic and ecological moments are interlocked with the one profoundly affecting the other. Like Burawoy, Pillay suggests that humanity’s future hinges on our ability to halt capitalism’s destruction of nature by acknowledging the limits of a fossil-fuel capitalism that is threatening the planet’s capacity to reproduce itself. Pillay shows how most Marxists’ readings of Marx highlight the social critique of capitalism and see nature’s role as simply instrumental to human exchange. Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Pillay rediscovers a deeply ecological side to Marx’s writings. Pillay provides two sets of analyses: first, he shows how the recent crisis of capitalism is not a financial crisis, as many analysts claim, but has its roots in stagnation in the real economy, and second, he shows an ecological Marx who never saw nature as something simply to be conquered but as something that human existence depends on. With regard to this second point, in particular, Pillay argues that nature was central to Marx’s thinking. He maintains that rescuing an ecological Marx is necessary both for our analysis of the link between the social and ecological crises, and for our political mobilisation of alliances between ecologists (green) and socialists/Marxists (red). Pillay thus provides a powerful argument for a greening of Marxism and looks to Marx to pave the way in this effort.

In Part Three, we look specifically at Marxism and socialism in Africa, with an emphasis on South Africa. This section is particularly important as Marxism in Africa is a neglected area within Marxist scholarship. For example, Eric Hobsbawm’s monumental How to Change the World (2011) gives scant attention to Marxism’s influence in Africa as well as Africa’s influence on Marxism. Yet Africa’s engagement with Marxism is significant and provides important lessons for the twenty-first century (Glaser and Walker 2010).

Glaser takes up this challenge and explores Marxism in Africa, a theme that Burawoy situates in the second wave of Marxism, by developing ‘seven theses’ on African Marxism. While Marxist–Leninist governance was a failure on the African continent, Glaser shows that important lessons can be drawn for contemporary politics seeking more egalitarian and democratic outcomes. He thus offers seven theses about Africa’s Marxist–Leninist governments and movements: (i) there was no clear difference between the ‘radicalism’ of Marxist–Leninist regimes and the ‘African socialist’ ones; (ii) there was no clear difference of Marxist commitment between regimes that came to power via military coups and those that came to power through guerilla war; (iii) while Marxism–Leninism was culturally alien to Africa it was brought to Africa via cultural outsiders located in the colonies and ex-colonies themselves; (iv) there emerged a distinctive African Marxist–Leninist tradition; (v) the failure of Marxist–Leninist regimes was above all ‘a product of flawed domestic choices’; (vi) the Marxist–Leninist slide into authoritarianism was the product of a flawed theory of democracy; and (vii) Marxism’s future in progressive politics depends on its place as one ideological current among others.

Thus there was a distinctive contribution to Marxism, largely authoritarian in its practices, that was coming out of Africa. Whereas socialist movements acknowledged the importance of popular participation and participatory democracy, the vanguard style of party organisation stymied local energies in their efforts to play an active role in society. Indeed, there was very little effort to entrench post-independence democratic practices and challenges to the ruling party were rarely, if ever, tolerated. Not without irony, the turn to representative democracy in the 1990s corresponded with a shift to pro-capitalist projects, neoliberal economic policies and a complete abandonment of socialist projects. Glaser essentially provides a new and powerful reading of engagement with Marxism in Africa and draws important lessons from this history.

Also drawing lessons from Marxism in Africa, Saul takes the discussion to two particular cases – Tanzania and Mozambique – and asks whether these experiences have anything to teach us today, especially in South Africa. Saul homes in on the choices made by the African National Congress (ANC) in its post-apartheid nation-building project and argues that it decidedly chose a capitalist route to development over a socialist one. Drawing on the experience in Tanzania, he problematises the way in which leadership was invoked, noting that South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment entrepreneurial leadership is also deeply problematic. He argues that the problem of leadership is ‘one of the most difficult challenges facing those who would create a politics that is at once progressive in import and democratic in substance’. Although enlightened leadership is always needed, he points out that ‘no “leadership” can long go unchecked from “below” – not if it is to avoid a fall into highhandedness and self-indulgent elitism’. He then draws lessons about the importance of imaginative planning from Mozambique’s experiments with building ‘socialism in Africa’. Saul explains that one of the crucial lessons to learn is not ‘what not to do’, but rather that we cannot afford ‘not to dare to be self-reliant and economically imaginative and not to dare to be genuinely democratic and actively committed to the social and political empowerment of the people themselves. For not to so dare is, in our contemporary world, merely to wallow in a stagnant pond of self-serving vanguardism and in a post-Fanonist pattern of elite aggrandisement – even if such attitudes are, in South Africa, sustained within what is now a formally democratic process’. Saul thus makes a bold argument for confident, creative, accountable and imaginative leadership that prioritises people’s needs and domestic development on the continent.

The next two chapters look specifically at South Africa and explore the possibilities for developing Marxist-inspired politics today. Bond, Desai and Ngwane explore the issue of ‘uneven and combined Marxism’, playing on Trotsky’s famous ‘uneven and combined development’. Bond, Desai and Ngwane take stock of South African politics both within the ANC-led Alliance and within the independent social movements. They argue that we must begin our discussion on the South African Left by recognising the contradictory reality of South African social relations. They argue that ‘“uneven and combined Marxism” implies a way of considering the difficulties of constructing independent left politics in the conjuncture of a long-term capitalist stagnation in a twenty-first-century South Africa, in which some sectors of the economy – construction, finance and commerce – have been booming while many other former labour-intensive sectors of manufacturing were de-industrialised … and in which large sections of society are still peripheral to the interests of capital, domestic and global’. Through an analysis of social movement and left politics in South Africa, including the 2012 mineworkers’ struggles in Marikana, they convincingly argue that we need to consider ‘strategic questions for an agency-centred South African Left’, an area that is often neglected. They are, thus, challenging us to think beyond our old certainties and creatively embark on agentic practices.

In the final chapter, Jara explores the way in which the ANC’s post-apartheid politics has eschewed a Marxist orientation in favour of controlling and containing social forces, despite its rhetorical uses of ‘colonialism of a special type’ (CST) and ‘national democratic revolution’. Jara shows how the ‘ANC’s continued use of Marxism has been transformed into attempts to hegemonise and marry the working class to a project to transnationalise and deracialise South African capitalism’. At the same time, the ANC has retribalised and re-ethnicised South African political and social spaces. Using the cases of housing in the Western Cape and legislation targeting rural areas and traditional leadership, Jara powerfully shows how ‘the ANC’s nation-building project has failed to grapple with racialised post-apartheid social struggles over housing in the Western Cape’ and has attempted to retribalise the former bantustans through legislation that reinforces chieftancy and traditional patriarchal forms of leadership. Jara demonstrates that the ways in which the ANC has ‘acted on race and nation in the post-apartheid period has opened the door to the reproduction of apartheid racial categories and regressive forms of nationalism including the return of ethnic identity, white supremacist arrogance, regressive racial polarisation, narrow black elite solidarity and Africanist chauvinism particularly in relation to the so-called Indian and coloured racial “minorities”’. He shows how the national democratic revolution (the core of the ANC’s Marxism) is ‘an exhausted Marxism that is denuded of both its radical impulses and emancipatory logics, particularly when it comes to resolving the national question’. Jara thus embarks on a journey of renewal that has the courage to think with and against Marxism as the basis for a new democratic left politics.