Marx 2020: After the Crisis 9781783608089, 9781783608072, 9781350221277, 9781783608119

Table of contents :
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
References
Book Epigraph
1. Beyond the labyrinth: Marxism and history
Marx in his era
The followers
Marx in the East
Marxism today
References
2. Red and green: Marxism and nature
Marx and nature
Socialists and ecology
Feminism and ecology
Sustainable development
References
3. Soviets plus electrification: Marxism and development
Marx and development
Leninism and development
Socialism and underdevelopment
Post-development
References
4. The gravediggers: Marxism and workers
Marx’s myth
Lenin and the workers
The death of the working class
Workers and globalization
References
5. Unhappy marriage: Marxism and women
Engels and the family
Socialists and feminism
Socialist feminism
Post-feminism
References
6. The return of the superstructure: Marxism and culture
Marx and ideology
Proletkult
The Gramscian moment
The cultural turn
References
7. Difficult dialogue: Marxism and nation
Marxist blind spot
Communists and nationalism
Otto Bauer’s break
Post-nationalism
References
8. ‘Opium of the people’: Marxism and religion
Marx and faith
Socialism and religion
Liberation theology
Religion returns
References
9. After the crisis: Marxism and the future
Marx renewed
Last time round
The great recession
After capitalism
References
Index

Citation preview

About the author Ronaldo Munck has written widely in the broad area of political sociology and political economy, including influential texts on politics and dependency, democratization in Latin America, and globalization and its discontents. His recent books include Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony and Social Transformation. He is head of civic engagement at Dublin City University and senior researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies of Latin America at the University of Buenos Aires. He is a lead author for the International Panel on Social Progress chaired by Amartya Sen, reporting in 2017.

M ARX 2020 AFTER THE CRISIS

Ronaldo Munck

Zed Books London

Marx 2020: After the Crisis was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London, SE11 5RR. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Ronaldo Munck 2016 The right of Ronaldo Munck to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Typeset in Plantin and Kievit by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Index by Ed Emery Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78360-808-9 hb ISBN 978-1-78360-807-2 pb ISBN 978-1-78360-811-9 pdf ISBN 978-1-78360-809-6 epub ISBN 978-1-78360-810-2 mobi

CON TE N TS

Preface | vi 1 Beyond the labyrinth: Marxism and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Red and green: Marxism and nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3 Soviets plus electrification: Marxism and development . . . . . . . . 52 4 The gravediggers: Marxism and workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 5 Unhappy marriage: Marxism and women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 6 The return of the superstructure: Marxism and culture . . . . . . . 123 7 Difficult dialogue: Marxism and nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 8 ‘Opium of the people’: Marxism and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 9 After the crisis: Marxism and the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Index | 213

PR E F AC E

Before embarking on Marxism’s engagement with key issues of the day I should mention in the interests of full disclosure that ‘I am not a Marxist’ in the same sense that Karl Marx made this statement when he saw how his revolutionary thinking became a dogma and the subject of theological debates. In the contemporary era I would agree wholeheartedly with Alain Badiou’s somewhat cryptic statement that ‘Marxism does not exist’ (Badiou, 2005: 58). This statement fully recognizes the rupture rather than continuity between Marx, then Lenin, Stalin and so on. ‘Marxism’ is thus an empty name for inconsistent or politically singular sets that cannot be amalgamated into a continuous, developmental unity. Marxism, in short, cannot serve as a self-contained, self-referential homogenous discourse. Nor, if it is to be true to its principles, can its own ‘truths’ be paramount as with most religions. If not a ‘Marxist’ why would one write about Marxism? Well, as I will argue in this preface I see a continuous, and even increased, relevance for the ideas of Karl Marx in this period of global turbulence. Marx’s methodology and his (incomplete) theoretical toolbox has a deep relevance in a period of renewed capitalist crisis. We also need to come to terms with the subsequent history of Marxism and communism which clearly (in my view) cannot be reduced to Stalin’s prison camps. The Marxist enterprise – as in based on Karl Marx’s foundational thinking – is an open one, based on critical engagement with the key issues of the day in a creative and not theological manner, and in dialogue with many other political and cultural currents oriented towards a better tomorrow. The first edition of this book was prepared in the lead-up to the year 2000 when a certain ‘end of century’ and even ‘end of history’ mood prevailed in many quarters. It was in some ways a rear-guard action, seeking to salvage something of Marxism in what seemed clearly a postmodern era. Unlike most of those coming to terms with what seemed the terminal crisis of Marxism, my concerns were not

preface | vii primarily with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, important as those events undoubtedly were. Rather, it was a deep-rooted reaction to the retreat of the ANC (and its communist leaders) from anything approaching socialism in South Africa where I was living in the mid-1990s. In my own region of origin, Latin America, I had already seen a shift rightwards of Marxist parties and individuals across the Southern Cone in the late 1980s onwards, and the sorry collapse into authoritarianism of the Sandinistas who had inspired a generation after 1979. Marxism, from the Russian Revolution onwards, had actually ‘worked’ in the East/South and now we could see it everywhere in retreat, not to say betrayal, in terms of basic principles. This new edition of Marx @ 2000 is looking forward to Marx at 2020 at a time when his relevance has come to the fore once again. The capitalist press was replete with references to Karl Marx and his theory of capitalist development and crisis following the global financial crisis which emerged in 2007. Economic liberalism had hit the rails and the only rational explanation could be found in Marx. Barely fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union – supposedly Marxism in practice – its founding political philosophy was being used as the key to understanding the collapse of economic liberalism and the political liberal faith which had preached the ‘end of history’ and ‘there is no alternative’. However, there were very few political forces anywhere in the world based on, and actually putting into practice, the ideas of Karl Marx. The post-1968 and post-1989 generations had, for their part, left behind a Marxism they considered debilitating and sought inspiration in various poststructuralist, postmodern and even postpolitical philosophies. That contradiction lies at the heart of this book. The Marx that is now being rediscovered has very little in common with the wooden Marxism that once dominated internationally or the theological debates in the Marxist currents to the left of official communism. Thus we find a veritable encyclopaedia of contemporary Marxism, of over 800 pages, appearing in 2009 (Bidet and Kouvelakis, 2009) which openly admits the turn of the century crisis of Marxism – deemed far deeper than that of the end of the nineteenth century after the death of Marx and Engels – and yet is able to demonstrate the vitality and diversity of this political philosophy today. The crisis of Marxism threatened its very existence as Marxist political parties disappeared and, argues Bidet, ‘its erasure from the cultural sphere,

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the collective memory and individual imaginations’ (Bidet, 2009: 5). It seemed a pretty desperate act to celebrate this collapse on the basis that it would allow for a flourishing of other, alternative, liberatory forms of Marxism. Not even the mildest of social democracies – that Marxists once scorned – seemed viable when the ‘magic of the market’ ruled supreme and privatization of all aspects of social life had become the new common sense. Yet within less than a decade into the new century some basic Marxist insights were once again becoming common currency. The claims of neoliberal globalization – for example that it would lead to a decline of global inequality – were disproven by senior World Bank economists (Milanović, 2016). It became clear that global capitalism was not some form of rational order that would persist ad infinitum. To understand the contradictions of this new global order, Marx’s original theory of capitalism was a required starting point. Marx – as we must do – situates the structures of modern capitalism within a broader understanding of historical tendencies. This world history is not one characterized by a smooth progress to a conflict-free future. Rather it was – and is today of course – characterized by global uneven development, wars between nation-states, and struggles between social classes and groups. Marx does not counterpose the evolutionism of economic and political liberalism with the magic of revolution, but he does provide some of the tools for a critical analysis of emerging contradictions and tendencies. This book is about the ideas of Karl Marx and how they have been developed or underdeveloped in practice. It will not engage with the very complex history of Marxism since Marx, except in a somewhat stylized way. But it would be remiss not to acknowledge at the outset the ‘many Marxisms’ which now exist. Thus André Tosel refers to ‘the two poles that form the spectrum of the thousand Marxisms: the pole of a good utopianism and the pole of an analysis based on a re-reading of Marx’s key concepts’ (Tosel, 2009: 63). These are but fragile currents compared to the close integration between Marxist theory and practice in the Second and Third Internationals. Yet they are testimony that, on the whole, the dangers of a fundamentalist Marxism, which simply repeats the sacred nostrums and seeks to fit reality to them, have been overcome. Tosel quite correctly observes that it is ‘the open crisis of liberalism [that] is the objective foundation for the thousand Marxisms’ (Tosel, 2009: 45). There are, of course,

preface | ix no guarantees that these new Marxisms will succeed, or even survive, but they are a sign of vitality to be sure. In some way these poles of utopianism and conceptual deconstruction/reconstruction mirror a much longer divide going back to the ‘Young Marx’ versus the mature Marx of Das Kapital. It is the Hegelian Marx focused on alienation and reification taken up by thinkers such as Lukács and political movements such as the council communists and even the students/workers of 1968. It is a humanist Marxism that does not shy away from utopianism. The other side of the coin is the ‘scientific’ Marx seeking to uncover the laws of motion of capitalism, scornful of less rigorous socialist thinkers. It is codified in the ‘historical materialism’ of the Soviet manuals, encouraged by Engels and latterly revived by Louis Althusser. For a whole series of reasons, I will not be taking sides in this binary opposition of the two Marxs and will continue advocating for many Marxisms, some of which will provide at least some of the answers we need today to construct a better world. However, despite all the diversity and dynamism which Marxism still possesses (or is regaining) it has very clear limitations. I would argue that Karl Marx, contrary to some of his followers, was not interested in prognostication. Nor did he ever (unlike Engels) see his approach as a divining tool. So, not surprisingly, Marxism – as in the application of Marx’s approach – has limitations in explaining the current world around us. Thus, for example, Nancy Fraser argues that ‘we lack conceptions of capitalism and capitalist crisis that are adequate to our time’ (Fraser, 2014) and calls for an expanded conception of capitalism building on Marx’s approach. Through the thought of Karl Marx – but cognizant of the diversity of social struggles today – we can arrive at a Marx for our times. We need to build in a much better understanding of social reproduction – sometimes outside of the market – and not just focus on the world of commodity production. We also need to bridge properly the divide between Marxism and ecology, an epistemic split damaging to both sides. Finally Fraser bids us recognize the other ‘major structural division that is constitutive of capitalist society, that between polity and economy’ (Fraser, 2014) which sets the conditions for the possibility of the capitalist order. Another way of posing this reconstruction of Marxism to make it fit for purpose today would be to integrate it much more closely with the insights of feminism, ecology and post-colonialism. On all three

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fronts classical Marxism has been weak on the whole. One of the particular focuses of this book is precisely this missed opportunity for fruitful interaction between Marxism and its others, to put it that way. Post-1968, as we know, has been the era of the new social movements. Yet Marxism remains a powerful analytical force and the workers’ movement, to which it was once linked, remains a weighty social actor. The social, political and cultural divide between the ‘old’ and new social movements remains a deep one. Recent events, from the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring point towards the need to bridge the divide between labour and its Others. Then, of course, we have the ongoing struggles of the dispossessed in the global South from landless peasants to Islamist jihadists. The struggle for global social transformation – which was the abiding moral compass of Karl Marx throughout his life – demands a much more unified approach across regions and social sectors. For myself, the main ‘rectification’ of Marxism I would wish to propose is one which recognizes its European origins and hence limitations. Marx at the margins of his thinking, and late in life, recognized that the capitalist periphery was different from the England he was immersed in. In relation to Ireland he – and his friend Engels in particular – felt the interpellation of the Irish revolutionary nationalism of the Fenians. From that lived experience came Marx’s aphorism that ‘A nation which enslaves another cannot itself be free’. In relation to pre-revolutionary Russia, in correspondence with local activists, Marx began to rethink his historical schema of capitalist development. Maybe, just maybe, Russia could skip a stage as it were and move straight from absolutism to socialism without going through a capitalist phase. This view was not, however, mainstreamed into Marxist thinking. Rather, after Marx’s death, Engels worked with the German Social Democrats to codify his thought at its most mechanical, a task later taken up with righteous rigidity by the writers of the Soviet manuals on Marxism-Leninism. From Marx we can gain a good understanding of capitalism as a global system. From the late Marx we are able to pursue hints towards a non-mechanistic understanding of its evolution and transformation. The Eurocentrism of classical Marxism still needs to be overcome and that can only come from an engagement with Third Worldism, revolutionary nationalism and what has more recently become known as post-colonialism. That China, Brazil and India

preface | xi have escaped some of the worst effects of the post-2008 capitalist crisis must tell us that the world has changed. A global perspective today needs to start from the South, much as Lenin in 1917 relaunched Marxism from the East. The uneven, yet combined, development of capitalism on a global scale is the founding principle from which to build an understanding of the complexity of the global order and the prospect for its progressive transformation as the contradictions unfold and new social actors come on the scene. I move now to an outline of the main themes to be taken up in this book to provide a thumbnail sketch to guide the reader. Chapter 1 on Marxism and history takes a broad retrospective look at Marx and Marxism. It focuses very much on Karl Marx as a thinker and activist of his era, and not some disembodied timeless political philosopher. His analysis of capitalism and its contradictions, along with the centrality of class struggle, is his main legacy. His successors in European social democracy and Soviet communism are then examined along with the controversial role of his lifetime collaborator Friedrich Engels. Lenin’s ‘turn to the East’ redirects classical Marxism to the point that it practically becomes an ideology of national development. Social democracy’s rightward turn since the 1980s and Soviet communism’s demise in the late 1980s leave us with a Marxism without state or mass party backing. The final section then tracks some elements of the regeneration of Marxism in the twenty-first century as a system of thought, of critical analysis and of deconstruction of accepted wisdoms. This new Marxism has yet to find a secure social footing but its influence is pervasive across the political spectrum, from mainstream critics of global neoliberalism to the various strands of the counter-globalization movement. In Chapter 2 we take up the story of Marxism and nature, surely one of the most important issues of our day and one where classical Marxism is probably quite weak. As with subsequent chapters, we begin by examining Marx’s own original engagement with nature. We then move on to how subsequent socialists and self-proclaimed socialist states engaged with nature and what we would today call the question of sustainability. Moving to the contemporary era we examine the confluence of feminism and ecology which has produced ecofeminism. Despite what some may argue is a tendency towards essentialism (women as closer to nature) this current has revived the debate in an imaginative way. Finally we turn to a critical discussion

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of current concerns with sustainable development in the context of globalization. Can the interests of the industrialized North and industrializing South be reconciled, we ask? We pose the issue of how the socialist red and ecological green might be synthesized in a new Marxist answer to the crisis of sustainability. There are few more urgent issues for the future of humanity as we move into an uncertain and conflictual twenty-first century. Chapter 3 tackles the question of Marxism and development, central to our objective of foregrounding global development and a Southern perspective in the reconstruction of Marxism. Marx himself was torn between an economistic and a mechanistic view of development, only broken late in life in relation to India. Of course some of his interpreters have removed this ambiguity in his thinking. Lenin swept away the lingering Eurocentrism in Marxism but in turn produced another developmentalist ideology under the slogan ‘Soviets plus electrification equals socialism’. The later theories of imperialism and dependency sought a Marxist understanding of underdevelopment which they could not find in classical Marxism. More recently, with a big question mark over whether capitalism can actually deliver development there has been a turn towards a post-development approach which we examine critically. Overall, while Marx saw socialism growing out of advanced capitalism, almost organically, in practice the revolutions of the twentieth century have all occurred in conditions of relative, if not absolute, underdevelopment, and most often as part of nationalist or anti-imperialist revolutions. That contradiction needs to be explained. In Chapter 4 we take on the relationship between Marxism and workers, once famously dubbed the gravediggers of capitalism. For Marx it was the self-organization of the workers, created by the expansion of capitalism, which would lay the basis for its supersession by socialism. He had confidence in the creativity and self-organization of the working class and never saw a political party taking over their role. The Russian Revolution, in practice, substituted the Bolshevik party for the working class as historical agent of change. In conditions of underdevelopment it was deemed unrealistic to expect the weak industrial proletariat to act as a vanguard and carry the whole of society with it. In recent decades the debate around workers and socialism has shifted towards a supposed decline of the traditional (Western) working class. While the rise of the new social movements

preface | xiii to some extent confirms the loss of centrality of workers, a more careful analysis of labour and globalization paints a different picture. Today, across the global South, there is a growing industrial working class (in formal and informal sectors) which is increasingly taking a proactive role in social transformation. In Chapter 5 the focus is on Marxism and women, which is central to the reconstruction of Marxism, not least as it involves the relationship to feminism which has sometimes been close but also troubled. The original Marxist engagement with gender was carried out by Engels rather than Marx. While it produced some insights into the bourgeois family and oppression of women it was also quite limited. Later socialist movements all tried to engage with the ‘woman question’ with varying degrees of success and commitment. It was not until the 1970s that a socialist feminist theoretical and activist tradition emerged and we consider its achievements and limitations. Finally we move to third wave feminism and queer theory or, what we might call, postfeminism. Can Marxism engage with these currents and, vice versa, can they gain anything from working with/through Marxism? Marxism is not the only androcentric theory in the world but its male bias, in theory and in practice, has been an impediment to it acting as a guide for social transformation for the whole of humanity. In Chapter 6 we examine the engagement between Marxism and culture once reduced to a passive ‘superstructure’ on the determinant economic ‘base’ but which is today very much dominant in cultural materialism. Marx’s conception of ideology is considered here, as is the Soviet project to create a ‘proletarian culture’ (Proletkult). But a major emphasis is placed on Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s break with determinism and his recognition of the huge role played by the cultural domain in contemporary capitalist societies. Gramsci acts as a hinge between classical Marxism and the neo-Marxist ‘cultural turn’ in the 1980s which we consider next. This turn is associated with the emergence of postmodernism, as cultural expression of late capitalism and as analytic tendency. From a neglect of culture and its autonomy we seem to have passed into a view that all is culture. Nevertheless these currents have finally ridded Marxism of any lingering economism. Chapter 7 turns to Marxism and nation with nationalism being seen by many as Marxism’s greatest historical failure. This chapter traces the early, troubled and contradictory engagement by Marx and Engels with what they called the ‘national question’. From

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this ambiguous legacy Lenin went on to construct the much more influential, but just as contradictory, Marxist theory and policy of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’. The explosion of national tensions in what was once the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia showed the limitations of this approach. The one lasting Marxist contribution to an understanding of the nation was carved out by Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer in the 1930s which we consider next. Finally, we turn to the era of post-nationalism, at least as proclaimed by the gems of globalization and the ‘end of history’. Nations and nationalism continue to have a major – we might even say decisive – impact on world events and in setting the frame for social transformation. A Marxist understanding of these processes can clearly not be neglected in an era when national and ethnic divisions are coming to the fore again, albeit under different conditions. In Chapter 8 we turn to Marxism and religion, sometimes seen as the ‘opium of the people’, but which today no serious Marxist can afford to dismiss so casually. Marx himself was an atheist but he did engage with religion in many ways. Commentators have become fixated by his phrase that religion was ‘the opium of the people’ but they neglect another phrase shortly after which was that religion was ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature in a soulless world’. From these early engagements we turn to the policies and practices of the self-proclaimed socialist states that often began, as in Russia, with a militant atheist approach. More recently, in Latin America, from the 1960s onwards we have seen the emergence of ‘liberation theology’, which represents a certain confluence between Marxism and Christianity. Finally, the discussion is broadened out to consider current debates around religion and politics both within Marxism and more widely. It seems quite clear, at the start of the twentyfirst century, that no project for social transformation can afford to neglect a critical, but also reflexive, encounter with the importance of religion in the contemporary world. Finally in Chapter 9 we tackle Marxism and the future. We start with the relevance of Marx’s economic analysis for an understanding of the capitalist crisis opened up in 2007. A system deemed selfsustaining and capable of infinite expansion collapsed like a house of cards and with it the theoretical claims of neoliberalism. How would Karl Marx analyse this crisis and its likely further outcome? We also return to the last great global crisis of capitalism in 1929 and

preface | xv the 1930s to consider possible parallels with the current dilemmas facing the rich and powerful as well as the subaltern and rebellious classes. There is a growing consensus that the current unstable and very conflictual resolution of the crisis is not sustainable, either economically or politically. So what might happen ‘After capitalism’? We turn to the incipient counter-movements on the margins of the market economy which have begun to articulate another logic. The renewed, reconstructed and revitalized Marx we have sought to create will be part of this future and not just a dim and distant memory. Soon after this book is appearing, in 2017, it will be 150 years since Karl Marx published Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. Surely this can be of interest only to Marxologists and the historians of economic thought? In fact, now, a decade after the implosion of the neoliberal model in 2007 we see no sign that capitalism will embark on a more productive and stable course that would disprove Marx once and for all. Marx still provides us with many of the tools needed for a critical analysis of contemporary capitalism and its contradictions. Another significant date we can mark is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. This signalled the rise of Marxism to state power and as driver of an international political movement. Does its demise around 1989–91 simply prove how illusory, even criminal, such an ambition was? For myself, the quest for a more humane and sustainable global order still persists and is, if anything, more urgent. If the reconstruction of Marxism to make it fit for purpose today has any logic at all it is to assist in such an effort. References Badiou, A. (2005) Metapolitics, London: Verso. Bidet, J. (2009) ‘A Key to the Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism’ in J. Bidet, and S. Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Bidet, J. and Kouvelakis, S. (eds) (2009) Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Fraser, N. (2014) ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode’, New Left Review, 86.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Milanović, B. (2016) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Tosel, A. (2009) ‘The Development of Marxism: From the End of MarxismLeninism to a Thousand Marxisms – France-Italy, 1975–2005’, in J. Bidet and S. Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

‘El amanecer ya no es una tentación’ (Sandinista saying circa 1980)

1 | B E Y ON D T H E L A B YR I N T H : M A R X IS M AND H I S TOR Y

Jacques Derrida, a champion of the postmodern, post-Marxist era, once declared: ‘There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx’ (1994: 13). It is not a simple question of saying ‘Marxism is dead, long live Marx!’ But there is now – more than thirty years since the collapse of the state socialist regimes – a more sober reappraisal of the Marxist heritage than was previously possible. This chapter traces some of the high (and low) points of the complex Marxist trajectories from their origins in Marx, through the social-democratic and communist traditions, to Marxism’s difficult engagement with postmodernism in recent times. I have inevitably simplified the complex labyrinth of the Marxist discourse and the socialist communist movements. Sometimes, though, it would seem that the labyrinth – with its walls, dead-ends and Borgesian logic – is one that some Marxists/socialists/communists created for themselves or, more often, their followers. Marx in his era At first glance we would have read as counter-intuitive Étienne Balibar’s confident prediction in 1995 that: ‘Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a movement of the past, but as a contemporary author’ (1995: 1). But just as we thought that Marx had become a ‘dead dog’ (as Hegel before him), he now seems to spring back to life. The Marxist project did not emerge fully developed one summer day from the head of Karl Marx. The genealogy of Marxism shows a complex, sometimes contradictory, development of the discourse we now know as Marxism. Nor can this be reduced to the ‘young Marx’ versus the ‘mature Marx’ or artificial distinctions between Marx as economist, philosopher or politician. It is even a simplification to argue, as Kautsky and Lenin both did, that Marxism as a world-view has three clear sources: German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy.

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This type of totalization, which is intrinsically and inevitably Europebound, will not do for a critical or ‘live’ Marx for today. Instead, we must delve into the real world of Marx and examine the shifts, retreats and advances he carried out in his bid to put revolutionary theory on a scientific standing against all the ‘utopian socialists’ of his day. With the Communist Manifesto, written with Engels in 1847, Marx’s political vision was made explicit. While often read for its dramatic images of a dynamic bourgeoisie, the Manifesto is also marked by a strong belief in an imminent and general crisis of capitalism. This would create the conditions for the proletariat to lead all the dominated classes towards a radical democracy, which, in turn, would create the conditions for a classless, communist society. This was the era of permanent revolution. The proletariat is seen as the universal class of history. This, as Balibar notes, ‘allows Marx to read off from the present the imminence of the communist revolution’ (1995: 40). The themes of modernism and romanticism seem rolled into one. Marx’s dialectic of modernity creates a politics of redemption, of universal fulfilment. The image of perpetual progress and the inevitable advance of history is a bold one. From a postmodern perspective we can also see the dark side of these images. Marshal Berman, admirer of Marxthe-Modernist, can write of the Manifesto We can see, too, how communism, in order to hold itself together, might stifle the active, dynamic and developmental forces that have brought it into being, might betray many of the hopes that have made it worth fighting for, might reproduce the inequities and contradictions of bourgeois society under a new name. (1983: 105) As it turned out, history took a turn showing it would not always advance by its good side. The European revolution of 1848–49 could have seen the implementation of the Manifesto but, instead, had relegated it by 1850 into a seeming non-runner. The collapse of capitalism and the proletariat as universal class had been proven to be either a mirage or wishful thinking. The notion of permanent revolution went out the window and Marx was forced to grapple with the power of nationalism and religious ideas. There was to be no smooth move towards a classless society. Marx turned, in The

ma rx i sm and history | 3 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean, to seek strategies to confront the counter-revolution and to bridge the gap between what he began to call ‘class in itself’ and ‘class for itself’. Capitalism would not magically unite the working class, this unity would have to be constructed politically. Marx also (re)turned to his ambitious research programme into capitalism, the critique of political economy, which would bear fruit with the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. Capitalism’s failure to oblige through a simple collapse and general crisis led Marx, thus, to uncover the hidden secrets of this mode of production, the sources of its dynamism and the nature of its contradictions. The complex architecture of Marx’s Capital, in its three volumes and the ‘fourth’ volume of the Theories of Surplus Value is, of course, his most enduring and systematic legacy. Yet at this level only, read as an economist, Marx could conceivably be dismissed, as he has been by some commentators as a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. This perception changes if we move on to read Capital politically, as Harry Cleaver advised: ‘it is a reading which eschews all detached interpretation and abstract theorizing in favour of grasping concepts only within that concrete totality of struggle whose determinations they designate’ (1979: 11). With the rule of capitalism having been secured (almost) across the globe, it would seem opportune to return to Capital. Of course many of the problems which have exercised Marxist economics over the years – for example the so-called ‘transformation problem’ of finding a general rule by which to transform the ‘values’ of commodities determined by the labour theory of value into the ‘prices’ of the marketplace – seem, and probably are, arcane today. However, a strategic reading of Capital can still be a useful aid towards developing a deeper conceptual understanding of capitalism today. With capitalism triumphant, Marx may still provide, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘a thoroughly critical utopia, exposing the historical relativity of capitalist values, laying bare their historical limitation and thereby preventing them from freezing into an horizon-less commonsense’ (1976: 99). In developing a new common sense for our new times, Marx still has something to say, if read critically. The events of 1870–71 were, as those of 1848–49, also to have a mixed effect on the development of the Marxian system. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the great but tragic Paris Commune, set back even further the optimistic view of history.

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While Marx may have hailed the Commune as the first ‘workingclass government’ in history, he was still shocked that the revolution had not broken out in the most developed capitalist country, namely England. Then, the merciless crushing of the Parisian working classes brought home the real, material military power of the ruling classes. There would be no simple, organic path to communism. Real politics came smashing into the developing Marxian paradigm. Again history was not developing on the ‘good side’, as testified by the dissolution of the First International in 1872. After 1871, as Balibar writes, Marx ‘did not stop working, but from that moment on he was certain that he could no longer “finish” his work, that he could not come to a “conclusion”. There would be no conclusion’ (1995: 103). The Marxian discourse became more open, less necessitarian and more ‘political’. In Marx it led to the notion of ‘transition’ seen as a phase before communism when the proletariat would have to dismantle the state apparatus. This ‘rectification’ of Marx’s would have serious effects on the later history of socialism. After the shock of 1871, Marx again interrupted his research programme, this time to learn Russian among other things, and to rectify his theory of social evolution. The inexorable progress of capitalism towards communism with its evolutionary image had been shattered. It was a simple question, yet one that was inordinately difficult for Marx to answer, which prompted this epistemological rupture. The early Russian socialists, known as ‘populists’, sought Marx’s opinion in 1888 on whether the rural commune could be the germ of a non-capitalist development prefiguring communism. In the 1867 Preface to the first edition of Capital Marx had argued famously: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1976: 91). In 1881, Marx was able to articulate in his letter to Vera Zasulich that Capital’s law-like theory of capitalist accumulation did not apply regardless of historical circumstance. No longer is there a unilinear path of capitalist development, but a recognition of complexity, diversity and the distinct concrete paths to development in different parts of the world. For Teodor Shanin, who helped bring to light Marx’s writings on Russia: ‘His last decade was a conceptual leap, cut short by his death. Marx was a man of intellect as much as a man of passion for social justice, a revolutionary who preferred revolutionaries to doctrinaire followers’ (Shanin, 1983: 33).

marx i sm and history | 5 When Marx died in 1883, Engels became his literary executor, with huge effects for the development of what was to become Marxism. Along with the notables of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) Engels systematized or simplified and made mechanical Marx’s fluid thought. His defining influence is felt in the volumes of Capital published after Marx’s death, in his own doctrinal texts such as AntiDühring and in his creation of ‘historical materialism’ as Weltanschauung (world-view). In his analysis of the critical reception of Marx after his death, Paul Thomas goes as far as to say that ‘Engels’s doctrines owed little or nothing to Marx, the man he called his mentor’ (1991: 41). Perhaps this is going too far, but it is no coincidence that the Soviet translation of Marx’s thought into state ideology began with the work of the Marx-Engels Institute. Against all the scientific readings of Marx by Engels and others, it should be recalled that Marx never referred to ‘historical materialism’ and certainly never to that Soviet monster ‘dialectical materialism’ (or ‘diamat’ for short). It was, of course, Stalin’s 1938 pamphlet, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which cemented this ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy and helped convert it into state ideology and police method. None of this was inevitable of course. We do not need rose-tinted spectacles to reject Kolakowski’s concerted effort in his three-volume history of Marxism to make the father responsible for the sins of his children. The religion of MarxismLeninism simply cannot be laid at Marx’s door, if we place the latter in historical context and actually read what he wrote at the time, in the conjuncture in which he was living. This does not mean, of course, that Marx is immune to criticism, particularly as a modernist thinker. In this regard, we need to consider Foucault’s warning that: ‘the claim to escape from the systems of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions’ (1984: 46). Marx was probably guilty of this type of arrogance, but Capital does not lead inexorably to the Gulag, as some of the more disingenuous ‘nouveaux philosophes’ tried to tell us in the 1980s after they forsook Marxism (e.g. Glucksmann, 1980). Even Foucault, as we shall see, who ran a mile from anything which smacked of ‘dialectical materialism’, can be seen to be in a constant engagement with the ‘ghost of Marx’, as Max Weber was before him.

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Why would we imagine that the ideas of Marx might be relevant today? For Lukács, in a text he later disowned during the Stalinist heyday, ‘Orthodox Marxism … does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations …. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’ (1971: 1). Though still a text of a ‘true believer’, to some extent the point is a sensible one. The method of Marx is that of the radical critique, with its inherent capacity of reflexivity and self-critique. If the ‘diamat’ is an integral part of Stalinist totalitarianism, Marx’s critical method points instead towards all the radical trends in epistemology, from feminism to deconstruction. In Marx’s own thought there was permanent innovation, adaptation and self-critical reflection. Marx’s thought was/is as dynamic as the society it worked on, and its drive for social justice is as relevant today as then. There does seem to be considerable consensus that Marx was on surer ground as critic of capitalism, rather than as creator of a new society. In this regard we can but agree with Marshall Berman, for whom: ‘The great gift [Marx] … can give us today, it seems to me, is not a way out of the contradictions of modern life but a surer and deeper way into these contradictions’ (1983: 129). If Marx sought a science, did he not also create a utopia with communism? Certainly in much of his writing we can detect a strong anti-utopian sentiment, but communism is still a utopia in the full sense of the word. There are many voices urging a reconsideration of this utopian element in Marx. For John Gray, no friend of Marxism, to ‘repress in the interests of criticism and objective knowledge the mythopoeic impulse which explains its appeal’ is to reduce it to ‘an esoteric and barely intelligible cult’ (1995: 232). Jacques Derrida, in his own settling of accounts with Marx, similarly, but more positively, notes that Marxism ‘carries with it, and must carry with it, necessarily, despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology’ (1994: 59). It would indeed be a very reductive and ‘cold’ view of science which would divorce it from all positive human endeavour. The politics of utopia can be grounded and do not necessarily degenerate into totalitarian nightmares. It is perhaps, at this point, that Marx speaks most clearly to the new social movements which many would see as the agents of change comparable to Marx’s gravedigger of capitalism, the proletariat.

marx i sm and history | 7 The followers The socialist clock (or bomb?) so passionately wound up by Marx was slowly but surely unwound by his followers, to become a pale reflection (even betrayal) of its former self. The Second or Socialist International was formed in 1889, a few years before Engels died in 1895. Hopes were high that this new international body would take up and develop the heritage of the First International. Kolakowski has, with little exaggeration, called the 1889–1914 era the ‘golden age of Marxism’ (1981: 1). Yet as the First World War broke out in 1914, the socialist parties of the French and German proletariats lined up behind their national states and armies in the great conflagration. The great hopes of socialist internationalism were dashed as its constituent parts succumbed to chauvinism and jumped on, with varying degrees of reluctance, to their respective nation-state war machines. This watershed in the history of Marxist ideas and practice was to give rise to a new, hardier offshoot, Bolshevism or communism, to be examined in the next section. But first we have to consider in more detail the epistemological and political underpinnings of ‘orthodox’ Marxism after the death of its reluctant founder, Karl Marx. The role of Friedrich Engels in Marxism has always been contested. For some we are dealing always with a hybrid Marx/Engels persona, for others Engels was elevated by orthodox Marxism-Leninism precisely because he simplified and sometimes distorted the thinking of Karl Marx. My own position, in brief, is that Engels played a vital role in Marx’s life and at times collaborated with him, but that he must be regarded as a separate thinker. In the years which Friedrich Engels lived after the death of Karl Marx – 1883 to 1895 – he acted as the latter’s literary executor, editor of the volumes of Capital after Volume 1 and, in some ways as the arbiter of what Marx ‘really meant’. Inevitably that role, to some extent foisted on him by the leaders of social democracy, left him in the ambiguous position as Marx’s ‘alter ego’ and, as some said at the time the ‘source of truth’. Soviet ideology then canonized him in this role so that Marx-Engels became a duo to be followed by Lenin, Stalin and Mao – all claiming to be direct descendants from the work of Karl Marx philosophically, intellectually, politically and ethically. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ‘young Engels’ was an accomplished analyst from The Peasant War in Germany (1850), to The Conditions of the Working Class in

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England (1845) and his famous polemic Anti-Dühring (1878). In later life he returned to philosophical themes in the posthumously published Dialectics of Nature (1927). In between he acted as Marx’s collaborator and popularizer and friend of course. But when Marx died, Engels began to construct a Marxism that was very much his own, starting with the Graveside Speech of 1883 that portrayed Marx as a ‘scientific materialist’ to mirror Darwin. In his 1892 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which was widely translated and distributed, Engels carried out a further systematization of what he called ‘scientific socialism’. This ‘scientific’ reading of Marx with strange writings on natural science and the construction of a theological ‘dialectical materialism’ (nowhere to be found in Marx) fitted in well with the needs of the new Soviet state after 1917 to legitimize itself. Put simply, Marx never claimed to have discovered ‘the law of development of human history’ as Engels claimed in Socialism: Utopian or Scientific. Karl Kautsky, the ‘Pope’ of Marxism as he became known, carried out the organic systematization of the doctrine, for that is what it became. Even Lenin, for whom he was ‘the great renegade’, praised his role in developing Marx’s theoretical legacy, notably in relation to the agrarian question. According to Kolakowski, ‘Next to Engels, Kautsky was certainly the chief exponent of the naturalist, evolutionist determinist Darwinist element of Marxism’ (1981: 51). Yet Kautsky did develop a far more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the workers’ movement and the complex society which capitalism was becoming in the early twentieth century. Kautsky was keenly aware of the importance of democracy in the development of socialism. His analysis of the new relationships emerging between society, the state and political parties prefigures the later developments of Gramsci. His opposition to the undemocratic nature of the Bolshevik revolution 1917 repays attention, even today. Finally, Kautsky was the guardian of ‘orthodox’ Marxism against the ‘revisionism’ of Eduard Bernstein and others, who sought a wholesale revision and modernization of Marxism to fit the new conditions of a stable, increasingly prosperous and democratic capitalism as they saw it. Bernstein’s views have been anathematized even more than Kautsky’s in communist and revolutionary circles. His practically Fabian view of a smooth, non-violent evolution towards socialism

marx i sm and history | 9 was easily derided. His aphorism of the final goal (socialism) being nothing and the movement (social democracy) ‘everything’ has been wilfully caricatured. Following the death of Engels, Bernstein developed a series of articles in The Preconditions of Socialism (1993) criticizing the founders of Marxism for their belief in a catastrophic collapse of capitalism. The crisis of capitalism did not seem much in evidence in the Germany of the mid-1890s. The advance of democracy in the more industrialized countries seemed to indicate the possibility that working-class parties could advance the cause of socialism through parliament. Perhaps legislation, institutional reform and piecemeal social engineering could create a smooth transition to socialism. Bernstein picked up, astutely enough, the contradictions between the late Engels’ advocacy of strict legality in the pursuit of socialism on the one hand, and his lingering attachment to revolutionary rhetoric on the other hand. While Kautsky clung to ‘orthodoxy’ while developing Marxism, Bernstein became a more open advocate of a reformist socialist ideology. Both Kautsky and Bernstein are bridges between classical Marxism (that of Marx primarily) and the modern tradition of social democracy. With these two thinkers, Marxism emerges squarely into the modern era and shakes off most of its Romanticist heritage. As Beilharz writes, it is no ‘accident that Kautsky and Bernstein have little patience for the Fourieresque idyll of The German Ideology’ (1992: 118). An air of realism had crept into the socialist discourse and the utopian element faded away. The modern concept of identity sat ill at ease with some of the idyllic, pastoral visions of labour utopias. This was now the age of Max Weber, and Hegel was very much in the past. Capitalist accumulation and social differentiation were producing a complex society irreducible to simple dialectical schemas. Beilharz has advanced the interesting idea that ‘Social democracy takes this process of rupture the furthest, and consequently is the most modern or potentially “postmodern” of labour’s utopias’ (1992: 118). The illusions of a simplistic Marxist teleology were dispelled and its belief in itself as a fixed and finished system was severely shaken. However, what was to become known as social democracy in this modem era was equally teleological and represented no answer to the failings of classical Marxism. The trauma of 1914 and subsequent events – such as social-democratic participation in ‘bourgeois government’ in

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Germany after 1918 – utterly transformed the social-democratic discourse. For one, the state became the undisputed matrix of all social-democratic strategy. From this it followed that gaining more seats in parliament was the way to get access to state power and policy-making. Marcel Leibman goes on to argue: ‘As a result, reformism came to be redefined. Its gradualism and peaceful legalism were now so blatant that they did not need to be spelled out’ (1986: 4). Just as the Russian Revolution was opening up a new heroic chapter in the Marxist story, the Western European social democrats were extolling the virtues of the prosaic, and sinking into apathy over the viability of even mild reformist measures. Whereas in the past, even moderate social democrats were prepared to endorse mass action and possibly revolutionary rhetoric to gain advantage, now many leading social democrats began to fear the mobilized masses. Social democrats were becoming ‘responsible’ aspirants to hold state power and thus any attempts against this state were to be opposed, with force if necessary. Even the reformisms of a Kautsky and a Bernstein were beginning to seem dangerously radical. By the time the Second World War had come and gone, social democracy had mutated into an ideology which could barely trace its history back to Marx. Keynes had replaced Kautsky as the leading theoretical light, and a broad, classless appeal had replaced the traditional reliance on labour and the trade unions. Even the commitment to nationalization of the means of production, through which the statist orientation had been implemented, was being drawn into question by the 1950s. This turn was symbolically ratified in the 1959 Bad Godesberg programme of the German social democrats. To the new Keynesian consensus was added the welfare state and political liberalism. This new hybrid liberal-social democracy was not a particularly stable ideological formation. As Padgett and Patterson note: ‘Attempts to redefine social democracy met with only limited success and the parties entered a period of ideological disarray. The collapse of the social-democratic consensus led to an intensification of the ideological fission which is a primary characteristic of the [social-democratic] parties’ (1991: 2). The compass of Marxism, albeit reduced to a largely symbolic or theological function, had now been thrown overboard and a new mutant political discourse had been created.

ma rx i sm and history | 11 By the 1980s, the 100-year-old history of social democracy as a discernible reformist interpretation or development of Marxism had clearly come to an end. In essence social democracy had become assimilated with liberalism in the now globally dominant neoliberal discourse. With the decomposition and ultimate collapse of communism, social democracy could not even pose as a bulwark against radicalism or as socialism ‘with a human face’. The ‘Mitterrand experiment’ in France during the 1980s saw just how rapidly social-democratic discourse would evaporate under the new liberal dispensation and the rigours of globalization. Reformism and socialization are now replaced by modernization and liberalization. What is most noticeable is that the label of radicalism was now more often seized by the right. Social democracy lost even that intellectual or political ascendancy it had in the postwar period due to its association with radicalism and reform. The democratic terrain no longer saw the uncontested hegemony of these descendants, however distant and however intermarried, of Karl Marx. A blind spot of the social-democratic tradition was always the colonial or ‘Third’ world. An implicit, even explicit, acceptance of European imperialism was matched by a particularly virulent Eurocentrism when it came to dealing with the colonial Other. As an example we find George Leichteim, in his classic history of socialism, dedicating a short subsection to the Third World where he refers among other things to ‘the infantile parody of Lenin’s thought known as Maoism’ and the ‘childlike simplicity’ of the Maoist model (1970: 282–3). Needless to say, no such derogatory language is deployed against European thinkers, even when the author disagrees with them. Of course, colonialism is a problem for the Marxist tradition from the founders onwards. Marx may well have come to grips with the politics of development in Russia and nationalism in Ireland, but he still thought British colonialism had done a good job in India, and that the ‘energetic’ Yankees should obviously have the upper hand over the ‘lazy’ Mexicans (see Chapter 3). But in recent decades, social democracy, as a political current largely shorn of its Marxian heritage, has taken an increasingly interventionist stance in some areas of the Third World. Perhaps it would take on a new lease of life there as its cycle in the advanced capitalist countries seemed to come to a close?

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There was a certain boom for social democracy in Latin America during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It seemed that this European tradition might transplant successfully to the Americas. One inspiration was the success of Spain’s Socialist Party in managing the transition from Franco to a parliamentary democracy. Another key factor was the decisive drive by German social democracy to support, or even create, Latin American social-democratic forces to counter the hegemony of US imperialism in the region. Thus one determinant was to help make the region safe for Western European investment and to block any prospect for insurgency through preventative reform. Yet, the tradition of Willy Brandt in seeking a more conciliatory relationship between the North and the South in global economic and political relations is not a purely self-serving one. It is also the case that the social-democratic tradition has, or at least had, certain minimal articles of faith – such as the right of workers to organize, the inalienable need for free, democratic elections, and the responsibility of the state for the common good – which were truly transformatory in a Latin America coming out of the long night of military dictatorship. Social democracy clearly faces severe challenges in the developing world. To some extent its Eurocentrism has been overcome and it has developed strong hybrid offshoots in many countries. It is interesting in this regard to consider the challenges as seen by a social-democratic leader of a major developing country, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. For Cardoso the challenges for social democracy in Brazil and elsewhere in the Third World revolved around three main issues: 1. social democracy’s relation with the state, once seen as a saviour, but now subject to liberalism’s privatization drive; 2. social democracy’s ambiguous relationship with nationalism now so clearly questioned by the advance of globalization; 3. social democracy’s relationship with democracy and the troubled relationships between the need of a strong executive to achieve modernization and the defence of a parliamentary system (Cardoso, 1993: 403–13). Whether social democracy was, or is, able to deal with these tensions is an open question. Whether social democracy’s economic

marx i sm and history | 13 and political reformism can provide solutions to the pressing social problems of developing countries is even more open to question. Marx in the East When the Russian communists took power in 1917 it seemed that the shame of German and French social democracy in 1914 had been expunged. Indeed, a new dynamic Marxist-Leninist hybrid spread throughout the world. Yet, in historical terms a brief seventy years later, this movement had definitively collapsed. This section traces the rise and decline of the communist idea and state. But first we must recall just what a landmark 1917 was in the world’s political history. As Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein write: ‘1917 became such a big symbol because it was the first dramatic victory of the proponents of statepower strategy … 1917 proved it could be done’ (1989: 99). Whereas Marx and Engels had no clear conception of how proletarian political power would be achieved, and Kautsky and Bernstein had developed a reformist, parliamentary road to socialism, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (albeit reluctantly for many of them) pioneered the revolutionary path to state power. Renewing the Jacobin tradition, the Bolsheviks were to become part of a broader wave of revolutions in China, Mexico and, in a different context, Germany. The undoubted founder of the Bolshevik discourse is Lenin, a historical figure who inevitably became part of the MarxistLeninist couplet created by the new orthodoxy. Lenin sought to fill the gaps left by Marx in terms of political strategy. The whole nature of Marxism, or historical materialism as it became known, was transformed by Lenin’s particular vision of politics, organization and the state. Lenin’s epistemological breakthrough dates from 1903 at the Second Congress of the AllRussian Social Democratic Labour Party. A seemingly trivial dispute over the definition of membership led to the unravelling of two distinct discourses. A whole style of Bolshevik practice and attitudes entered the political vocabulary. The ‘professional revolutionary’ made its debut as a political category. Dogmatism in theory, or ‘principle’, was allied with a flexibility in tactics which bordered on duplicity. The Leninist machine – The Party – was launched and, as Félix Guattari put it, ‘the fundamental signifiers, the cardinal positions, entered history at that moment’ (1984: 190). To assess its significance we need to consider Lukács, for whom Lenin’s ‘admirable realism’ was

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simply ‘the consistent application of Marxism … to problems of socialism’ (1971: 73) alongside the sombre verdict of those such as A. J. Polan, for whom Lenin forecloses politics and seeks to ‘ontologize the apocalypse’ (1984: 204) in an authoritarian discourse which has conspired against human freedom. The notion of Lenin as the agent of Realpolitik who simply sought to operationalize Marxism is a problematic one. Lenin was fully part of the socialist tradition committed to rationality and with universal aspirations. Indeed it makes more sense to see Lenin as the epitome of, and epitaph for, a doctrinaire socialism believing in the power of theory. Here is where we need to distinguish at least two Lenins. There is the Lenin of direct democracy, the architect of ‘dual power’ and the promoter of ‘all power to the soviets’. This is also the Lenin of the last years when, already ailing, he agonized over the partystate bureaucracy, rapidly becoming a dictatorship over (rather than of) the proletariat. Yet, in practice, the Lenin who led to Leninism was the creator of the vanguard party, the admirer of Taylorist work methods and the firm believer in economic and political discipline. There is, to be sure, an ‘objective’ basis for this particular resolution of Lenin’s ambiguities, in the painful conditions of economic, social and political backwardness in the Russia of the early twentieth century. So, in many ways inevitably, Leninism became the Marxism of backwardness or, to put it bluntly, an underdeveloped socialism for an underdeveloped capitalist country. The young Bolshevik revolution looked hopefully to Germany in 1918 for a revolution in the capitalist heartland that would give respite to their beleaguered enterprise. As Marxists they were internationalists, but also, more importantly, they clearly believed that socialism could only come about through capitalism. In this sense, they did not accept Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich, which opened up a less necessitarian development scenario. In the end, the headquarters of the world revolution would remain in Russia, as hopes for a European rising faded. Optimism remained and, as Lenin announced to the founding conference of the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919, ‘the victory of the proletarian revolution all over the world is assured’. The colour of this new revolutionary wave was to be less than pristine red however. Led by Lenin’s conception of imperialism, national liberation in the colonies was to be the mainspring of the move against international

marx i sm and history | 15 capitalism. At the 1921 Congress of the Peoples of the West the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution were calling for a Jihad or ‘holy war’ against British and French imperialism. Communism turned its eyes to the East (the ‘South’ of the early twentieth century) and towards nationalism. This was a long way from classic Marxist proletarian internationalism and belief that only the most advanced capitalist countries could hope to achieve a transition to socialism. After the First World War there was one beleaguered, if big, anticapitalist state on the world scene; after the Second World War, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba joined the club. Albeit imposed by Russian arms, most of Eastern Europe also fell under the sway of pro-Soviet governance. Yet these were revolutions that were predominantly nationalist in character and the setting was mainly agricultural (except for parts of Eastern Europe). By this stage few observers doubted that the economic and political system which had emerged was far removed from anything envisaged by Marx or even Lenin. Critical Marxism was wracked by a debate on the ‘nature of the USSR’ which now seems byzantine and theological. While the more or less critical supporters of the non-capitalist, but definitely not socialist, regimes sought mitigating factors, the ideologues of capitalism waxed indignant about the communist monster. What is clear is that, after the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union embarked on a course of authoritarian modernization and totalitarian politics under Stalin which has few parallels in modern history. Whereas Mao’s successors in China were able to retreat under control from such a course, Stalin’s successors found regime decompression a more difficult process to manage. The Soviet monolith was, however, less solid than it looked, even by the late 1950s. The increased centralization of the economic model was not conducive to efficiency or technological innovation. The virtual absence of political participation meant there was little prospect for self-correcting mechanisms in the decision-making process. At another social or molecular level, the regime was simply losing consensus; this would ultimately lead to its decomposition. Within forty years the bright and shiny hopes of 1917 had been tarnished. The nationalist element remained, heightened by Russia’s experience in the Second World War, as did, of course, inertia. A vicious cycle of instability, frustrated reform and decay led eventually to Gorbachev’s perestroika, a restructuring tune which became a funeral march.

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For Carl Boggs: ‘Modernity in its diverse expressions (economic complexity, technology, urbanism, increased levels of education) had finally destroyed the firmaments of the post-Stalinist order and now threatened to undermine Communist rule in any form’ (1995: 89). Yet there was no ineluctable necessity to this outcome – as the modernization and convergence theories of the 1960s argued – which was mediated by a political struggle punctuated by popular revolts, labour organizing and human rights campaigns. It was not long before resentment over the imposed ‘state socialist’ regimes in Eastern Europe boiled over: East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 saw impressive, if ultimately defeated, uprisings. The latter, in particular, became a landmark for the international communist movement. Then Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1979–81 saw even more decisive moves by the people against the ruling bureaucracy. The bureaucratic centralism of these regimes was more fragile than it appeared. Faced with these less than impressive models for an alternative society, Western communists began to develop a ‘Eurocommunist’ hybrid. Essentially, the communist tradition began to occupy the ground ceded by social democracy in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was not much distance now between the inheritors of the Gramsci-Togliatti tradition and that of Kautsky-Bernstein. Parliament became the privileged focus of political transformation and socialism was placed on a very distant backburner. However, these respectable reformist communists were not able to make a breakthrough and by 1990 ‘Eurocommunism no longer existed as a vehicle of social change in the Mediterranean or anywhere else, much less as the fruition of grandiose visions entertained by many Marxists in the 1970s’ (Boggs, 1995: 129). Contrary to the agonizing, inward-looking debates on the ‘crisis of Western Marxism’, events in the wider socialist world would prove decisively important. The Chinese Revolution had been the second great revolutionary act following Russia 1917. If the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries would not rise, then perhaps the ‘world of the country’ (the agrarian or ‘Third World’ countries) would encircle and engulf the ‘world of the city’ (advanced capitalism). Following events in Hungary 1956, many radicals turned their eyes to what would become known as the Third World. Victorious revolutions in Algeria and Cuba cemented the legend of the people’s war against imperialism. Jean-Paul Sartre used Franz Fanon to

ma rx i sm and history | 17 berate the impotence of metropolitan Marxism. Emancipation had found another route in the Third World with many in the West acting as cheerleaders. Then Ché Guevara died and Castro supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1967. Realpolitik was taking over from utopia again. Even the long-awaited victory of the Vietnamese revolution in 1975 was to turn sour. The internecine war in Indo-China and the ‘boat people’, finally buried Third Worldism as a progressive discourse. Now capitalism appeared once again, as in classical Marxism, as the progressive agent of economic transformation. In 1989, the Berlin Wall, dividing East from West Germany, came down, symbolizing the end of the communist era. In practical and discursive terms, the events of 1989 represent a watershed in global history. They are equivalent to the French Revolution and 1917 as events marking the death of an old regime. There was no way to escape the conclusion that Marxism had come to the end of the road in almost all its various manifestations. The idea of socialism as a totalizing discourse and privileged path to social transformation had evaporated. Yet Fred Halliday could read the events of 1989 as having ‘restated, in a dramatic form, the most neglected facet of political life … namely the capacity of the mass of the population to take sudden, rapid and novel political action’ (1991: 78). So, at the very moment when Marxism as movement and Marxism as government was coming to an end, the risen peoples of Eastern Europe were carrying out some very ‘Marxist’-like revolutionary actions. What ‘1989’ represented, just like ‘1968’ before it, was much more than the collapse of the communist political regimes. As David Held writes, the debates on ‘1989 and all that’ were about ‘the character and form of modernity itself: the constitutive processes and structures of the contemporary world’ (1992: 14). The book by Francis Fukuyama proclaiming ‘the end of history’ (1992), contestable though it was, did actually capture something of the mood of the times. There was an epochal mutation going on, even if the extreme conservative optimists and radical pessimists were to be proven wrong very shortly. History had not, of course, come to an end, but capitalism and liberalism did seem to be the only games in town. Soviet socialism seemed as much a bad dream as fascism had been in preventing humanity’s progress towards the ‘good life’. The West had won the Cold War and its triumphalism, for example in the

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Gulf War, was a terrible and terrifying sight to behold. But it would not be many years before it dawned on supporters and opponents of the new world order alike that this victory might, indeed, be a poisoned chalice and that new contradictions would emerge to challenge capitalist complacency. There were many reactions on the Marxist left to the events of 1989. For those organized in political groups to the left of Soviet Marxism, the crisis represented opportunity. The false Soviet god had been torn down, now the one true faith could re-establish its project. Unfortunately, in the real world, people did not tend to distinguish between Soviet-style Marxism and the 236 varieties to its supposed left. Another reaction was to develop an acute case of political amnesia where the whole history of Marxism was simply forgotten. From embracing the New Times and a critical more liberal Marxism, it seemed that ‘1989’ gave licence for a love affair with capitalism itself and the wonders of the free market. The binary opposition between these two positions hardly needs remarking on. For myself, I would go along with Fred Halliday’s argument/belief that ‘After its long and painful historical detour, the Communist tradition can now return to its point of origin, the critique of, and challenge to capitalist political economy’ (1991: 99). We were now back where Marx had been when he looked out at the nascent capitalist world around him. Marxism today In 1977, at a conference in Venice organized by the Italian communist breakaway movement II Manifesto, Louis Althusser, then the recognized contemporary ‘Pope’ of Marxist theory, officially declared the ‘crisis of Marxism’. For him, this seemed to be mainly due to the crisis of the official communist parties then beginning to go their own separate ways. It was left to Rossana Rossanda to declare more precisely that actually existing socialism had drawn into question ‘the very idea of socialism, not as generic aspiration, but as a theory of society, a different mode of organisation of human existence’ (Il Manifesto, 1979: 9). In fact, by 1977 it was only a belated recognition by the communist tradition of a process which had begun a decade earlier. For it is ‘1968’ (1967–69) that symbolizes the death of the old left and the beginning of a new one which would become known as post-Marxism, with its varying degrees of emphasis

ma rx i sm and history | 19 on the first and second term of the couplet. The events around 1968 led to the questioning of a whole series of premises of orthodox Marxism/socialism: ‘its discursive universality, its identification with single classes and parties, its premise of a simple representation of (economic) interests, its blindness to multiple forms of domination, its unbridled productivism in a world of ecological limits’ (Boggs, 1995: 182). We can take as part of the same historical moment the May events of France in 1968, the ‘Prague Spring’ in Czechoslovakia and the 1969 ‘Cordobazo’ in Argentina. The old bureaucratic, authoritarian statist way of being was under challenge. It was, indeed, a world revolution which transformed utterly both the world and the way we view it. Though a ‘failure’ in the military sense, it brought onto the political scene the new social movements which effectively buried the old MarxistLeninist dogmas. An optimistic reading was that of Perry Anderson, for whom ‘The re-emergence of revolutionary masses outside the control of a bureaucratised party rendered potentially conceivable the unification of Marxist theory and working class practice once again’ (1976: 95). This conclusion was based on the assumption that there was, indeed, an uncorrupted Marxist tradition waiting in the wings once Stalinism was dead, but Trotsky’s descendants were too late. As it was, the significance of 1968 was to prove far more important at the cultural level, that domain for so long dismissed by most Marxists as a ‘superstructure’ at the mercy of the all-important economic base (see Chapter 6). It was the tradition of Gramsci which would provide the hinge between the old and the new Marxisms. In the Marxist tradition it was mainly Antonio Gramsci who had developed the idea of socialism as cultural critique. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony opened up a consistent critique of traditional or orthodox Marxism. Seeking to capture the complex nature of authority under developed capitalist conditions, it shows that consent is as important as coercion in maintaining the system. Gramsci’s suggestive, if fragmentary, analysis refused the reductive temptation and sought to grasp the multiplicity of social reality. There was a flourishing of interest in Gramsci’s writings during the 1970s which was far from restricted to Western Europe. One example was the individual and joint work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe which developed a post-Marxism in the footsteps of Gramsci but was also keenly aware of poststructuralists such as Foucault and

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Derrida. One point they make insistently is that the traditional socialist yearning for totality needs to be abandoned, and in rejecting all essentialist a-priorism they argue that: The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘Society’ as a sutured and self-defined totality. ‘Society’ is not a valid object of discourse. There is no underlying principle fixing – and hence constituting – the whole field of differences. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111) If a Gramsci-inspired ‘open’ Marxism was one result of 1968, there was also a lot of disillusionment and, sometimes, a turn towards irrationalism. The revolution did not happen, the workers went home, the students became employees, and the Communist Party carried on as before. From modernist millenarianism we passed over to the conservative simplicities of the nouveaux philosophes. The latter, mainly ex-Maoist ‘children of ’68’ became notorious for their intemperate denunciations of Marxism as nothing more or less than the philosophy of the Russian Gulag or labour camps. A leading light of this school, Bernard-Henri Lévy in La barbarie à visage humain (1977) rejected the Marxist theory of power in favour of a conception where power is ‘everywhere and yet is nothing’. For Lévy the lesson was clear: liberation is impossible and the good society is but a dream. Political struggle is between ethereal theories such as domination, submission and the love of freedom. The boundaries between the oppressed and the oppressor are fuzzy at best. André Glucksmann, one-time Althusserian, was particularly virulent in his The Master Thinkers (1980) where Marx is seen as the epitome of the dominator philosopher who, with his ‘cult of the total and final Revolution’ and ‘the State that terrorizes for the good of the collectivity’, is behind all the oppression unleashed by socialist regimes. The whole ambiguity of ‘1968’ can be seen in the intellectual career of Jean-François Lyotard, who is more icon or demon than properly read. First of all, it is worth recalling that for many years Lyotard was a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie politicalintellectual grouping, which was committed to an ‘internal’ critique of Marxism and which included such key thinkers of the left as

ma rx i sm and history | 21 Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. Lyotard’s disillusionment with Marxism derives from his experience in Algeria (where he witnessed Communist Party compromising) and the events of May 1968, in which he played an active part. Lyotard is far from being a simple apolitical metropolitan penseur. Lyotard’s break with Marxism is most clearly articulated in his 1974 text Libidinal Economy (1993) – which he himself later called an ‘evil book’ – in which he develops the idea of a libidinal economy to counter Marx’s notion of a political economy. Marxism had failed to work for Lyotard and he adopted his ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. His 1979 text The Postmodern Condition (1984) went on to become the Bible of the postmodern cult, but the point is that it is squarely within the tradition of post-Marxism. Lyotard is not the only political thinker who still lives in Marx’s shadow and who, while heavily criticizing and even disowning him, cannot refuse his history. Lyotard’s mid-1950s writings on Algeria in the maverick Marxist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie throw new light on his postmodernism. His main concern was the way Marxist categories failed to grasp the particularities of the Algerian situation, seeing it instead as a simple rerun of the Russian Revolution. This was not, for Lyotard, a ‘pure situation’ amenable to analysis by the rigid and dogmatic Marxism of the day. Algeria became symptomatic, for Lyotard, of Marxism’s being out of touch with reality and confirmed its ideological decay. In light of recent work on post-colonialism, it is highly significant that Lyotard made his break with Marxism over the colonial question and the failures of metropolitan Marxism regarding the national-colonial revolution. It was only after this, in the early 1960s, that Lyotard began to move beyond a critical Marxism towards what is now called postmodernism. As Stuart Sim puts it: ‘Postmodernism is embraced only after Lyotard has painstakingly catalogued Marxism’s failings in a concrete political situation over a period of several years’ (1996: 3). The point is that Lyotard, as Derrida and Foucault for that matter, engaged with Marxism (and Marx) for a long time and the new theories and politics did not just drop down from the sky. To understand the postmodern challenge to traditional Marxism it is probably appropriate to begin with Lyotard’s 1979 text The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984). In it Lyotard describes the postmodern age in terms of technological and social changes which

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would not be unfamiliar to the Marxists of the day. However, he goes beyond this substantive focus to develop an epistemological analysis of modernity’s limitations. Lyotard questions the Enlightenment’s view of knowledge as scientific, holistic, progressive, universal, rational and objective. Lyotard encapsulates postmodernism as a ‘scepticism towards all metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiii) by which he refers to all those stories based on absolute or universal truths such as the creation of wealth (Adam Smith), the evolution of life (Darwin) and, of course inevitably, the emancipation of humanity through that of the working class (Karl Marx). With knowledge thus deconstructed and desacralized, we are taken onto a new terrain where foundational claims are rejected, as is the constant search for ‘deeper’ truths. No views are privileged, everything is provisional, representation is futile and the future is uncertain. In an era where all is fragmentation and flux, destinies make little sense. Postmodernism became, if nothing else, a widespread mood in the arts and humanities during the course of the 1980s. It is Michel Foucault who has probably most influenced the progressive intellectual agenda in the last couple of decades and whose relationship with Marxism is not really clear. On the one hand he has told us himself that ‘what has happened since 1968, and arguably what made 1968 possible, is profoundly anti-Marxist’ (1980: 57). Certainly Foucault’s themes were developed in counterposition to much of Marxism, but to see ‘1968’ (or Foucault) as anti- (as against post-) Marxist is a different thing. We also know from Pierre Macherey that it is repudiation of his early adherence to Marxism which explains why Foucault ‘shunned like the plague everything which arose out of dialectical materialism’ (cited in Balibar, 1992: 39). On the other hand, we have more recent interpretations such as that of Althusser’s one-time collaborator, Étienne Balibar, for whom ‘the whole of Foucault’s work can be seen in terms of a genuine struggle with Marx, and that this can be viewed as one of the driving forces of his productiveness’ (1992: 39). Following this line of enquiry we could think of Foucault as a lever to carry out a critique of Marx, as a privileged, if heretical, vantage point to assist in the development of a late-Marxism, more in keeping with the critical impetus of Marx himself. Foucault once called himself a ‘Nietzschean Communist’ and seemed well pleased with this heretical concept. For Foucault,

ma rx i sm and history | 23 Marxism (with a capital M) is inextricably bound up with domination, in its pursuit of scientificity and its acceptance of power structures. As is well known, Foucault developed a ‘capillary’ theory of power, focused on the disciplinary mechanisms of ‘micro’ power. Though at odds with much statist Marxist work, it fits readily into the work of creative Marxists such as Nicos Poulantzas in his last work (1980). As Abdul Janmohamed notes: ‘Foucault himself is aware of the problems involved in his conflation of Marx and Marxism and in the hasty skirting of Marx’s notion of the function of power within the sphere of political economy’ (1995: 34). I think it is plausible to say that Marx was a positive reference point in Foucault’s thinking. We can also agree that power needs to be analysed in all its diversity and not reduced to the orthodox Marxist trinity of state, class and party. In studying the complexity of power relations in the current era of globalization, Foucault is probably an indispensable complement (and provocation) to any Marxism wishing to break with dogmatism and the structures of domination. Turning now to Jacques Derrida, we have a guru of the poststructuralist movement and scourge of Marxism who has recently turned to acknowledge his (and our) debt to Marx. Derrida is quite explicit: ‘To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made Marxism in principle, and first of all, a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique’ (1994: 88). Derrida focuses on Marxism’s essential character as critique as against the wooden Soviet doctrine of dialectical materialism. As is well known, Derrida has developed an approach known as deconstruction which, in a Nietzschean spirit, ‘has produced a discourse of extreme sceptical rigour and rhetorical self-consciousness’ (Norris, 1991: 75). What is less well known, perhaps, is Derrida’s recent attempt to bring this approach more into line with Marxism. For Derrida now: ‘Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism. There has been, then, this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction’ (1994: 92). While this argument is contestable, it at least signals the enduring pull of Marxism for all intellectuals with radical aspirations.

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There is another dimension to postmodernism usually neglected in the Western textbooks, namely its relation to post-colonialism. As the editors of a reader in post-colonial studies put it: ‘the major project of post-modernism – the deconstruction of the centralised, logocentric master narratives of European culture – is very similar to the post-colonial project of dismantling the Centre/Margin binarism of imperial discourse’ (Ashcroft et al., 1995: 117). In some ways while postmodernism has led to an aestheticization of politics, postcolonialism has led to a politicization of aesthetic studies. More pertinently, perhaps, postmodernism has in practice become the privileged domain of a North Atlantic intelligentsia. Even postcolonialism has, to some extent, become an academic niche for Third World intellectuals in the West. Nevertheless, especially when we combine postmodernism with post-colonial politics, we have a very powerful discursive movement seeking to decentre and destabilize the ontological security of the West. Eurocentrism is alive and well within postmodernism, which accounts for its hostile reception among many Third World radicals. However, from a broad historical perspective, postmodernism does seem at least to allow some space for the post-colonial Other to speak. There is no single or simple politics of postmodernism because there is no one postmodernism: its politics will thus be as diverse, fluid and contradictory as the ‘movement’ is. However, there are certain creative themes we can discern among ‘affirmative’ or ‘oppositional’ postmodernists. Foucault (not necessarily a postmodernist) had already advocated very strongly a move away from grand, totalizing, contestatory politics to a micro-politics more appropriate to the way capitalism works today. Félix Guattari goes one step further in advocating a micro-politics that will set loose ‘a whole host of expressions and experimentations – those of children, of schizophrenics, of homosexuals, or prisoners, or misfits of every kind – that all work to penetrate and enter into the semiology of the dominant order’ (1984: 184). At a more prosaic level, the oppositional postmodernist celebrates diversity, encourages political pluralism and works at a grass-roots level in favour of radical democracy. Postmodern politics stresses autonomy and identity, rejecting the master-plan for ‘emancipation’. As Ernesto Laclau (again not necessarily a postmodernist) puts it: We are today coming to terms with our finitude and with the

ma rx i sm and history | 25 political possibilities that it opens. This is the point from which the potentially liberatory discourses of our postmodern era have to start. We can perhaps say that today we are at the end of emancipation and at the beginning of freedom. (1996: 18) The overall position of Karl Marx in the current intellectual universe is quite mixed. Thus, for example, Eric Hobsbawm noted how ‘Silence greeted the last instalment of the fifty-volume English translation of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, in progress since the 1970s, when it was finally published in 2004’ (Hobsbawm, 2011: 385). It seemed that interest in Marx could be only the preserve of antiquarians or students in search of an obscure PhD topic. A decade later Marx is on every economist’s lips when they talk about the crisis, globalization or alternatives to a failed status quo. In a sense, though, Marx had never ceased to be influential. Marx influenced political regimes across a third of the world’s populations, energized political movements of the most diverse kinds and had a decisive influence on the social sciences from the early days until today. Marx also, according to Wolin, ‘founded a new conception of politics, revolutionary in intent, proletarian in concern, and international in scope and organization’ (cited in Thomas, 1991: 27). And yet he was much more than that because there is very little of the contemplative academic intellectual to Marx: he was above all a revolutionary. Marx and the 1848 Revolution, Marx and the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx and the budding Russian revolutionary movement towards the end of his life, all show a revolutionary who would have had little truck with the political systems created in his name. The creation of a universal history – historical materialism – was never his objective. As Paul Thomas notes ‘there is no good reason to suppose that Marx thought of himself as some kind of sibyl, purveying timeless truths to an anxious posterity’ (Thomas, 1991: 42). Marx did not see himself as a scientist or a seer but as someone seeking to carry out a ‘critique of political economy’ and an understanding of the contradictions of capitalism the better to exploit them to undermine a cruel and inhuman social order. His objective was quite simply ‘the complete emancipation of the working class’ as stated in the first point of the statutes of the First International drafted by Marx himself. Such an objective remains as urgent, valid and worth striving for today as it was in Marx’s day.

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References Anderson, P. (1976) Consideration on Western Marxism, London: Verso. Arrighi, G., Hopkins, T. and Wallerstein, I. (1989) Antisystemic Movements, London: Verso. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (eds) (1995) The Post-Colonial Reader, London: Routledge. Balibar, E. (1992) ‘Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism’, in T. Armstrong (ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher, New York: Routledge. Balibar, E. (1995) The Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso. Bauman, Z. (1976) Socialism: The Active Utopia, London: Allen & Unwin. Beilharz, P. (1992) Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy, London: Routledge. Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso. Bernstein, H. (1993) The Preconditions of Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boggs, C. (1995) The Socialist Tradition: From Crisis to Decline, New York: Routledge. Cardoso, F. H. (1993) ‘Desafios de la socialdemocracia en América Latina’, in M. Vellinga (ed.), Democracia y politica en América Latina, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Cleaver, H. (1979) Reading Capital Politically, Brighton: Harvester. Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1984) ‘What Is the Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow

(ed.), The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London: Hamish Hamilton. Glucksmann, A. (1980) The Master Thinkers, Brighton: Harvester. Gray, J. (1995) ‘Among the Ruins of Marxism’, in F. Mount (ed.), Communism, London: Harvill. Guattari, D. (1984) Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Halliday, F. (1991) ‘The Ends of the Cold War’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, London: Verso. Held, D. (1992) ‘Liberalism, Marxism and Democracy’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures, Cambridge: Polity. Hobsbawm, E. (2011) How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Abacus. Il Manifesto (1979) Power and Opposition in Post-revolutionary Societies, London: Ink Links. Janmohamed, A. (1995) ‘Refiguring Values, Power, Knowledge’, in B. Magnuo and S. Callenberg (eds), Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, London: Routledge. Kolakowski, L. (1981) Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2: The Golden Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Leibman, M. (1986) ‘Reformism Yesterday and Social Democracy Today’, in R. Milliband, J. Saville,

ma rx i sm and history | 27 M. Liebman and L. Panitch (eds), Socialist Register 1985/86, London: Merlin. Leichteim, G. (1970) A Short History of Socialism, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lévy, B.-H. (1977) La barbarie à visage humain, Paris: Grasset. Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London: Merlin. Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1993) Libidinal Economy, London: Athlone. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Norris, C. (1991) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Padgett, S. and Patterson, W. (1991) A History of Social Democracy in Postwar Europe, London: Macmillan. Polan, A. J. (1984) Lenin and the End of Politics, London: Methuen. Poulantzas, N. (1980) State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso. Shanin, T. (ed.) (1983) Late Marx and the Russian Road, London: Routledge. Sim, S. (1996) Jean François Lyotard, London: Prentice-Hall/Harvester. Thomas, P. (1991) ‘Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now’, in T. Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 | RE D AN D G R E E N : M A R X I S M AND N ATU RE

The story of Marxism’s engagement with nature is an odd one. It abounds in sorry tales such as Engels and his ‘dialectics of nature’ and Lysenko’s ‘proletarian science’ in biology. Yet for a living Marxism in the twenty-first century, the coming together of red and green politics will, undoubtedly, be a critical issue. If we trace back Marx’s own ambiguous legacy on the question of nature we find relevant lessons for today’s debates. After summarizing the background, this chapter will move on to consider the subsequent attempts by various theorists to develop a rapprochement between socialism and the new politics of ecology. The underlying issue is the tension between an anthropocentric and an ecocentric approach to development. The third section explores some of the fascinating encounters between feminism and ecology, including the development of a radical, if debatable, conception of ecofeminism. Finally, in the last section, the current state of the debate around globalization and sustainable development is considered. The point of this chapter, as of most subsequent ones, is to consider ‘classic’ Marxist debates but also confront them with current concerns in a spirit of critical engagement. Marx and nature Marx himself is irrevocably associated with a hostile attitude towards the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and a belief in a homo faber who would dominate nature. While there is certainly a Promethean ethos running through much of Marx’s scattered writings on nature, there is also considerable ambiguity. To seek to discover a ‘green Marx’, an ecologist avant la lettre, would not be particularly fruitful, but it would be wrong to flatten Marx’s views on nature and refuse their ambiguities. At the same time, we should be aware of what Alfred Schmidt refers to as ‘the technocratic and scientistic misinterpretation that Marx was solely concerned to secure a quantitative increase in the existing forms of mastery over nature’ (1971: 12). While Marx

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 29 did constantly refer to the ‘domination of nature’, he tended to conceive of this in terms of the need to achieve mastery of society by its members. The broader problematic within which Marx worked was the distinction between a ‘realm of necessity’ and a ‘realm of freedom’. Nature is thus an issue for Marx as part of human practice. Marx put it bluntly in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’: ‘nature taken abstractly, for itself, and fixed in its separation from man, is nothing for man’ (1975: 398). For Marx ‘Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature’ (Marx, 1973: 706). This is the Marx taken up by the subsequent tradition of Marxist developmentalism (see Chapter 3) with its self-confident, indeed arrogant, view of humankind’s domination of nature. Yet Marx, when he wrote of the sharp division between town and country, so typical of the growing capitalist mode of production, could point out critically how this division had disturbed ‘the metabolism between man and the earth; i.e. the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing, and therefore violated the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil’ (Marx, 1973: 505). Marx would probably thus fully understand the implications of the capitalist industrialization of agriculture in the contemporary era. There are, indeed, for Marx natural conditions for human existence. It is further possible, in line with Marx’s thought, to distinguish between a transformative labour process and another, such as in agriculture, where human labour is applied in a way to facilitate natural processes of growth. Marx could certainly pour scorn on the naturalists of his day: ‘We can see this cult of nature is limited to the Sunday walks of an inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird’s nest, at tears being designed to keep the surface of the eyes moist, and so on’ (cited in Grundmann, 1991: 110). Marx went on to explain to Herr Daumer, whose romantic cult wished to see ‘the sacrifice of the human to the natural’, that modern science had revolutionized the whole of nature. If nature is, for Marx, an object to be mastered, he did, however, recognize limits to this process. These natural limits are not purely ‘natural’ but result from humanity’s interaction with its natural environment. Because, as Marx and Engels argued in

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The German Ideology, our relationship with nature is always dialectical, in harmony and in struggle with it at the same time: The celebrated ‘unity of man with nature’ has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the ‘struggle’ of man with nature, right up to the development of his productive forces on a corresponding basis. (cited in Parsons, 1977: 160) There has been an interesting debate on Marx’s conception of nature and the heritage it has left progressive forces today. Rainer Grundmann, on the one hand, has sought to defend Marx’s record, arguing that ‘the potential of Marxism … has not been exhausted’ (1991: 52). Marx is seen as maintaining the modern conception of nature, going back to Hegel and Nietzsche and, ultimately, Bacon. The idea of an ecocentric approach to nature is seen as inconsistent because it begs the question of who will define an ecological problem as such. Against an unproblematic ecological conception of pollution, Grundmann quotes Mary Douglas, for whom ‘uncleanliness is matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966: 106). This means that pollution is a culturally specific phenomenon. Above all, Grundmann defends Marx’s view that humanity must seek the domination of nature. For Grundmann this is no more problematic than him seeking to ‘dominate’ his violin. He has no empathy with Greens who criticize this Promethean attitude towards nature, rejecting their plea ‘for a new harmonious relationship with nature’ which he sees as part of some mystical move to seek ‘a re-enchantment of the world’ (Grundmann, 1991: 120). In a polemic with Grundmann, and independently, Ted Benton has taken a far more critical stance with regard to Marx’s views on nature. For Benton, ‘the idea of a limitless mastery [of nature], the project of “controlling all natural and social processes”, is literally unthinkable: it is incoherent’ (1992: 67). Marx was simply immersed in a nineteenth-century conception of progress through scientific advance and industrial control over nature. To reject the project of ‘domination’ over nature is not to lapse into naïve nature worship and sentimentalism. Benton rightly draws attention to the political context in which Marx and Engels dealt with issues around the natural limits

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 31 to human development. In particular their polemic with Malthus, who viewed population and resource-scarcity as limiting growth and hence social reform, meant that Marx and Engels ‘were disposed by the politics of these debates to view with suspicion all natural-limit arguments’ (Benton, 1992: 56). Ultimately, Benton believes that Marx’s views are deeply ambivalent and often contradictory on the way human life relates to its natural conditions. If Marx has left us ambiguity, Engels has left us a text dedicated to the Dialectics of Nature usually viewed with embarrassment by critical Marxists. For Engels, nature is the proof of dialectics: ‘Dialectics, socalled objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature’ (Marx and Engels, 1987: 492). The laws of the dialectic derived by Engels from the current natural sciences are three: the transition from quantity to quality and vice versa; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation. Engels was seeking, in a sense, the basis of universal causality. From his home-brew studies of biology, chemistry, physics, mechanics and mathematics Engels hoped to derive the ultimate scientific method. He was reworking Hegel’s dialectics from what he conceived to be a materialist standpoint. It would be facile to poke fun at this rather strange book by Engels. Suffice it to say that this naturalistic evolutionism is at odds with the ideas of Marx. Specifically, Marx never advanced the notion that nature itself was ‘dialectical’ in any way; at most he could envisage a dialectical relationship between humanity and nature. Darwinism seems to have made its entry into Marxism (or Marx/Engels) through this route. There is, I would argue, a ‘Green Marx’ that could be rescued from his early writings which is also not inconsistent with the mature Marx of Capital. Marx always referred in his early writings to the manner in which ‘man’ was alienated from nature in ways that show considerable sensitivity. For all his alleged ‘productivism’ he was fiercely critical of the pollution he witnessed in Britain’s Industrial Revolution cities. He was also keenly aware that nature was a precondition for human existence and understood that the resources of nature were not inexhaustible. Then in Capital, Marx deployed the concept of ‘metabolism’ to define the labour process between man and nature, ‘a process by which man through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature’

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(Marx, 1976: 283). An irreparable rift emerged in this metabolism with the development of industrial capitalism and the separation of town and country. The society of ‘associated producers’ – that is to say socialism – would need to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way’ Marx argued, thus pointing clearly towards the need for a socialist ecology. It is no simple matter to evaluate the views of Engels on nature in terms of their position in Marxist thought. According to the editors of the Marx-Engels collected works, there was simply a division of labour between the two men: ‘Since Marx was wholly absorbed in his main work, Capital, it was Engels who undertook the solution of the latest theoretical tasks raised by the whole course of development of the natural sciences’ (Marx and Engels, 1987: xx). Others are far more reluctant to see Dialectics of Nature as a MarxEngels product, and the most systematic reading of the Marxist concept of nature by Alfred Schmidt concludes that it represents ‘a naive-realist regression in comparison with the position both he and Marx had reached in their polemic against Feuerbach in the German Ideology’ (1971: 195). It is from this work of Engels that Soviet ‘diamat’ (dialectical materialism) developed its bizarre ‘laws’ of the dialectic. It also led, inexorably or not, to the Lysenko affair in Soviet genetics and agriculture, in which the absurd notion of a ‘proletarian science’ combating a ‘bourgeois science’ was promoted by the state. Lysenkoism and its grandiose plans for the transformation of nature promised a technical resolution of the problems of agriculture and served as ‘scientific’ ideological underpinning for Stalin’s policies (see Lecourt, 1976). Subsequent thinkers in the classic Marxist tradition could not fail to engage with the question of society’s relation to nature. Karl Kautsky, in his somewhat Darwinian development of Marxism, argued that human history derived from natural history and that its laws of motion were reflections of biological laws. The history of humanity became an aspect of the laws of nature. Lukács, on the other hand, engaged in the binary opposite, arguing that: ‘Nature is a societal category … nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned’ (1971: 234). For Lukács’ Hegelian-tinged Marxism, nature is dissolved into a metaphysically conceived ‘Spirit’. Of course, we cannot collapse nature into society, or society into nature. Karl Korsch was the classic Marxist who

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 33 understood rather better the complex dialectic of nature and human history, arguing: It is not nature, or organic nature and the history of its development in general, nor is it the historical development even of human society in general, but rather modern ‘bourgeois society’ which forms for Marx and Engels the real point of departure, from which all earlier historical forms of society are to be grasped materialistically. (cited in Schmidt, 1971: 47) Whatever might be said about the gaps and inconsistencies of the Marxist approaches to nature, they are certainly united in their anthropocentrism. That is to say, the debate on nature is always framed from the viewpoint of human emancipation. Conversely, an ecocentric approach may also espouse emancipatory projects for humans, but will do so within a broader conception which recognizes a moral standing for the non-human world. Thus, the concept of rights could be extended to animals and to various manifestations of nature. For Grundmann: ‘It seems pretty clear that Marx would have scorned rights-based theories’ (1991: 85). Whatever the case, Marxists may still wish to embrace various ecological concerns, as we shall see in the next section. For now we can accept Robyn Eckersley’s characterization of anthropocentrism, of which Marx was part, as a human-centred orientation towards nature in which ‘the nonhuman world is reduced to a storehouse of resources and is considered to have instrumental value only, that is, it is valuable only insofar as it can serve as an instrument, or as a means, to human ends’ (1992: 26). It seems on the face of it difficult, on this assumption, for a socialist ecology to be established. Socialists and ecology Before considering the current engagements by socialists with ecology we need to allude to the Soviet experience in that regard. In the first flush of enthusiasm for the new Soviet revolution there were radical stances taken on all sorts of issues, including ecology. The energetic Soviet Commissar for Education, Anatolii Lunacharsky, threw his full weight behind the formation of an influential environmental movement, and he encouraged the development of ecology as a discipline. As Douglas Weiner shows in a pioneering

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study from the 1950s, ‘In what will be a surprise to many, through the early 1930s the Soviet Union was on the cutting edge of conservation theory and practice’ (1988: 35). The Soviet Union was the first country to set aside protected territories for the study of ecological communities, and its early advances in community ecology and work on rehabilitating degraded landscapes is still worthy of study. Though this orientation towards conservation is probably not a green one in the contemporary meaning, it did reflect an early Soviet awareness of the need for a certain balance between human needs and nature. The reality is that Soviet ecology in the 1920s was one of the most advanced in the world. One need only think of the ecological poverty of the capitalist West at that point. Symbolic of this synergy between Marxism and ecology was the work of Bolshevik theorist Nicolai Bukharin who was already in the 1920s articulating a nuanced understanding of what he called ‘the equilibrium between society and nature’. Tragically his most advanced work occurred in 1936 as he lay in one of Stalin’s prison’s awaiting execution for ‘treason’ (see Cohen, 1980). In his posthumously published Philosophical Arabesques Bukharin firmly grounded historical materialism in an understanding of ecology, the earth’s biosphere and the physical and chemical processes of nature (Foster, 2000: 227). The human being lives within nature and shares in the rhythm of nature and its cycles. Clearly Bukharin was following and extending Marx’s own understanding of the metabolic interaction between nature and society. With his death, and that of many other Russian ecologists, this rapprochement between Marxism and ecology came to an end. As John Bellamy Foster puts it ‘Bukharin’s fate can be taken as symbolic of the grand tragedy that befell Marxist ecological thinking after Marx’ (Foster, 2000: 228). As is well known, the new Soviet Union embarked on a course of accelerated industrialization which paid little heed to environmental effects. There was soon to be no conservation movement or any other which might act as a countervailing influence to the mighty development drive. The fate of the Aral Sea was but one example of this terrible process. Once the size of Ireland, the Aral Sea began to dry up in the 1970s as a result of diversion of its tributary rivers. As David Dyker notes: ‘On present trends it will have dried up altogether by the early decades of the next century. Water apart, this is causing the release of noxious salts into the atmosphere in

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 35 the Aral region which are creating grave public health problems akin to the effects of nuclear radiation’ (1992: 127–8). This, of course, is but one example of the environmental damage caused by Soviet development strategies at home, in Eastern Europe and in those Third World countries where it obtained influence. Socialism, for many, was to become a byword for dirty development, and it was no surprise that, when Soviet politics began to open up in the 1980s, there were many thriving environmental movements adding their weight to the democratization impetus. If one event could symbolize the ecological disaster lurking in the Soviet development paradigm, it would be the ‘accident’ at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1985. The plume of radioactive gases which swept across parts of Western Europe brought home the transnational nature of ecological issues. As Camilleri and Falk argue: ‘The Chernobyl accident graphically illustrates how the physical environment is now integrated with human technology on a scale which is truly global’ (1992: 178). This is an issue which I shall develop in a subsequent section of this chapter dealing with globalization and sustainable development. At this point we should take cognizance of Chernobyl as symbol and symptom of Soviet developmentalist lack of concern with ecology. The aftermath of the terrible collapse of the Chernobyl reactor was equally significant. At a turning point in Soviet politics, first attempts to contain the news were followed by a terrible helplessness. The sight of unprotected workers dealing with the radioactive aftermath and ‘clean-up’ was at once heroic and pathetic. The project to ‘dominate’ nature had come full circle and its terrible and terrifying consequences became plain to see with the naked eye. Non-orthodox Marxist thinkers such as Ernest Mandel did adopt a grudging acceptance of ecology’s main themes in the 1960s (see Mandel, 1985). However, this acceptance was still marked by a fervent rejection of the ‘natural limits’ argument as the thin end of a Malthusian wedge. One author who received the Mandel imprimatur as a socialist-acceptable ecologist was Barry Commoner. According to Commoner: ‘We can learn a basic lesson from nature: that nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of a larger, global whole’ (1973: 299). Instead of a linear, selfdestructive development course, Commoner called for ‘closing the circle’, through recycling and other measures designed to complete

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the great ecological cycle. What made this a socialist and not just an ecological vision was Commoner’s bringing of poverty, racial discrimination and war into the equation as blockages of the project to resolve the environmental crisis. The environmental debt had been presented to humanity and, in a modern version of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous ‘socialism or barbarism’, Commoner argued that there was a stark alternative: ‘either the rational, social organization of the use and distribution of the earth’s resources or a new barbarism’ (1973: 296). Another early socialist engagement with ecology was that of HansMagnus Enzensberger. The editors of New Left Review said in their 1974 introduction to his ‘Critique of Political Ecology’ that this was ‘one of the first Marxist attempts to go beyond a simple reduction and dismissal of environmentalism’ (Enzensberger, 1974: 1). Yet Enzensberger still argued that it was ‘easy to understand that the working class cares little about general environmental problems’ and that as an ideology ‘ecology is a matter that concerns the middle class’ (1974: 10). There seems a pale reprise here of Lysenko’s fateful separation of a proletarian from a bourgeois science. Ecological problems were caused by capitalism, so this should be the focus of socialist energy rather than its unfortunate side-effects, which were focused on by middle-class liberals. For Enzensberger, ‘the preoccupation with ecological crisis appears as a phenomenon belonging entirely to the superstructure – namely an expression of the decadence of bourgeois society’ (1974: 17). It would seem that such a reductionist view shows some socialists to be suffering from the ‘blindness and naïveté’ of which Enzensberger accuses the ecologists. Without doubt, the two most developed and influential attempts to marry the red with the green have been those of Rudolf Bahro and André Gorz, which we shall consider in turn. Bahro first came to prominence with the East German dissident programme The Alternative in Eastern Europe (Bahro, 1978). Later, in exile in West Germany, Bahro joined the Green Party and developed in an ecological direction. He began with the assumption that ‘Marx never asked whether the earth might have finite limits, because in his time there were no limits in sight’ (Bahro, 1984: 143). Now the utopian socialist vision is simply no longer utopian: ‘We have reached the limit. Nature will not accept any more and is striking back’ (1984:

marx i sm and nat ure | 37 184). As Bahro became more and more green he began to see ever fewer merits in the traditional socialist arguments. Bahro saw the trade unions as among the most conservative forces in society, especially in contrast to the peace and ecology movements. This was all part of the great cultural shift which occurred in 1968 and which Bahro was retrospectively embracing. While not denying a utopian socialist element in his thinking, Bahro was categorical: ‘I am green and not red. The socialist concept, in theory and in practice, was tied to industrialism and statism’ (1984: 235). Bahro was eventually to leave the German Greens when the clash between ‘fundamentalists’ who cling to principles and ‘realists’ who wished to put them into practice, came to a head. Bahro could not accept the ‘realist’ turn towards parliamentary politics, seeing the Social Democratic Party and the unions as ‘institutional prisons’. Instead, Bahro advocated staying outside the walls of the state, building parallel institutions such as a citizen’s parliament. The whole industrial system is doomed for Bahro, so the task is to build a type of ‘dual power’ similar to that which Lenin advocated in dealing with the corrupt capitalism of his day. Bahro, the post-industrial utopian, still tends to think in terms of traditional Marxist-Leninist categories. He also suffers from the traditional Eurocentrism of ‘Western Marxism’ and sees little role for the oppressed peoples of the Third World in transforming the global capitalist system. Bahro’s limits in terms of developing a coherent ecosocialism are admitted openly: ‘From scientific socialism I have returned to utopian socialism, and politically I have moved from a class-dimensional to a populist orientation’ (1984: 220). Though a defensible political position, this does not really take us further in investigating the compatibility between red and green politics. André Gorz appears to be a far more eclectic thinker and political actor than Bahro, while pursuing a similar engagement with ecology from a Marxist perspective. The starting point for Gorz is that: ‘Growth-oriented capitalism is dead. Growth-oriented socialism, which closely resembles it, reflects the distorted image of our past, not of our future’ (1980: 11). If this is the old, the new is ecology, a perspective Gorz sees as incompatible with the rationality of capitalism and authoritarian socialism alike. However, he argues that ecology is compatible with a libertarian or democratic socialism of the type he espouses. This ecosocialism which Gorz advances leans

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quite heavily on the work of Ivan Illich, in particular the notion of socially necessary labour which could be seen as ecologically sound. This post-industrial utopia is, somewhat contradictorily, associated with a benign view of automation and computerization and a view of the state as neutral technical administrator. Not surprisingly, radical ecologists have argued that: ‘Gorz’s technocratic post-industrial utopia is riddled with paradoxes in attempting to combine central planning with neighbourhood self-help initiatives and worker selfmanagement’ (Eckersley, 1992: 135). Gorz cannot escape the dilemmas faced by the socialist movement since its origins – such as the issue of the state, planning and democracy. He has engaged with ecology in a bold way, just as he had earlier with the issue of new technology. Yet, ultimately, the eclecticism of his thinking seems to lead to inconsistency. Can we really have technology and ‘small is beautiful’, state planning and local control, high-tech and Illich’s ‘convivial tools’ all working together in harmony? Frankel has called his vision ‘puzzling and paradoxical’ (1987: 58). Eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin has summed up his ecological utopia as ‘a childish “libertarian” Disneyland’ (1980–81: 188). This is not to say that a more coherent ecosocialism cannot be imagined. This would be based on ‘political pluralism, public accountability and widespread public participation in economic planning’ (Eckersley, 1992: 136). The objectives of ecology and social justice are certainly compatible. Viable political forms are not that easy to develop, though, and ‘ecosocialism’ has no easy answers to the dilemmas that have bedevilled the democratic socialist project since its inception. Perhaps the most imaginative of recent socialist engagements with ecology is the work of James O’Connor (1998) and the journal Capitalism, Socialism and Ecology. For O’Connor the ecological crisis has become the ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ the first one resulting from the contradiction between the ever-expanding forces of production and the restricted and restrictive relations of production. The ecological crisis is, rather, an effect of the external conditions on which capitalism depends. Capitalism, by its very nature as an expansionist and profit-maximizing system, tends to destroy the natural conditions it requires to thrive. Thus the ecological crisis becomes a crisis of capitalism as raw materials, clean air and water and spatial resources become relatively scarcer and thus more expensive

marx i sm and nat ure | 39 conditions of production. My only quarrel with this analysis – to be pursued in the final section on ‘Sustainable Development’ – is that the ecological crisis is viewed as one of the capitalist order’s externalities and not an integral feature of the capitalist mode of production. Feminism and ecology If socialists have had a less than totally fruitful engagement with ecology, feminism, or at least some currents of this movement, has developed an influential symbiosis of the two discourses. Ecofeminism, at its starkest, produces a new unitary focus or discipline. Thus ecofeminism theorist and propagandist, Vandana Shiva writes: ‘women and nature are intimately related, and their domination and liberation similarly linked. The women’s and ecology movements are therefore one, and are primarily countertrends to a patriarchal maldevelopment’ (1988: 47). Not only is there a confluence of interests between the women’s and ecology movements but they are seen to be as one, because they face the same enemy. Ecofeminism, whatever nuances it may contain, starts from the premise of a nature/culture opposition as binary opposites. That nature might be culturally constructed is a notion quite alien to ecofeminism. Women are equated with nature and nature is seen as feminine. Thus the woman/nature versus man/culture opposition is seen to replace any division between left and right politics seen as quaintly outmoded and irrelevant. By far the most influential presentation of ecofeminism is that by Shiva in her book Staying Alive (1988). Shiva illustrates her work within a broad overview of the Enlightenment, and its associated view of progress and development which ‘began to destroy life without any assessment of how fast and how much of the diversity of life on this planet is disappearing’ (1988: xiv). It is science which is seen as responsible for the transformation of nature into a source of raw material for humankind. Women are seen by Shiva as privileged fighters ‘for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival’ (1988: xviii). There is a symmetry, and even equivalence, between the violence against nature resulting in the ecological crisis, and the violence against women resulting in their subjugation and exploitation by men. Women, for Shiva, are part of nature: ‘At one level, nature is symbolised as the embodiment of the feminine

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principle, and at another, she is nurtured by the feminine principle to produce life and provide sustenance’ (1988: 38). Women and nature share a different philosophy from that of men and science: one is based on nurture and co-operation, while the other can speak only the language of domination. The political project of ecofeminism has a broad emancipatory sweep to it. Third World women, in particular, are seen to have privileged access to survival expertise. Thus, for Shiva: ‘The ecological categories within which they think and act can become the categories of liberation for all, for men as well as for women, for the west as well as the nonwest, and for the human as well as the non-human elements of the earth’ (1988: 224). Ecofeminism thus advocates an ecocentric philosophy grounded in principles of harmony, sustainability and diversity. The women of Chipko, in India, were involved in a struggle to defend their forests in a way which Shiva has seen as paradigmatic. In gestures which created a powerful image, these women embraced the trees to prevent the loggers from cutting them down: Embrace our trees Save them from being felled The property of our hills Save it from being looted. (quoted in Shiva, 1988: 73) Ecofeminism is a holistic approach to nature, some may say it is spiritual. Its effect in the international environmental movement has been considerable. The critique of ecofeminism appears to be devastating. Ecofeminism starts off with a highly dubious separation and opposition between nature and culture. Following the nineteenth-century discourse of romanticism, this leads ecofeminism to extol the (sometimes imaginary) virtues of nature against the evil advance of modernity, industrialization or development. As Molyneux and Steinberg point out, ecofeminism is based on a (mis)understanding of ‘the dualistic and reductionist nature of scientific thinking and in the simultaneous romanticization of what science destroys’ (1995: 89). This view is based on an overly negative view of science as though the benign view of science, as bearer and agent of all progress, has simply been turned on its head. Furthermore, this view of science seems to ignore

marx i sm and nat ure | 41 the longstanding debates within feminism and in epistemology over the nature of science. The ecofeminist perspective of Shiva and other authors such as Maria Mies (cf. Mies and Shiva, 1993) works with an essentialist view of science as a monolithic enterprise. Science cannot be reduced quite so automatically and inherently to a male enterprise. There seems in ecofeminism to be more than a hint of reductionism at work. The main weakness of ecofeminism is, probably, its equation between nature and woman. Nietzsche once said that ‘Woman is more closely related to nature than man and in all her essentials she remains ever herself. Culture is with her always something external …’ (1964: 23). Feminism, in all its facets, has fought against this essentialist linking of women and nature. Yet some ecofeminists have followed in the footsteps of Mary Daly (1979) and Susan Griffin (1978) in asserting women’s special relationship with nature. This essentialism, as Elizabeth Carlassare notes, ‘refers to the assumption that a subject (for example, a “woman”) is constituted by presocial, innate, unchanging qualities’ (1994: 52). The so-called naturefeminists have sought to celebrate the special link between women and nature, rejoice in their place in the world and to transform their consciousness to be more in tune with nature. Women’s ‘innate’ abilities in terms of co-operation and ecological sensibility are, in short, promoted against patriarchal polluting society. Whatever motivation might lie behind these attempts to link women with nature against men and culture, it is clear that this type of position from Nietzsche onwards has served to oppress women. Its contribution to a politics of ecology is also open to question. The critique of ecofeminism’s essentialism is a powerful one, but this does not necessarily invalidate it as a political perspective. It would seem unlikely that feminist writers such as Daly and Griffin were articulating a position inherently designed to oppress women. Criticisms of their nature-feminism seem to be as much about style – often poetic and allusive – as about content. The critique of this current smacks of scientism and intolerance, especially in its reference to the ‘irrationalism’ of the nature-feminists and cultural ecofeminists. Nor is a discourse ‘apolitical’ simply because it does not conform to Western standards of what is an acceptable political practice. As Carlassare argues: ‘Dismissing cultural ecofeminism on this basis, however, precludes the possibility of learning from this

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position and obscures the legitimacy of the variety of positions and discursive forms that are affiliated under ecofeminism’s umbrella’ (1994: 65). Certainly there is no doubting the energy and originality of the ecofeminists’ arguments and policies. They provide a genuine contribution to a new vision of transformation politics in the era of global capitalism. Their attempt to bring together feminist and ecological concerns and movements must surely be a positive thing. The critique of ecofeminism has been, on the whole, of its ‘cultural’ variant or current; the social or socialist ecofeminists are not necessarily prone to the same criticisms. Refusing all essentialist views of ‘woman’, this current argues instead for the social and material construction of gender in contemporary society. They argue that there is no such thing as an immutable essence of ‘woman’ which may make her closer to nature then men, or anything else. There is a need to recognize the diversity of women’s experience rather than seek to homogenize it under a common label. In particular this would lead us to distinguish the distinct interests of Third World women from those in the advanced capitalist countries. Nor could we stop at this, because the category of ‘Third World women’ is itself a form of essentialism, which refuses to recognize diversity. On this basis, it is possible to imagine an ecofeminism which does not suffer from essentialism, advocating a new universalism and being seen as a form of eco-messianism. In the rest of this section some hints at what this ecofeminism might entail are advanced. It is well to recall, as Cecile Jackson summarizes, that ‘technocratic environmentalism is largely gender-blind, either because it fails to recognize gender differentials at all, or, it recognises women as a distinct category, because gender stereotypes prevail and the household continues to be treated as a unit’ (1994: 123). If, as with Marxism, we are dealing with a discourse which is largely (essentially?) gender-blind (see Chapter 5), then ecofeminism has had a positive role to play. As a new social movement it has been seeking the democratic equivalent which might unite the struggles against gender oppression and environmental degradation respectively. It has shown an acute awareness of our relationship with the non-human world and its problematic nature. That ecofeminism has shown signs of essentialism are more understandable when it is viewed as a political movement. To seek the common ground between feminism and environmentalism, and to call for more synergy between them, has

marx i sm and nat ure | 43 been the overriding objective of a current of thought that has made some of the most original contributions to the radical environmental discourse. A reconstructed ecofeminism will undoubtedly play a key role in the development of an ecological socialism fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. It must be noted that the critique of ecofeminism has, at times, been motivated by anti-feminism even if this is not admitted. But, standing back from the sometimes fierce polemics it seems clear that ecofeminism has put social reproduction firmly on the map alongside economic production. The metabolism of the human species with nature clearly goes wider (and deeper) than production. As Mary Mellor noted ‘By separating off production from reproduction and from nature, patriarchal capitalism has created a sphere of “false” freedom that ignores biological and ecological parameters’ (Mellor, 1992: 51). Marxism – if it wishes to be a genuinely transformative theory and practice – needs to pay equal attention to reproduction and production and, inevitably, that means foregrounding the gendered divisions and oppressions which exist in all domains of society. A more social or material development of ecofeminism would probably focus on gender rather than women. As in the field of women and development there has been a shift in recent years to a focus on gender and development. The emphasis is thus on the gender relations of development (or environmental issues in this case) rather than on woman as problem or solution. A focus on women does not constitute a gender analysis, which would need to focus on gender-differentiated social roles and identities. This would lead us, in turn, to examine the household critically rather than assume it is unproblematic. The household is now understood to be a far from unitary phenomenon, and it is seen as subject to class and other social divisions – including, primarily, gender divisions. In terms of ecology, we need to understand, as Cecile Jackson puts it, ‘that individuals within households will have different objectives and livelihood strategies’ (1994: 122). This means that men and women will have different approaches to issues such as sustainable agriculture or forestry conservation. On this basis, we would be able to detect specific material or social causes explaining why women might have particular views and practices in relation to environmental issues.

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Ecofeminism, as a politics, fits in with the new ‘postmodern’ orientation towards the local and the experiential dimension. It sees the body, especially that of women, as a site of struggle over power. The idea of ‘ecocide of the body’ is central to ecofeminism in its social variant, and highlights the effects of capitalist patriarchy. The new political economy, inspired by Foucault, points us towards a new liberation politics. This assumes a feminist, socialist and ecological orientation. What is being articulated is a new truth/power relationship, less repressive than the current one. Ecofeminism points towards a new regime where gender and environmental relations are more egalitarian. As Val Plumwood has argued, at this stage of human history we now require ‘an account of the human ideal for both sexes, which accepts the undesirability of the domination of nature associated with masculinity’ (1988: 22). This entails a critique of all forms of dualism, be it that of masculine and feminine, mind and body, nature and culture, reason and emotion or public and private. Sustainable development At some point in the late 1970s, the ecological debate shifted from libertarian conceptions of the ‘good life’ to concerns with planetary survival. The earth’s resources were seen to be finite, the ‘limits to growth’ were recognized, and the sober prospects for human survival were highlighted. The first phase of the debate focused on material shortages and on food shortfalls in relation to population growth. By the late 1980s, the focus on limits to growth had shifted to such issues as air pollution and water quality. The environmental agenda was largely set by people and agencies in the advanced industrial societies, with the South or ‘Third World’ dominated still by the development agenda. The huge gap between these two great masses of humanity can be highlighted by data from the 1991 World Conservation Strategy (Benton and Redclift, 1994: 15) that showed that one-quarter of the world’s population, living in the advanced industrial societies or North, consumed 80 per cent of the commercial energy produced worldwide, whereas three-quarters of the world’s population, living in the South, consumed barely 20 per cent of the world’s commercial energy. What was becoming clear in the course of the debates around the environment, from the 1980s onwards, was that ecology was increasingly a global issue.

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 45 The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 brought home how permeable national boundaries were to ecological phenomena. As Camilleri and Falk argue: ‘The traditional description of a world broken into hermetically partitioned sovereign states was confronted by a biosphere emerging ever more deadly as a single integrated whole’ (1992: 177). The danger of ‘global warming’ due to the emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ into the biosphere heightened this phenomenon. As with the thinning, or breaching, of the ozone layer around the earth’s poles, here was a natural process where a fine balance was being disrupted by human economic activity. The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 saw some intergovernmental commitment to deal with these issues, but no real co-ordinated action. What there has been is much anguished concern over the fate of ‘spaceship Earth’, the common vessel for the whole of humanity. Yet, as Enzensberger reminded us, the idea of spaceship Earth tends to ignore the difference between ‘the bridge and the engine room’ (1974: 15). For the peoples of the poor countries, much of the concern with environmental issues was perceived as a direct threat to their socioeconomic interests and, indeed, survival. The Rio Summit brought out in the open the conflicting interests around the supposedly common global concerns of the environment. Failing to question in any way the sacrosanct principles of the capitalist market, this gathering could not really address the underlying interlocking issues of environment and development. As Nicholas Hildyard explains, there was a move towards ‘a convention on biodiversity but not on free trade; on forests but not on agribusiness; on climate but not on automobiles’ (1993: 22–3). Thus, while the rich countries achieved much of what they sought, the poor were hardly able to get on the agenda. The ‘management’ of the environment, as discussed at Rio, is not the same as radical concern with environmental degradation. Nor did it take long for the mystifying rhetoric of common concerns to dissipate as it became clear that the powerful and the rich would continue their ‘management’ of the environment in the same way that they managed the global economy. What we need to examine in some detail is whether the subsequent strategy of ‘sustainable development’ is more energizing and more viable in political terms. The concept of ‘sustainable development’ has been called a ‘development truism’ (Redclift, 1987: 3) and a ‘flag of convenience’

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(Adams, 1993: 218). We are dealing with a fluid, labile concept and a discourse which can take on different meanings according to the context. A fundamental document for the ‘sustainable development’ concept is Our Common Future (Brundtland, 1987) which followed in the footsteps of the influential Brandt Reports with their multilateralist North–South approach. Applying a type of globalized Keynesianism, this approach appeals to what it would see as the enlightened self-interest of Northern politicians to allow for some level of development in the South. Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report, after the Norwegian prime minister who co-ordinated it) sought to place the issue of sustainable development back in the context of international development strategy. It recognized the links between the environment and poverty, which is seen ‘as a major cause and effect of global environmental problems’ (Brundtland, 1987: 9). It sees sustainable development being based on meeting ‘basic needs’ and the idea of ‘environmental limits’ set by technology and social organization. Our Common Future calls for a new form of sustainable growth leading to integrated socioeconomic development which would be ‘more equitable in its impact’ (1987: 52). The mainstream notion of sustainable development is based firmly on the modernization approach to development. Its vision is explicitly predicated on the need for ‘more rapid economic growth in both industrial and developing countries … greater technology transfer … and significantly larger capital flows’ (Brundtland, 1987: 89). There is little in this agenda to distinguish Our Common Future from the internationally dominant and dominating doctrines of neoliberalism. As for the element of ‘sustainability’, it appears to be merely a pious wish. The report argues, with little foundation or evidence, that it might be possible that ‘the international economy must speed up world growth while respecting environmental constraints’ (1987: 89). It would seem that ‘sustainable development’ has brought together certain environmental concerns in the North, with the need of Third World dominant classes to foment development. The notion of ‘sustainability’ is simply not addressed in a rigorous fashion at all. How economic activity can be conducted in such a way that it is environmentally sustainable, cognizant of the issue of non-renewable resources and the environmental impact of this activity, has still not been addressed adequately.

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 47 The new ecological management approach has blurred the concept of sustainability and reinscribed it within the orthodoxies of modernization theory. Sustainable development, as Wolfgang Sachs puts it, ‘emasculates the environmental challenge by absorbing it into the empty shell of “development”’ (1993: 9). This is a totally anthropocentric strategy which, ultimately, ignores the current threat to ecological balance and perpetuates the utilitarian approach to nature. The world’s poor enter this global stage as the principal culprits of environmental destruction. To ‘save the planet’ the poor are put in the frame. Global management of the environment is conducted in ways which, as always, marginalize the poor. Global control by capital entails removing all local, national and international constraints on its operation. Indeed, the very notion of a global environmental problem is a dubious one. As Vandana Shiva points out, this notion has ‘been so constructed as to conceal the fact that globalization of the local is responsible for destroying the environment which supports the subjugated local peoples’ (1993: 151). While the North constructs its horizons on the global terrain of ‘spaceship Earth’, the peoples of the South live on the depressed, impoverished and environmentally degraded terrain of the local. In developing his ‘global sociology’ approach, Leslie Sklair has argued that ‘The hypothesis that there is a contradiction between capitalist development and global survival appears … to have prima facie plausibility’ (1994: 220). In this scenario, we can then interpret the ‘sustainable development’ movement as one designed to regenerate the development idea against cultural survivalist ideas. There would be many now who would think that the Earth cannot ‘afford’ industrialization of the Third World and the ex-state socialist countries. The ‘greening’ of sections of the transnational business class (for example, the International Chamber of Commerce’s World Industry Council for the Environment) also responds to similar pressures and growing environmental awareness worldwide. Whether it is possible or not, transnational capitalists must act as if they can resolve the contradiction between development and survival. Given these imperatives, it is most likely that Third World countries will continue to be ‘pollution havens’ as others are ‘tourism havens’, acting as a dumping ground for hazardous waste produced in the North. For global ecology this could presumably be classified as a kind of ‘recycling’.

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It is certainly the case that ecology has now become central to most debates on the future of capitalism. As Alain Lipietz puts it: ‘Ecology, previously on the “periphery” of the economy, is today right at the heart of the problem’ (1992: 55). Fordism was a form of capitalist development which held sway from the 1920s to the 1970s. We are now in a post-Fordist era in the sense that the old way of doing things is no longer viable. Fordism was based on productivism and on consumerism. It was the philosophy of quantity rather than quality. The perception of an ecological crisis, however we might care to define it, challenges the functionalist logic of production and consumption in their neat self-contained worlds. In the era of globalization, ecology is a clear example of the interconnectedness of all parts of the capitalist system. It is also part of the solution, insofar as whatever development model replaces the now defunct Fordistproductivist model, it will, of necessity, need to be a more social and ecological one. To articulate a perspective on sustainable development adequate to the post 2008–09 crisis period we need to foreground the global ecological limits of capital. The bulk of scientific opinion (mainstream as much as critical) is now very clear on the imminent and extreme dangers posed by global warming. Allied to this is the social crisis of a global capitalism that has produced untold wealth for the top ‘1 per cent’ while devastating whole regions in the South and many cities of the North. These twinned disasters – social and ecological – are clearly caused by the particular model of global capitalist development prevalent since the collapse of the state socialist order. It seems that what is not needed is some form of rapprochement between the ecological and socialist movements. While the former could at times be blind to social inequality (at national and transnational levels) the latter could, despite Marx’s own tendencies, be extremely productivist and somewhat blasé about the ‘natural limits’ to capitalist development. I would argue that Karl Polanyi, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, is an essential bridge between the Marx of the nineteenth century and the post-Marxism of the twenty-first century. He articulates a novel analysis of a ‘double movement’ – whereby the market (capital) seeks to disembed social relations – and a social counter-movement whereby society protects itself from the depredations of the unregulated market, or what we would today

ma rx i sm and nat ure | 49 call neoliberalism. For Polanyi ‘to allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment … would result in the demolition of society …. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers, polluted … the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed’ (2001: 73). To theorize a socialist ecology, it is essential to understand how neoliberalism’s tendency to disembed social relations needs to be countered by a re-embedding that brings economic relations back once more under the sway of society. The main point to be made by this bridging theory is that if the ecological and social crises have a common cause then a common riposte is called for notwithstanding the historical barriers between the socialist and ecology movements. I would argue that the social and ecological crises we now face have the same cause, that being the unsustainable nature of capitalism. If we discount the possibility that a ‘clean capitalism’ could develop to surmount these contradictions then a new global order becomes necessary. For Jean-Marie Harribey: ‘Ecological Marxism thus fixes itself the aim of subordinating social activity to use-value’ (2009: 204). Marx’s value theory thus becomes central to any theory seeking to integrate the aims of ecology and those of progressive social transformation. We then need to think through what collective ownership of the means of production might mean in practical terms. Once we discount the prospects of state collectivism (á la USSR) and accept that capitalism has reached its natural limits, then it is incumbent on us to imagine alternative scenarios. Communal production, social ownership and cultural autonomy are all elements that will feature in this new social map emerging out of the dual but totally interlinked ecological and social crises of contemporary capitalism. A Marxist ecology would bring the Marxist paradigm fully into the twenty-first century where industrial capitalism has been replaced as the dominant modality by a new globalized informationalized capitalism. What we need to develop is a measure for national resources not determined solely by market criteria as with the carbon credits. Many ecologists, such as Alain Lipietz (1992), have been tempted by the proposal to create a market in pollution permits but this is simply accepting the ‘magic of the market’ arguments that the market can ensure the most rational distribution of resources. Nature

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simply cannot be objectified and accounted for by pure market criteria. Profit maximization cannot (especially after the 2008–09 crisis) serve as a compass for the rational ecological/social future of humanity. What is most exciting about this potential ecologicalsocialist rapprochement, or synthesis, is that it, as Harribey argues, lies ‘at the junction between ethics and politics [and] the relationship between ecology and social justice’ (2009: 204). References Adams, B. (1993) ‘Sustainable Development and the Greening of Development Theory’, in F. Schuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, London: Zed Books. Bahro, R. (1978) The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London: Verso. Bahro, R. (1984) From Red to Green, London: Verso. Benton, T. (1992) ‘Ecology, Socialism and the Mastery of Nature: A Reply to Reiner Grundmann’, New Left Review, I/194. Benton, T. and Redclift, M. (1994) ‘Introduction’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and the Global Environment, London: Routledge. Bookchin, M. (1980–81) ‘Review of A. Gorz’s Ecology as Politics’, Telos, 46. Brundtland, H. (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Camilleri, J. and Falk, J. (1992) The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Carlassare, E. (1994) ‘Destabilizing the Criticisms of Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 5(3). Cohen, S. (1980) Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Commoner, B. (1973) The Closing Circle:

Confronting the Environmental Crisis, London: Cape. Daly, M. (1979) Gyn/Ecology: The MetaEthics of Radical Feminism, Boston, MA: Beacon. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge. Dyker, D. (1992) Restructuring the Soviet Economy, London: Routledge. Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, London: UCL Press. Enzensberger, H.-M. (1974) ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, New Left Review, I/84. Foster, J. B. (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Frankel, B. (1987) The Post-industrial Utopians, Cambridge: Polity. Gorz, A. (1980) Ecology as Politics, London: Pluto. Griffin, S. (1978) Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, New York: Harper & Row. Grundmann, R. (1991) Marxism and Ecology, Oxford: Clarendon. Harribey, J-M. (2009) ‘Ecological Marxism or Marxian Political Ecology’, in J. Bidet and S. Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Hildyard, N. (1993) ‘Foxes in Charge of Chickens’, in W. Sachs (ed.), Global

marx i sm and nat ure | 51 Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. Jackson, C. (1994) ‘Gender Analysis and Environmentalisms’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and the Global Environment, London: Routledge. Lecourt, D. (1976) Lysenko: Histoire réelle d’une ‘science proletarienne’, Paris: Maspero. Lipietz, A. (1992) Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy, Oxford: Polity. Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London: Merlin. Mandel, E. (1985) ‘Marx: The Present Crisis and the Future of Labour’, Socialist Register, 22. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1987) Collected Works, Vol. 25, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mellor, M. (1992) Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist Green Socialism, London: Virago. Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (1993) Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books. Molyneux, M. and Steinberg, D. L. (1995) ‘Mies and Shiva’s Ecofeminism: A New Testament?’, Feminist Review, 49. Nietzsche, F. (1964) Complete Works, Vol.

2, New York: Russell & Russell. O’Connor, J. (1998) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, London: Guilford Press. Parsons, H. (ed.) (1977) Marx and Engels on Ecology, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Plumwood, V. (1988) ‘Woman, Humanity and Nature’, Radical Philosophy, 48. Polanyi, K. (2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Beacon. Redclift, M. (1987) Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradiction, London: Methuen. Sachs, W. (1993) ‘Global Ecology and the Shadow of “Development”’, in W. Sachs (ed.), Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. Schmidt, A. (1971) The Concept of Nature in Marx, London: New Left Books. Shiva, V. (1988) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books. Shiva, V. (1993) ‘The Greening of the Global Reach’, in W. Sachs (ed.), Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. Sklair, L. (1994) ‘Global Sociology and Global Environmental Change’, in M. Redclift and T. Benton (eds), Social Theory and the Global Environment, London: Routledge. Weiner, D. (1988) Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

3 | S OV I E TS P L US E L E CT R I F I CA T I O N: M ARX I S M AND D E V E L O P M E N T

Development is often seen as the overarching need of the human condition. Marxism, like most other thought systems, has perforce had to face up to the issues of development and underdevelopment. Indeed, development, in either its capitalist or socialist variants, is central to the Marxist enterprise. This chapter surveys critically some of the main interactions between the discourses of Marxism and of development. Marx himself is shown to be ambiguous, with early fairly mechanical or unilinear views on progress balanced by some more nuanced writings on Russia, for example. Lenin begins a new trend in the Marxist tradition which was to become, in ways, an ideology of developmentalism in many Third World countries. A further section deals with the once critical issue of socialism and underdevelopment, the fact that most socialist revolutions have not occurred in the states where the most advanced capitalism prevails. Finally, this chapter turns to more recent engagements of postMarxist currents with the issue of development, now perceived much more critically and indeed rejected as an assumed human good. Marx and development For Marx, development and capitalism were almost synonymous. Marx’s vision of development was also totally wrapped up with the era of modernity. Production was becoming increasingly internationalized and capital was being centralized. Capitalism advanced at an ever more frantic pace and development spread across the globe. This vision of what we might call ‘Manifesto Marxism’ is quite explicit: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 71). For the Marx of the Communist Manifesto, ‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-

marx i sm a n d development | 53 formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 70). This exhilarating roller-coaster of modernization is the essence of Marx’s conception of development. As the bourgeois era mounted the world stage it would sweep away all old orders and transform all in its own image. The more developed country was a mirror in which the less developed could glimpse its own future. The bourgeois era, for ‘Manifesto Marxism’, is one of unprecedented development of the productive forces: ‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all previous generations together’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 72). Nature is subjected to humankind, chemistry is applied to industry and agriculture, the railway and the telegraph revolutionized communications. The insatiable drive of bourgeois development tears up all obstacles in its path. Markets are constantly expanding, capitalist social relations corrode all others, productivity increases by leaps and bounds. Manifesto Marxism, as we might call it, is a thoroughly modernist discourse, as Marshall Berman reminds us so eloquently: from its relentless and insatiable pressure for growth and progress; its expansion of human desires beyond local, national and moral bounds; its demands on people to exploit not only their fellow men but also themselves; the volatility and endless metamorphosis of all its values in the maelstrom of the world market, its pitiless destruction of everything and everyone it cannot use … and its capacity to exploit crisis and chaos as a springboard for still more development, to feed itself on its own self-destruction. (Berman, 1983: 121) Of course, Marx did not stop at his paean of praise for the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary development role for human society. This capitalist development process was also creating its own ‘gravedigger’, the proletariat or working class. In proportion as the bourgeoisie – that is to say capital – develops, so does that class of labourers who sell their labour, as a commodity, to this hungry new mode of production. The same process which revolutionizes society creates the revolutionary class which will overthrow the new order. Capitalism will be devoured by the product of its own incandescent energy in this vision. The development of modern capitalist society

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produces ‘dialectically’ as it were the basis for its own surpassing. This organic process is conceived in fairly linear terms as dispersed workers combine first in trade unions and then in a workers’ political party. As feudalism gave way to capitalism, so capitalism would cede to socialism. As Marx claimed in the Manifesto: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the full development of all’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 87). This was a manifesto, but in practice capitalist development was just spreading its wings in Marx’s era. The ambiguity of Marx’s views on development can be illustrated through his (admittedly journalistic) writings on India. In these infamous passages Marx paid tribute to the progressive role of capitalist colonialism: ‘England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’ (Avineri, 1969: 132). Modern industry and the railway system would dissolve the old divisions of labour, break up the ‘inertia’ of the Indian villages and drag the country into the slipstream of global capitalist development. Of course, The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos [sic] themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. (Avineri, 1969: 137) While those passages can be read as support for the civilizing effect of Western capitalism over Eastern barbarism, in fact Marx’s writings on India, admittedly one-sided, dated and not too well informed, are consistent with the message of the Manifesto. Capitalism is a revolutionary force but it begets the cause of its own eventual downfall. Where Marx began to break with his previously mechanistic/ modernist views on development was in relation to Russia. In 1881 Marx spent some considerable time and effort drafting a reply to Vera Zasulich on the nature of the Russian peasant commune. Marx had been studying Russia since 1861, the year of the ‘emancipation of the

marx i sm a n d development | 55 serfs’. The question was whether the commune was a symptom of all that was archaic in Russian society or whether it was a harbinger of a progressive ‘communist’ future. Marx’s intervention in this debate was quite clear-cut. He foresaw two alternatives. The first would involve state capitalism penetrating and destroying the commune. The second option, however, was that the commune would become ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’ (Shanin, 1983: 124). Following a ‘Russian revolution’, which both Marx and Engels thought was imminent, the commune would become a springboard for a new mode of organization. The keepers of the Moscow archives after the revolution of 1917 discovered these letters of Marx and were shocked by the unorthodoxy. The ‘populist deviation’ which the orthodox ‘Marxists’ discovered in these letters was put down to the master’s senility (he was sixty-three at the time) or, according to another version, by his tactful wish not to discourage the Russian revolutionaries of the time too much. The significance of Marx’s delving into the affairs of prerevolutionary Russia cannot be underestimated. What Marx was arguing against, on the basis of the Russian case, was the tendency to make his analysis of mature capitalism in Capital into a schema of historical inevitability. This has major implications for any theory of development and, seemingly, contradicts his earlier dictum that the backward country saw its future in the mirror of the advanced one. What Marx actually argued later, in a letter to another Russian follower, was that ‘to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historicophilosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances it finds itself, … is honouring and shaming me too much’ (cited in Shanin, 1983: 59). There is a refusal here of any deterministic, blanket application of ‘laws’ of historical development. Marx was engaging, in fact, with the combined and uneven nature of development in strikingly ‘modern’ terms. What Marx and Engels foresaw in the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto was the Russian Revolution acting as a ‘signal for proletarian revolution’ in the West so that the two would ‘complement each other’. Marx, as is well known, never developed a theory of imperialism as such. However, his theory of capitalism and its development does foresee the creation of a world capitalist economy. Already

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the Manifesto was eloquent on the mission of the capitalist class: ‘it compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 71). Marx understood that, following the process of dissolution of the old social structures, what would replace them would depend mainly on the character of the old mode of production itself. To this end he developed a sketchy theory of pre-capitalist modes of production including the classless primitive community, the slave-based society of the classical era, the feudal society characterized by serfdom, and, in some accounts, an ‘asiatic’ mode of production (cf. Bailey and Llobera, 1981). However, it is clear that, for Marx, all modes of production prior to the bourgeois/ capitalist society are simply part of this mode’s prehistory. The structuralist cul-de-sac of the modes of production controversies is one of the more unproductive offshoots of teleological, not to say theological, Marxism. Marx did not, either, have a particularly developed idea of what we would today call the Third World. He was certainly aware of the role of colonial plunder in oiling the wheels of the Industrial Revolution. However, in analysing the internal and external factors in the ‘primitive accumulation’ which gave rise to capitalism, Marx undoubtedly prioritized the first dimension. Subsequent Marxists, engaged in debates over imperialism and dependency, would reverse the order and prioritize the external dimension as the explanation of why capitalism emerged in some regions of the world and not others. Anthony Brewer correctly points out: ‘A stress on external factors is consistent with a picture of capitalism in which a centreperiphery division on a world scale is a defining feature, but such a definition of capitalism is not to be found in Marx’ (1980: 44). Certainly, for example in his writings on Ireland, Marx can be seen to be aware of the stunting effects of colonialism on development. However, the main thrust of his theoretical, rather than journalistic, writings is on the internal development of capitalism as a mode of production and its appetite to create a whole world in its own image. What Marx does leave us with is an ambiguous legacy on the question of development. He would probably have agreed with

ma rx i sm an d development | 57 the once heretical statement by Geoffrey Kay that: ‘capital created underdevelopment not because it exploited the underdeveloped world, but because it did not exploit it enough’ (Kay, 1975: 2). This view is totally at odds with most subsequent Marxist theories of development and underdevelopment. This is not, of course, a harmonious view of capitalist world development and does not exclude an emphasis on exploitation, as Marx understood from India or Ireland. Nor was Marx advising nationalist movements in these countries simply to wait until capitalist development made their countries ‘ripe’ for revolution. The key to Marx’s arguments was that, whereas previous forms of capital (such as merchants) simply destroyed and pillaged, industrial capital also transformed while it destroyed the old modes of production. A simple glance at India today or Brazil would probably find support for the underlying approach Marx had to the question of development. The odd ethnocentric/Westernist/modernist flourish or emphasis should probably not detract from this fundamental confirmation of Marx’s original research and predictions. With Engels we have far less ambiguity on the question of development and a more firmly unilinear conception of modernization. Whereas Marx resisted attempts to make his theory of capitalism a theory of the ‘marche générale’ of history, Engels was moving precisely in that direction. The evolutionary framework which Engels was developing is clear in his 1875 essay ‘Social Relations in Russia’, where he concludes: ‘only at a definite high level of development of society’s productive forces does it become possible to raise production sufficiently for elimination of class distinctions to become really progressive, to survive without engendering stagnation or decline in the mode of social production’ (cited in Bideleux, 1985: 23). By 1892 Engels was even more firmly committed to the necessity of capitalist industrialization, as shown in a letter to one of Marx’s Russian followers: ‘capitalism opens up new vistas and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West …. There is no great historical evil without a compensating historical progress’ (cited in Bideleux, 1985: 27). In this way Engels led the codification of a mechanistic ‘Marxist’ development theory which was deeply fatalistic about the inexorable and mechanical advance of capitalism, and somewhat hard-nosed about its attendant social ‘side-effects’.

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Leninism and development It is ironic, given the subsequent history of Marxism-Leninism, that when Lenin engaged with the issue of the Russian commune in the mid-1890s he was implicitly opposing Marx’s views of the same phenomenon. Lenin’s perceptions of the Russian peasantry were extremely negative, stressing their individualistic nature. Belief in the peasants’ ‘communist instincts’ had naïvely infected many Russian socialists ‘based on a purely mythical idea of the peasant economy as a special communal system’ (cited in Bideleux, 1985: 71). Lenin developed the label of ‘populism’ to criticize those Russian socialists who sought in some way to bypass capitalism via the commune. For Lenin, following in the footsteps of Engels rather than Marx, only the industrial proletariat (however minuscule it might be) could lead a revolution: ‘only the higher stage of capitalist development, largescale machine industry, creates the material conditions and social forces necessary for … open political struggle towards victorious communist revolution’ (cited Bideleux, 1985: 73). We have here a conception of development which is quite unilinear and mechanical. The negative view of the peasant commune is certainly debatable and, politically, this explains the general lack of support among the peasantry for Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Lenin developed his ideas further in his turn-of-the-century book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1967), considered by many as one of the best Marxist studies of the emergence of capitalism from feudalism. Lenin’s theme in this text is the apparently technical one of how the home market of Russian capitalism was formed. His task was to demonstrate how the commodity economy became established in all branches of economic life, and how the division of labour became dominated by capitalism. Against the under-consumptionist arguments of the ‘populists’, Lenin showed convincingly that capitalism had created for itself a home market in Russia. Lenin’s conception of capitalist development is centred on the question of social differentiation, which he examined in detail in relation to the rural population. It should be pointed out that he clearly exaggerates the role of capitalism at this stage, treating as capitalist ‘economic structures which Marx explicitly described as pre-capitalist’ (Harding, 1977: 87). Lenin did admit that his earlier writings had led to an ‘over-estimation’ of the degree of capitalist development in Russian agriculture but the point is clear that Lenin’s early conception of

marx i sm a n d development | 59 development was absolutely focused on the internal development of capitalism in Russia. What Lenin, or Leninism, is better known for is his theory of imperialism. In terms of Marx’s view of the progressive function of capitalism on a world scale, and Lenin’s own analysis in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, this theory, elaborated during the First World War, was a watershed. It is only somewhat exaggerated to state, as Bill Warren did, that ‘In effectively overturning Marx and Engels’ view of the character of imperialist expansion, Lenin set in motion an ideological process that erased from Marxism any trace of the view that capitalism would be an instrument of social progress even in precapitalist societies’ (1980: 48). From now on the Marxist tradition would begin to view the world system as centre– periphery, and imperialism as a block or impediment to development. Certainly, it was easy to understand that a political movement which was setting out to gather support among the poor and downtrodden worldwide would find it difficult to maintain Marx’s stance on India, for example. Though Marx never ignored the negative effect of capitalist expansion worldwide he, undoubtedly, stressed the positive effect it would have on the productive forces. In the period of crisis, expectation and uncertainty of the First World War lofty, detached observation of this sort seemed out of place. Lenin’s work on imperialism is not, and was not, intended to be a major or innovative investigation. It was based largely on the works of others, like the Marxist Bukharin and the non-Marxist Hobson. It outlined what it saw as certain key tendencies of the period, such as the concentration of capital, its export to ‘underdeveloped’ countries and the dominance of finance capital (a merger of industrial and banking capital). Lenin’s political objective was to counter Kautsky’s notion of ‘ultraimperialism’ which implied a fairly smooth and peaceful carve-up of the world by the major powers. Instead Lenin tried to show the inevitable trend towards world war, implicit in increased worldwide competition. He was not really concerned with the impact of capitalist imperialism in the colonial world. He did recognize that: ‘The export of capital affects and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in these countries to which it is exported’ (Lenin, 1970: 718). Yet Lenin also moved towards the under-consumptionist positions he had criticized, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In particular, he became the forerunner of the neo-Marxist

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underdevelopment school (Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank for example), with his argument that imperialism would become a fetter or a brake on development, referring to ‘the tendency to stagnation and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate, and in certain branches of industry, in some countries, for certain periods of time, it gains the upper hand’ (Lenin, 1970: 745). Gradually the latter tendency, to view imperialism and monopoly capitalism as the highest or last stage of capitalism, prevailed. Not only that, but the view also prevailed that imperialism was becoming the major obstacle to development. All ambiguity had gone by the time of the 1928 Congress of the Communist International, where a key resolution argued: ‘The epoch of capitalism is the epoch of dying capitalism …. The capitalism system as a whole is approaching its final collapse’ (quoted in Claudin, 1975: 600). This was the general diagnosis, but specifically in regard to the colonial world the communist movement now began to prioritize its alliance with nationalist movements. It is this political imperative which explains the resolutions explicitly and unambiguously portraying imperialism as retrogressive economically, and foreign capital investment, not only as an affront to national dignity, but also as a simple drain on national resources. Henceforth development became synonymous with national development. Somehow capital acquired political colouring so that the same social relations of production could be seen as healthy if under national bourgeois control and exploitative if under international or imperialist control. The later school of ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Gunder Frank) has its intellectual/political origins here. Within Russia itself, as the 1917 revolution succeeded and a new social order was established, an economic debate on alternative development strategies began in earnest. This debate was also part of the political struggle to see who, and what policy, would succeed Lenin after his death in 1924. The issues ranged from the technical aspects of planning, to the mid-range issue of the priority to be given to industry compared to agriculture, to the big political issue of whether ‘socialism in one country’ was in fact feasible at all. Many of the central issues in development economics over the last fifty years were first aired in the Soviet debates of the 1920s as the country recovered from the ravages of civil war. For Moshe Lewin these debates were essentially a battle for or against the instalment of a new

ma rx i sm an d development | 61 development model: ‘an entirely, or almost entirely, nationalized economy and a political system run by a unique state-party making the whole system into a sui generis party-state’ (1975: xiv). In a sense this was Marxism’s first laboratory to try out its recipes for development, confront awkward realities and adjust its theoretical dictums to the real world in which they now operated. Nikolai Bukharin is a neglected figure, who developed a coherent gradualist socialist project during these debates (see Cohen, 1980). Bukharin held a more positive (or neutral) view of the peasantry than did Lenin, and conceived of the conciliatory New Economic Programme (NEP) of 1921 in a more long-term way. Bukharin saw the need for an organic development model and political stability. As summarized by Robert Bideleux, this entailed: ‘balanced, mutually reinforcing, largely autarkic development of small-holder agriculture and light industries propelled by rising consumption levels … and by providing positive economic incentives for both town and country’ (1985: 84). If this was the right position, the left side was argued most coherently by Evgeny Preobrazhensky (1979). In his version, the new Soviet state would need to prioritize forced state-funded industrial development. Preobrazhensky was going for the most advanced capital-intensive model of development – Fordism, in a word – with financing to come from various sources but including a squeeze on ‘private capitalist profit’ and the peasant sector. The gradualist model of accumulation versus forced industrialization was a conflict which was to dominate, and to some extent still does, if in different forms, the development debate. The best-known debate in the struggle is that between Stalin and Trotsky of course, that between ‘socialism in one country’ and ‘permanent revolution’. In a sense, this big question masked some of the more detailed polemics between the two leaders following Lenin’s death. Trotsky and a number of economists such as Kondratiev (of ‘Kondratiev waves’ fame) argued for a least-cost model of industrialization based on the increased international integration of the new Soviet state, strong industrial planning and a balanced urban–rural exchange. This was a buoyant, modernist model of development. Stalin, on the contrary, was going for self-sufficiency when he launched a long tradition of supposedly socialist autarkic development models. He argued for large-scale import-substitution industrialization, based on continued unfavourable terms of trade

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with the peasantry. A series of ‘emergency measures’ were inflicted on the peasantry, and then an outright terror which left some 5 million farmers either without land or in the labour camps. The Soviet model of development, under Stalin, was not only a travesty of anything Marx or Lenin ever advocated but also went far beyond the debates between the left and the right in the mid-1920s which Stalin’s authoritarianism certainly transcended with his brutalism. As the Soviet Union became consolidated and Stalinism tightened its grip on society, so Leninism became transmuted into a veritable ideology of development for what was soon to become the ‘Third World’. The ideology of proletarian revolution in the West became the ideology of peasant mobilization in the East, and then the ideology of modernizing elites in the South. David Lane puts it bluntly that ‘Leninism is the developmental ethic of Marxism’ (1974: 31). Of course, one could argue that this judgement is one-sided, but it does capture the trajectory of a certain state version of Leninism. The sanitized ‘Marxism-Leninism’ of the bureaucratic-authoritarian Soviet state served as legitimizing cover for what was a NIC (newly industrializing country) in its day. This Leninism is very close to the US modernization theory of the 1950s in many respects. Stalin, predictably, expressed the discourse bluntly: Socialist industrialisation is the development of large-scale industry, and primarily heavy industry, to a level where it becomes the key to the reorganisation of the entire national economy on the basis of an advanced machine technology, it ensures the victory of socialism and strengthens the country’s technical and economic independence and defence capacity in the face of the capitalist world. (Stalin, 1973: 351) Whatever merits this statement may have in terms of development theory, it is certainly a long way from the Communist Manifesto. It was Lenin himself who inaugurated this productivist-economisticdevelopmentalist version of Marxism with his notorious definition of communism in 1920 as ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of all the country’. This was an extreme but, undoubtedly, representative expression of Leninism as development ideology. It is not our concern here to decry its reduction of socialism to industrialization, but simply to highlight to what extent Leninism became a bridge

marx i sm a n d development | 63 between classical Marxism and the more contemporary theories of development, from modernization theory to the radical dependency theory of the 1970s. For a whole historical period in the 1950s and 1960s in a range of countries in the Third World, not all of them even claiming to be socialist, the Soviet development model took a grip. Soviet Marxism even fashioned a particular theory of ‘noncapitalist mode of development’ as a supposed third way between the Western model and a Marxist model deemed utopian for the actual conditions of the Third World. In legitimizing many authoritarian or populist Third World industrializing regimes, this particular hybrid of ‘Leninism’ helped stabilize capitalist rule worldwide and allowed imperialism to overthrow many of the features of colonialism which were by now more of an impediment to capitalist development. Socialism and underdevelopment It is by now a well-known ‘paradox’ that, although Marx expected socialism to flourish in the most advanced capitalist countries, most socialist revolutions occurred in conditions of relative or absolute underdevelopment. Socialist practice seems to contradict socialist theory. At one level the case is unarguable and accounts for why socialism and development had become practically synonymous in many parts of the world. Yet, at another level, it is hardly surprising that, in conditions of underdevelopment, wide sections of the population might come to view socialism as potentially liberating. Furthermore, Lenin advanced within his account of imperialism the notion that the world capitalist system would break at its ‘weakest link’. This points towards a realist interpretation of revolution, unencumbered by Marxist or any other teleology, where a whole range of political, strategic or ideological factors may create a situation ‘ripe’ for revolution. It is not a question of simply waiting for the development of the forces of production to reach the point where a country is ‘ripe’ for socialism. Whether it is a paradox or a natural concomitant of uneven capitalist development, socialist regimes have almost always inherited the legacy of underdevelopment. The constraints on the fledgling socialist state are formidable. Not only must it seek a more even distribution of income, but it also needs to create a massive advance in terms of economic development. The ‘gigantomania’ of a Stalin is not just the product of his fevered imagination and

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lust for power. The country will, more than likely, be devastated by external or internal war. There will probably be a small industrial base and an underdeveloped internal market. Natural resources may exist but may well not be immediately available. Human resources will exist but will, on the whole, not be endowed with great training or education. These hardly add up to fertile conditions for the development of socialism. It is not surprising that Paul Baran once famously admitted: ‘Socialism in backward and underdeveloped countries has a powerful tendency to become a backward and underdeveloped socialism’ (1968: viii). Underdevelopment of the forces of production also means underdevelopment of the working class, agent of transformation in the classic Marxist schema. It is possible to detect a working-class role in socialist revolutions usually deemed peasant-based, such as that in China. More often the ‘workers’ party’ has substituted for the actual participation of workers en masse in the revolutionary struggles. The main point remains that it is hard to conceive of socialism developing in the context of what were often pre-capitalist social and economic conditions. Socialization of the means of production was often replaced by a socialization of misery. Even relatively optimistic accounts of the prospects of socialism in Africa, such as that of Kidane Mengisteab, admit that: ‘Under these conditions, however, while the seizure of state power can be revolutionary, developing socialism can only be evolutionary’ (Mengisteab, 1992: 86). It may be the case that the best that socialism, in conditions of underdevelopment, can achieve is (was) the development of capitalism under slightly more democratic conditions. Even this is unlikely, however, given the prevailing international political context in which the socialist revolutions occurred. To the legacy of underdevelopment one must add the hostile international environment which socialist regimes faced from 1917 onwards. Being a ‘weak link’ in an imperialist chain may have facilitated a socialist revolution but, for sure, imperialist aggression would ensue. This was the case for Russia, Cuba, Vietnam and Angola. Revolutionary, nationalist self-determination had its place in the imperialist system. Wars, boycotts, external aggression and blockades have been a fact of most successful revolutions. The transition to socialism has thus been ‘over-determined’ by the conditions prevailing in the international political system. This

marx i sm a n d development | 65 situation can only exacerbate the already difficult internal conditions for democratic, let alone socialist, development. The internal balance of forces between democratic transformation and restoration are, inevitably, tilted towards the latter. While in the short term external aggression may hasten the transformation of social relations after the revolution, in the longer term it needs only to be maintained to fatally weaken the transformation project or turn it in an authoritarian militarist direction, as happened in Nicaragua. The twin constraints of economic underdevelopment and external aggression point many victorious revolutions towards selfreliance, if not outright autarky. The radical dependency theory of development, which built on Lenin’s concept of imperialism, advocated some form of ‘de-linking’ from the world economy as the remedy for underdevelopment. National liberation, however defined, became a central goal of socialist movements and regimes (see Chapter 7). This is understandable, but it does not lead to socialism in the way Marx understood it. Nor do we need to look beyond the experience of Burma or Kampuchea to see the terrible cost of autarky as a substitute for socialism. We can even question the end result of import-substitution industrialization as a means of promoting self-reliance and national independence. In a hard, but ultimately realistic, vein Bideleux commented before the collapse of communism: ‘In fact really all the communist states have become increasingly dependent on heavily subsidized Soviet fuels, raw materials, equipment, technical aid and credit; on preferential access to “soft” Soviet markets for their relatively inferior and unmarketable manufactures; and on Western technology and finance’ (1985: 152). It is clear by now, that the socialist regimes of the twentieth century existed more in the ‘realm of necessity’ than in the promised ‘realm of freedom’. In terms of the theme of this chapter this meant that socialism, as it actually materialized, had to confront above all, the problems of underdevelopment. As Ken Post and Phil Wright argue, the main characteristic of all socialist regimes is that they are ‘resource constrained economies’ the principal characteristic of which ‘is the continuous reproduction of shortages or, alternatively, continuous underproduction, in contrast to the overproduction of capitalism’ (1989: 72). In this scenario, it is inevitable that there will be distributional conflicts between industry and agriculture,

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investment and consumption, or military and civilian expenditure, for example. There is no abundance to be socialized, no irrationality to be ironed out to everyone’s benefit, no benign or virtuous circle waiting to be activated. It is certainly easy to see how, from the very start, there would be a tendency towards full reintegration into the world market in a bid to escape the critical resource constraints which the new socialist economies faced. The resource-constrained economy finds it very difficult to escape the capitalist ‘law of value’ and launch the system of planning deemed essential for a transition to socialism. The idea was that the state would control the means of production and distribution sufficiently to act as a countervailing power to the law of the market. Central planning was seen as a key element in gaining social control over the economy. E. V. K. Fitzgerald even argued, with Nicaragua in mind, that ‘The advance toward the effective socialization of the enterprise sector of the economy through subordination to the plan may … be more rapid than in a larger, more developed economy’ (1986: 44). The idea was that prices could be set through economic calculus by a central decision-making power without recourse to internal market forces. In practice, this model did not succeed and the international capitalist market proved totally corrosive of any national attempt at control over the levers of economic power. This central planning proved to be as much chimera as self-reliance. The fragmentation of the post-revolutionary state and the ‘dollarization’ of the economy was the seemingly inevitable result imposed by a hostile capitalist world. Faced with the inevitable contradiction engendered by state socialist economic policies, economic reform was inherently unlikely to achieve its objectives. As Janos Kornai explains: ‘Stalinist classical socialism is repressive and inefficient, but it constitutes a coherent system. When it starts reforming itself, that coherence slackens and its internal contradictions strengthen’ (1992: xxv). According to this argument, which Kornai backs with vast experience and detailed historical material, reform is destined to fail because the socialist system is unable to renew itself internally. This is where capitalism is undoubtedly ‘superior’ as a mode of production, given its almost infinite capacity to reform and transform itself, its knack of renewing itself even (particularly) through crisis. The debates around ‘market socialism’, which seemed so riveting thirty years ago, now seem just

ma rx i sm an d development | 67 quaint. The revolutionary changes in Russia since 1989 are but one dramatic example of how piecemeal change and reformist tinkering could not make the socialist economy viable in the long run. The balance sheet of socialism and underdevelopment or underdeveloped socialism is, inevitably, a mixed one. Adrian Leftwich argues that in the well-established socialist states such as China, Cuba and North Korea ‘the grossest forms of prerevolutionary oppression, inequality, disease and poverty have been eliminated; industrialisation has progressed some way; and average life expectancy and perinatal infant mortality … compare well or begin to approach levels typical of industrialised societies’ (1992: 38). More recently established socialist states such as Angola and Mozambique, the Yemen or Afghanistan, do not fare so well on any of the conventional social development indicators. One could go even further and question whether, for example, that showcase for Third World socialism, Cuba, has really done all that better than it would have done under dependent capitalist development. Cuba on the eve of the revolution was among the better off Latin American countries not just in terms of per capita income but also according to health indicators, for example. There are limits, of course, to the usefulness of this type of counter-factual exercise, but it is still the case that Cuba has failed to provide an alternative development model as originally hoped for by dependency theory. Socialism was once seen as the best means to ‘catch up’ with advanced Western capitalist societies. In 1936, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke for many Third World nationalist leaders when he declared: ‘I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation and the subjection of the Indian people, except through socialism’ (Nehru, 1972–83, 108). Some years after that Nikita Khruschev could still, with some credibility, talk about ‘catching up’ with the West, as Sputnik reached for the stars and the combine harvesters reaped bumper crops. Yet fifty years after Nehru’s desperate leap of faith, it was abundantly clear that ‘socialist development’ was just a pale imitation of its capitalist progenitor, with its own undesirable features and inefficiencies thrown in. There can be little justification for Gordon White’s arguments, barely five years before the great anticommunist popular revolts of 1989, that, for medium-sized Third World countries, with a reasonable resource base and ‘a determined leadership and a relatively homogeneous

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population’, ‘the Soviet model cannot be discounted as a strategic option’ (White, 1983: 13). North Korea is hardly a strong case on which to base this argument. Post-development If until now we have largely taken for granted the concept of development itself, we must now question its meaning. We cannot simply assume, from a supposedly critical perspective, that development is a common human good. Recent attempts to deconstruct the development discourse have helped highlight its less than benign role. Gustavo Esteva points to the apparent contradiction that while ‘development occupies the centre of an incredibly powerful semantic constellation … At the same time, very few words are as feeble, as fragile and as incapable of giving substance and meaning to thought and behaviour as this one’ (1992: 8). Development acts as a truism and its open-ended significance renders it almost meaningless. Yet its conceptual inflation has led it to dominate almost all treatments of the non-Western world. Development seems to act as a metaphor for the Western way; a word to represent a world to be built in its own image. Far from benign, a wholesome objective all political tendencies could agree to, development begins to appear as a disciplinary mechanism in the Foucaultian sense. Foucault has provided some fundamental insights into the dynamics of power and knowledge in Western societies. It is from this perspective that we can envisage development as the extension into the non-Western world of modernism’s disciplinary and normalizing mechanisms. A discursive field has been set up under the umbrella of development which has determined which questions get asked and which do not. Development is the deployment of power/knowledge to deal with ‘underdevelopment’ in a similar way that psychiatry came into existence to deal with ‘madness’. Arturo Escobar has argued forcefully in this regard that ‘not only does the deployment of development contribute significantly to maintaining domination and economic exploitation but that the discourse itself has to be dismantled if the countries of the “Third World” want to pursue a different type of development’ (Escobar, 1984: 378). From this point of view, it becomes pointless to qualify development, as it were, by talking of ‘sustainable development’, ‘integrated development’ or ‘endogenous development’. While appearing to be

ma rx i sm an d development | 69 progressive, these amendments to development are seen simply as a way of heading off challenges to Western dominance and co-opting resistance. Marxism might seem to be above this type of critique. After all, Marxism has hardly been on a par with Western imperialism as an agent of development. Yet Marxism is an integral part of the modernist paradigm, in many ways its epitome. Development can, indeed, be seen as a central axis of the whole of Marx’s work. The Hegelian concept of history as an unfolding of the Spirit; and Darwin’s concept of evolution merge and intertwine in the classic Marxist notion of development. As seen above, Marxism exudes confidence in the onward march of history and the inexorable progress of development. The Marxist stages of human history – the sequence of modes of production – are imbued with a modernist conception of development. Thus, from a post-Marxist perspective, we need to establish some critical distance from this conception. Whatever contradictions Marxism may contain within its various theoretical and political manifestations, it is clearly imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and its concept of development. One way of illustrating this argument would be through a discussion of the radical, Marxist and otherwise, dependency theory. This is not the place to carry out a genealogy of the concept of dependency (cf. Kay, 1989). The point is that the dependency approach emerged in the late 1960s as a supposedly radical critique of the orthodox, conservative theory of modernization. In all its tenets it simply reversed the arguments of the mainstream discourse. Where modernization theory saw the diffusion of progress across the globe, the dependency approach saw simply the ‘development of underdevelopment’. Where one saw integration into the capitalist world economy as the only path to development, the other saw delinking from the world economy as the key to development. Where one saw capitalist development leading steadily towards democracy, the other saw only an inexorable slide into dictatorship or fascism. Thirty years later it would seem that modernization theory has won the battle of ideas hands down, with the rise of neoliberalism becoming the uncontested development paradigm. Reform, in development parlance, has now become synonymous with neoliberal, free-market doctrines, where once it conjured up images of agrarian reform and income distribution. The dependency approach has even

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been disowned by its erstwhile authors, who see it as naïve, simplistic and, ultimately, misguided. Basically we would have to argue that dependency shared the same discursive terrain as modernization theory. In this regard it is useful to refer to Derrida’s notion of ‘logocentrism’, which refers to a Western tendency to impose hierarchy when dealing with oppositions such as man/woman, West/non-West, modern/traditional and so on. As Kate Manzo argues, this concept is important in relation to a critical understanding of development theory because ‘it demonstrates how even the most radically critical discourse easily slips into the form, the logic and implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest’ (1991: 8). Thus dependency theory assumes most of the postulations of mainstream development theory, it just seeks different ways of meeting its objectives. To produce a mirror image of another theory is still to pay it homage. Dependency, in its Marxist and non-Marxist variants, rarely stepped outside the development horizon of meanings. Dependency’s challenge to developmentalism can at best be seen as only partially counter-modernist, and never postmodernist in a positive sense. If the modernization and dependency theories are, at one level, simply mirror images of each other, what could break this impasse in development theory? From a post-Marxist perspective, both feminism and ecology appeared to be attractive alternatives. The various attempts to carry out an ‘engendering’ of development theory – women in/and development, gender and development, and so on – have utterly transformed this area of study. In theoretical terms, however, some of the criticisms of development theory, such as its essentialism, can be applied equally to feminism, at least prior to the emergence of poststructuralist feminism. As to ecology, we now have a new radical/reformist orthodoxy of ‘sustainable development’, a blanket term covering various perspectives, but imbuing them all with the’ warm glow of ‘motherhood and apple pie’. As noted in Chapter 2, there is also now a hybrid formation bringing both discourses together in the shape of ‘ecofeminism’. While these new critical approaches have taken over at the margins of development practice, the mainstream carries on being dominated by the technocratic/ Western-centred/evolutionist perspectives of modernization theory which has even brought under its sway many erstwhile dependency theorists.

ma rx i sm an d development | 71 Postmodernism would also see itself as breaking with the sterile counter-position of modernization and dependency theory, seeing both as part of a discredited modernist paradigm or ‘grand narrative’. From this perspective, development theory operates a classic modernist procedure: ‘a disposition to impose hierarchy between places and subjects, a nostalgia for origins, and a philosophical predisposition to foundationalism which provides a standard or vantage point independent of interpretation’ (Watts, 1995: 53). This critique allows us, for example, to situate dependency theory better, which always operated with an assumed binary opposite of ‘non-dependency’, some state of origin which was totally mythical. As to the privileged vantage point of the development theorists and practitioners, this is where we see best the arrogance of developmentalism, which assumes an Olympian perspective of humanity down in the mud. The radical dependency theorist also assumed an all-knowing perspective, presumed to speak for all sections of the population, and offered the most unlikely salvation, namely the state of Cuba. Post-colonial theory has, more recently, sought to develop a novel approach to the question of development. It is much more ‘ThirdWorldist’ in its approach, foregrounding the colonial history of Third World countries. In this sense, though it is related theoretically to postmodernism, it would be critical of the latter’s engagement with modernism almost exclusively on the terrain of the West. Postcolonialism is critical of the Eurocentric universalism of development theory, its denial of ambivalence, alterity and heterogeneity, and its silencing of other voices. It criticizes the discursive homogenization of even apparently radical discourses such as those on ‘Third World women’. In Chandra Mohanty’s (1993) critique, this category serves as a narcissistic other for Western feminism, part of the paternalizing, colonial project dealing with the colonial native. Post-colonialism is more political than postmodernism, in spite of its origins in cultural studies, and operates in a reverse direction, taking Third World voices into the heartlands of capitalism rather than telling peoples that have not enjoyed/suffered modernism that a postmodern era is now upon us. To posit the emergence of a new post-Marxist synthesis on the question of development would probably be futile. From feminism, ecology and other ‘new’ social movements we can take a critique of mainstream notions. From the emerging ‘anti-development’

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school (see Sachs, 1993) we can take the sharp deconstruction of the developmentalist discourse and puncture its self-assuredness. Yet this school’s anti-modernism hardly takes us ‘beyond’ modernism or even a post-Marxist terrain. There is also something arrogant about talk of ‘another’ development which preaches non-material values and evades the basic problems of material needs. The postmodern tack is a different one and, at the very least, it has carried out an effective ‘decentring’ of the white European male who invented development to deal with the rest of the world when colonialism had had its day. A new era of scepticism towards metanarratives of progress is upon us, we stress self-reflexivity more, and we are much more open towards difference and local knowledge than in the heyday of development theory. In conclusion, it might be salutary to remember that the problems of development and underdevelopment are still with us, whatever theoretical juggling we might carry out. This is one reason, of course, why a ‘development industry’ persists even while others proclaim that ‘development is dead’. Arturo Escobar writes in this regard, that ‘development (as discourse) is a very real historical formation, albeit articulated around a fictitious construct (“underdevelopment”) and upon a certain materiality (i.e. certain conditions of life baptized as “underdevelopment”), which we must seek to conceptualize in different ways’ (1984: 389). Gunder Frank noted a long time ago that there was no such thing as underdevelopment, only undevelopment. What we need to do now is to go beyond even this distinction and question whether development itself has any positive or progressive connotations. All attempts to repackage or relabel the destructive social effects of capitalist expansion across the globe must be questionable from a critical perspective in the ‘spirit’ of Marx. This enterprise of reconstruction might usefully start with Marx who did not have a simplistic view of development as a mechanical succession of modes of production (see Banaji, 2010). His own views were much more nuanced and he still provides an unsurpassed theorization of the development of capitalism and its contradictions that is essentially what we today call ‘development’. These theoretical tools –including the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour – are only now emerging after the theoretical underdevelopment of Marxism by Soviet and other ideologies. We might also usefully revisit the Latin American dependency theory

ma rx i sm an d development | 73 which remains a singular expression of a Southern development theory. Notwithstanding the poststructuralist critique of its lack of attention to culture and the politics of representation, the dependency approach is now staging a comeback and has in many ways been ‘mainstreamed’ through the Economic Commission for Latin America. While the neoliberal perspective on development prevailed – the market knows best – Latin American structuralism with its emphasis on the role of the state and the unequal power relations of the global economy posited another type of development. In the post neoliberal world we have now entered, these theories and policies will come to the fore once more. References Avineri, S. (ed.) (1969) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York: Anchor. Bailey, A. and Llobera, J. (eds) (1981) The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Banaji, J. (2010) Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Baran, P. (1968) The Political Economy of Growth, New York: Modern Reader Paperback. Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso. Bideleux, R. (1985) Communism and Development, London: Methuen. Brewer, A. (1980) Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Study, London: Routledge. Claudin, F. (1975) The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cohen, S. (1980) Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Escobar, A. (1984) ‘Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault

and the Relevance of His Work in the Third World’, Alternatives, 10(3). Esteva, G. (1992) ‘Development’, in W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power, London: Zed Books. Fitzgerald, E. V. K. (1986) ‘Notes on the Analysis of the Small Underdeveloped Economy in Transition’, in R. Fagen, C. D. Deere and K. L. Coraggio (eds), Transition and Development: Problems of Third World Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Harding, N. (1977) Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol. 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kay, C. (1989) Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, London: Routledge. Kay, G. (1975) Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, London: Macmillan. Kornai, J. (1992) The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Oxford: Clarendon. Lane, D. (1974) ‘Leninism as an Ideology of Soviet Development’, in E. de Kadt and G. Williams (eds), Sociology and Development, London: Tavistock.

74 | t h r ee Leftwich, A. (1992) ‘Is There a Socialist Path to Socialism?’, Third World Quarterly, 13(1) (Special Issue: ‘Rethinking Socialism’). Lenin, V. I. (1967) The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, V. I. (1970) ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’, in Selected Works in Three Volumes, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lewin, M. (1975) Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, London: Pluto. Manzo, K. (1991) ‘Modernist Discourse and the Crisis of Development Theory’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 26(2). Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in K. Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mengisteab, K. (1992) ‘Responses of Afro-Marxist States to the Crisis of Socialism: A Preliminary Assessment’, Third World Quarterly, 13(1) (Special Issue: ‘Rethinking Socialism’). Mohanty, C. T. (1993) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and

Post-Colonial Theory, New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Nehru, J. (1972–83) ‘The Presidential Address’, in S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works, Vol. 7, Delhi: Orient Longman. Post, K. and Wright, P. (1989) Socialism and Underdevelopment, London: Routledge. Preobrazhensky, E. (1979) Crisis of Soviet Industrialization, ed. D. Filtzer, New York: Sharpe. Sachs, W. (1993) ‘Global Ecology and the Shadow of “Development”’, in W. Sachs (ed.), Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. Shanin, T. (ed.) (1983) Late Marx and the Russian Road, London: Routledge. Stalin, J. (1973) The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings 1905–52, London: Croom Helm. Warren, B. (1980) Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso. Watts, M. (1995) ‘A New Deal in Emotions: Theory and Practice and the Crisis in Development’, in J. Crush (ed.), Power of Development, London: Routledge. White, G. (1983) ‘Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World: An Overview’, in G. White, R. Murray and C. White (eds), Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World, London: Macmillan.

4 | TH E GRAV E D I G G E R S : M A R X I S M A N D WORK E R S

The working class is central to the Marxist enterprise. There is a whole Marxist myth constructed around the concept of the proletariat. Labour is seen as central to the development of modern society and workers are seen as the ‘gravediggers’ of capitalist society. This chapter examines firstly how Marx himself conceived of workers and their role in the Marxist conceptual edifice. This is followed by a consideration of the role of workers in the Russian Revolution. This was, after all, the first time that workers had a chance to build a new society along Marxist lines. This is followed by a discussion of various subsequent debates on the role of the working class in politics, such as the ‘new working class’ debate. Finally, this chapter turns to certain post-Marxist themes which reconsider the traditional Marxist views of the working class. Current concerns with new technology and globalization are seen to link up with the more positive premonitions of Marx himself. Marx’s myth The proletariat, for Marx, is the class under capitalism that has nothing to lose but its chains. This class of labourers ‘live only so long as they find work, and … find work only in so far as their labour increases capital’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 73). This proletariat was created by the Industrial Revolution and was crowded into the teeming industrializing cities of this era. Their conditions of existence led them inexorably towards ‘combinations’, then strikes and insurrections. While they had nothing – no status, no property – they were also the bearers of a new universality against the bourgeois or capitalist class they confronted, which exuded particular interest. The proletariat, in short, was to become for Marx the new universal class in history. Their presence at the heart of the new capitalist society was its fatal flaw or contradiction. This new class, which traced its ancestry to the Roman slaves and beyond, carried within itself a new co-operative mode of production

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which prefigured the new classless society which Marx called communism. In the Communist Manifesto the story of the proletariat is recounted lyrically: ‘of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 77). The organization of the proletariat into a class, and ‘consequently’ into a political party, is disrupted by competition among workers: ‘But it ever rises up again stronger, firmer, mightier’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 76). Thus the ‘incoherent mass scattered over the whole country’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 75) begins to organize and struggle against the dominant order. The expansion of capital requires wage labour and, at first, competition among these labourers prevents combination. Gradually this situation is overcome and big industry promotes association among the wage labourers. The development of modern industry sows the seeds of its own destruction. In the famous passage of the Manifesto: ‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 79). The political agent of this transition is a political party, but one of a special type. For Marx: ‘The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 79). The communists are not enlightened intellectuals bringing light where there was once only darkness. They ‘merely express … actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 80). They seek the formation of the proletariat into a class and the overthrow of the bourgeois order. But it is a constant refrain of Marx that: ‘The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself’. When bourgeois supremacy is overcome and the proletariat becomes the ruling class, the battle for democracy will be won. Class power will be used by the proletariat to sweep away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms. In another famous passage: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 87).

ma rx i sm and workers | 77 Let us consider further who this proletariat is composed of for Marx. At one level, it is a straightforward question of those who work for a living. To the industrial working class of the factories Marx adds, in his writings on France, those such as the garment workers and construction workers who support the industrial proletariat in its struggles. However, Marx writes out of this definition of the new universal saviour class those whom he calls the ‘lumpen-proletariat’. In the Manifesto, Marx refers to ‘The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society … [whose] conditions of life … prepare it … for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’ (Marx and Engels, 1977: 77). In his later writings, Marx goes on to distinguish between productive and unproductive labour, with the latter being seen as not part of the proletariat either. This distinction will be referred to again, but the point here is that Marx began a tradition of distinguishing socalled ‘objective’ criteria for class belonging and as predictors of class activity. The objectivist Marxist definitions of class are currently sustained by G. A. Cohen, for example for whom: ‘A person’s class is established by nothing but his [sic] objective place in the network of ownership relations, however difficult it may be to identify such places neatly’ (Cohen, 1978: 73). Culture, politics and consciousness have nothing to do with definitions of class position in this orthodox tradition of Marxism. It is a structural conception of class opposed totally to E. P. Thompson’s action-based conception of a working class which is present at its own ‘making’ (Thompson, 1970). Against objectivist, and inherently economistic definitions of the working class, Thompson argues that this was not Marx’s meaning; rather ‘class happens when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences …, feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against these whose interests are different from … theirs’ (Thompson, 1970: 9). Both interpretations – a structural one and an action-based or experiential one – can be found in Marx’s writings. What is clear in the Marxist tradition is how central the working class is to the Marxist political project. Ellen Meiskins Wood engages in a forceful restatement of orthodoxy in an attempt to rebut all those involved in ‘the retreat from class’ in recent years. For her: ‘The proposition that the working class is potentially the revolutionary class

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is not some metaphysical abstraction but an extension of … materialist principles, suggesting that, given the centrality of production and exploitation in human social life … certain other propositions follow’ (1981: 14). These would include the notion that the working class suffers the most ‘direct’ form of oppression under capitalism, and that it has the most direct ‘objective’ interest and ability to overthrow capitalism. The proletariat, at the heart of the capitalist machine, is seen as the principal motor of its emancipatory transformation. The problems with this vision will be examined in a subsequent section of this chapter. At this stage we register only what the orthodox Marxist position on the centrality of workers is. In Marx himself, what we get is largely a philosophical account or justification of working class centrality. In The German Ideology we have a picture of bourgeois society being superseded through a development of its own logic. The universal development of the productive forces seemingly demands a transition to a postcapitalist society. The universalizing of exchange, the generalization of commodity production and the emergence of the new universal class, or proletariat, go hand in hand. As Marx and Engels write: only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the development of a totality of capacities entailed by this. (1976: 87) With the emergence of the proletariat, as the culmination of the division of labour, communism becomes immanent, as it were, within bourgeois society. As Balibar observes: ‘The thesis of the proletariat as “universal class” … allows Marx to read off from the present the imminence of the communist revolution’ (1995: 40). It may be useful at this stage to examine Marx’s analysis of an actual labour movement, namely the Chartists in Britain. For Marx, the vibrant capitalism of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was bound to produce a dynamic and radical workers’ movement. The People’s Charter of 1838 demanded universal male suffrage and other democratic reforms as well as a shorter working day. Engels even referred to this charter as the proposed ‘law of the proletariat’, which would replace the law of the middle classes. For Marx, as Alan

ma rx i sm and workers | 79 Gilbert recounts, there was a condensation of the aspects of Chartism: ‘unionization, formation of a radical party to fight for a shorter working week by legal enactment and the vote, and finally, socialist revolution into a new strategy for the working class movement’ (1981: 53). This type of interpretation was pursued by other Marxist interpretations, including that of E. P. Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class (1970). In spite of his break with simple reductionism, Thompson still posited a direct link between ‘social being’ and ‘social consciousness’ in the making of Chartism. More recent students of Chartism, such as that of Stedman Jones, have broken with this Marxist tradition and helped us see the relationship between workers and politics in a new and more complex way. He is critical of Engels and others who examine reasons for discontent, such as unemployment and poverty on the one hand, and the evidence for class antagonism in the Chartist discourse on the other hand. What has been problematic, he argues, ‘has been the way in which these two types of evidence have been connected’ (Stedman Jones, 1983: 19). An intuitive connection between the discontent of workers and the political movement of Chartism cannot be based on simple terms such as ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’. In a novel, but persuasive, manner Stedman Jones counters the traditional interpretation, arguing that ‘it was not consciousness (or ideology) that produced politics, but politics that produced consciousness’ (1983: 19). What this meant as a research programme, was a new emphasis on the language of Chartism in a non-referential way ‘rather than setting particular propositions into direct relation to a putative experiential reality of which they were assumed to be the expression’ (1983: 21). To conclude then, Marx created a veritable myth of the proletariat as universal historical subject and harbinger of a new co-operative and, ultimately, classless social order. Marx was big on the ‘vision thing’ but weak on details. As is often the case with Marx’s legacy, it is ambiguous in this area. While certainly prone to determinist, structuralist and economistic ways of thinking about workers, he also stressed workers’ selfactivity. There is no hint of substitutionism in Marx’s conception of communist politics, which is also quite nonsectarian in political terms. His emphasis on the creativity and selforganizing capacity of the working class has inspired labour activists for over 150 years. Marx’s more dogmatic followers have, however,

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accentuated the theological aspects of his work, and prevented recognition of new social and political realities. It was Marx’s Soviet followers, though, who went furthest in creating a new agency, the Party, which would substitute for the self-activity of the masses and become the arbiter of truth and error among the Marxist clergy. Lenin and the workers In the mid-1890s, the incipient Russian workers’ movement came into contact with Marxism. As has often been noted, industrial capitalism and Marxism arrived in Russia almost simultaneously. In this particular situation, as Oskar Anweiler describes, ‘The nascent Russian labour movement became totally dominated by the Marxist intelligentsia, which assigned to the proletariat the messianic role of redeemer in its revolutionary scheme of salvation’ (1974: 27– 8). So, contrary to expectations, it was Russia and not Germany where the first Marxist-inspired workers movement played a key role in a revolutionary upheaval. From the 1905 Soviets to the democratic and socialist revolutions of 1917, this movement was to play a key role. A product of the particular uneven development of capitalism in Russia and the First World War, this revolution came to epitomize what became known as the ‘workers’ state’. But what, in brief was the fate of labour in this dramatic, since terminated, social experiment? When the Tsar’s government fell in February 1917, the workers in the factories moved into action. Unrealistic, even utopian, ideas about the end of all oppression prevailed. The discourses of anarchocommunism and anarcho-syndicalism competed favourably with the more staid Marxism of the orthodox Mensheviks and even the Bolsheviks. Factory committees took over the running of many workplaces in an incipient, if semi-spontaneous, movement towards workers’ control. Economic chaos and the collapse of planning added impetus and gave an edge to the growing radicalization of the working masses. While the orthodox Marxists maintained their neat schema involving state control over production, workers in the factories were demanding direct control and self-governance. This was no doubt a confused, inchoate movement which probably did not address the economic realities of the new, semi-democratic nation-state. It did, however, force the Bolsheviks into reluctant support for the slogan of ‘workers’ control’ for a couple of decisive years.

marx i sm a nd workers | 81 On a broader, if interrelated, front the Soviets were re-forming, involving workers and soldiers in particular in governance of the new order. The Petrograd Soviet was the leading player in this field, acting as a dynamic, semi-permanent, assembly of workers and soldiers. Memories of the Paris Commune of 1871 were no doubt stirred in the Marxist participants in this chaotic assembly. Gradually order was established, delegations were regularized and committees began to do routine work. Within a couple of months, there was a small Bureau of the Executive Committee established with the power to take ‘emergency’ political decisions. As Anweiler notes, ‘the Petrograd Soviet thus changed from a provisional revolutionary organ into a well-organized administrative machine’ (1974: 108). No, doubt this was necessary, and should not be put down to some ‘iron law’ of bureaucratization, but it did lead to a distancing of this, and similar, bodies from the working masses. The ferment of Soviet organizations and the movement for workers’ control led to a fierce debate within the Marxist movement in Russia. Lenin, the undisputed intellectual leader of this movement, had no real conception of workers’ self-management in 1917. Although keen to foment grass-roots activity among workers, he conceived of selfmanagement in fairly limited terms. Socialism, for Lenin, would come through workers’ control of the state through the Bolshevik Party, rather than through workers’ control over the means of production. By 1919 the inchoate movement for workers’ control had been decisively replaced by a centralized administration of industry, an all-encompassing nationalization. Exemplifying the new mood was Lenin’s call in his 1918 Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government: ‘Obedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet directors’ (Lenin, 1970: 680). Piecework, Taylorism and payment by results was the new Soviet way, and any resistance to it was, for Lenin, simply the effect of the ‘influence of petty-bourgeois anarchy’. The trade unions would be the natural beneficiaries of this return from utopia to business as usual. By 1919, the Russian trade unions had broadened their scope practically to merge with the machinery of government to run industry. As Robert Daniels puts it, however, ‘The reverse side of the unions’ administrative prerogative was their responsibility for maintaining labour discipline and productivity and for preventing, rather than conducting strikes’ (1969: 120).

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The language of workers’ control was giving way to the language of ‘efficiency’ and the Taylorist labour process. The trade unions were becoming ‘transmission belts’ for ‘the party of the working class’ among the working masses. If this new labour discipline was not sufficient, Trotsky saw fit in 1920 to advocate the full militarization of labour: If we seriously speak of planned economy, which is to acquire its unity of purpose from the center, when labour forces are assigned in accordance with the economic plan … the working masses cannot be wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, – appointed, commanded, just like soldiers. (cited in Daniels, 1969: 121) The subject of this unprecedented attack, the working class, which would supposedly be the leading class of the new order, was being decimated during all these debates. The First World War was followed by the war of imperialist intervention from 1918 to 1921, along with a catastrophic civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. The number of industrial workers in the Soviet Union fell from 3 million in 1917, to 2.5 million in 1918, to 1.5 million in 1920 and, finally, less than 1.25 million in 1921 (Furedi, 1986: 16). Whether this process of social decomposition of the working class forced the Bolsheviks to do things on their behalf is probably an open question. What is certain is that the social force behind the drive towards workers’ democracy was in serious risk of disintegration. Mounting unemployment and exclusion from political life was taking its toll on a once vibrant labour movement throughout the 1920s. By the 1930s, the capacity of Soviet workers to act in any way as a class, coherently and collectively, had been crushed. There are many stories of the ‘degeneration’ of the workers’ state declared so precociously in 1917. What is important to note, from the perspective of this text, is the subsidiary role allocated to workers in this so-called workers’ state by its leaders. The dominant Marxist discourse shared by the Second and the Third International, to some extent, was inherently productivist. The seizure of political power and rational planning was sufficient in itself to usher in the promised land. As Carmen Sirianni notes: ‘Lenin postponed the question of selfmanagement to the distant future, when the entire population would

marx i sm a nd workers | 83 be fully educated to the tasks of economic administration’ (1982: 260). In the meantime, the development of the productive forces, in a crude evolutionist reading of Marx, would take precedence over the transformation of the relations of production. The workplace was conceived by Lenin as a place where objects were produced, not the site of conflicting social relations at the heart of Marx’s original vision for transformation. It is not a question of drawing up a crude counter-factual version of the Russian Revolution whereby all the blood and conflict could have been avoided in a harmonious development of communism. For S. A. Smith, the Bolsheviks were facing a ‘cruel dilemma’ in 1918: ‘They were intent on creating democratic socialism, but their priority had to be the re-construction of the productive forces, especially, the revival of labour discipline’ (1983: 264). We might question the imperative nature of this dilemma, but the point is well taken. The problem goes deeper, however. One-party rule, the so-called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and its substitution for workingclass self-activity was more than just a difficult and reluctant choice. Even if adoption of a capitalist labour process, labour discipline and labour intensification was inevitable in the short term, the Bolshevik theorists, including Lenin, showed little awareness that this was incompatible with the construction of socialism in the long term. The question then arises as to whether other Marxist currents had a better understanding of these issues. There were various opposition currents in the young Soviet state, with varying degrees of consistency. The Left Communist leader V. V. Osinsky was, however, able to remind Lenin in the journal Kommunist of Marx’s forgotten tenet that: ‘The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself’. In a remarkable series of articles, Osinsky uttered some basic home truths which should have been familiar to all Marxists, starting from the obvious one that nationalization was not the same thing as socialism; that without democratic workers’ control, the result would be simply bureaucratic centralization; and that ‘Socialism and the socialist organization of work will either be built by the proletariat itself or it will not be built at all’ (cited in Sirianni, 1982: 149). Osinsky understood that Taylorism, the epitome of the capitalist labour process, would destroy the solidarity of the working class. He understood that labour productivity needed to rise to secure the material foundations of the socialist state, but

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accused Lenin of confusing labour productivity with labour intensity. Lenin did not really respond to this detailed critique. Within a broader context, we can point to an alternative Marxist tradition during this period which had a far more positive attitude towards workers’ self-activity. The critical views of Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek towards the Russian Revolution were encapsulated by Antonio Gramsci’s reference to it as the ‘revolution against Capital’ (Gramsci, 1977). By this he meant that, in practice, the Russian masses had carried out a revolution in defiance of the dominant evolutionary reading of Marx’s Capital. In the period following the First World War there was an upsurge of factory committees in various European countries which led to a distinctive ‘councilist’ perspective. As Carmen Sirianni argues: ‘Factory councils would be the material and organizational basis for the creation of a new consciousness, and would prepare workers technically and spiritually to run society without the bourgeoisie’ (1982: 338). That this did not materialize does not lessen the significance of this submerged communist tradition, even today. The death of the working class As the first workers’ state went into decline and settled into a cold, non-capitalist – but hardly socialist – nature, the orthodox Marxists worked hard to re-affirm fundamental tenets. The Third, or Communist, International spread this proletarian messianism to many parts of the world, including those where a proletariat, in the Marxist sense, hardly existed. In the Marxist-Leninist system, quasifaith, the proletariat was still the key actor. The path to salvation still lay through the working class and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. As in any theological system, there were many convoluted and contrived attempts to keep theory in line, to some extent, with reality. New formulations on the nature of the ‘revolutionary alliance’ and the type of revolution and post-revolutionary state abounded. Fierce debates, ideological splits and actual fighting occurred over these theological niceties, until the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in 1989. One issue seen as important was the degree of working-class participation in revolutions. After all, a socialist revolution would not be up to much if its alleged agent, the proletariat, was nowhere to be found. Thus James Petras carried out a sociological survey

marx i sm a nd workers | 85 of the major twentieth-century revolutions, seeking their workingclass component and concluded: ‘In all cases, the revolution had a socialist character because working class struggles profoundly influenced the ideas and practices of the revolutionary organization’ (1978: 40). From Russia, through China and Vietnam, through to Cuba, Petras thus detects the proletarian agent at work against all the evidence of historical studies of these revolutions. When the evidence is too incontrovertible, Petras falls back on the proletarian party ‘representing’ the interests of the actual proletarians. The problem of the working class in the socialist revolutions is ‘complex and dialectical’ (1978: 57) but the schema holds. The orthodox Marxist mechanism holds because it developed a somewhat mystical view of the working class and revolutions. Petras, for example, argued that ‘The strategic importance of the working class in the development of the revolutions we have been considering derived above all, from its qualitatively greater capacity to pose socialist goals’ (1978: 63). However, the source of this capacity is never examined, let alone confirmed. When the self-activity of the working class could not be discerned by even the most sympathetic observer, then the Party was wheeled in to ‘represent’ the proletariat. And here the Marxist tendency towards evolutionism is displayed to its fullest: The sequence leading to the revolutionary transformation begins with the formative period involving the organization and ideology of the party. This is followed by class and political struggles in which forces are accumulated, roots are put down among the masses, a mass membership is won and, finally, power is seized. (Petras, 1978: 37, emphasis added) Oh, that life was that simple …. Another debate which preoccupied Western Marxism for many years was who actually was part of the working class and deserved the Marxist seal of approval. The composition of the working class was crucial if we were to know who, precisely, would be the agent of the coming socialist revolution. The epithet of ‘petty bourgeois’ to label any deviation from the true proletarian socialism gives an indication of the depth to which this struggle for proletarian purity went. Other non-proletarians would be accepted into the struggle for democracy

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but, when the socialist phase of the revolution began, they would become our enemy. The boundaries of the working class were not just some arcane sociological dispute but were perceived as crucial to the integrity of the revolutionary project. The unitary conception of capitalism, held by orthodox Marxists, was matched by this very teleological view of class as the subject of the inexorable advance of history. A seemingly bizarre, but quite critical, debate emerged over the correct Marxist definitions of productive and unproductive labour, the latter being deemed beyond the proletarian pale. Nicos Poulantzas, before he discovered Foucault, built an elaborate framework to explain class and concluded that the working class consisted exclusively of productive, subordinated manual wageearners (Poulantzas, 1975). While productive labour produces surplus value, unproductive labour – for example state employees, service workers or administrators – is paid from this source. While Marx himself had seen entertainers and school teachers as productive when they were employed by capital, Poulantzas was more ‘Marxist’ than Marx. For him only those engaged in the production of physical commodities could be deemed productive. Leaving aside the strong moral connotations of this distinction, we must question the whole nature of a debate so reminiscent of that on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. While this debate raged in the post-1968 period, the working class itself seemed to be disappearing. A landmark event in this regard was the publication in 1980 of André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class (1982). Since the early 1960s, industrial sociologists, especially in France, had been preoccupied by the ‘dilution’ of the traditional working class and the emergence of what was being called post-industrial society. Gorz took these theoretico-political elaborations to their logical conclusion. For Gorz, the ‘crisis of socialism’, increasingly apparent from 1968 onwards, is simply a reflection of the ‘crisis of the proletariat’ of Marxist myth. He argued: ‘The disappearance of the polyvalent skilled worker – the possible subject of productive labour and hence of a revolutionary transformation of social relations – has also entailed the disappearance of the class able to take charge of the socialist project and translate it into reality’ (Gorz, 1982: 67). Working strictly within Marxist postulates, Gorz is driven into this impasse. He ends up advocating what can non-pejoratively be

ma rx i sm and workers | 87 called a ‘post-industrial utopia’ (cf. Frankel, 1987) which is quite Eurocentric and quite unrealistic. The post-industrial utopians are quite correct in their arguments that the Marxist view of the working class mirrors that of capital. Workers are, indeed, distributed in the social division of labour according to the needs of capital. Workers’ organizations, such as the trade unions, reflect the role of their members within capitalist society rather than challenge it. As Gorz puts it, ‘In its struggle with capital, the proletariat takes on the identity capital itself has given it’ (1982: 39). Demands for higher wages are a far cry from early socialist calls for the abolition of ‘wage slavery’. Yet Gorz’s new/old call for ‘the abolition of work’ seems simply an anarchist/utopian knee-jerk reaction to the degradation of work under capitalism. It does not, either, reflect the aspirations of millions worldwide seeking to enter the world of paid employment, to whom this call might appear bizarre in the extreme. What is probably beyond question is that the proletariat of Marxist myth has now left the stage, if it ever did exist anyway. Within Marxism there was much debate around the implications of the new high-tech, information-based jobs and work. For some this represented the end of work as we know it while for others these were new technologies of freedom – Marx the Luddite versus Marx the Modernist as it were. Cybernetics would lead to the new workerless factory all seemed to agree. Nick Dyer-Witheford in his Cyber-Marx (1999) carries out a nuanced analysis of these debates steering between the technophobes and the technophiles. Marxism – in all its conflictual varieties – still illuminates the nature of work in postmodern capitalism. The new capitalism has integrated a whole range of new social sites and circuits of production into the ambit. We see the final shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour by which Marx referred to a shift from capitalist ‘external’ control of a given labour process to its ‘internal’ reorganization to bring it directly under the sway of capital. In more general terms we can refer to the ever-increasing commodification of social life. New sites of contestation and new forms of agency are emerging with the same information technologies that drive the new capitalism facilitating insurgency. With the traditional working class rapidly fading in revolutionary potential, many on the left turned elsewhere to find a revolutionary subject in the post-1968 period. The ‘embourgeoisement’ of the

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traditional industrial working class led some towards the technicians/ engineers/computer specialists of late capitalism. Perhaps this was the new, anti-capitalist vanguard being forged in the white heat of technology. Others, perhaps through participant observation, saw revolutionary virtue in the student activists of 1968 and its aftermath. But by far the most far-reaching turn was towards the oppressed peoples of the Third World. If the Western working class had become soft and corrupt, the lean and hungry peasants of the Third World would encircle the cities and lead the way to the promised land. Some, however, saw even Third World workers as a ‘labour aristocracy’, bought off and reformist, and saw the untutored revolutionary zeal of the ‘marginals’ in the shanty towns as the only possible saviours of the ‘revolutionary’ project. The flourishing of post-working-class subjects prompted some on the left to call a halt to ‘the retreat from class’ (Wood, 1981). Alternative visions of the traditional Marxist view of the working class are accused of ‘strategic bankruptcy’, and Gorz, in particular, is berated for his ‘counsel of despair’ (Wood, 1981: 15). Faced with the ‘randomization of history and politics’ operated by the post-Marxists, Wood hews her way back to fundamentals. To carry on arguing that ‘the working class is potentially the revolutionary class’ is not seen as a metaphysical statement in any way, and the fact that the working class has not produced a revolutionary movement is simply brushed aside. We are just told that the working class has the most direct ‘objective interest’ in establishing socialism, and that it is the one social force with the ‘strategic social power’ to achieve this transition (Wood, 1981). The point of this narrative is to recall how common it is for thought systems to retreat into blind dogmatism when their consistency and adequacy are contested by events. If we stand back from the particulars of these debates within Marxism on the working class, we can see certain more general problems. It would seem that even some of the critics of traditional Marxism, such as Gorz, operate on the same discursive terrain as those they criticize. The search for the revolutionary subject would seem to be the problem, rather than the suitability of the candidates for this role. Furthermore, all sides of the debate on the composition of the working class seem to suffer from the problems of seeking structures, instead of conceptualizing class more productively as processes. Against the language of social ‘system’ and class ‘subjects’

marx i sm a nd workers | 89 Gibson-Graham has called for ‘the need to liberate class politics from these restrictive yet privileged scenarios …: [and] understand society as a complex disunity in which class may take multiple and diverse forms’ (1996: 58). We are now more able to conceive of capitalism as decentred and fragmented, and the processes of class as diverse, and unevenly developed. This is not a simplistic ‘beyond class’ scenario. Workers and globalization If the previous section has dissected orthodox Marxist concerns with the working class, we need now to examine some post-Marxist themes. Against all essentialisms, the post-Marxists theorists, such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, stressed the plurality of contemporary social struggles and the contingent nature of politics. They argued in the mid-1980s: What is now in crisis is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of Revolution, with a capital ‘r’, as the founding moment in the transition from one type of society to another and upon the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 2) The idea of a universal subject – the proletariat – marching towards its inexorable destiny did not withstand the critique of the poststructuralists or the events in the real world following the cataclysms of 1989. The traditional Marxist discourse on class and the working class has had a paradoxical effect. While its critics have proclaimed the ‘death of class’, the fundamentalists simply call for a halt to the ‘retreat from class’, while privately lamenting working-class demobilization. In fact, we could argue with Gibson-Graham that ‘what has died or been demobilized is the fiction of the working class and its mission that was produced as part of a hegemonic conception of industrial capitalist development’ (1996: 69). We are now much more aware of the diversity of capitalism and the plurality of social struggles. Race, gender, sexuality, religion, (dis)ability and region are all on this terrain, alongside, and integrated with, class. There is now no one locus or

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site of social transformation. Oppressions are seen to be multiple, and the sites of resistance are seen to be everywhere. The capacity for transformation is not held in the hands of a mythical proletariat – or any other single subject – but is dispersed throughout society. These are themes which, of course, the ‘new’ social movements of the 1980s – the peace, ecology and women’s movements above all – began to articulate. The transition from industrial to postindustrial society had apparently thrown up a new societal type. The old conflicts over distribution were being replaced by new concerns with identity and the qualitative transformation of society. An economic emphasis was replaced by a cultural emphasis, to put it one way. The ‘new’ social movements were seen as a response to new forms of antagonism which had emerged under late capitalism. As to the internal workings of these movements, David Slater has argued that ‘the importance given to high levels of participation in internal decision-making, the search for cooperative relations, the respect of social differences, and the socio-cultural “signification” of inter-personal relations combine to form another key constitutive element of the novelty of the new social movements’ (1984: 7). What we need to consider is to what extent these practices have spread to the more traditional labour movements. We can certainly detect in the last ten to fifteen years some signs of a ‘social movement unionism’ more attuned to the themes and moods of the ‘new’ social movements. In semi-peripheral countries, such as Brazil and South Africa, but also even in the United States, there has been a flourishing of ‘new unionism’ practices and strategies. Concerns about inner-union democratic procedures, gender equality and qualitative, rather than quantitative, strategies are now much more common. The old prevalent state-centric strategies are now much more commonly matched by an orientation towards civil society. Trade unionists are more prone to accept that the working class has two sexes and that race cannot be brushed aside with simplistic formulae. In a sense, the practice of the working class has, however unevenly and sporadically, outstripped the preconceptions of its self-appointed ‘representatives’ within Marxist orthodoxy. If one factor can be said to have disrupted the traditional Marxist views of class, that would be gender. In an influential article, Heidi Hartmann argued:

ma rx i sm and workers | 91 the categories of Marxist analysis, ‘class’, ‘reserve army of labour’, ‘wage-labourer’, do not explain why particular people fill particular places. They give us no clue as to why women are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is not the other way round. Marxist categories, like capital, are sexblind. (Hartmann, 1986: 8) Once the floodgates of criticism were opened in this way, there were few areas of Marxist enquiry, like the social sciences and humanities generally, which remained immune to feminist subversion. Our understanding of the formation of the working class, patriarchy at work, the labour process and engendered citizenship were all transformed. It was no longer possible to forget, as Ros Baxandall and co-authors forcefully reminded Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), that: ‘the working class has two sexes’ (Baxandall et al., 1976). Yet even when Marxism began to engage the feminist critique, it often did this in a partial or distorted manner. One example of this problem was the so-called domestic-labour debate on which Marxists expended considerable energies in the 1980s. This was an attempt to situate women’s domestic labour within the capitalist realm and to categorize it within Marxist terminology. Its focus was not the oppression of women, but the precise role of domestic labour under capitalism. The type of question which prevailed was whether domestic labour was productive, unproductive or non-productive of surplus value. To have women’s domestic labour recognized as work was undoubtedly a step forward, but to then wonder whether this was strictly productive or not was a step backwards. Marxism, even when it tried, tended to remain trapped within a productivist logic. Class was still reduced to production (albeit in ‘the last instance’) and forms of consciousness and action arising outside production relations were barely perceived. In more recent years, it has been the theme of globalization which has most impacted the critical study of the working classes. Marx himself, in the Grundrisse notebooks, had some brilliant intuitions on this process: The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome … In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond

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national barriers and prejudices … It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production. (Marx, 1973: 408–10) In recent decades economic relations, among others, have progressed from an international dimension to a truly global one. It is a process of integration which is having far-reaching effects on the world of work. Capital has, as Marx foresaw, brushed aside any national boundaries which stood in its way. Capitalism has penetrated (the word is used advisedly) into all spheres of economic, cultural and social life across the globe. In the new ‘global factories’ workers have become mere commodities once again. The nationstatist terrain of struggle gives diminishing returns in an era where the survival of the nation-state is considered to be in question. Hand in hand with globalization, capital has been leaping into a new technological era dominated by information (see Castells, 1996) and knowledge. This has led to a historical redefinition of the relationship between labour and capital to the advantage of the latter. The gradual dispersal of the traditional working class was accentuated as capital gained in flexibility and the power of adaptability. Labour and its organizations were characterized, on the other hand, by rigidity and, on the whole by a failure to adapt to the new order. As Manuel Castells notes: Labour unions, the main obstacle to one-sided restructuring strategy, were weakened by their unadaptability to representing new kinds of workers (women, youth, immigrants), to acting in new work places (private sector offices, high-technology industries), and to functioning in the new forms of organisation (the network enterprise on a global scale). (Castells, 1996: 278) It would seem that the lessons of the ‘new’ social movements were learnt too late or that the dead hand of inertia and orthodoxy prevailed. There have been various responses from Marxists, and radicals generally, to these trends. One tendency is simply to bemoan the uneven playing field between the ‘footloose and fancy

ma rx i sm and workers | 93 free’ transnational corporations and labour. Another line of thought preaches doom and gloom about a ‘jobless future’ (Aronowitz and Di Fazio, 1994), against the available evidence. Yet there is also a sign that a new poststructuralist understanding of work and workers is emerging. Catherine Casey, for example, has argued for a new conception of the ‘decentred workplace’ created through the ability of the new information technologies to disperse work across national boundaries (1996: 195). Furthermore, she argues that advanced information technology and the ensuing reorganization of work ‘are decentering the workplace in even more complex ways’, as where we work is becoming a more diffuse site compared to the office block or the manufacturing plant which prevailed until the 1980s (1996: 195). The new decentred workplace also has its internal effects within the enterprise as network begins to prevail over hierarchy. If we now perceive of class as decentred, it does not necessarily spell the end of class as a passé modernist phenomenon. Denying privileged agency to the proletariat (however we are to define it) does not mean turning our backs on workers’ struggles. We do need to recognize that the militant particularism of this or that struggle is not synonymous with socialism. We do need to understand that class is not only constructed in the workplace and has a crucial cultural component. We also need to address constantly the divisions between workers of the industrialized North and the poor South, between women and men, and the running sore of racism in all its guises. But we also need to recognize that globalization has produced a new working class in the South which may yet play a major political role. In recent years the labour movement in most parts of the world has begun to recover from the impact of neoliberalism and its unregulated market approach. This has occurred at peak level with the formation of a unified trade union confederation as a result of the end of the Cold War. The old International Trade Secretariats also became energized as the new World Councils which organize internationally across a given sector. At a national level there has been a certain resurgence by trade unions in some regions such as in Latin America, while in the US there was a marked political radicalization at peak level. The growing literature on trade union revitalization has found evidence transnationally of advances in key areas of activity such as the organizing of new sectors of workers, greater political activity,

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the reform of trade union structure, building of coalitions and, not least, an increase in international solidarity activity (Frege and Kelly, 2004). We could argue that we are at the start of a phase when trade unionism will yet again be reconfigured and revitalized to meet the new conditions it faces. Labour has always been slow to adapt to capital’s mutations and crises. That there has been a time lag of twenty-five years between the neoliberal capitalist offensive and labour’s recomposition is hardly surprising and fits the pattern of nineteenth- and twentieth-century waves of labour disintegration and recomposition (Arrighi, 1996: 348). This cyclical nature of labour–capital relations seems to have been ignored by analysts circa 2000 who perhaps reflected the mood at the time that US capitalism had really broken the cyclical nature of capitalism. Thus Castells argued that, ‘The labour movement seems to be historically superseded’ (1997: 425) because while capital is global, labour is local: ‘labour is disaggregated in its performance, fragmented in its organization, diversified in its existence, divided in its collective action’ (Castells, 1996: 475). While some of these points were conjuncturally correct at the time its overall analysis ignored the basic fact that labour is a social movement. A more long-term view of the last century would show that trade unions have not only endured but that they have also been ‘making society more democratic, more respectful of the poor, moving human rights above the claims of capitalist property’ (Friedman, 2008: 10). That is no mean achievement given the brutality of the neoliberal counter-revolution. We need to understand the critical importance of the re-making of the working class on a global scale over the last thirty years or so. The dynamic (yet destructive) nature of this system is evident not least in the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as vibrant centres of capital expansion and accumulation in a ‘classical’ mode. New working classes are being forged in these regimes and the future of class struggle will depend largely on their outcome. What we need to add, however, to this classic Marxist perspective is an understanding of how ‘primitive accumulation’ continues to operate through ‘accumulation through dispossession’, a ‘Third-Worldist’ perspective articulated before its time by Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin and the other orthodox Marxists of her day.

marx i sm a nd workers | 95 References Anweiler, O. (1974) The Soviets, New York: Simon & Schuster. Aronowitz, F. and Di Fazio, W. (1994) The Jobless Future, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arrighi, G. (1996) ‘Workers of the World at Century’s End’, Review, 19(3). Balibar, E. (1995) The Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso. Baxandall, R., Ewen, E. and Gordon, L. (1976) ‘The Working Class Has Two Sexes’, Monthly Review, 28(3). Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press. Casey, C. (1996) Work, Self and Society after Industrialism, London: Routledge. Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I: The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II: The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Cohen, G. A. (1978) Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Oxford: Clarendon. Daniels, R. (1969) The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, New York: Simon & Schuster. Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Frankel, B. (1987) The Post-industrial Utopians, Cambridge: Polity. Frege, C. and Kelly, J. (2004) ‘Union Strategies in Comparative Context’, in C. Frege and J. Kelly (eds), Varieties of Unionism: Strategies for Union Revitalization in a Globalizing Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Friedman, G. (2008) Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring Means to Ends in a Democratic Labor Movement, London and New York: Routledge. Furedi, F. (1986) The Soviet Union Demystified: A Materialist Analysis, London: Junius. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell. Gilbert, A. (1981) Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Oxford: Martin Robertson. Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Lost Industrial Socialism, London: Pluto. Gramsci, A. (1977) ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’, in A. Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920), London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hartmann, H. (1986) ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in L. Sargent (ed.), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, London: Pluto. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Lenin, V. I. (1970) ‘Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, in Selected Works in Three Volumes, Vol. 2, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) ‘The German Ideology’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in K. Marx,

96 | fo u r The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Petras, J. (1978) ‘Socialist Revolutions and Their Class Components’, New Left Review, I/111. Poulantzas, N. (1975) Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: New Left Books. Sirianni, C. (1982) Workers’ Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience, London: Verso. Slater, D. (1984) ‘Social Movements and a Recasting of the Political’, in D. Slater (ed.), New Social Movements

and the State in Latin America, Amsterdam: CEDLA. Smith, S. A. (1983) Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stedman Jones, G. (1983) Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1970) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wood, E. M. (1981) The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism, London: Verso.

5 | U N H AP P Y M A R R I A G E : M A R X I S M A N D W OM E N

It is probably not coincidental that when the ‘crisis of Marxism’ was noted in the 1970s, feminism was increasing in theoretical stature and political influence. While Marxism tried to incorporate, even domesticate women under the ‘woman question’ label, feminism was setting its own agenda. This chapter examines the attempted ‘marriage’ between socialism and feminism after a brief retrospective of the ‘classic’ engagement with women. Socialist feminism proved not to be a sturdy hybrid, as both partners came under scrutiny by postmodernism in the 1980s. There is thus a case for a new postmodern feminism as a radical vehicle for women (and men too, perhaps). Classical Marxism is not the only androcentric mode of thought but its male-centredness in so many aspects, as we shall examine, would probably be enough to disqualify it as an adequate guide and programme for the construction of a new society. One aspect of this chapter which distinguishes it from the others is that for once Karl Marx is the silent partner and it is Friedrich Engels who comes to the fore in an early ‘Marxist’ engagement with gender. The extent to which this was successful is still debated by Marxologists and feminists. Engels and the family There have been attempts to find in Marx’s mature works an adequate basis for a materialist understanding of the position of women under capitalism (see Vogel, 1983), but on the whole it is recognized that Marx delegated ‘gender’ (along with religion, science, war and other ‘non-central’ topics) to his colleague Engels. As Michèle Barrett notes in a volume commemorating the centenary of Marx’s death in 1983, ‘his treatment of the issue [gender] is now widely regarded as scattered, scanty and unsatisfactory’ (1983: 199). Nor can Marx, in all honesty, be ‘excused’ by the political culture of the era, which was hardly that ‘pre-feminist’. It would even be doing Marx a disservice to see him as a simple product of his time, when his analytical vigour was so evident in other areas where he stripped

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away the naturalistic illusions of bourgeois common sense. At a much later, stage the categories developed by Marx in his analysis of capitalist society would be deployed by the socialist feminist current in seeking to articulate a coherent Marxist understanding of gender relations under capitalism. For the time being, we need to examine what Engels – factory owner, slightly unconventional, personally more ‘liberal’ than Marx – had to say on gender in his famous Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels, 1990). Women are approached via the family in this foundational text. Written in 1884, The Origin became a more or less instant classic and was accorded, in the socialist tradition, the status of definitive treatment of the family and, hence, the ‘woman question’. Essentially, what Engels was seeking to theorize was the relationship between the division of society into classes (and the emergence of the state) and the subordination of women to men. His main empirical anthropological source was Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society, published in 1877. One of the formulations used by Engels was later to spawn a whole area of Marxist debate: ‘According to the materialist conception, the determining factor of history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life’ (Engels, 1990: 131). Hailed as an insight by many contemporary socialists and feminists, it directed attention to the social and material aspects of reproduction of society, usually neglected by productivist narratives. However, it still takes as a given that the domain of reproduction is a female one, counterposed to a male realm of production. Not only does this perpetuate androcentric categories and ways of thinking, but it also inaugurates a long tradition of dualist thinking in this regard. Moira Maconachie is understated in arguing that: ‘This conceptual dualism which separates the family from social production and which confines women to the sphere of domesticity is not especially useful to feminism’ (1987: 107). History and social change is seen to spring from the ‘male’ sphere of production. It flows logically from this conception that Engels would see the liberation of women coming from their increased entry into the sphere of production. For Engels: to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labour and restricted to private domestic

marx i sm and women | 99 labour. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. (Engels, 1990: 262) Not only does this statement suffer from a crude productivist logic – why should factory work liberate anyone from anything? – but it also operates with the gendered assumption that women ‘naturally’ take responsibility for domestic labour. Nor is there any location of this process in terms of the division of society into social classes. In the state socialist societies which emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917 this confident assertion by Engels was repeated ad nauseam to justify their productivist logic and their failure to address the emancipation of women in a meaningful way. The ultimate expression of this wilful blind spot was articulated by a Yugoslav official in the 1970s, for whom: ‘Marxists have ascertained that the causes of the unequal position of women do not lie in their oppression by men … Hence the only way to achieve the emancipation of women … is by pursuing … the road to revolutionary struggle’ (quoted in Molyneux, 1981: 177). In terms of his anthropological account, derived largely from Morgan, Engels sees the shift to the patrilineal clan system as a turning point in gender relations. It was to create the conditions for the emergence of private property and the development of class society. As to gender relations, for Engels, ‘the overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman as degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children’ (1990: 165). Descent by the female line and the supremacy of women in the communal household is the status quo ante according to Engels, but this is by no mean uncontroversial. The myth of ‘man the hunter’ has been largely discredited. Basically, Engels held a naturalistic view of gender relations and assumed women’s responsibilities regarding home and family. The above account further subordinates an account of women’s role to the broader story of how families were seen to have evolved by contemporary anthropology. It also tied gender inequality to the development of antagonistic class societies seen as the sole ‘material’ basis for women’s subordination. For Engels,

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‘The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear in itself’ (1990: 181). If we accept that Engels at least paid serious attention to gender, unlike Marx, there are still serious limitations to The Origin, even as a preliminary sketch of an area of enquiry. We have already mentioned the productivist bias in Engel’s account of the development of capitalist society. It suffers, furthermore, from the economic determinism which is undoubtedly partly, but not the sole, legacy of Marx (see Chapter 1). There is also a strong naturalistic strain in the account Engels gives of the sexual division of labour. While this undoubtedly has a technical (‘material’) side which Engels examines, he seems oblivious to the hierarchical gender relations constructed socially around the sexual division of labour. As Maconachie puts it: ‘Naturalizing women’s domestic relationship to men blinds us to the strategic possibilities of any interchangeability of tasks between men and women, so making current domestic practices appear particularly immutable’ (1987: 11–12). For pre-capitalist societies Engels ignores, more or less, the role of women outside the domestic sphere. Nor does he explain how the emergence of a specific sphere of social activity related to the reproduction of labour power (childrearing, socialization, feeding, clothing and so on) is related to the emergence of capitalist society. The feminist critique of Engels’ Origins is quite fundamental: it is highly economistic and does not grasp the importance of patriarchy in organizing the relation between men and women in a similar way to which capitalism orders the capitalist and worker relations. To develop an understanding of the oppression of women solely from the development of private property is quite reductive and does not acknowledge the importance of wider social and cultural relations shaping gender relations. To posit, as Engels does, that the liberation of women can only occur under a classless society could be justifiably reversed so that an end to the oppression of women is a pre-condition for social transformation. Nevertheless Carol Gould has argued for the continued relevance of Engels: ‘his account of the basis and development of the subordination of women is not biologistic [and] he regards oppression and to some degree even gender as socially and historically constituted or constructed’ (1999: 258). Engels was not producing a universalistic story based on the

marx i sm and women | 101 ‘innate difference’ between the sexes and understood fully their variability and complexity. Taking a broader look at Engels and Marx’s treatment of gender issues, we can usefully focus on two issues, namely the family and wage labour. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels developed a conception of the family as rooted in the social division of labour. This division of labour, for the founding fathers of Marxism, ‘was originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 44). From this arises the supposedly ‘natural’ division of labour in society as simply an extension of this ‘natural’ division of labour within the family. However, increased needs create new social relations and the family was becoming subordinate to the emerging capitalist system. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels also go on to make the general theoretical claim that ‘the production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation’ (1976: 43). What is significant in the present context is that this strong dualism posited between the natural and the social was explicitly overcome in Marx’s own mature works such as Capital, but Engels chose to reproduce it nearly verbatim when dealing with gender relations in The Origin. Where The German Ideology retained its utopian, even feminist, edge was in relation to the future of the family. In an admittedly fleeting passage, Marx and Engels declare that in communist society ‘the supersession of individual economy is inseparable from the supersession of the family’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 76). However, in The Origin Engels tends to extoll the virtues of the proletarian family to an unwarranted extent. While for the bourgeoisie marriage is a matter of convenience, and Engels is eloquent on the various double standards, for the proletariat ‘all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective’ (Engels, 1990: 179). Among the working class, for Engels, ‘personal and social conditions’ decide and ‘individual sex love’ is paramount. This idealized view of the working-class family is not even excusable for a man in Engels’ position, as he would have been well aware of contemporary denunciations of domestic violence, for example. On this issue he somewhat tamely referred to it as ‘a

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leftover piece of the brutality towards women that has become deeprooted since the introduction of monogamy’ (1990: 181). State socialist societies would later excuse the subordination of women as an unfortunate ‘leftover’ of capitalism. On the question of wage labour, to put it bluntly, Marx simply assumed that the wage labourer was a male. Scattered throughout Marx’s Capital are many references to women workers and their conditions. Marx focused particularly on the impact of the introduction of machinery, which allowed the capitalist to shift towards the employment of ‘cheap labour’ such as women, children and the unskilled. Some of the most eloquent pages of Capital deal with the social degradation of women workers, for whom Marx continually called for better ‘protection’. However, the focus was always the ‘modal’ male worker, with Marx typically denouncing how: ‘By the excessive [sic] addition of women and children to the ranks of the workers, machinery at last breaks down the resistance which the male operatives in the manufacturing period continued to oppose to the despotism of capital’ (Marx, 1976: 526). So, not only is the male worker centred in Marx’s account, but he sounds quite unjustifiably (given contemporary knowledge of the subject) shocked by the number of female workers being employed in industry. Again, Marx succumbs to ‘common sense’ notions and perceptions where, in relation to other topics, he would have sought to deconstruct received wisdom. This is also typical of later Marxist use of genderblind categories that tacitly accept the precepts of a sexist society. Central to Marx and Engels’ attitude towards gender relations at work is the notion of the ‘family wage’, whereby male workers are seen to receive a wage sufficient to sustain a family. In the context of discussing how the introduction of machinery brought ‘under the direct sway of capital, every member of the workman’s family, without distinction of age or sex’ (Marx, 1976: 517), Marx went on to describe how this ‘spreads the value of the man’s labourpower over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour-power’ (1976: 518). Marx had simply assumed that the male breadwinner had earned enough to sustain a family until women and children fell under the sway of capital. He also simply assumed that this would depreciate male wages, a conception which lay behind many subsequent struggles over ‘dilution’. The issue of the ‘family wage’ – more discourse than reality in practice – is a symptom of one of the

ma rx i sm and women | 103 deepest divisions in the labour movement. Socialist historians and trade unionists have, on the whole, portrayed the world of work in a way which simply assumed it to be a male domain. Women workers were, and were conceived rightly to be, part of the ‘reserve army of labour’ to be called into service and dismissed back to the home when their services were no longer required. I believe, finally, that the most serious political critique of Marx and Engels in relation to gender is that they took at face value the tenets of liberal feminism. Here was a form of bourgeois liberal ideology which simply went unchallenged by the founders of Marxism. Why was this, when they had offered such a sharp critique, for example, of Dühring’s ‘ethical socialism’, based on vague notions of truth and justice? As Barrett puts it: ‘Neither Marx nor Engels saw fit to attempt to rebut the classic statements in favour of women’s rights: Wollstonecraft and Mill remain unanswered where similarly egalitarian and liberal arguments on other topics are dispatched with vigour’ (1983: 201). So it is not that Marx and Engels were ‘pre-feminist’, but that they failed to see how the cause of socialism and the cause of women’s rights might come together or point in the same direction towards a better society. To this day Engels’ The Origin stands as both a solid contribution to a materialist understanding of gender – witness its influence on the active school of Marxist anthropology – and a symbol of its limitations. This text continues to be important, paradoxically, as Ros Coward says, in revealing ‘the political theory by which the woman question became such a problematic area in Marxism while at the same time being absolutely central to it’ (1983: 141). Socialists and feminism After the ambiguous engagement by Engels and Marx with questions of gender, the international socialist movement sought to establish a more organic relationship with the ‘woman question’. A crucial landmark was the 1878 text Woman and Socialism by a contemporary of Engels, the German Social Democratic leader, August Bebel. Its core was analysis of the oppression of women under capitalism, which Bebel related to the penetration of the cash nexus into all areas of social life. While advocating equal rights for the sexes, Bebel believed they were fundamentally different, with women needing protection, especially from work which would threaten their femininity. As with other socialist thinkers, Bebel believed that under capitalism only

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palliatives were possible and that only after the socialist revolution would women’s liberation be possible. Although dubious in terms of its Marxist pedigree (Engels did not seem to have been too impressed) Woman and Socialism had an incredible impact on the European socialist movement, becoming a bestseller in Germany and being a major influence on subsequent socialist feminist pioneers such as Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai. It probably showed again how important the ‘woman question’ was to socialism even when it had immense problems in accepting feminism in any meaningful sense. Clara Zetkin was to become the undisputed leader of the socialist women’s movement in Germany at the turn of the century and a major influence on the European and Russian scenes. Her personal history made her as much a feminist as a socialist. She followed Engels in advocating economic independence for women as a precondition for emancipation, but began to recognize that this was not a sufficient condition on its own. Influenced by current feminist writings, Zetkin developed a dialectical view of women’s condition where class and gender both played a full role. While continuously stressing that her role in organizing working-class women was not in competition with the male socialist leaders, in practice she knew chauvinism was alive and well in those quarters. Thus, while attacking ‘bourgeois feminism’ and refusing common platforms on suffrage issues, for example, Zetkin began to move towards the concept of an autonomous women’s movement in practice. The German Social Democratic Party’s women’s movement had 175,000 members when the First World War broke out in 1914, they had unionized some 215,000 women workers and Zetkin’s magazine Die Gleichheit (Equality) had a circulation of around 125,000 subscribers. In Zetkin’s view, autonomy for socialist women within the party was essential to stimulate initiative and maximize the potential of the women involved. Taking advantage of laws that forbade mixed-sex political gatherings for a time, Zetkin developed a feminist agenda within the socialist movement. When a change in the law in 1908 allowed women to organize politically with men, the party leaders moved rapidly to dissolve separate women’s organizations within their ranks. In return one seat on the party executive was to go to a woman – but that was not to be Clara Zetkin. She still retained a loyalty to the party that blinded her to the conscious move to nip radicalism and separatism in the bud. As Karen Honeycut puts it,

ma rx i sm and women | 105 there was a deliberate strategy by the party leadership ‘who as males, as Marxists and as bureaucrats committed to revisionist tactics and organizational uniformity, opposed autonomy for socialist women’ (1981: 41). Clara Zetkin goes down in history as the woman who not only created and led the Socialist Women’s International but also took the initiative in establishing International Women’s Day in 1907, a symbolic confluence of the socialist and feminist movements which is still having an impact today. After the First World War, the centre of gravity of the international socialist movement shifted to Russia, where the revolution was brewing. In 1900, Nadezhda Krupskaya published The Woman Worker, drawing largely on Bebel and Zetkin but enormously influential as, for a long time, the only Russian text on the ‘woman question’. Krupskaya did give much more attention to peasant women than the two German writers had, and helped focus the attention of the Russian social democrats on the question. Lenin, himself, wrote more than most male Bolsheviks on the ‘woman question’ but he tended to just follow a basic line. For Lenin: The female half of the human race is doubly oppressed under capitalism. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly – and this is the main thing – they remain in ‘household bondage’, they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid and backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the individual family household. (Lenin, 1966: 83–4) As an individual rather than as theorist, however, Lenin is perhaps best known for his frank personal conservatism in sexual matters as expressed in conversations with Clara Zetkin. Alexandra Kollontai was, undoubtedly, the leading Bolshevik who engaged with the ‘woman question’. Yet she did not call herself a feminist and much of her early political work was in vociferous opposition to the feminists. During the First World War, feminism in Russia had grown significantly, with women’s movements springing up everywhere. The Bolshevik women’s group was, in contrast, defunct

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at this stage. So, when the (first) Russian Revolution began on 23 February, International Women’s Day, it was not the Bolsheviks who were to the fore. The feminist movement lost no time in pursuing the question of universal suffrage with the provisional government. Kollontai was scathing about these ‘upper-class ladies’ who sought suffrage rights from bourgeois governments. She would attend feminist meetings to rail against ‘bourgeois feminism’ and to urge the women attending to focus on the war and on class exploitation. Shortly after the October Revolution the First Conference of Working Women of the Petrograd Region was held. At this, Kollontai urged women to vote for the Bolshevik list for the Constituent Assembly and not for the candidates of the feminist League for Women’s Equality. A feminist delegate showed the distance between feminist and Bolshevism in declaring that: ‘Everywhere women are subjected; everywhere they struggle for their rights … Men cannot defend our interests; they do not understand us’ (quoted in Stites, 1978: 306–7). In the new government, Kollontai went on to become Commissar for Social Welfare, her priority being the achievement of full independence and equality within marriage. Under Kollontai, equal pay for women was instituted, abortion was legalized and illegitimacy disappeared as a legal category. Many of these gains were, of course, to be reversed under Stalin’s regime. But in the 1920s, the cause of women was advanced vigorously by Zhenotdel (Women’s Section or Department), led first by Inessa Armand and, after 1920, by Kollontai. The latter told Emma Goldman that the work of Zhenotdel, in relation to raising the consciousness of women and addressing gender-specific issues such as maternity care, was not ‘feminism’ (Stites, 1978: 332). In reality her work with women, especially in the East – where hundreds of women were killed because the patriarchal society would not accept their new status as equals – is nothing if not feminist. Certainly, Kollontai did not stop at political emancipation (if that can be taken as ‘feminism’) and it was her leading role in the radical Workers’ Opposition which soon saw her removed from the head of Zhenotdel and sent, eventually, to diplomatic exile in Norway. Her removal was a bitter blow to the women’s and socialist movements in Russia. Where Kollontai really drew her distance from the male Marxists of her day, and can be seen as a bridge to the 1960s, is in relation to sexual politics. The normally restrained E. H. Carr declared

ma rx i sm and women | 107 that Kollontai ‘preached the uninhibited satisfaction of the sexual impulse, supported by the assumption that it was the business of the state to take care of the consequences’ (1970: 41). Indeed, her theories and personal example were seen as the main causes of the ‘sexual excesses’ or ‘new morality’ of the 1920s. The truth is more prosaic. Kollontai believed in the sacred function of motherhood, saw marriage as a free union which was impossible under capitalism, and saw that under communism ‘Eros will occupy a worthy place and be a source of emotional experience and of ever increasing happiness’ (cited in Stites, 1978: 353). This is hardly a libertine manifesto. However, it was sufficient for Aron Zalkind, founder of the Society of Marxist Psychoneurologists, to develop a countertheory of ‘socialist sexuality’ which boiled down to sex and love being akin to fixed capital which should be involved in ‘class’ activities and not squandered frivolously. As in the cultural domain (see Chapter 6) the rolling back of the Russian Revolution involved considerable psycho-sexual repression, sublimation and domination. Kollontai, for her part, signalled a new area of Marxist enquiry, to be taken up by Wilhelm Reich and others some time later. If we now take a broader look at the policies of state socialist societies in regard to the oppression of women, the record is, at best, ambiguous. The context was not usually favourable, as virtually all these societies were characterized by material scarcity and external aggression or internal conflict. Yet there is no doubt that at least formal gender equality was high on the agenda of most socialist states and, due to the productivist bias of Marxism and the needs of development, women were brought into the workforce in large numbers. Lenin was not totally deluded when he declared that the Russian Revolution led the world in according equal rights to women and in doing away with traditional patriarchal barriers to their advancement. Yet the sexual division of labour continued to prevail. Economic independence has not secured and cannot secure women’s emancipation. For this to be achieved, as Maxine Molyneux puts it, ‘the complex combination of mechanisms, non-economic as well as economic, through which women’s subordination is mediated must form the object of a specific struggle’ (1981: 179). Only a reductionist form of economism could see oppression being derived solely from economic, or even only class, factors. Thus the legacy of a mechanical Marxism thwarted the cause of women’s liberation.

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Another legacy of state socialism was the Leninist model of party organization, endowed with quasi-mystical revolutionary virtues. The hard professional revolutionaries who stressed leadership, sacrifice and a knowing vision were, invariably, male. More to the point, this can be seen as an inherently male form of organization. The Leninist language of power politics is hardly reflective, it certainly does not favour any consideration of the personal. For all the talk about proletarian democracy’s superiority over mere bourgeois democracy, the Leninist party is no school for democracy. This party model also operates with a rigid (if variable) hierarchy of activities from the political (state power), to the economic (the workplace), to the social (the family), to the community (housing, for example), to the cultural and other assorted lowpriority issues. What feminism did (does) was bring prefigurative politics back to the fore; the form of organizing for socialism is as important as the objective. As Sheila Rowbotham puts it: ‘The recognition, which was present within pre-Leninist radical movements, of the importance of making values and culture which could sustain the spirit and help move our feelings towards the future, has been reasserted by the women’s movement’ (1979: 128). In conclusion, the socialist engagement with feminism after Marx and Engels was not always a fruitful one. Most socialists clung to the notion that engagement with paid work was the path to women’s liberation, a goal that was, anyway, subordinated to the socialist revolution as they saw it. Socialists and feminists were often competing for the same political constituency and this accounts for much of the antagonism between these currents. Socialists would certainly seek to co-opt the politics of feminism and, sometimes (but not always) became enthusiastic supporters of universal suffrage. Socialist women often had to mask their feminism and make continuous declarations of faith to the party male-stream. When all the context is allowed for, most socialist organizations remained deeply patriarchal movements. As Richard Stites writes in relation to the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: Male workers continued to resent the competition of females, and would do so long after the Revolution. Male leaders of the various Marxist factions had little interest in organizing women. Some opposed it as a waste of time, energy, and funds; others as smacking too much of mere feminism – a movement that was held in contempt by every self-respecting socialist, man or woman. (1978: 257)

ma rx i sm and women | 109 It would be fifty years before a rapprochement between the socialist and feminist discourses would occur. Socialist feminism When the great ‘second wave’ of feminism surged forward in the 1960s, alongside liberal and radical feminisms was socialist (sometimes Marxist) feminism. It seemed at first rather bereft of counter-arguments to radical feminism’s claim that Marxism was, at least, gender-blind. Dusty texts by Engels, Bebel and Lenin, and the forgotten lives of Zetkin and Kollontai, could hardly compete with the drive and originality of the Germaine Greers and Shulamith Firestones. Yet a socialist feminist political theory and practice was gradually constructed. It was in this context that the ‘marriage’ between Marxism and feminism (referred to in the title of this chapter) emerged as a possible strategy. Marxism was usually the lead partner, as in Juliet Mitchell’s drive in Woman’s Estate to ‘ask the feminist questions but try to come up with some Marxist answers’ (1971: 99). How successful these Marxist answers were is now open to question. Furthermore, the whole proposal that feminism should melt into socialism also seems misconceived. However, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s these socialist feminist debates advanced our knowledge of gender oppression considerably. What Engels bequeathed to the modern socialist feminists was, above all, a view of capitalism and patriarchy, or class and gender, as autonomous systems. This is the ‘dual systems’ approach which runs through much of the socialist feminist discourse. There is an underlying assumption that capitalism creates the slots in the hierarchy of classes and workers, but it is gender (and race) which establishes who will fill these slots. The concept of patriarchy enters as a trans-historical and geographically universal construct to explain the domination of women by men. In some variants of this theory, capitalism is deemed dominant in the ‘material’ world, while patriarchy is seen as dominant ideologically. This would be the case for Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), where Marxism appears as the explanation for class and psychoanalysis becomes the theory for the analysis of patriarchy. Another variant is Christine Delphy’s view that there are two modes of production in contemporary society: ‘The first mode of production gives rise to capitalist exploitation. The second gives rise to familiar, or

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more precisely, patriarchal exploitation’ (1984: 69). All forms of dual systems theory are, to my mind, examples of Derrida’s binary oppositions, they reproduce hierarchies, and they fail to contest the capitalo-centric logic of Marxism, its productivist bias and its essential economism. By the mid-1980s the critique of the dual systems approach had gained ground to such an extent that it was largely abandoned. As Barbara Marshall says: ‘There appears to be general agreement that analytically separating the ideological and the material is fruitless, and that capitalism and patriarchy are so interwoven as to be one and the same system’ (1994: 84). One of the writers who developed the conception of a unified ‘capitalist patriarchy’ was Zillah Eisenstein, for whom capitalism and patriarchy are so interwoven as to make their analytical separation impracticable. Engels, we recall, brought patriarchy (‘the world historic defeat of women’) into the Marxian system to account for gender oppression. Now it was being integrated with capitalist logic because, for Eisenstein: ‘Capitalism uses patriarchy and patriarchy is defined by the needs of capital’ (1979: 28). The concept of patriarchy itself had become deeply problematic by this stage. There was little agreement on its origins, its meaning and its effect. Nor was it clear whether it was independent from capitalism, interdependent in some ill-defined, perhaps symbiotic way, or simply a dependent functional variable of the ‘needs’ of capital. The legacy of Marx himself on the question of gender was equally ambiguous because his actual writings on it were sparse, but he did leave us the concept of ‘reproduction’, which was to play a key role in the development of the socialist feminist approach. The problematic of social reproduction to some extent overcame the economism of productivist Marxism. There was now a dynamic, processual aspect to the Marxist story of capitalist development. Gender could be integrated into this story and social reproduction could embrace sexual as much as class aspects. Gendered relations of domination and subordination could now be seen as integral to the reproduction of capitalist society. Yet there was a conceptual confusion at the heart of this new problematic because, as Edelholm, Harris and Young (1977) showed, it could mean social reproduction proper (that is, of the relations of production); reproduction of the labour force (the domestic economy and socialization coming in here); and

marx i sm and women | 111 the biological aspects of human reproduction. Women were involved in all three aspects of reproduction but there was a strange conflation of women’s biological and social roles. Nor do we get any convincing explanation as to why women play the key roles that they do in reproduction, with the biological aspect always hovering around unmentioned. In the reproduction of capitalist society, ideology is seen to have a crucial role. Socialist feminists correctly drew their distance from the economistic recipe of Engels that women’s liberation depended on their entering the paid labour market. The oppression of women was deeper-rooted than this and was seen to have strong ideological roots. So, as Marxists gradually began to recognize that ideology was relatively independent (see Chapter 6), feminists saw that it was possible ‘to accommodate the oppression of women as a relatively autonomous element of the social formation’ (Barrett, 1980: 31). A whole new area of critical feminist research opened up, focusing on the gendered construction of identities, the nature of familial ideologies and the submerged issues of feminine and masculine subjectivities. From this cultural turn came a much deeper understanding of the discursive construction of gender and, indeed, of feminism as a discursive movement. For this work to advance it was also, however, necessary to abandon Marxism as an overarching framework because of its debilitating restriction by the base/superstructure division and its granting of, at best, ‘relative autonomy’ to the ideological and cultural domains. This was another way in which socialist feminism created the conditions for the surpassing of orthodox Marxism. As the understanding of capitalism’s gendered reproduction advanced, attention naturally turned and focused on the domestic economy, of which the ‘domestic labour debate’ was one result. If capitalism needed to reproduce its labour force, women could ‘fit in’ here, structurally as it were, because they bore, fed, clothed, educated, nursed and nurtured the workers the system needed. Domestic labour, which had previously been unseen, was now foregrounded. From being valorized politically or culturally, it was a short step to discuss the value of housework in terms of Marxist economic categories. A long and convoluted digression followed, on whether domestic labour could be considered productive in the Marxist sense of producing surplus value, or whether it was ‘merely’ unproductive labour. In retrospect, there was a quite unnecessary

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struggle to establish an orthodox Marxist economic pedigree for women’s oppression and value to capitalism. Even Lise Vogel, who remains committed to a Marxist-feminist synthesis, admits that ‘many in the women’s movement regarded the debate (on domestic labour) as an obscure exercise in Marxist pedantry’ (1983: 21). It was hard to see how the domestic labour debate could advance either an understanding of women’s oppression (beyond making their domestic labour visible) or contribute to a strategy for overcoming it. One strategy advanced in this regard was the famous ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign. From this perspective, as Valerie Bryson puts it, ‘women should not enter the paid workforce as earlier Marxist analysis had suggested but they should demand that housework itself be paid for’ (1992: 238). It would be easy to take up this analysis for its practicality but this would not invalidate it as a ‘transitional’ political programme. It could also be said that it simply perpetuates the domestic drudgery of women, seeking only to normalize it through a wage. However, like ecofeminism, it could also be seen as an imaginative way of putting the capitalist state on the spot. It makes plainly visible to all, the undervalued contribution of women to the continuance of human society. It also challenges the assumption that women have perhaps some innate affinity with domestic labour (like the ‘nimble fingers’ supposedly characteristic of female electronics operatives) by demanding a crude cash nexus. In realistic terms, the notion of ‘Wages for Housework’ also exposes the limitations of the type of female employment opportunities actually available to women. That Marxist categories are subverted in this rhetorical strategy would probably not be a problem for Marx himself. In all these convoluted debates on the relationship between gender and class oppressions, there was the underlying issue of Marxism’s relationship with feminism. Socialist women obviously wanted to see some kind of rapprochement or, at least, friendly interaction. Marxism would help us understand the historical development of capitalism, and feminism would provide the critical insight into the relationship between men and women. Some Marxists tried to show the usefulness of their categories to understanding the oppression of women. Some feminists tried to make Marxism more useful to the half of humanity it tended to neglect. Yet if there ever was a ‘marriage’ of Marxism and feminism it was, as Heidi Hartmann put it in a landmark article, ‘like the marriage of husband and wife depicted

marx i sm and women | 113 in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism’ (1986: 2). Yet she did not do the obvious thing and sue for divorce but, rather, sought a more progressive union. Marxism’s categories might be gender-blind but feminism, left to itself, tended to be ahistorical. However, what Hartmann called for – essentially a dual systems theory where capitalism and patriarchy were seen as independent but complementary forms of domination – seemed inadequate even for the time at which it was written. The relationship between Marxism and feminism became much worse than an unhappy marriage eventually. There was a growing realization, expressed for example by Sandra Harding, that Marxist categories ‘are fundamentally sexist as well as sex-blind’ (1986: 137). If this was the case then, as Audre Lorde put it poetically, it followed that ‘The master’s house cannot be rebuilt with the master’s tools’ (Lorde, 1994). Too much of the masculinist Marxist apparatus lay intact, too much of the Marxist engagement with gender issues smacked of co-option. Perhaps the Marxist construction of a ‘woman question’ could now be replaced and understood by the ‘man question’. Men simply did have more to lose than their chains from the advance of feminism. The crisis of the patriarchal order across the West and the new feminist-influenced common sense showed how far-reaching the issues were. Socialist feminist androgyny was being replaced by an unapologetic gynocentrism, even by thinkers who saw its ‘theoretical’ flaws. For this new feminist politics: ‘We are at the moment in history when women must seize the lead in creating a theory and practice which are truly scientific in that they are more comprehensively historical and materialist. Women are now the revolutionary group in history’ (Harding, 1986). The socialist feminist project was an ambitious one. For Michèle Barrett, in a landmark text, the object of ‘Marxist feminism’ (as she called it) was no less than ‘to identify the operation of gender relations as and where they may be distinct from, or connected with, the processes of production and reproduction understood by historical materialism’ (1980: 9). It sought to clarify and analyse the relationship between capitalism and the oppression of women. It changed the hitherto dominant socialist understanding of gender, sexuality and the household. It did not, however, succeed in its own terms in producing a new unified discourse of socialist (or Marxist) feminism. Michèle Barrett herself, in a new edition of her text in 1988, admits

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that the Marxist feminist analysis had largely failed and distanced herself from the original political project which it represented insofar as ‘the arguments of postmodernism already represent, I think, a key position around which feminist theoretical work in the future is likely to revolve’ (Barrett, 1988: xxiv). Feminism had not been co-opted by Marxism but had, rather, along with poststructuralism, destabilized some of its key tenets. As Marxism’s unity was shattered, so was that of socialist feminism. It is this new heterogeneous landscape of the postmodern/post-Marxist feminisms which we now must explore. Post-feminism If Marxism was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of modernism, as we have seen above, so, arguably, was feminism. The bid for sexual equality is ‘modern’ in its decisive break with ‘traditional’ notions of gender roles and inequalities. Modernity and the development of capitalism led to the breakup of a whole series of social relations once assumed to be frozen and immutable. The classical ‘first wave’ feminist texts were inserted into this process, which they both reflected and influenced. Modernity also promises that the arbitrary authority of the old order will no longer hold sway. This would mean, or could be made to mean, equality and not absolutist authority based on ‘tradition’ or religious prescriptions. Feminism is based equally on the notion of ‘universal reason’, central to the Enlightenment and modern politics. Feminism is also, and most eminently, a movement committed to the Enlightenment notions of ‘autonomy’ and ‘emancipation’. It would seem natural in this context that feminism would line up with those political currents who believe in the ‘incomplete project of modernity’ (Habermas) and not with those radical postmodernists who question, root and branch, the logic and the politics of modernism and Enlightenment. However, certain parallels and convergences between postmodernism and the now multiple feminisms can be identified. Postmodernism has effectively challenged many fundamental and long-standing dichotomies essential to the Enlightenment way of thinking about the world. The separation between the subject and object of knowledge strengthens the feminist critique of male knowledge and recognizes that all knowledge is interpretative and positional. The Enlightenment duality of reason versus the irrational is also undermined by postmodernism in a way which parallels and strengthens

ma rx i sm and women | 115 the feminist critique of the ‘Man of Reason’. Postmodernism has also undermined the modernist opposition of nature and culture, often associated with woman and man in the Enlightenment discourse and popular culture. This critique of the rationalist philosophy of science, at the heart of modernism, also feeds into the feminist critique of masculinist treatments of nature and science. A postmodern feminism would thus be in a good position to deconstruct the rationalist epistemology on which all dualist forms of thinking and knowing the world are based. As Susan Hekman argues: ‘A postmodern feminism would reject the masculinist bias of rationalism but would not attempt to replace it with a feminist bias. Rather it would take the position that there is not one (masculine) truth but, rather, many truths, none of which is privileged along gender lines’ (1992: 9). But would this not undermine the feminist movement? Not only does postmodernism unsettle claims to truth or falsehood but it also undermines a unified subject such as ‘woman’ which is central to feminism as a political movement. The very notion of ‘woman’ from a postmodern (or poststructuralist) perspective would be ‘essentialist’ in that it posits a human ‘essence’. For Chris Weedon, ‘Humanist discourses presuppose an essence at the heart of the individual which is unique, fixed and coherent and which makes her what she is’ (1987: 32). Thus radical feminism appeals to an ‘essence of womanhood’, liberal feminism believes in a unified, rational political consciousness from which women are excluded, and socialist feminism is based on a notion of a ‘true human nature’ which has been alienated by capitalism. Against these universal human subjects postmodernism conceives of the self as fluid and contingent, always the site of conflicting identities and subjectivities. The stress is on fragmentation and heterogeneity against the unifying homogenizing vision of modernism. The diversity covered by the word ‘woman’ has now largely been recognized and difference has been legitimized. The abstract universals of the Enlightenment were having a diminishing purchase in a feminist movement which was breaking up in the 1980s in spite of, or because of, its considerable successes. Finally, if postmodernism is a critique or a suspicion of metanarratives, where does it leave socialist feminism as a political project? For Di Stefano ‘the postmodernist project, if seriously adopted by feminists, would make any semblance of a feminist politics impossible’ (1990: 76). This is a reference to the supposed

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relativism and political nihilism of postmodernism. It does seem odd that white Western males, who supposedly have a unified confident subjectivity, should now deny to women the possibility of a subject-centred politics. However, it is also possible to discern the potentially enabling aspects of postmodernism for a radical/socialist feminist practice. Grand narratives of emancipation can be seen as potentially oppressive and their false universalism can be extremely ethnocentric. With its reliance on gender as the main, if not sole, variable in its social theory, classical feminism can suffer from the binary opposition it was seeking to undo. Postmodernism frees feminism from the futile search for an essential female nature: ‘It would replace unitary notions of woman and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation’ (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990: 34–5). If we are to locate a political point in which the coherence of feminism was shattered and postmodern feminism emerged, it would be the eruption of black and Third World feminism. If Marxism was gender-blind, much of the 1970s feminism appeared to be race-blind. The ‘woman’ it referred to seemed Western, white and middle-class. bell hooks argued eloquently (1991) that the origins of the feminist movement inevitably shaped its agenda. Black women ‘could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiment of the dominant discourse’ (1991: 11–12). If gender differences are seen as primordial and always paramount then, inevitably, racial differences and oppressions are seen as secondary. The liberal feminist rhetoric of equality was itself seen as problematic: was this white woman also to be equal with white men, or were black women also to be equal with white women? Black critiques of white feminism (see hooks, 1994 and Collins, 1991, for example) not only question its false universalizing tendencies but also draw attention to the arena of representation and ideology, where the ideal-type feminine image is invariably white. It would be a mistake to take from this literature only the accusation of racism, which can then foreground once again the white theorist ‘working through’ their racism. It should help to decentre white Western feminism from its hegemonic pedestal, though. By the 1990s, gender was a legitimate area of enquiry in the academy. As Chandra Mohanty argues ‘the crucial questions of the

ma rx i sm and women | 117 1990s concern the construction, examination and, most significantly, the institutionalization of difference within feminist discourses’ (1992: 74). The challenges from black and Third World feminisms posed questions for feminism’s assumed unity and universality, but also pointed towards a more differentiated politics of transformation. It was no longer possible to believe, as Robin Morgan and others had, in ‘global sisterhood’ (Morgan, 1984) with women granted a cross-cultural coherence and unity they patently did not have. Third World feminisms had for long advanced by paths quite different from Western feminism. Issues of ethnicity, rurality and nationalism loomed larger than the ‘personal politics’ that dominated some strands of Western feminism. Then black feminism and workingclass feminism showed that even feminism in the West was a mansion with many houses. The stories of these feminisms cannot be simply subsumed under the generic labels deployed in the standard Western texts, such as ‘liberal’, ‘radical’ and ‘socialist’. Here was a difference which could not be so easily accommodated. They were not just a distant, alien ‘Other’ to serve as a useful comparison. White Western feminism did try at first to marginalize colonial and post-colonial women by constructing the monolithic category of ‘Third World women’, which homogenized and, ultimately, obliterated difference. Chandra Mohanty has shown in considerable detail how Western feminist writing on women in the Third World subscribes to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of ‘male dominance and female exploitation’ (1993: 208–9). Women in Third World countries are often perceived as helpless victims of male violence, as dependent in gender, race and class relationships, and as subordinates in familial and religious ideologies. Third World women are subsumed under these various oppressions, they are seen as devoid of voice, incapable of agency and virtually without history, always already colonized. This blatant ethnocentrism has recently been challenged in the literature on the interface of gender, development and postmodernism. Paternalism towards the ‘non-Western’ peoples has a long history in the Enlightenment tradition. It is not surprising that it has permeated much of Western feminism. Now, however, women in the Third World are beginning to set their own agendas, which can only strengthen feminism as a whole (because there can be unity in diversity).

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The rise of black and Third World feminism was part of a broader process of debate and fission within the feminist movement. Where modernist feminism stressed ‘equality’, for example, the new postmodern feminist discourse stressed ‘difference’. The belief in a transcendental Reason was giving way to a more culturally situated understanding of people’s positions and possibilities. Large-scale intellectual and political projects for political transformation lacked credibility or even attractiveness. This was all part of a broad shift in paradigms in feminist theory in the 1980s. Yet, with just some hindsight, it is easy to see how new false polarities can be created, binary oppositions which can only divide. Joan Scott argues eloquently that the equality/difference opposition should be refused in the name of an equality based precisely on differences: ‘the antithesis itself hides the interdependence of the two terms, for equality is not the elimination of difference, and difference does not preclude equality’ (1990: 138). It has been argued that the great feminist slogan of the 1960s and early 1970s ‘the personal is political’ has actually backfired insofar as the new ‘politics of identity’ has ‘meant women found they had less, not more, in common and a bitterness developed in the will to discover who had the most “authentic” voice in the women’s movement’ (Whelan, 1995: 129–30). The new notion of ‘speaking from one’s position’ could actually become an excuse for not confronting hierarchy, racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. The new tone is captured by a statement from a women’s collective in the US which argued: ‘This focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the conception of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression’ (Comabhee River Collective, 1981, cited in Adams, 1994: 345). Not only is there a considerable accommodation to the rampant individualism of the New Right which set the tone for much of the 1980s, but a return to the old essentialism, as if ‘experience’ were something unambiguous and transparent from which the ‘right’ politics would spontaneously and naturally flow. It is now possible, and necessary, to move beyond ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ and other such oppositions. From a postmodern perspective the notion of ‘equality’ is problematic insofar as it assumes that it is equals that are being dealt with, which from a feminist perspective can mean simple assimilation to the male norm.

ma rx i sm and women | 119 That ‘equality’ is not ‘innocent’ does not mean that a postmodern feminism turns its back on justice. Even those feminist currents which stress difference against the Anglo-American emphasis on equality do strive for ‘a different conception of justice conceived as an equal liberty to shape oneself in accordance with whatever differences one finds significant’ (Buck and James, 1992: 7). Sexual difference cannot, from this perspective, be subsumed under a bland conception of gender equality or, to put it differently, gender neutrality cannot lead to justice. In practice, neither an appeal to an undifferentiated equality nor an undifferentiated difference can suffice. Equality certainly needs deconstructing from the perspective of the various feminisms (including Third World feminisms) but, following Moira Gatens, ‘to understand “difference feminism” as the obverse of “equality feminism” would be to miss entirely the point’ (1992: 135). To recognize a multiplicity of differences is to open the door for a more pluralist politics of transformation. One of the most innovative developments in unsettling previous socialist feminist paradigms has been ‘queer Marxism’ (see Floyd, 2009). This emerges from a split in the 1970s between the radical but multi-issue Gay Liberation Front and the single-issue Gay Activists Alliance. The latter looked away from Marx towards Foucault as a theoretical/political horizon. It led towards a politics of ‘autonomy’ for the LGBT movement and away from broader political alliances towards social transformation. A confluence gradually occurred in the 1980s between the constructionist perspective on sexuality advanced by Foucault (sexuality is not a given) and the radical identity politics of groups such as Queer Nation. For many Marxists this was a welcome development insofar as they have historically opposed all forms of sexism and homophobia although, of course, they could not go along with the proposition that ‘straight people’ (as a whole) were the enemy. For now the project of a ‘queer Marxism’ remains mainly a culturalist and North Atlantic one but it has served to further unsettle traditional Marxist notions of gender, sex and sexuality. For its part, radical feminism continued its trajectory to become ‘third wave’ feminism. This postmodern feminism leant heavily on the work of Judith Butler who once said: ‘There is no identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is perfomatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990: 25). Thus ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’ are for Butler not

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essentialist concepts but internally unstable and ambivalent cultural constructions. Sexuality comes to the fore from this perspective and heterosexuality is seen as an integral element in the contortion of male superiority. As MacKinnon once put it ‘Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’ (MacKinnon, 1982: 516). Taking a broad perspective to this postmodern or third wave feminism it is, at least partly, an integral element of the cultural turn (see Chapter 6) of the 1990s. The deconstruction of the category ‘women’ was an enduring conquest of this period and one that has encouraged the development of alternative non-Eurocentric feminisms. As to socialist feminism, it has regained some theoretical and policy purchase since the crisis, despite having fallen out of favour in many academic centres. There is a sense that the cultural turn had moved all social critique away from the material conditions of women’s lives. For Stevi Jackson ‘A materialist analysis is as relevant now as it ever was. While accepting that traditional Marxism had little to say about gender divisions … the method of analysis Marx left us remains useful’ (Jackson, 1999: 331). Women and work, women and education, women and welfare provision were going off the agenda just when the neoliberal offensive was at its fiercest. The crucial role of gender in the construction of the new international division was being explored in innovative ways that integrated the productive and reproductive spheres (see Peterson, 2003). While understanding that power is often diffuse (á la Foucault) it is still the case that structured power relations have created systematic forms of oppression based on ‘gender’, ‘race’ and ‘class’ differences (see Walby, 2009). References Adams, M. L. (1994) ‘There‘s No Place Like Home: On the Face of Identity in Feminist Politics’, in M. Evans (ed.), The Woman Question, 2nd edn, London: Sage. Barrett, M. (1980) Women’s Oppression Today, London: Verso. Barrett, M. (1983) ‘Marxist-Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx’, in B. Matthews (ed.), Marx: A Hundred Years On, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Barrett, M. (1988) Women’s Oppression Today, rev. edn, London: Verso. Bryson, V. (1992) Feminist Political Theory: An Introduction, London: Macmillan. Buck, G. and James, S. (1992) ‘Introduction: Contextualizing Equality and Difference’, in G. Buck and S. James (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, London: Routledge.

ma rx i sm and women | 121 Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Carr, E. (1970) Socialism in One Country of 1924–1926, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Collins, P. (1991) Black Feminist Thought, London: Routledge. Coward, R. (1983) Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Delphy, C. (1984) Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, London: Hutchinson. Di Stefano, C. (1990) ‘Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity and Postmodernism’, in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Edelholm, F., Harris, O. and Young, K. (1977) ‘Conceptualising Women’, Critique of Anthropology, 3(9–10). Eisenstein, Z. (1979) ‘Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism’, in Z. Eisenstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Engels, F. (1990) ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches by Lewis H. Morgan’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 26, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Floyd, K. (2009) The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, N. and Nicholson, L. (1990) ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism’, in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Gatens, M. (1992) ‘Power, Bodies and Difference’, in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory:

Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity. Gould, C. (1999) ‘Engels’s Origins: A Feminist Critique’, in M. Steger and T. Carver (eds), Engels after Marx, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Harding, S. (1986) ‘What Is the Real Material Base of Patriarchy and Capitalism?’, in L. Sargent (ed.), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, London: Pluto. Hartmann, H. (1986) ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in L. Sargent (ed.), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, London: Pluto. Hekman, S. (1992) Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism, Cambridge: Polity. Honeycut, K. (1981) ‘Clara Zetkin: A Socialist Approach to the Problem of Women’s Oppression’, in K. Slaughter and R. Kern (eds), European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present, Westport, CT: Greenwood. hooks, b. (1991) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1994) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End Press. Jackson, S. (1999) ‘Marxism and Feminism’, in A. Gamble, D. Marsh and T. Tant (eds), Marxism and Social Science, Houndmills: Macmillan. Lenin, V. I. (1966) The Emancipation of Women, New York: International Publishers. Lorde, A. (1994) ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in M. Evans (ed.), The Woman Question, 2nd edn, London: Sage.

122 | fi v e MacKinnon, C. A. (1982) ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, Signs, 7(3). Maconachie, M. (1987) ‘Engels, Sexual Divisions and the Family’, in J. Sayers, M. Evans and N. Redclift (eds), Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays, London: Tavistock. Marshall, B. (1994) Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) ‘The German Ideology’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mitchell, J. (1971) Woman’s Estate, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mohanty, C. T. (1992) ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience’, in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity. Mohanty, C. T. (1993) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Molyneux, M. (1981) ‘Women in Socialist Societies: Problems of Theory and Practice’, in K. Young, C. Wolkowitz and R. McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the

Market Women’s Subordination in International Perspective, London: CSE Books. Morgan, R. (1984) Sisterhood Is Global: the International Women’s Movement Anthology, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Peterson, S. (2003) A Critical Review of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies, London: Routledge. Rowbotham, S. (1979) ‘The Women’s Movement and Organizing for Socialism’, in S. Rowbotham, L. Legal and H. Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, London: Merlin. Scott, J. (1990) ‘Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference’, in M. Hirsch and E. F. Keller (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, New York: Routledge. Stites, R. (1978) The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vogel, L. (1983) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Walby, S. (2009) Globalisation and Inequality: Complexity and Contested Modernities, London: Sage. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Whelan, I. (1995) Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

6 | TH E RE TU R N O F T H E S UP E R S T R UC T UR E: MARX I S M AND CUL T UR E

Culture has made a remarkable move in the story of Marxism from dependent, determined and subordinate part of the ‘superstructure’ of society (the economy being the ‘base’) to centre-stage in the new Marxist cultural studies and, even more, in forms of Marxism influenced by postmodernism. This chapter begins with Karl Marx’s own engagement with culture and ideology, emphasizing the ambiguous legacy it left. It then turns to the post-Russian Revolution attempt by Marxist cultural theorists to create a socialist culture, including the Soviet Proletkult movement. Any ambiguity in the Marxist discourse is dissipated as culture is recruited to fight the class struggle. Then Antonio Gramsci, from his jail cell in Mussolini’s Italy, began to break away from Marxist determinism in regard to culture. The culturalist turn in Marxism had begun, and its effects are still being felt today. Finally, this chapter turns to postmodernism and poststructuralism, which finally broke culture away from the orthodox Marxist grip. The ‘superstructure’ had its revenge, but where does this leave a critical study of culture in society today? Marx and ideology Marx was no philistine and had a highly developed appreciation of the culture of his day, especially literature: In his private life Marx constantly demonstrates the way in which literature may embellish, enliven and heighten existence … He reads tales and poems with his children … He declaims aloud poems and dramas in several languages … He characterizes his acquaintances by means of literary nicknames … As a public figure too, as author and as orator Marx constantly draws on the writers of the past and present whose work he admires. (Prawer, 1978: 415) Indeed, S. S. Prawer spends 444 pages describing Karl Marx’s intense relationship with world literature. Marx the writer certainly

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understood the creative process and would not dream of reducing it to impersonal class or economic determinations. Marx’s taste in literature was quite traditional and he probably would not have liked the Latin American ‘magical realism’ texts, but there was nothing crude, instrumental or reductionist in his approach to literature. The problem lies in that literature, and culture more generally, fit within the broader understanding Marx developed of bourgeois society. Where culture fitted into the Marxist system was in the box called ‘ideology’. Marx argued famously in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that: ‘a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of a natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious and fight it out’ (Marx, 1968: 182). This is a broad conception of ideology and one which, in its last manifesto-like sentence, prefigures the concerns of the new cultural politics. Ideology is not seen here as simple misperception, illusion or clever bourgeois ruse. Yet there is no agreed or consistent version of Marx’s theory of ideology which, elsewhere, did appear as a defective perception of reality (see Larrain, 1983). What does seem clear is that Marx counterposes, as in the above passage, science or knowledge more broadly with ideology. The truth claims of the Marxist conception of science and knowledge are as evident – witness Marxism as the science of historical materialism – as they are contested. Foucault cut across much of the convoluted Marxist debates on science and ideology in a few lines: The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. (Foucault, 1980: 118) Even in its own terms the science/ideology couplet is dubious when we consider the close imbrication of the natural sciences, say

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 125 biotechnology, with the political and ideological realms. Of course Foucault’s objection is a more sweeping one which cuts the ground from under all assumed privileged vantage points, be they white, male or Marxist. The banishing of epistemology may not be as simple as Foucault’s practically throwaway comment in an interview implied. However, it is a telling critique of one of the fundamental tenets of Marxism, and Marxism-Leninism in particular, namely its claim to scientificity. It is interesting to recall that Louis Althusser had begun ‘to wonder whether art should or should not be ranked as such among ideologies, to be precise, whether art and ideology are one and the same thing’ (1984: 173). Thankfully, he concludes:‘I do not rank real art among the ideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specific relation with ideology’ (1984: 173). This ‘authentic’ art, not to be confused with the ‘average or mediocre’, does not seek to replace ‘scientific knowledge’ but does help us ‘see’ or ‘feel’. What we see, feel or perceive is the ideology from which this non-popular art is born, according to Althusser. He also praises Lenin’s critical analysis of Tolstoy (dubbed ‘brilliant’ by Terry Eagleton), in particular that the literary ‘greats’ are able partially to detach themselves or step outside the ideology which bathes them in a particular political light. In his conception of ideology as ‘lived relation’ between people and ideology, Althusser moved beyond mechanical Marxism. In his willingness to let art out of the science/ideology binary opposition he was also helpful. Yet, Althusser remained trapped, to a large extent, in the orthodox Marxist architectural analogy of society as base and superstructure. Raymond Williams, in his Marxism and Literature, has written that ‘Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined super-structure’ (1977: 75). For Marx, there are relations of production which constitute ‘the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure’ (Marx, 1968: 182). In a typical logocentric manoeuvre we have the economic/real/material/primary/determinant on the one hand and the non-economic/non material/determined on the other hand. Whether Marx would have wished it or not, the base/superstructure became central in the Marxist apparatus and, in particular, where cultural analysis is concerned. Thus Terry Eagleton, who is by no stretch of

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the imagination a mechanical Marxist, can write: ‘Art, then, is for Marxism part of the “superstructure” of society. It is (with qualifications we shall make later) part of society’s ideology’ (1976: 5). The trouble with these qualifications – such as the notion that the economic base is (only) determinant ‘in the last instance’ is that that lonely hour never seems to come. It was Althusser, of course, who pushed the base/superstructure analogy furthest and disputed the notion expressed by Engels (not Marx) that the economy was determinant ‘in the last instance’. For Althusser, there was clearly a ‘relative autonomy’ for the areas usually described by Marxism as superstructure. Althusser developed instead the notions of ‘structure in dominance’, ‘articulation’ and, above all, ‘over-determination’, which implied that all social phenomena have complex causation mechanisms and cannot be reduced to unidirectional causation by any ‘base’. Since then, one-time followers of Althusser such as Paul Hirst (1979) have abandoned the whole notion of causality and autonomy altogether. The fact remains that Althusser’s critique of the totality-based theorizing of traditional Marxism had an enabling effect on critical cultural studies in general and on literary and film studies in particular. The problem was, as Michèle Barrett puts it, ‘Althusser’s recasting of Marx pushed Marxism further than it can logically go’ (1991: 45). What Althusser’s intervention in Marxism achieved, notwithstanding his ‘scientific’ intentions, was to liberate Marxism from its Second International shackles as regards the idea that culture, for example, could be seen as a simple ‘reflection’ of the economic relations of production in society. It is hard to overestimate the damage done by the base/ superstructure topographical analogy to the possibility of a Marxist theory of culture. It is not only the question of economic reductionism, which is debilitating in itself to any critical cultural work, but the implicit reproduction of the idealist separation of culture from supposedly material social life. Thus, as Raymond Williams says ‘the full possibilities of the concept of culture as a constitutive social process, creating specific and different “ways of life” … were for a long time missed, and were often in practice superseded by an abstract unilinear universalism’ (1977: 19). Rather than move into ‘cultural materialism’ as Raymond Williams did, most Marxist cultural theorizing was hampered and restricted by the notion that

marx i sm a nd cult ure | 127 arts, customs, religion and so on were simply ‘ideas’. We could say that the enterprise undertaken by Williams in this regard was more in keeping with the critical spirit of Marx than the mechanical elaboration of subsequent Marxist theories of culture even by the Marxist literary critics, notwithstanding their considerable impact in the field of literary studies itself. Having deconstructed Marx’s concepts of ideology and the superstructure, where does it leave a Marx(ist) theory of culture? Marx did not develop such a theory and some of his isolated formulations have created some quite horrible offspring. Christopher Caudwell, the British Marxist critic of the 1930s, was one ‘who heroically attempted to construct a total Marxist aesthetic in notably unpropitious conditions’, according to contemporary Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (1976: 79). In his Studies in a Dying Culture Caudwell saw all branches of ‘bourgeois culture’, from art and philosophy to biology and physics, undergoing a fundamental crisis. His main work, Illusion and Reality (Caudwell, 1973), is seen, even by his admirers, as a somewhat crude and slipshod attempt at creating a total theory of art as an economic activity arising from the labour process. It is not the individual Shakespeare or Wordsworth who writes poetry, for Caudwell, but the man-class, or genotype. In his Romance and Realism (Caudwell, 1970), he moves on to the terrain of ‘socialist-realism’ (see the next section of this chapter) and proclaims that revolutionary truth is foreclosed to ‘fellow travellers’ and even accuses the likes of Stephen Spender of ‘an anxious solicitude about the freedom of the writer’ in the USSR, not realizing that ‘whatever methods are necessary for a social transformation must be necessary in art’ (Caudwell, 1970: 132). That Caudwell died fighting fascism in Spain symbolizes both the high and the low points of Stalinism. Another ‘powerful and original study which analyses the relations between Marx’s aesthetic views and his general theory’ is, according to Eagleton (1976: 86), that by Mikhail Lifschitz, also writing in the 1930s. Lifschitz, a Russian critic, seeks to draw a parallel between Marx’s analysis of the contradiction between the development of the forces of production and the relations of production and a ‘contradiction between the development of the productive forces of society and its artistic achievement, between technology and art, between science and poetry, between tremendous cultural

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possibilities and meagre spiritual life’ (Lifschitz, 1973: 106). For him, the objective of Marxism is not only the abolition of the contradiction between mental and manual labour, and that between oppressor and oppressed, but also the creation of an unalienated universal culture. For Lifschitz, the Marxist view of the development of art and culture is clear: ‘Decadence of artistic creation is inseparable from bourgeois civilization’ (1973: 99) but Marx and Engels ‘knew full well that a new cycle of artistic progress can begin only with the victory of the proletariat … only then can all the forces now exhausted by capitalist oppression be liberated’ (Lifschitz, 1973: 114–15). Basically, the interpretation of Marx by Lifschitz argues that through creating a new society, the proletariat will resolve the contradictions of the cultural development of humanity. It is Terry Eagleton himself who, undoubtedly, has sought to create the most coherent modern Marxist theory of literature (the ‘cultural materialism’ of Raymond Williams being a much more explicit departure from Marx). For Eagleton: To understand King Lear, The Dunciad or Ulysses is … to do more than interpret their symbolism, study their literary history and add footnotes about sociological facts which enter into them. It is first of all to understand the complex, indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit. (1976: 6) Marxist cultural critics need to examine the historical conditions which give rise to cultural products. This is not the same as a view of literature or culture as nothing but ideology, a form of ‘vulgar Marxist’ criticism Eagleton is keen to dismiss. Eagleton follows Lukács in arguing that ‘the true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than abstractable content, of the work itself’ (1976: 24). Thus developments in literary form, for example the novel, can be traced to shifts in ideology which lead to new ways of perceiving social reality and the new relations between culture and society. At the end of the day, in the last instance, and in the last sentences of Terry Eagleton’s punchy review of Marxism and literary criticism: ‘Marxist criticism is not just an alternative technique for interpreting Paradise Lost or Middlemarch. It is part of our liberation from oppression, and that is why it is worth discussing’ (1976: 76).

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 129 Proletkult For Lenin: ‘Every artist, who considers himself an artist, has a right to create freely according to his ideals, regardless of anything. But then, we communists cannot stand idly by and give chaos free rein to develop’ (Solomon, 1979: 166). Where Marx’s own cultural outlook would have been liberal, Lenin’s was sternly functional: why, for example, should the Soviet state provide an expensive subsidy to the Bolshoi Theatre ‘when we haven’t enough money to maintain the most ordinary schools in the villages’? (Solomon, 1979: 166). In this atmosphere it was not surprising that in postrevolutionary Russia a cultural movement called Proletkult emerged, committed to the creation of a purely proletarian culture purged of all bourgeois components. At its height in 1920, Proletkult had some 84,000 members, published an influential review, Proletarian Culture, organized some 300 writing workshops across the country, and controlled thousands of amateur companies and theatres in small towns and villages. How successful was this move to ‘Bolshevize’ culture? Was Lifschitz accurate in stating that ‘the communist revolution of the working class lays the necessary basis for a new renaissance of the arts on a much broader and higher basis’ (1973: 101)? If not, why not? The Russian Revolution of 1917 led to a great ferment in the cultural domain. Osip Briz, one of the main theorists of the Futurists, wrote of how the new art would break completely with bourgeois art, it would create new and unprecedented things. Futurism and the proletariat would march hand in hand (Struve, 1972: 20). The great poet Mayakovsky threw his lot in with the proletarian revolution and sang its praises. While Lenin liked some of his satirical anti-Western work and even his anti-bureaucratic tirades, on the whole he preferred the old school of Pushkin and company. Alongside the Futurists, Proletkult was set up to foster a specifically proletarian literature. Its guiding spirit was Bogdanov, with whom Lenin had a famous philosophical controversy (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) in pre-revolutionary times. For Bogdanov cultural action was a crucial component for building socialism. The first Soviet Commissar of Education (or ‘Enlightenment’), Anatolii Lunacharsky, while sympathetic towards Futurism and the Proletkult movement, was warning the cultural far left in 1919 that it should not have a fully negative and alternative attitude towards the culture of the past, and

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that it should not seek to speak for the government while it was only an artistic current (Struve, 1972: 29). It was this last point – implicitly contesting Bolshevik hegemony – which brought down the wrath of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. In 1920 the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a declaration on Proletkult which, among other things, said that ‘Under the guise of “proletarian culture” the workers were offered bourgeois views in philosophy (Machism) and in the cultural field absurd, perverted tastes (Futurism) began to find favour’ (Vaughan James, 1973: 114). The techniques and methods of the new ‘proletarian poets’ were derivative of Symbolism, with a strong dash of romantic heroism, but this was hardly the problem for a state under siege. The problem was, as the Central Committee made explicit, that the ‘decadents’, ‘idealists’ and ‘drop outs’ of Futurism seemed to be directing Proletkult, which ‘continued to be “independent”, but now this was “independence” of the Soviet regime’ (Vaughan James, 1973: 114). Trotsky, for his part, was against total Party control of the arts and also opposed the notion of a specifically ‘proletarian’ culture. However, Trotsky’s own conception of Marxism and culture was quite mechanistic, seeing art as simply a passive reflection of the social order, and postponing the cultural advancement of the people until some unspecified date in the future when they had ‘caught up’ and class had been abolished. The Proletkult initiative was followed in 1925 by the formation of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) committed to ‘proletarianizing’ Russian literature, while, against Proletkult, stressing the need to ‘learn from the classics’. As the Russian peasantry was being forcibly collectivized, so would RAPP assert the hegemony of the proletariat in the cultural domain. For RAPP’s leading light, Leopold Averbakh, only the proletariat could create an art that was in harmony with the new way of life, and hence class warfare was required in culture as much as in the countryside. By 1929 Stalin was encouraging RAPP to take on the ‘fellow travellers’ – non-communist but sympathetic cultural workers – and thus purge the cultural domain of ‘non-proletarian’ elements. Literature must be placed at the service of the Five Year Plan. Writers were to become ‘shock workers’. These ‘excesses’ were condemned belatedly by the Party in 1932 and the dissolution of RAPP was ordered. While it seemed that more moderate ‘popular front’-type policies in culture

marx i sm a nd cult ure | 131 would now apply, the grip of the Party actually tightened. Some of the sorriest episodes in so-called Marxist dealings with culture would now take place. While in exile in 1905 Lenin had written about the party press and the need for a party line by its writers. The formulations are categorical: ‘Literature must become part of the common sense of the proletariat, “a cog and screw” of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism … Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen!’ (cited in Vaughan James, 1973: 104). Against all concessions to ‘bourgeois individualism’, the socialist proletariat demanded ‘party literature’. Yet this was not a crass call for censorship of all the arts: ‘Calm yourselves [said Lenin] …! First of all, we are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions’ (cited in Vaughan James, 1973: 16). Whether Lenin would have approved or not is impossible to tell, but around 1928–29 the Bolshevik Party used these early statements to legitimize a naked subordination of cultural workers to the party diktat. By 1932 all existing workers’ organizations were ‘liquidated’ by party decree and a single staterun- body, the infamous Union of Soviet Writers, was set up, which would henceforth regulate professionally, ideologically and morally all Russian writers. As the party of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ moved to take over the cultural domain, it obviously needed to discipline the ‘fellow travellers’. In 1929 a volume entitled Literature of Fact, edited by N. Chuzhak, declared that fiction was but ‘opium of the people’ to be countered by factual literature, which would lead to the ‘concretizing’, ‘activizing’ and ‘rationalizing’ of literature (Struve, 1972: 216). Art had nothing to do with inspiration, it was simply a skill to be learned. At the 1939 First Congress of Soviet Writers (of which more later) Karl Radek could declare, without a hint of irony: ‘I don’t write novels, but if I did I think I would learn how to write them from Tolstoy and Balzac, not from Joyce’ (cited in Struve, 1972: 275). The watchword of this period was ‘social command’, which meant that art would be obliged to ‘mirror’ social reality and ‘encourage’ socialist transformation. Gorky, a writer of some repute, sponsored a massive Histories of Factories and Plants during this period, one of the volumes of which ‘celebrated’ the building of the Stalin Canal linking the Baltic to the White Sea, built on the basis of forced labour by common-law

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criminal and political prisoners. The effects on creativity and cultural freedom of this type of venture were bound to be dramatic. As literature became handmaiden of the state, so the confidence of the new cultural commissars increased. In his inaugural address to the First Congress of Soviet Writers held in 1934 Zhdanov, the new culture supremo, declared proudly that ‘Our Soviet literature is not afraid of being accused of tendentiousness. Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in the age of class struggle a non-class, non-tendentious, would-be apolitical literature does not and cannot exist’ (cited in Struve, 1972: 261). Led by the great ‘Comrade Stalin’, socialism had triumphed and Soviet literature was the greatest and most progressive in the world. Soviet culture was ‘optimistic’ because it was linked to the rising class of the proletariat. Cultural workers, for Zhdanov, should be ‘engineers of human minds’, provide uplifting and heroic tales, and not divert people towards impossible utopias. This was to be a new cultural philosophy, Socialist Realism, portraying reality ‘objectively’ and assisting the great masses to understand history and their role in it. The 1934 Congress paid special attention to the need to produce ‘national defence literature’ to boost the fighting spirit of the glorious Red Army. Literature would serve the people/party/army from now on. What is not always so obvious, even to leftist critics of Soviet cultural terrorism, is the deep psycho-sexual implications of these moves towards control. Maynard Solomon is one critic who understands that ‘it was inevitable that Zhdanov’s and Radek’s 1934 call for Socialist Realism coincided precisely with cancellation of the liberal abortion and divorce laws, with passage of strict laws against homosexuality and with the arrest of a large number of homosexuals among the intelligentsia, accused of conspiracy with the Roehm Nazis’ (Solomon, 1979: 239). Zhdanovism became a fanatical bulwark against all forms of ‘irrationality’, by which was meant any deviation from ‘normal human emotions’. Not only were ‘paranoiacs’, ‘schizophrenics’ and ‘gangsters’ to be targeted, but also ‘pimps’, ‘adulterers’, ‘chorus girls’ and, quaintly, ‘rogues’. Thus, it is not surprising that Karl Radek launched a vicious attack on James Joyce at the 1934 Congress for his ‘madhouse phantasmagorias’ and ‘delirious ravings’, as a writer with a small view of life – ‘no great events, no great people, no great ideas’ – and whose writing was simply ‘a heap of dung, teeming with worms’ (cited in Struve, 1972: 173). Thus so-called Socialist Realism made its intellectual mark on world culture.

marx i sm a nd cult ure | 133 As the grip of Stalinism tightened over Soviet society, so did its control over culture in all its manifestations. Successive party decrees between 1946 and 1948 meant that: the Soviet creative intelligentsia lived in a constant state of fear, and the political demands made on writers were so excessive as to destroy even the propaganda value of literature. Socialist realists were now required to ignore the grim realities of Soviet postwar life and present instead fanciful pictures of material abundance and social harmony. (Hayward, 1983 65) Socialist Realism had become a straightforward means of bureaucratic and administrative control of culture by the state. Even allowing for the hostility of the Cold War critics of the Soviet state’s dealings with writers, the picture is a grim one indeed and a travesty of anything Marx ever said on culture. It is said that Stalin himself coined the phrase ‘socialist realism’ while attending an artistic soirée at Gorky’s flat, where he intervened to end a discussion between proponents of ‘proletarian realism’, ‘tendentious realism’ and ‘monumental realism’: ‘If the artist is going to depict our life correctly, he cannot fail to observe and point out what is leading it towards socialism. So this will be socialist art. It will be socialist realism’ (Vaughan James, 1973: 86). As Soviet culture went on to decline, and many of its more radical exponents were executed, accused of being ‘Trotskyite’/‘Zionist’/ whatever agents, there were few voices left to denounce this cultural terror. Many ‘fellow travellers’ abroad felt it best to go along with things, for whatever reason. Lukács did in the 1950s apply a subtle critique to this regime, which reversed Marx’s view of uneven development to claim that Soviet cultural evolution unfortunately lagged behind its dynamic economic development. However, as Henri Arvon recounts, ‘immediately thereafter Lukács is obliged to retract his statement, and in a most humiliating way moreover, for he is forced to attribute what he now describes as his errors of judgement to his lack of familiarity with Soviet literature’ (1973: 93). State control of culture and ideological control over the schools, forms and techniques of art culminate perhaps in the 1946 Central Committee proclamation on literature: ‘The function of Soviet literature is to aid the State in properly educating young people … That is why

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everything that tends to foster … “Art for Art’s sake” is foreign to Soviet literature and is harmful to the interests of the people and the Soviet State’ (cited in Arvon, 1973: 91). We should not however think that post-revolutionary Russia was simply a barren space for developments in the field of culture. It was not until the late 1960s that the early 1920s Russian linguistics theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and V. N. Voloshinov were rediscovered but their impact was huge in the area of dialogic communication. For them culture can be conceived as a dialogic activity. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination published in 1975 introduced the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope which made a considerable contribution to contemporary literary studies. The generation of meaning is established for Bakhtin through the primacy of context over text (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relationship between utterances (intertextuality). They thus represent a considerable shift beyond the once dominant perspective of Ferdinand de Saussure on the relationship between language and power. Mark Smith comments that ‘This approach recognizes the historical and social situatedness of knowledge and the way that language can be used to tailor messages for specific audiences in definite material conditions’ (2000: 76). It is thus a bridge to the cultural materialism of the 1970s. The Bakhtin Circle in the late 1920s and early 1930s undermined the traditional Marxist view that language simply mirrored reality. They argued that language did not just reflect a pre-existing reality. Instead they saw language being an active player in the construction of social reality, thus prefiguring contemporary discourse analysis. Where this work remained firmly Marxist was in its emphasis on the crucial role of social struggle in creating meaning and mastering discourse and producing the ‘social accenting’ of language. It is thus critical of Saussure and an abstract objectivism which sees the source of meaning in an abstract system of rules external to social agents. Predictably Stalin closed down the Bakhtin Circle but its work was taken up again in the 1960s. The Gramscian moment From the embarrassing excesses of Zdhanovism, we can tum to the fresh air brought to the Marxist debates on culture by Antonio Gramsci. From an attempt (largely successful) at closure, we turn to

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 135 a desire (eventually successful) for openness. Against all variants of economism and reductionism, Gramsci comes to symbolize an open, fluid, less ‘necessitarian’ brand of Marxism. Of course, his dispersed, difficult, practically coded prison notebooks do not amount to a ‘Gramscian’ system of thought. In that, I would disagree with the assertion of Renate Holub (in what is nevertheless a remarkable book on Gramsci ‘beyond’ Marxism and postmodernism) that Gramsci’s ‘research programme’ was ‘to write a definitive Marxist cultural theory’ (Holub, 1992: 40). The Gramsci industry has produced a variety of Gramscis, not all of which are plausible versions. Gramsci has also been ‘used’ to justify particular political or cultural positions. Yet in all the Gramscis and Gramscianisms there is an understanding that classical Marxism neglected culture and had a mechanical conception of how people lived their lives and contested the oppressive conditions under which they lived. The plasticity of Gramsci’s Marxism, perhaps inevitably, became a stepping stone to post-Marxism, as we shall shortly see. Antonio Gramsci broke decisively with the mechanistic Marxist tendency to take literally the base/superstructure analogy of how societies work. For Gramsci: ‘The claim, presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism, that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice’ (1971: 407). It was in a critique of Bukharin’s Popular Manual of historical materialism that Gramsci most explicitly rejected the claims to Marx’s authority of the subsequent ‘scientific’ renderings of his thought. Gramsci derided the attempt to reduce Marx to the search for ‘so-called laws’ typical of the new ‘Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist’ positivism. Necessity and determination were not terms with which Gramsci was happy. In an explicit rejection of economism in particular, Gramsci wrote of Bukharin’s work: ‘One of the most blatant traces of old-fashioned metaphysics in the Popular Manual is the attempt to reduce everything to a single ultimate or final cause’ (1971: 437). This reference to determination ‘in the last instance’ by the economic base (or structure) of society Gramsci places, appropriately, in the long line of attempts to ‘search for God’. In relation to the concept of ideology, Gramsci developed one strand of Marx’s contradictory accounts, namely that which has

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become known as the ‘positive’ as against the ‘critical’ view of ideology (see Larrain, 1983). For Gramsci, ideology is neither an ‘illusion’ nor a simple ‘reflection’ of an economic process. Instead, it is, above all, a contested terrain, a key arena for political struggle. Gramsci usefully distinguishes between two types of ideology: ‘philosophy’, which refers to organized sets of conceptions about the world; and ‘common sense’, by which he refers to the lived culture of particular social classes or groups. As ideology is no longer just an illusory representation of what is happening in the economic ‘base’, Gramsci is free to prioritize the political struggle over ideas and culture. As Michèle Barrett puts it: ‘Gramsci sees, what is now generally called, “ideological struggle” as politically effective and significant in its own right’ (1991: 28). His understanding of ‘common sense’ or popular culture is typically nuanced, accepting that, while these contain ‘ideological elements’ (in the negative sense), they also contain much ‘good sense’. What emerges from this contested terrain depends on agency above all, and cannot be predetermined. What is undoubtedly the central and most influential of Gramsci’s concepts in following this through is that of ‘hegemony’. Gramsci understands that no ruling class rules through coercion alone. Briefly, for Gramsci, egemonia refers to the social and cultural organization of consent in society: ‘if the ruling class has lost its consensus, it is no longer “leading”, but only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies’ (Gramsci, 1971: 275–6). The hegemony of a given social group over society as a whole is achieved through a wide range of institutions within civil society such as schools, the church, the media and even trade unions. Not only does this conception of contemporary capitalist society redress the balance from Lenin’s focus on the coercive element of state power, but it lays the basis for a cultural programme of social transformation. If in Lenin’s Russia a ‘war of manoeuvre’ may have been appropriate, in Gramsci’s Italy a ‘war of position’ was called for. Where one advocated the seizure of state power in a politics akin to trench warfare, the latter moved towards a subtle analysis of how ‘hearts and minds’ are won in contemporary capitalist societies and emphasizes the need for broad popular consensus around a transformation project. Where Gramsci’s ideas have probably been most creatively taken up has been in relation to the ‘national-popular’. Though developed

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 137 in various ways (see Forgas, 1984) this couplet generally refers to the formation of a ‘historic bloc’ in society which unites national and popular aspirations. It forms the basis for a cultural policy for social transformation and also for a more directly political strategy of a ‘post-class’ popular-democratic struggle. It is thus the site on which bourgeois hegemony operates and on which popular hegemony might be constructed. For Gramsci, for example, Catholicism needed to be understood in all its complexity and not simply wished away by a secular, socialist hegemonic project. He also understood, ‘the role which Fascism played in Italy in “hegemonizing” the backward character of the national popular culture … and refashioning it into a reactionary national formation, with a genuine popular basis and support’ (Hall, 1996b: 439). This subtle, open-ended engagement with the national-popular, and in particular its discursive construction, was followed through by Stuart Hall, among others, in his original analyses of ‘Thatcherism’, which grasped some of its popular appeal and refused the easy option of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘reflection’ of economic transformations. In terms of the production of that prolific field of study now known as ‘cultural studies’ Gramsci was a watershed. As Stuart Hall recalls, in his account of the emergence of cultural studies in the 1970s, while Gramsci belonged to the problematic of Marxism, ‘his importance for … cultural studies is precisely the degree to which he radically displaced some of the inheritances of Marxism in cultural studies’ (Hall, 1996a: 267). We have seen how far removed Gramsci was from earlier Marxist cultural theorists in breaking with the mechanical base/superstructure distinctions and in understanding the autonomy of the political and ideological/cultural domains. The new cultural paradigm which emerged focused particularly on the ‘way of life’ of particular social groups, their ‘common sense’ and their sense of agency. In Althusser, ideologies are seen to ‘interpellate’ (hail or address) a ‘subject’ but, as Richard Johnson reminds us, that ‘subject’ is never naked: ‘Outside some structuralist texts, the “lonely hour” of the unitary, primary, primordial and cultureless interpellation “never comes”. Ideologies always work upon a ground: that ground is culture’ (1979: 234). Cultural studies may later, in the 1980s, have become institutionalized and depoliticized (see Davies, 1995), but if they did no more than remind of the centrality of culture to ideology, they would have served a useful function for a Marxist understanding of culture and society.

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Gramsci was also a key figure in that other flourishing area of study known as post-colonial studies (see Ashcroft et al., 1995). Its origins can be traced back to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1985) which examined how the West had constructed the Orient as an object of knowledge and domination. Orientalism shows how Western cultures make representations of foreign cultures, the better to master or in some way control them’ (Said, 1985: 120). Central to Orientalism is the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ and the role of intellectuals in constructing and reproducing it. Orientalism is shown by Said to be a hegemonic Western discourse, a ‘cultural and political fact’. While aware that ‘most attempts to rub culture’s nose in the mud of politics have been crudely iconoclastic’ (1985: 210) Said has, in Orientalism, but particularly in his subsequent Culture and Imperialism (1993), begun to fill an enormous gap in bringing these two domains together. Orientalism has been criticized for producing an over-monolithic, totalizing or over-hegemonic view of this discourse and for neglecting or downplaying agency or resistance. Nevertheless, it more or less singlehandedly brought post-colonialism to the fore as a dynamic new area of critical cultural studies. Another related ‘Gramscian’ area of study is that of ‘subaltern studies’, which emerged in India but also had a significant influence in Latin America. For the Subaltern Studies Group, Gramsci’s concept of subaltern is taken ‘as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, race, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha, 1982: vii). Colonial history always ignored the politics of the people, and subaltern activity in particular. The subaltern studies approach stresses cultural autonomy, authenticity and consciousness, and thus is very much in the Gramscian tradition. For Ranajit Guha, in particular, the subaltern study project has shown that popular culture and resistance in India meant that the British colonial project was never truly hegemonic (1982). Gayatri Spivak critiques and extends the subaltern studies project, focusing not only on the knowledge-power couplet, but bringing gender squarely into this critical area of study. Her influential ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1993) focuses on the figure of the subaltern South Asian woman, whose contradictory location is both constructed and controlled by colonialism and traditional patriarchy. The increasing influence of

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 139 Foucault in Said and Spivak is, of course, taking our account beyond the ‘Gramscian turn’. Internationally, Gramsci’s thought was probably most influential politically (as against in the academy) in Latin America. The much earlier reception of Gramsci in Spanish is part of the reason, but also a marked ‘fit’ between the type of problematic Gramsci was dealing with and the reality of Latin America. Work by Jose Aricó (1988) and Juan Carlos Portantiero (1983) are some examples of the sophisticated political use to which Gramsci was put in Latin American progressive circles. A whole range of social, political and historical enquiries were guided by the Gramscian concepts of passive revolution, historic bloc, hegemony and civil society. The perverse, practically ‘postmodern’, nature of the modernization process in Latin America proved fertile ground for the application and development of Gramsci’s concepts. In the cultural domain, Gramsci’s influence has been equally significant, for example in the recent influential work by Nestor García Canclini on ‘hybrid cultures’ (1995). As political practice now moves beyond the state-centric model, so the Gramscian influence is likely to be even more strongly felt. The growing importance of the cultural domain in terms of creating the conditions for development and for democratic citizenship is giving rise to new diverse debates, often under the explicit or implicit sign of Gramsci. To round off this cursory account of the Gramscian turn in Marxist cultural studies it might be useful to recall the controversy between so-called ‘culturalists’ and ‘structuralists’. In terms of Marx’s legacy, the ‘culturalists’ (such as E. P. Thompson) would lay stress on people ‘making their own history’, whereas the structuralists would stress the element of ‘not in conditions of their own making’. Thompson’s history of the ‘making’ of the English working class stressed the active process of class formation and the element of conscious agency: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at the appointed time. It was present at its own making’ (1970: 9). Yet, structuralists would note a lack of basic objective co-ordinates in this story of the cultural development of a class, such as the size and composition of the working class. While it is possible to short-circuit this discussion by pointing to the obvious ‘dialectical’ interaction between structure and agency (or voluntarism and determinism, in another language), the fact remains that Thompson (and Raymond Williams) helped

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define a crucial absence in traditional Marxist theory. Thompson’s concern with culture, values and ideas, along with Williams’ focus on culture as a ‘way of life’ represent a significant enrichment of the Marxist tradition. The structuralists, meanwhile, were becoming ‘poststructuralists’, the theme of our next section. The cultural turn If Gramsci brought culture squarely back into the Marxist vocabulary, postmodernism seemed to put it on a pedestal. In this era of post-everything ‘the word “culture” … seems to be appearing everywhere, its meaning stretched to the point that attempts to specify the noncultural run into severe difficulties’, as Adam and Allan put it, in their recent attempt at theorizing culture, after postmodernism (1995: xiii). Whereas Marxism, but also much of social science, had neglected culture, now the postmodernists seemed to be proclaiming the death of society and the rule of culture. As culture was/is an expansive and ever-inclusive concept, this tendency towards conceptual inflation was, perhaps, inevitable. So, not only has culture gained a more important role in critical social analysis but there are those of extreme tendencies (for example, Baudrillard) who argue that ‘everything’ is culture. Also apparent is the tendency for the postmodern turn in cultural studies to be studiously apolitical, especially compared to the likes of Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall. It would, however, be quite inadequate to leave the verdict on postmodern cultural studies at ‘culturalist’ and ‘apolitical’. A knee-jerk Marxist reaction ‘against postmodernism’ (for example, Callinicos, 1989) both impoverishes Marxism and allows the reactionary tendencies in postmodernism to run unchecked. The cultural turn of the 1980s represented a turn against economism, represented one reaction to the fading relevance of socialism and responded to changes in the world with the rise of the new information technologies. Radical politics was shifting towards the new politics of recognition and what was seen as the economism of Marxism was now widely repudiated. The new capitalism was permeated by terms such as difference, choice, information rich, and was effectively becoming culturalized. The workplace was no longer seen to the dominant site for the formation of cultural identity (‘working class culture’) which now seemed to shift to the domain of the consumer market. The materialist emphasis of Marxism – and

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 141 the social sciences as a whole to some extent – was being replaced by a strong culturalist emphasis, even dominance, which seemed more in keeping with the new ‘soft capitalism’. As Ray and Sayer comment: ‘there are many positive effects of the cultural turn – both in taking culture, discourse and subjectivity more seriously and in escaping from reductionist treatments of culture as mere reflection of material situation’ (1999: 2). However, we need to distinguish between capitalism’s ‘cultural turn’ under the new globalized, informationalized order prevailing since the 1990s and a research perspective on contemporary capitalism. The notion that capitalism can be reduced to culture and discourse without taking into account its economic logic is clearly not plausible. Certainly a cultural perspective orients us towards an analysis of meaning and representation. However not all social processes can be reduced to a ‘signifying practice’, any more than culture could be reduced to an economic base in the past. In reality we cannot separate the ‘economy’ from ‘culture’ as is implicit in these debates. The economic relations are culturally embedded and cultural practices are hardly divorced from economic relations. Indeed in recent years we have seen the emergence of cultural political economy as a post-disciplinary perspective cognizant of the complexity of contemporary capitalism and equipped to understand the interrelationship between economic, political, social, spatial and cultural processes. It is probably impossible to summarize the main tenets of postmodern cultural theory in a short space, certainly impossible to capture its flavour, but some main ideas are clear enough. Probably above all else, postmodernism implies a mistrust of ‘metanarratives’ or master narratives, such as wealth creation or workers’ revolution. All paradigms of progress based on science are also rejected as incredulous. Rejecting foundational truths and global knowledge, postmodernism turns instead to ‘local’ or grounded knowledge, forms of knowledge which stress openness, discontinuity and reflexivity. The postmodernist also rejects the studiously disinterested language of representation, seen as typical of modernism. The world is not simply out there – ‘objective reality’ – waiting to be represented. Boyne and Rattansi write of ‘a series of crises of representations, in which older modes of defining, appropriating and recomposing the objects of artistic, philosophical, literary and social scientific

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languages are no longer credible’ (1990: 12). The boundary between the object and language seems to have been dissolved and we are now more prone to take a ‘perspectival’ view of things. The universality of Reason – the cornerstone of the Enlightenment of which Marx was of course part – seems to have run into a brick wall and dissolved into relativism. In relation to culture, postmodernism rejects the idea of art as unique, based on the creative genius of the artist. For Baudrillard, in particular, there is nothing real or original, we have only simulations, we can only copy. Thus the boundary between ‘high’ and popular art, which Marxist cultural critics usually shared, is dissolved. The boundaries between reality and images fade away. Images and simulations take on a life of their own. It is not all free play and heterogeneity because postmodernism also deconstructs, interrogates and disrupts traditional cultural forms, such as their highly gendered nature. Cultural metadiscourses are seen as masks for the partiality and prejudice of the powerful. However, this subversive element is at least matched by what Mike Featherstone refers to as postmodernism’s ‘aestheticization of the mode of perception and the aestheticization of everyday life’ (1991: 124). Images of war, sexual violence and famine shamelessly sell products to the consumer society. Politics and war (the Gulf War, for example) are reduced to images. The aesthetic becomes a new master paradigm, all is culture, everything is discourse, all sense of reality, oppression and justice disappears. Postmodern cultural theory can thus destabilize its predecessors but can also be as one-sided as any theory of ideology ever was. Existing as a bridge between Marxism and ‘post-Marxism’ via postmodernism, is the figure of Antonio Gramsci, very much a limit case before Marxism was seen to collapse, at least in its traditional form. Ernesto Laclau (then Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) began in the mid-1970s the break with class reductionism via an original and dynamic engagement with the work of Gramsci. The Laclau and Mouffe text on radical democratic politics is even entitled Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Gramsci, as we saw above, had developed a non-reductionist conception of ideology and his conception of hegemony broke decisively with economism. However, he would simply have taken for granted that ideologies ‘belonged’ to classes, an assumption that post-Marxism would come to challenge

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 143 in developing its conception of non-class political ideologies. While ideology and culture, for Gramsci, could not be reduced to, or explained by, the economic base, they were always part of the political, basically class, struggle. As Michèle Barrett notes: ‘Gramsci is a pivotal figure for Laclau and Mouffe because he represents the furthest point that can be reached within Marxism and the intrinsic limitations of the theoretical problematic’ (1991: 63). This leads Laclau and Mouffe to recognize ‘the impossibility of society’ (as a unitary object of cognition) and to turn from class essentialism to the pluralist demands of the ‘new’ social movements of gender, antiracism, peace, ecology and so on. We have already seen the influence of Foucault alongside Gramsci in producing a ferment in Marxist cultural studies. Foucault turns from science versus ideology to knowledge and power. Foucault cuts across the science/non-science division with his ‘archaeology’ of knowledge and his particular conception of discourse. For Foucault a discourse is what constrains or enables what we write and speak within historical limits. Against all forms of idealism, Foucault is acutely aware of the non-discursive domain, however. What he does is supersede the traditional Marxist distinction between base and superstructure. It is not that ‘all is discourse’, but that we cannot separate in a mechanical, unilinear and hierarchical manner, words from things. For Foucault, Marxism is a ‘totalizing discourse’ and its claim to scientificity an instrument of domination. Foucault, as others, rejects the grand narrative, the grand theory and the great truth and directs our attention to local, fragmented and subaltern knowledges. Culture – in the sense of how people live, think and speak – is central to Foucault. Cultural resistance emerges from specific struggles, because ‘one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with “dominators” on one side and “dominated” on the other …’ (Foucault, 1980: 142). If Foucault could be useful even to a structuralist Marxist such as Nicos Poulantzas in his last writings on power (Poulantzas, 1980), the impact of Derrida was seemingly more corrosive, less assimilable. Derrida once (in)famously declared, ‘Il n’ya pas d’hors texte’, literally ‘there is nothing outside the text’. In fact he was saying no more than Laclau and Mouffe were to say, namely that ‘society’ is not a valid object of discourse in and of itself. The idea of society as a selfcontained and integrated totality – base and superstructure – was,

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of course, central to Marxism. Derrida shows how thought systems, based on foundations or first principles, are eventually metaphysical, and how ‘binary oppositions’ can always be deconstructed. For Derrida there is no direct, transparent and unmediated knowledge of the world. As Madan Sarup puts it ‘Derrida wants to emphasize the culturally produced (as against natural) character of thought and perception’ (1993: 56). Meaning cannot be absolute, it is always positional, as against traditional beliefs in the fixity of meaning. While this point cannot be developed in detail here it is worth mentioning at this stage that Derrida’s poststructuralist advocacy of deconstruction is opposed to some postmodernists’ refusal of ethical choices, irrationalism or nihilistic political outlook. Having cast a cursory glance at certain elements in the postmodern turn, we can, perhaps, return to what postmodernism ‘is’. Nowhere better to start than Fredric Jameson’s influential 1984 essay (Jameson, 1991) on postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’. For Jameson, the cultural transformations of late capitalism express a deeper logic of the system. Where market capitalism produced realism and monopoly capitalism led to modernism, late or consumer capitalism has spawned postmodernism as its cultural expression. As commodity production expands throughout society, and accelerates constantly, so aesthetic innovation and experimentation take on ‘an increasingly essential structural function and position’ (Jameson, 1991: 5). This new dominant or hegemonic cultural logic is characterized by its ‘depthlessness’ and what Jameson calls ‘multi-phrenic intensities’, which refers to the breakdown of individual identity though cultural bombardment by fragmented images and signs. Aware that he is using ‘a different language’, Jameson argues that culture can no longer be characterized by its ‘semiautonomy’, rather it is ‘to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life … can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense’ (1991: 48). It is interesting to note that Jameson has since been accused of being an irresponsible postmodernist and an apologist for Marxism. This is not surprising, in that he explicitly seeks to follow Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism in both its negative consequences and positive potential. Far easier to question is his (admittedly broad-brush)

marx i sm a nd cult ure | 145 periodization of capitalism, and his (rather appealing) ‘Hegelianism’. However, it is true to say that Jameson sees history in terms of a relentless logic of development, and there is rather too seamless a fit between culture and society in his narrative. Also, while it is true that postmodernism (or contemporary society) has become fragmented, this cannot be contrasted to a golden age, unified or integrated past. To say that today’s advanced industrial societies are culturally saturated implies some sort of nonsaturated other past or different society. Jameson is seeking to develop a new cultural politics adequate to the era in which we are living, but simply to ‘unmask’ postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism may ultimately prove too reductionist, too necessitarian, and may constrain the options that need to be considered in an epoch of unprecedented fragmentation and flux. What I would wish to foreground, is the post-colonial moment of postmodernism which radically decentres the West and registers its declining cultural role in the post-colonial world. Politics are back in command and the relativist slip into nihilism has little place in this radical postmodernist hybrid. There has been a spatial relativization of the Western Enlightenment tradition, a ‘provincialization’ of Europe, as the Subaltern Studies Group puts it. Cultural complexity, hybridity and syncretism are now seen as important components in the increasingly important cultural sphere. Where postmodernism sought to deconstruct the master narratives of European culture, the post-colonial project is to dismantle the binary opposition of centre–periphery, typical of imperialist discourse. Yet against a certain universalizing (even Euro-American-centredness) tendency of postmodernism, post-colonialism gives voice to the colonized and seeks to subvert the discursive and material effects of imperialism. It has the added bonus of correcting the economism of Marxist theories of imperialism, by recognizing the multiple axes of cultural formation, including those of race, gender, sexuality, religion and family discourses. The post-colonial ‘movement’ is potentially, at least, a source of cultural resistance and reconstruction. There are, however, serious objections to it as a totalizing framework. Why centre colonialism, when it is largely superseded in most areas of the ‘Third World’? Is Latin America post-colonial? Is North America post-colonial? For Aijaz Ahmad, post-colonialism takes upon itself to privilege colonialism in structuring other people’s histories (1992). Instead of decentring

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imperialist history, the very singularity of the term ‘post-colonialism’ seems to reassert European historical time and bring colonialism in through the back door. Certainly there is a risk of homogenizing the ‘non-European’ cultural experience by using the simple label ‘postcolonial’ too literally. However, as with postmodernism, there is a need to discriminate between variants of post-colonial theory and to understand their contradictory make-up. Ultimately, following Ali Rattansi: ‘There is some commonality in the postmodernist and the post-colonial critique of Western modernity and the Enlightenment’s power/knowledge complex, nevertheless post-colonialism must also act as a form of counter-discourse to postmodernism, decolonizing the postmodern imagination as much as that of modernity’ (1997: 494). The cultural turn referred to above has had an impact in supposedly reducing Marxism to cultural studies according to some critics. This is no mere academic debate and goes to the heart of who are the agents of social transformation today. Judith Butler has claimed that what she calls ‘neo-conservative Marxists’ (1998: 36) are now fighting back against the cultural turn by relegating some of the new social movements (such as that around gay rights) to the ‘cultural’ domain and thus not integral to the struggle against capitalism. Butler sees this move ‘to make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the “real” business of politics’ as an ‘attempt to separate Marxism from the study of culture and to rescue critical knowledge from the shoals of cultural specificity’ (1998: 36). We could see this argument as part of a somewhat over-heated US ‘cultural wars’ academic debate but it is relevant in a more general sense to understand the political importance of current debates around Marxism and culture. Nancy Fraser responds to Judith Butler in a way which clarifies this debate I believe (Fraser, 1998). The point is not to oppose the ‘economic’ to the ‘merely cultural’ but rather to deconstruct the economic/cultural distinction itself. Fraser has always distinguished between redistribution and recognition demands but she rejects Butler’s premise that the latter are immaterial or non-economic as she claimed in relation to gay rights struggles. For Fraser ‘injustices of misrecognition [for example in relation to gay rights] are just as material as injustices of maldistribution’ (1998: 3). While homophobia may be rooted in symbolic practices of interpretation and evaluation they are nonetheless material in their real impact in preventing people from accessing economic or political rights.

ma rx i sm and cult ure | 147 Clearly moving forward we need to understand but also destabilize the economic/cultural distinction and not think of any process as ‘purely economic’ or ‘merely cultural’ in ways that acknowledges the merits of classical Marxism but also the real purchase of the postMarxist or poststructuralist critique. References Adam, B. and Allan, S. (1995) ‘Theorizing Culture: An Introduction’, in B. Adam and S. Allan (eds), Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, London: UCL Press. Ahmad, A. (1992) In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso. Althusser, L. (1984) ‘A Reply on Art in Reply to André Daspre’, in Essays on Ideology, London: Verso. Aricó, J. (1988) La Cola del Diablo. Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Buenos Aires: Puntosur. Arvon, H. (1973) Marxist Esthetics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (eds) (1995) The Post-Colonial Reader, London: Routledge. Barrett, M. (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity. Boyne, A. and Rattansi, A. (1990) ‘The Theory and Politics of Postmodernism: By Way of an Introduction’, in R. Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds), Postmodernism and Society, London: Macmillan. Butler, J. (1998) ‘Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, I/227. Callinicos, A. (1989) Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, Cambridge: Polity. Caudwell, C. (1970) Romance and Realism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caudwell, C. (1973) Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Davies, I. (1995) Cultural Studies and

Beyond: Fragments of Empire, London: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1976) Marxism and Literary Criticism, London: Methuen. Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage. Forgas, D. (1984) ‘National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept’, in Formations of Nations and Peoples, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester. Fraser, N. (1998) ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler’, New Left Review, I/228. García Canclini, N. (1995) Hybrid Cultures, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Guha, R. (ed.) (1982) Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (1996a) ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, in D. Morley and K. H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996b) ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies’, in D. Morley and K. H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall:

148 | s i x Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Hayward, M. (1983) Writers in Russia: 1917–1978, London: Harvill. Hirst, P. (1979) On Law and Ideology, London: Macmillan. Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Johnson, R. (1979) Three Problematics: Elements of a Working-Class Culture’, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), WorkingClass Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchinson. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Larrain, J. (1983) Marxism and Ideology, London: Macmillan. Lifschitz, M. (1973) The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, London: Pluto. Marx, K. (1968) Selected Works in One Volume, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Portantiero, J. C. (1983) Los Usos de Gramsci, Buenos Aires: Folios Ediciones. Poulantzas, N. (1980) State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso. Prawer, S. S. (1978) Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rattansi, A. (1997) ‘Post-Colonialism and Its Discontents’, Economy and Society, 26(4). Ray, L. and Sayer, A. (1999) ‘Introduction’, in L. Ray and A. Sayer (eds), Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn, London: Sage. Said, E. (1985) Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus. Sarup, M. (1993) An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, London: Harvester. Smith, M. (2000) Culture: Reinventing the Social Sciences, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Solomon, M. (ed.) (1979) Marxism and Art, Brighton: Harvester. Spivak, G. C. (1993) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Struve, G. (1972) Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Thompson, E. P. (1970) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Vaughan James, C. (1973) Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory, London: Macmillan. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 | D I F F I C U L T D I A L O G UE : M A R X IS M AND N ATI ON

For many writers, accounting for nationalism has been Marxism’s great historical failure. This chapter seeks to examine why that might have been the case. It starts, predictably, with the engagements of Marx and Engels with the pressing national questions of their day. This is followed by a cursory account of the communist movement’s interaction with nationalism. These were, after all, competing political movements and the heated debates between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on the ‘national question’ were no mere pedantic or esoteric terminological squabbles. Antonio Gramsci, as we saw in relation to Marxist treatments of culture, was also an innovator in terms of nationalism. But our emphasis here lies in the partial, important yet neglected, break in Marxist orthodoxy on the national question effected by the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer at the turn of the last century. Finally, we turn to certain crucial postmodern questionings of the whole Marxist tradition’s limitations regarding the national. Here we examine the deep Eurocentrism in the Marxist, as well as liberal, views of the national question and we sketch in the necessary engendering of the national question, so long subsumed under an implicit, if not explicit, androcentrism. Marxist blind spot It was Tom Nairn who famously argued that ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have others as well, and some have been more debated … Yet none … is as important, as fundamental, as the problem of nationalism, either in theory or in political practice’ (1981: 329). This dictum has become something of a truism accepted by non-Marxist and Marxist writers alike. It is sometimes argued, or implied, that nationalism is so primordial that a political ideology, such as Marxism, would find it somehow ungraspable. It is also argued that Marxism failed to understand nationalism because of its inherent reductionism (superstructures determined by the economic base) and its class

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essentialism, because of which only class ideologies were seen. Both these lines of attack are based on certain undeniable features of classical Marxism. However, when considering the interaction of Marx and Engels with the ‘national question’ it is probably best to start by situating them within the politics of the day. They were men of their times, they were not disembodied, they were politicians not sociologists. In mid-nineteenth-century Europe ‘To support nationalist aspirations for unity, autonomy, or independence was to support popular liberties against empire and absolutism’ (Benner, 1995: 9). For a Mazzini or a Herder, nationalist icons of the day, the flourishing of nation-states was synonymous with democracy. The negative connotations of nationalism after 1914 or 1989 were not even a glimmer on the horizon. Indeed, what was unusual in Marx and Engels was their politically discriminating attitude towards the various national issues of the day. Marx and Engels displayed a normative approach towards the nationalisms of their day, with the guiding light for them being democracy and later, also, internationalism. In a sense they were not interested in analysing nationalism as a unified consistent entity because they did not believe it was such. As Erica Benner writes, they could not have grasped the differences between the new forms of national politics and the democratic politics they advocated had they treated nationalism ‘as a phenomenon sui generis, rather than analysing national movements as a variety of distinct political programmes based on conflicting social interests’ (1995: 10). It is this discriminating, deconstructionist approach to nationalism which we now need to outline. Though Marx and Engels were keen supporters of German unification, they were not German nationalists. For them, national unification was a preliminary task of the German democratic revolution. Marx and Engels were equally sympathetic to the ongoing process of national unification in Italy: ‘No people, apart from the Poles, has been so shamefully oppressed by the superior power of its neighbours, no people has so often and so courageously tried to throw off the yoke oppressing it’ (Marx and Engels, 1977b: 170). Here we get a hint that support for nationalist demands was not unconditional for the founders of Marxism. Rather, it was tied to the big power politics of the day and in particular the dominating role of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. For Marx and

ma rx i sm and nat ion | 151 Engels, neither a common language and traditions, nor geographic and historical homogeneity, were sufficient in themselves to define a nation. Rather, a certain level of economic and social development was required, and priority was given, on the whole, to larger units. So, for example, on the question of Germany ceding the Schleswig and Holstein territories to Denmark in 1848, Marx and Engels believed that the German role was revolutionary and progressive and advocated a resolute conduct of war against Denmark from the start. In the great historic nations, people had gained the right to strong, viable national states through their struggles for unity and independence. These nations would be the standard-bearers of progress and civilization for Marx and Engels. This was, indeed, a form of national social Darwinism. Yet, who entered the charmed circle would depend on political circumstances. Thus, in 1851 Engels could write to Marx that ‘The Poles are une nation foutue’ (Marx and Engels, 1982: 363) and in 1864 they could refer to the Poles as ‘a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination’ (Marx, 1974: 380–1). The reunification of Poland was to become a central workingclass aim of the First International which Marx and Engels did so much to promote. The right of nations to self-determination was far from absolute for Marx and Engels and depended, rather, on the international political conjuncture and the developments of the class struggle, or lack of it, in each national situation. They were, of course, practical politicians and they were guided on national issues largely by action considerations rather than theory. Compared to the great ‘historic nations’ such as Germany, Engels, in particular, developed the Hegelian notion of ‘non-historic’ peoples. For Engels, ‘these relics of a nation mercilessly trampled underfoot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 234). The Southern Slavs – the Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs and Croats – were peoples without a history, were not viable and would never achieve independence. Of course, it was not because they were reactionary ‘by nature’ that this or that national or ethnic grouping might have remained aloof from the 1848

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revolutionary wave or might have entered into counter-revolutionary alliances. Thus, the Basques may have entered an alliance with Don Carlos, but only to defend their democratic fueros (autonomy rights) against Spanish absolutism. Furthermore, the concept of ‘national viability’ is inherently metaphysical and hardly accords with democratic criteria. No national group can be condemned to the counter-revolutionary dustbin of history, nor can any democratic politics call for their annihilation ‘by the most determined use of terror’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 378) as Engels infamously did on more than one occasion. The unfortunate categories of historic and non-historic nations were also to frame the writings of Marx and Engels in the world beyond Europe. After the war by the United States on Mexico in 1845–47 which resulted in the annexation of large areas of Mexico, Engels argued that it was in the interests of ‘civilization’ against the ‘lazy’ and ‘desperate’ Mexicans. The conquest of Algeria by France is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization, especially given that the ‘Bedouins were a nation of robbers’ (Avineri, 1969: 47). Later Engels was to display a much more positive attitude towards resistance in Algeria against French colonial rule. In relation to India Marx and Engels’ attitudes were also quite nuanced over the positive and negative aspects of colonialism, at once developing capitalism but also destroying a civilization. The point is probably more general: namely that they tended to view the world outside Europe as mere reflection, its own internal dynamic quite beyond their ken. In relation to Latin America, Marx in his writing on Simón Bolívar, the hero of the independence struggles, seems to share Hegel’s judgement of the continent as arbitrary, absurd and irrational in its nature. Thus he could not ‘see’ a class struggle in Latin America and could only see in Bolívar a pale Third World version of Napoleon III in France. Where Marx and Engels seem to break with the unfortunate binary opposition between historic and non-historic nations is in regard to Ireland. The ‘Irish turn’ is clearly signalled by Marx in a letter to Engels in 1867: ‘Previously I thought Ireland’s separation from England impossible. Now I think it inevitable’ (Marx and Engels, 1971: 143). What Marx now prescribed for Ireland was independence, protective tariffs and an agrarian reform. In a glimmer of what would one day be called ‘dependency theory’, Engels wrote

marx i sm and nat ion | 153 that ‘Every time Ireland was about to develop industrially, she was crushed and reconverted into a purely agricultural land’ (Marx and Engels, 1971: 132). Ireland’s domination by British force of arms had converted the country into an agricultural and labour reserve for the Industrial Revolution. Marx and Engels now stood squarely behind the Irish democratic movement for national independence. Their stance was summed up in the single yet eloquent phrase: ‘Any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains’ (Marx and Engels, 1971: 163). It seemed that they were recognizing the fundamental political, even class, differences between a nationalism of the oppressed and the aggressive, expansionist nationalism of the oppressor. Ireland seems to represent a genuine turning point in Marx and Engels’ understanding of the complex relationship between national and class struggles. During a dispute over affiliation of an independent Irish section to the First International, Engels declared unambiguously that ‘In a case like that of the Irish, true Internationalism must necessarily be based upon a distinctly national organisation … The Irish sections’ … most pressing duty, as Irishmen, was to establish their own national independence’ (Marx and Engels, 1971: 303). This ringing declaration of support for the democratic right of national independence for Ireland was still, ultimately, couched in terms of its effect on the British and European revolutions rather than in its own right. Overall, I would agree with Georges Haupt’s verdict: ‘Though the Irish problem [sic] leads to a definition of the principled position on the relation between dominant and oppressed nations and allows the national movement to be assigned new functions, the refusal to generalize, to integrate the national dynamic without reservations within the theory of revolution remains manifest’ (1974: 19). It seemed that Ireland marked the furthest Marx and Engels could go on the national question and the limits of classical Marxism’s understanding of nationalism, in its democratic and revolutionary variants. So, what was the legacy of Marx and Engels on the national question? It was probably not the ‘great historical failure’ it has been portrayed as, although it was certainly contradictory. Though living in the age of nationalism, Marx and Engels preached internationalism and probably exaggerated or over-estimated its homogenizing effect on the world. Furthermore, as Paul James notes: ‘ideologies like

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nationalism were in Marx’s writings often reduced to imaginary or fictitious representations of the really real’ (1996: 69). As with religion, famously for Marx the ‘opium of the people’, nationalism was most often seen as a veil over people’s eyes, a false consciousness masking the true class struggle. Nationalism belonged to the realm of subjectivity, whereas the class level was somehow more objective and material. Marx was, however, well capable of analysing national traditions, culture and institutions with a flexible methodology which did not reduce national particularities to their economic base. If there was a negative normative yardstick in the shape of ‘progress’ with which to measure nations, there was also in Marx and Engels a consistent commitment to democracy as the litmus test for an understanding of the political significance of particular nationalist movements. Communists and nationalism It is sometimes forgotten that communists and nationalists were political rivals, ‘fishing in the same pond’, as it were. We should thus reject the idea that one was ‘scientific’ and rational whereas the other was ‘primordial’ and irrational. In this regard, we can usefully consider the humorous, but nonetheless pertinent, analysis by Ernest Gellner of ‘The Wrong Address Theory’ of nationalism he believes is favoured by Marxism: Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims held that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. It is now necessary for revolutionary activists to persuade the wrongful recipient to hand over the message, and the zeal it engenders, to the rightful and intended recipient. (Gellner, 1983: 129) Of course this analysis is not, strictly speaking, accurate but it does capture some of the deep-rooted incomprehension and hostility which most Marxists displayed towards national phenomena. As with the ‘woman question’ (Chapter 5), communists were often to be found trying to find ways in which their Marxist theories could

ma rx i sm and nat ion | 155 provide a strategy for action towards a recalcitrant social reality they did not always comprehend. Lenin, as the Marxist leader of the multi-ethnic Soviet Union, was called upon to develop the Marxist theory of nationalism. His contribution, the so-called ‘right of nations to self-determination’, has been codified in the Marxist-Leninist system (see Lenin, 1963a). The right of nations to self-determination had become part of the Bolshevik armoury in 1903 as a response to the more ‘nationalist’ position of the Jewish workers’ organization, the Bund. The 1905 Russian Revolution was to bring the national question more fully into the centre of Bolshevik politics. Lenin took his position against both the demands for Jewish (and Ukrainian) national cultural autonomy and, what he saw as, the abstract leftist denial of national oppression by Rosa Luxemburg and those among the Bolsheviks who followed her position. Basically, Lenin advocated the right of self-determination (including secession) by smaller nations where they were oppressed by a dominant larger nation. As with Marx though, he preferred larger economic units as being more conducive to economic development. To a large extent Lenin’s support for nationalist movements was tactical, designed to undermine the tsarist regime in a Russia he recognized to be ‘a prison of peoples’. Once in power the Bolsheviks were loath to put the ‘right’ to selfdetermination of these peoples into practice. There is much that could be said about the Leninist ‘principle’ of the right of nations to self-determination. I could start with Tom Nairn’s caustic remarks that what Marxist ‘orthodoxy required was a plausible way of both supporting and not supporting national movements at the same time. It needed an agile and imposing nonposition which would keep its options permanently open. That was what Lenin supplied’ (1997: 39). Lenin certainly recognized in his political practice the strategic importance of the national question. He even began to transcend the class reductionism of classical Marxism in recognizing the specificity of national oppression. In a remarkable passage, he referred to how ‘By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality “only” – with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres … including complete freedom to secede’ (Lenin, 1970: 130). Full democratization of the state and society on the way to socialism would include the democratic rights of national

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communities. In practice, Russia remained a ‘prison of peoples’, albeit tempered by considerable degrees of national, especially cultural, autonomy. Rosa Luxemburg, as in all her political positions and practice, sought to refute any opportunism on the national question. For her, the ‘right’ of nations to self-determination made as much sense as the ‘right’ of workers to eat off gold plates. This right seemed to her either an empty, non-committal phrase which meant nothing, or else it was false and misleading if it implied that socialists had an unconditional duty to support all nationalist aspirations. While welcoming the Russian Revolution of 1917, she believed that the Bolshevik policy on national self-determination would lead to the disintegration of Russia and was storing up trouble for the Soviet state. In her critique of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg posed the highly pertinent question of who decided a nation’s will to secede: ‘But who is that “nation” and who has the authority and the “right” to speak for the “nation” and express its will?’ (Davis, 1976: 141). In this, Luxemburg was being consistent with her critique of the notion of representation implicit in the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. She was also sensitive to the perspectives of nonEuropean peoples (in her work on imperialism) and also recognized that: ‘The working class is interested in the cultural and democratic content of nationalism, which is to say that workers share interests in such political systems as assure a free development of culture and democracy in national life’ (Davis, 1976: 175). As Soviet Marxism began to consolidate its grip on the Russian state so its attention turned to spreading the revolution. Orthodox Marxism pointed West to the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries, such as Germany. However, Lenin severely underestimated ‘the Western proletariat’s deep attachment to national and democratic values. The nation and democracy were, historically, products of capitalism, but they were also conquests won by the working masses’ (Claudin, 1975: 60). Frustrated in the West, the young Bolshevik revolution turned its sights to the East, with far-reaching consequences. Nationalism came to the fore at the 1920 First Congress of the Peoples of the East held at Baku. The leaders of the Communist (or Third) International wooed the revolutionary nationalist leaders with a discourse, which could scarcely be called Marxist. Zinoviev proclaimed: ‘Brothers, we summon you to a holy war against British imperialism!’ while

marx i sm and nat ion | 157 the delegates brandished their sabres and revolvers in the air with cries of ‘Jihad’ and ‘Long live the renaissance in the East’ (Carrière d’Encausse and Schram, 1969: 173). It was indeed a renaissance, as communism was reborn in the East in local colours, and an antiimperialist movement, with communists in the vanguard, became a crucial factor in world history. Most Marxists and then communists would have hitherto held the most circumspect views on the prospects of non-European peoples contributing to the world revolution. Events in India or Ireland, for example, were usually only read in terms of their effect in Britain. The national question was still primarily a European question: for example, how to handle the various ethnic groupings in the AustroHungarian Empire. By 1922, however, the Fourth Congress of the Communist International had adopted a position which prefigured the idea of the anti-imperialist united front: ‘Taking full cognizance of the fact that those who represent the national will to State independence may … be … of the most varied kind, the Communist International supports every national revolutionary movement against imperialism’ (Degras, 1971: 385, emphasis added). With the temporary blip of the ultra-left turn between 1928 and 1934, the international communist movement began its adaptation towards, and accommodation with, Third World nationalist movements. Lenin himself had made the epistemological break to seek a way out of the imperialist blockade of the Soviet Union. Few now remember his words: ‘Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the “most just”, “purest”, most refined and civilised brand’ (Lenin, 1963b: 34). It was not just the ‘civilized’ brand of nationalism which was being wooed by the communists. For example, following a series of executions of communist leaders in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal, who was receiving Soviet military and financial aid, Karl Radek (who earlier held to Rosa Luxemburg’s position on the national question) could declare coolly: ‘We do not regret for a moment what we said to the Turkish communists: your first duty … will be to support the national liberation movement’ (Carrière d’Encausse and Schram, 1969: 173). Thus began a long series of ‘betrayals’ of Third World communists in the interests of Soviet state policy. Marxism-Leninism was becoming a promoter of ‘non-capitalist’ national development in the Third World. The lines between Marxism and nationalism

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were becoming very blurred indeed and in many cases a marriage, whether of conviction or convenience, was consummated. This is not intended as a moral critique (although that would probably be legitimate) but simply to point out how the binary opposite of the one time Marxist distance from, if not hostility towards, nationalism had now emerged. This was to persist until the collapse of state socialism or communism in 1989. As Soviet communism began its final decline towards collapse, so the national questions in the multi-ethnic state began to come to the fore again. A persistent image is of ‘primordial’ ethnic or national identities emerging when the authoritarian communist lid was lifted. An example, practically at random, would be Michael Ignatieff in his Blood and Belonging, where he argues that liberal civilization now seems to ‘run deeply against the human grain’ (1994: 189). He portrays a frightening picture of the demise of communism – with state structures collapsing, no imperial settlement to manage events, and hundreds of ethnic groups being left at the mercy of each other. As democratic discourse and the politics of conciliation had been notable by their absence under communist rule, so violence and force inevitably came to the fore. For Ignatieff: ‘Nationalist rhetoric swept through these regions like wildfire because it provided warlords and gunmen with a vocabulary of opportunistic self-justification’ (1994: 6). According to these images, nationalism is about blood and belonging and it is so strong, primitive and instinctive that it will out, if allowed to do so by a watchful ‘liberal civilization’. The current demonization of nationalism is understandable, but ‘liberal civilization’ (the United States of America?) is clearly no more of an antidote than ‘proletarian internationalism’ was. If nationalism is seen as a politics and a discursive formation rather than some primeval slime, then post-1989 events are somewhat less cataclysmic or surprising. Imperial collapse was bound to make nationalism an attractive vehicle for articulating a whole series of social and economic grievances. The nationalist form of conflicts does not mean that all is about ‘blood and belonging’ today. As Erica Benner puts it in a persuasive deployment of Marx and Engels to understand post1989 nationalisms: ‘If extremist nationalism is a powerful force in some formerly communist countries, the rise of blood lusting nationalist dictatorships is hardly a foregone conclusion in most of them’ (1995: 232). Nationalist movements do not operate as some simple,

marx i sm and nat ion | 159 unmediated reflection of a transparent national psyche, always waiting to explode malevolently. Their politics depends on particular social and economic circumstances which, if unfavourable, as Marx and Engels observed in their day, will give to nationalism a strongly negative connotation. In conclusion, the engagement of communists with nationalism has not been that fruitful in theoretical terms. In Lenin, ultimately nationalism was conceived as a transient problem in the inexorable march of history towards socialism. The turn towards the non-European colonial world gave rise to a sturdy hybrid of nationalist communism in which, to a large extent, Marxism was domesticated by nationalism, and Leninism became an ideology for development. Within European Marxism, nationalism continued to be underestimated and misunderstood. Thus, Eric Hobsbawm could write in 1989, in a broad retrospective on nationalism since 1780: ‘Post-1945 world politics have been basically the politics of revolution and counter-revolution, with national issues intervening only to underline or disturb the main theme’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 176). Hobsbawm has always followed Lenin in not wishing to ‘paint nationalism red’ but it is difficult to understand such a blinkered view of world politics. If there has been a ‘great historical failure’, it would probably not be at the theoretical level but at this practical level where an ideology, which is supposed to be a guide to action, can blind one to the overwhelming importance on the world stage of nationalism and ethnicity in all its variants. Otto Bauer’s break In most socialist engagements with nationalism, Otto Bauer’s work received little mention, generally only in relation to a few cutting remarks directed at it by Lenin and Stalin. Yet Kolakowski’s encyclopaedic history of Marxism refers to Bauer’s forgotten 1907 classic The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy as ‘the best treatise on nationality problems to be found in Marxist literature and one of the most significant products of Marxist theory in general’ (Kolakowski, 1981: 255). For reasons which will become clear, Bauer’s approach was difficult for orthodox Marxists to digest, but he did accomplish an important, if partial, break with the reductionism so evident in the classics, a break which has only recently been recognized (cf. Nimni, 1991).

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The context of Otto Bauer’s writing on nationalism was set by Austrian social democracy, which had to operate within a multinational state. Bauer formed part of the political current known as Austro-Marxism, which describes a number of theorists active in the Austrian socialist movement at the turn of the century (see Bottomore and Goode, 1978). They belonged to a tendency within the social-democratic movement, ‘The Marxist Centre’, led by Kautsky, and after the First World War they sought a third alternative between bankrupt social democracy and the new communist current. National tensions in the Habsburg Empire posed an obvious threat to the unity of the working-class movement. Until nearly the turn of the century the German-speaking social democrats of Austria had professed what Bauer called a ‘naïve cosmopolitanism’, which simply rejected nationalism as diversionary and preached a humanist message of fraternization (Bauer, 1979: 298). The Czech workers’ movement, on the other hand, was under considerable nationalist influence, not surprisingly given the predominant role of the Germans in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire. As one critic points out, ‘what this meant politically was, above all, that the Social Democratic Party lacked any common analysis of national conflicts within the multinational state, and could offer no united guidelines beyond an abstract profession of internationalism’ (Loew, 1979: 19). Support for nationalism was limited because Austrian social democrats wanted to preserve the empire, rather than see it break up into its national components. The centrifugal tendencies of the national movements were opposed in the name of a reformist political project within the whole state. For this the Austrian social democrats were sometimes referred to as the ‘KUK’ Social Democrats (Kaiserlich und Königlich: ‘imperial and royal’), a reference to the official designation of the Austrian crown (Loew, 1979: 20). Growing national tensions within the empire had forced the Austrian social democrats to face the national question. This was against the better judgement of their leader, Victor Adler, who considered the question too explosive. Largely inspired by Karl Kautsky, the Brünn programme of 1899 sought to resolve national tensions by allowing each national component of social democracy to present their own cultural demands, while the economic struggle would be waged at the level of the super-national state. Kautsky proposed the democratic transformation of the Austrian state along the lines of a federal

ma rx i sm and nat ion | 161 structure of six national parties, which the socialist movement had adopted at its 1897 Congress. The Brünn resolution advocated the restructuring of Austria along language divisions, against a minority who called for extra-territorial cultural autonomy. The debate at the Brünn Congress displayed clearly the varying conceptions of nationalism within the social democrat ranks. Seliger introduced the debate by saying it was ironic that those who were accused of being nationally neutral should be resolving the national problem. He stressed that above all, the question of the nationalities should not be seen as a question of power, but as a cultural question (Bernstein et al., 1978: 187). Delegate Daszynski disputed this view, arguing that ‘there is no national question without economic base’ (Bernstein et al., 1978: 195). The Ruthenian socialists pledged their support, but reminded the Congress that part of their people lived outside Austria in the Russian-dominated Ukraine: ‘We are convinced that the international power of the proletariat will only be developed when each nation can decide its history. We know that social and political liberation also presuppose national liberation’ (Bernstein et al., 1978: 198). In attempting to resolve the problem posed by the intersection of national and social struggles most delegates to the Congress emphasized that national disputes had to be resolved as a precondition for the advance of the labour movement. A minority argued on the contrary that ‘our activity is taken up too much by the national question’ and they had recruited workers often precisely because they did not raise the national question (Bernstein et al., 1978: 208). The problem was best addressed by the Polish delegation: Polish socialists would act within Austrian workers’ organizations but they would also ‘act incessantly within the whole Polish people to eliminate the grave national injustice exercised against the Polish people’ (Bernstein et al., 1978: 216). The struggle of the proletariat could not ignore brutal national oppression and the partition of their country. Mere cultural autonomy could not suffice. Even party leader Victor Adler, who had preferred to ignore the national question, got round the dilemma by saying that internationalists could also be good national patriots. Thus the early abstract stand for internationalism gave way to a limited support for nationalism. Bauer himself saw the main strength of his work as its description of the derivation of nationalism from the process of economic

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development, changes in the social structure and the articulation of classes in society (1979: 19). However, much of his work, and the debates to which it gave rise, centred around the definition of ‘nation’ that he advanced. In a nutshell this was that ‘The nation is the totality of human beings bound together through a common destiny into a community of character’ (1979: 142). The nation was seen as a ‘community of fate’ whose character resulted from the long history of the conditions under which people laboured to survive, and divided the products of this labour (the social division of labour). Before deriding this conception as a form of idealism, we should note that Bauer repeatedly criticized ‘national spiritualism [which] saw the nation as a mysterious spirit of the people’ (1979: 130). He also explicitly rejected psychological theories of the nation. His working definition of the nation was rather a methodological postulate which posed the task of understanding the phenomenon of the nation, explaining on the basis of the uniqueness of its history all that constitutes the peculiarity, the individuality of each nation, and which differentiates it from other nations, that is, showing the nationality of each individual as the historical with respect to him, and the historical within him. (Bauer, 1979: 14) Bauer concludes that only by pursuing this task of uncovering the national components can we dissolve the false appearance of the substantiality of the nation, to which nationalist conceptions of history always succumb. For Bauer, above all, the nation is a product of history. This is true in two respects: firstly, ‘in terms of its material content it is a historical phenomenon, since the living national character which operates in every one of its members is the residue of a historical development’ and secondly, ‘from the point of view of its formal structure it is a historical phenomenon, because diverse broad circles are bound together in a nation by different means and in different ways at the various stages of historical development’ (Bauer, 1979: 144). In short, the way in which the ‘community of character’ is engendered is historically conditioned. It follows that this ‘community of character’ is not a timeless abstraction, but is modified over time. Bauer refers to national character as something specific to a particular

ma rx i sm and nat ion | 163 decade and not something that can be traced back to the origins of history. Nor is it seen as an explanation in itself, but as something which needs to be explained. Internationalism cannot simply ignore national characteristics, but must show how they are the result of historical processes. Bauer also advanced a novel perspective on the future of nations under socialism. For Marx and Engels, ‘national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing … The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster’ (1976: 503). For Bauer, however, socialism would lead to ‘a growing differentiation of nations … a sharper relief of their peculiarities, a sharper distinction of their characteristics’ (1979: 116). For Bauer, socialism would lead to the genuine autonomy of nations, the masses would be integrated into the national cultural community, and therefore the spiritual differentiation of nations would flourish freely. The cultural history of the nation, hitherto the history of the ruling classes, would henceforth be appropriated by the masses, who could give free rein to national characteristics. This meant that ‘the task of the International can and should be, not the levelling of national particularities, but the engendering of international unity in national multiplicity’ (Bauer, 1979: 21). The workers’ international should not dictate methods of struggle without considering national diversity and the uniqueness of cultural traditions. Whereas Kautsky meekly lamented that the Second International was an instrument for peacetime, Bauer more realistically recognized that even in peacetime it was not an effective instrument for internationalism when the vested interests of the big states were at stake. Bauer certainly sought the international unity of the working class, but he argued that ‘we can only defeat bourgeois nationalism … when we discover the national substance of the international class struggle … We must defeat nationalism on its own ground’ (Bauer, 1978: 184). Though today Bauer’s theory of nationalism suffers from almost total oblivion (an exception is Nimni, 1991), in its day it was a subject of intense polemics. Karl Kautsky was the recognized ‘expert’ on the national question in the Second International, and it was his task to reassert orthodoxy. Kautsky argued firstly that ‘Bauer has not taken sufficiently into account the importance of language both for the nation and the state’ (Kautsky, 1978: 149). For Kautsky, language was the foremost constant in the historic development of the nation.

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Bauer responded, quite persuasively, that he fully recognized the nation as a ‘community of culture’ which lay behind the generation, transformation and limits of language (Bauer, 1978: 176). Kautsky went on to argue, more generally, that the main weakness of Bauer’s work was ‘its enormous exaggeration of the national factor’ (Kautsky, 1978: 166). For Kautsky, it was simply a question of Bauer not understanding that the proletariat was predominantly international in orientation rather than national. Kautsky saw the proletariat aspiring towards an international rather than national culture, especially as international trade was leading to a worldwide language. To these abstractions, Bauer counterposed a more realistic appraisal of the meshing of class and national struggles. As we have seen above, Bauer sought to confront nationalism on its own ground: ‘the art of war teaches us not to avoid the adversary but to take the war to his own country’ (Bauer, 1978: 184). This seems a more fruitful strategy than the development of Esperanto as the key to workers’ international solidarity. Perhaps the most relevant part of Bauer’s work today is his consideration of the relation between class struggle and nationalism. In a striking phrase he wrote that ‘nationalist hatred is a transformed class hatred’ (Bauer, 1979: 259). Bauer was referring specifically to the petty bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation affected by shifts in population and other convulsions engendered by capitalist development. But the point is a more general one, and Bauer shows clearly how class and national struggles were intertwined. For example, in the case of the Czech worker: ‘the state which enslaved him [sic] was German; German too were the courts which protected property owners and threw the dispossessed into jail; each death sentence was written in German; and orders in the army sent against each strike of the hungry and defenceless workers were given in German’ (Bauer, 1979: 296). The workers of the ‘non-historic’ nations adopted in the first instance a ‘naïve nationalism’ to match the ‘naïve cosmopolitanism’ of the big nation proletariat. Only gradually does a genuinely international policy develop which overcomes both ‘deviations’ and recognizes the particularity of the proletariat of all nations. Although Bauer preached the need for working-class autonomy in the struggle for the socialist form of production as the best means for seizing power, he argued that ‘within capitalist society, national autonomy is, however, the indispensable re-vindication of

marx i sm and nat ion | 165 a working class which is obliged to carry out its class struggle in a state of (different) nationalities’ (Bauer, 1979: 314). This was not a ‘state-preserving’ response, he argued, but was a necessary aim for a proletariat which sought to make the whole people into a nation. In conclusion, we could argue that Bauer’s work represents a major break with economism: politics and ideology are no longer viewed as mere ‘reflections’ of rigid economic processes. The very context in which Austrian social democracy operated made it particularly sensitive to cultural diversity and to the complex social processes of economic development. The economic determinism and basic evolutionism of Second International Marxism was implicitly rejected in Bauer’s treatise on the national question. In terms of its substantial contribution, Bauer advanced a concept of the nation as historical process, in pages of rich and subtle historical analysis. The nation was no longer seen as a natural phenomenon, but a relative and historical one. This allowed Bauer to break decisively with the Marx-Engels position on ‘non-historic’ nations, a category still employed by most contemporary Marxists. As with Gramsci’s much more influential work on the national-popular, we find with Bauer a welcome move beyond most Marxists’ continuous understanding of nation and nationalism as ‘problems’ to one of seeing them as an integral element of the human condition. Post-nationalism Nationalism, like Marxism, is inextricably bound up with modernity, which sets its parameters and determines its limits. In the era of globalization we may refer to a postmodern nationalism, where the old grand narratives are replaced by cultural management. Traditions become thinned out and are self-consciously ‘invented’. Paul James writes of how ‘the new nationalism has a febrile fragility’ (1996: 36). There is an immediacy of ‘nationness’ created by the mass media around military or sporting occasions, which cannot overcome the distance from the nation’s past as we move into the era of globalization. It is this postmodern-Marxist understanding of the nation and nationalism which helps move us into new areas of enquiry. People have multiple identities which interpellate them in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. Marxism and nationalism as modem phenomena are also irrevocably Eurocentric. What implications does that have for a theory of nationalism adequate to

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the post-colonial era? Nationalism is also cut across by the question of gender. Here is a discourse where gender images and gender roles are absolutely central, yet most Marxist theories of nationalism do not intersect with a gendered approach. Here I briefly address the issue of Eurocentrism and androcentrism (or gender-blindness) in Marxist theories of nationalism. Elie Kedourie is at least forthright in his conservative manifesto on nationalism, when he asserts that ‘Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (1960: 28). For Kedourie, every element of the doctrine or discourse can be shown to have a European origin. Nationalism in the non-European world is simply a pale imitation and cannot have an autonomous existence. There are various ways to deconstruct this set of statements. Let us begin by examining to what extent, indeed, nationalism is marked by its European origins. In a sense, we need to go no further than the maps of the globe which draw lines across continents and paint each section a different colour. We see Europe in the middle, and its colonies to the ‘South’ stand as eloquent testimony to the era of imperialism – the carve-up of Africa, for example. What appears fixed on these maps is, of course, a social construction. Marxism tended to share the related Eurocentric conception of the world and of nationalism in particular. So, even while the colonized peoples were freeing themselves from the colonial yoke, it was assumed that they were doing so with the conceptual tools of the Enlightenment, whether in its liberal or Marxist variants. Tom Nairn’s notion of nationalism as Janus-faced (at once looking forward and backwards) is often quoted as an influential, if idiosyncratic Marxist theory. After tracing the origins of nationalism in Europe, Nairn tells us: ‘We all know how it spread from its WestEuropean source, in concentric circles of upheaval and reaction: through Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and then across the other continents’ (1981: 340). The struggle between imperialism and anti-colonial resistance is translated by Nairn into ‘the battle between scathing cosmopolitan modernists and emotional defenders of the Folk’ (1981: 340). Now, Nairn begins with an understanding of the ‘historic’ nation in Europe as entirely unproblematic. These nations are seen as historical subjects with all the attributes of agency, they ‘aspire’ to things, they ‘mobilize’, they even have irrational ‘ids’. In the non-European world, nationalism arrives by diffusion,

marx i sm and nat ion | 167 by osmosis as it were, with little understanding of the real world of imperialism. Nairn’s theory, for all its undeniable engagement and sporadic insights, collapses totally when looking very close to home at Irish nationalism, where he makes a singularly bizarre construction of the Protestant settlers as the real oppressed national group. Benedict Anderson’s notion of nation as an ‘imagined community’ (1983) has achieved considerable diffusion and is a big step forward in terms of its sustained attention to the discursive domain and refusal of reductionism. Anderson goes beyond orthodox Marxist views of nationalism as ideology and false consciousness, addressing its ‘sacred’ role in Weberian terms. Language, literature and the press are seen as crucial in imagining the entity we call ‘nation’. Yet it was the same Enlightenment which created European modernity and nationalism, but also the depredations of colonialism. So, then, as Partha Chatterjee asks Anderson rhetorically: ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ (1996: 216). It seems that we are back with Hegel, for whom European nations were the only true subjects of history, with the rest of the world mere puppets or pale reflections of European themes. A European focus can only see the rest of the world in these terms and would fail to see, for example, how most Third World nationalisms (including Islamism) are based on their radical difference from Europe and not a mimicry of the master’s themes. That nationalism exists as an international discourse does not mean that it flourished in the non-European world in a simply derivative way, with all the negative connotations that implies. The hybridity of the post-colonial world means also that its nationalisms operated profound displacements, disruptions and subversions of the modernist discourses of nationalism (and Marxism for that matter). Nor can we ever forget the extent to which things have been ‘erased’ or ‘glossed over’ in the official histories of post-colonialism and nationalism, which ‘bear the marks of the people-nation struggling in an inchoate, undirected and wholly unequal battle against forces which have sought to dominate it’ (Chatterjee, 1986: 170). The critique of nationalist discourses should not blind us to the popular struggles it has fostered and animated. A Eurocentric Marxism could only be part of the West in the post-colonial world. The struggles of

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the subaltern may take many different forms – nationalist, ethnic, regional and religious among others – and a Marxism which seeks to have global influence needs to understand these and not just struggle to ‘demystify’ them and reassert a ‘true’ class struggle. If nationalism was marked by its Eurocentrism, it was also always profoundly androcentric. For a discourse which often constructed the nation as a woman and national wars as the natural pursuit of the male, the analysts of nationalism have seemed singularly uninterested in the question of gender. Only recently has there been a flourishing of interest in the engendering of nationalism, war and citizenship. The introduction to an interesting collection on Nationalisms and Sexualities points us to ‘the crucial recognition that – like gender – nationality is a relational term whose identity derives from its inherence in a system of differences’ (Parker, 1992: 5). Nations and genders are shaped by what they are not, as much as by what they ‘are’. National and gender identities are constituted through difference and are thus clearly relational terms. The concept of nation is also inherently gendered, such as the stereotypical images of women as symbols of the nation. National narratives and cultural identities are also always gendered. It is not only with fascism, but in most nationalisms that the defence of the nation is a task assigned to men. While stressing the solidarity of men in this task, nationalisms are fervently heterosexist and confine ‘women and children’ to a passive role as victim. Women are now being written back in to the history of nationalist struggles. Kuman Jayawardena’s account of feminism and nationalism in the Third World (1986) carries out a double operation in showing that feminism was no simple import to the post-colonial world and, at the same time, bringing women to the centre of the struggles for independence and national liberation in these countries. A Western feminism, which believed with Virginia Woolf that ‘as a woman I have no country’, would find some of these histories uncomfortable reading. Many women in many Third World countries have participated actively in nationalist struggles, and felt the common identity of nationality, without forsaking their struggles as women within these movements. That this did not conform to some models of sisterhood proclaimed by Euro-feminism did not particularly concern them. Women also had a contradictory relation towards capitalist modernization which at once created the conditions for a

marx i sm and nat ion | 169 move towards greater equality, and also generated a counter-move of reassertion or reconstruction of traditional social mores as a way to counteract imperialist cultural penetration. There is a cluster of roles where women play a key role in the social reproduction of nationalism. In a pioneering analysis Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis point towards the specific and crucial role of women in national or ethnic processes, including: 1. as biological reproducers of ethnic or national collectivities; 2. as reproducers of the boundaries of these collectivities; 3. as crucial in the ideological and cultural reproduction of these collectivities; 4. as signifiers of ethnic/national differences (Anthias and YuvalDavis, 1989: 7). While cognizant of the functionalist implications of the term ‘social reproduction’, the first three terms point to a set of interrelated processes where women play a crucial role in regard to nationalism. To me it is the last element which is most potent in explaining the gendered dimension of all national discourses. It is through female figures that most nations represent themselves. Women are often icons of the nation, embodiment of its assumed qualities as imagined community, while simultaneously confined to the margins of the actual political community and disempowered as citizens. A new way of exploring the complex interrelationship between gender, nation and politics would be through a development of the idea of liminality. The liminal points to difference, a betwixt and between, the knowable and the incomprehensible. From a liminal perspective, identities and allegiances are uncertain at best. We can imagine ethnic, territorial and social liminars. In her analysis of this terrain, Anne Norton refers to ‘the liminal and definitive role played by women in the structures of the state’ (1988: 79). For our purposes here it would be most interesting to extend this analysis to the construction of nations and nationalism. Women are liminars in the making of nationalism in that they are peripheral to the nation (denied citizenship, for example) yet they also symbolically personify the nation. Women’s exclusion from state politics is matched by their role as primary symbol of nationality. This ambiguity or ambivalence on the intersection between gender and nation – at once centre and

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periphery – is crucial to our understanding. Following Anne Norton, we could argue that ‘the political significance of liminality lies in [its] capacity to transform weakness into strength’ (1988: 76). Current debates and campaigns around the concept of engendered citizenship point in this direction. This section has exposed the limits of a ‘materialist’ theory of nationalism which reduces it to mere epiphenomenon of a material (economic) base, just ideology or false consciousness. We are now more likely to understand nationalism as what Michel Foucault called a ‘discursive formation’, namely ‘whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such as system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statements, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations)’ (Foucault, 1972: 38). From this perspective it is easier to see the limitations of these theories which seek to detect a ‘good’ (perhaps civic) nationalism to counterpose to the ‘bad’ (perhaps racist) nationalism often to the fore. For, as Craig Calhoun argues, ‘Both positive and negative manifestations of national identity and loyalty are shaped by the common discourse of nationalism’ (1997: 3). Many social conflicts take a national form and many social grievances are advanced through the rhetoric of nationalism. Understanding nationalism as a discursive formation in all its complexity and contradictory manifestations takes us beyond Marxist reductionism on this question. It is not that nationalism is somehow beyond theory (for example primordial), but it requires a multi-focus approach which would, today, start from the new globalism, and would include, centrally, a gender focus and an awareness of the post-colonial optic among other things. Finally, we need to consider the prospects for post-nationalism in an era when globalization claims to have produced a ‘smooth world’ notwithstanding the continued, if not deepening, influence of nationalism and tribalism. To some extent it is now accepted that globalization and localization go hand in hand (hence the term ‘glocal’) but there is still a hope that a post-nationalist order would prevent, or at least attenuate, the various international and internal wars going on across the globe. From a poststructuralist perspective, the new global imaginary is very real indeed and, for example, transnational migrants have produced a new transnational form of identity and

ma rx i sm and nat ion | 171 consciousness. The call for a ‘global civil society’ that could temper the role of national governments is part of this move. More generally, there is a belief, as Arjun Appadurai argues, that ‘transnational social forms may generate not only postnational yearnings but also actually existing postnational movements, organizations and spaces’ (Appadurai, 1993: 448). But is this prediction of the demise of the nation-state not only premature but perhaps mistaken? In the first instance I would argue that the very notion of a ‘global civil society’ is irredeemably Eurocentric (see Munck, 2007) and also that the post-national project elides the very positive role of nationalism in constructing democracy in the post-colonial world. Furthermore, here following Paul James, we might consider whether ‘in a sense, the advocates of postnationalism repeat the mistake of the theorists of nationalism when the latter make the common moral distinction between ethnic nationalism (bad) and civic nationalism (good)’ (James, 2006: 300). Post-nationalism, just like nationalism, can present itself in very different forms and with different effects. As expressed by influential academics and politicians in the North, post-nationalism today is taken to be the United States of America as paradigm of the brave new world where national boundaries do not matter. The melting pot post-nation has become the global policeman and its claims to post-nationalism are suspect to say the least. There are, of course, other forms of international solidarity and boundary-crossing that aim at a, perhaps illusory, global postnational world that many more would support. References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1989) ‘Introduction’, in N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (eds), Woman-NationState, London: Macmillan. Appadurai, A. (1993) ‘Patriotism and Its Futures’, Public Culture, 5(3). Avineri, S. (ed.) (1969) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York: Anchor. Bauer, O. (1978) ‘Observaciones sobre la cuestion de las

nacionalidades’ (Bemer-kungen zur Nationalitätenfrage, Die Neue Zeit, 1908), in R. Calwer, K. Kautsky, O. Bauer, J. Strasser and A. Pannekoek, La Segunda Internacional y el problema nacional y colonial (segunda parte), Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente 74, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Bauer, O. (1979) La cuestión de la nacionalidades y la socialdemocracia (Die Nationalitäten en frago und die Socialdemokratie, 1907), Mexico: Siglo XXI. Benner, E. (1995) Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist

172 | s ev en View from Marx and Engels, Oxford: Clarendon. Bernstein, E., Belfort Bax, E., Kautsky, K. and Renner, K. (1978) La Segunda Internacional y el problema nacional y colonial (primera parte), Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente 73, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Bottomore, T. and Goode, P. (eds) (1978) Austro-Marxism, Oxford: Clarendon. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism, Buckingham: Open University Press. Carrière d’Encausse, H. and Schram, S. (eds) (1969) Marxism and Asia, London: Allen Lanes Penguin. Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Books. Chatterjee, P. (1996) ‘Whose Imagined Community?’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, London: Verso. Claudin, F. (1975) The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Davis, H. B. (ed.) (1976) The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, New York: Monthly Review Press. Degras, J. (ed.) (1971) The Communist International 1919–1943: Documents, Vol. 1, London: Frank Cass. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Haupt, G. (1974) ‘Les Marxistes face à la question nationale: l’histoire du problème’, in G. Haupt, M. Lowy and C. Weill (eds), Les Marxistes et la question nationale, 1848–1914, Paris: Maspero. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ignatieff, M. (1994) Blood and Belonging:

Journeys into the New Nationalism, London: Vintage. James, P. (1996) Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community, London: Sage. James, P. (2006) Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, London: Sage. Jayawardena, K. (1986) Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London: Zed Books. Kautsky, K. (1978) ‘Nacionalidad e internacionalidad’ (Nationalität und Internationalität, Ergänzwigshefte zur Neuen Zeit, 1908), in R. Calwer, K. Kautsky, O. Bauer, J. Strasser and A. Pannekoek, La Segunda Internacional y el problema nadonal y colonial (segunda parte), Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente 74, Mexico: Siglo XXI. Kedourie, E. (1960) Nationalism, London: Hutchinson. Kolakowski, L. (1981) Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2: The Golden Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenin, V. I. (1963a) ‘Self-determination’, in Collected Works, Vol. 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, V. I. (1963b) ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, in Collected Works, Vol. 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, V. I. (1970) Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Loew, R. (1979) ‘The Politics of AustroMarxism’, New Left Review, I/118. Marx, K. (1974) The First International and After: Political Writings, Vol. 3, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1971) Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) Collected Works, Vol. 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

marx i sm and nat ion | 173 Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977a) Collected Works, Vol. 8, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977b) Collected Works, Vol. 9, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1982) Collected Works, Vol. 38, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Munck, R. (2007) ‘Global Civil Society: Royal Road or Slippery Path’, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-Profit Organisations, 17(4).

Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, London: New Left Books. Nairn, T. (1997) Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited, London: Verso. Nimni, E. (1991) Marxism and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis, London: Pluto. Norton, A. (1988) Reflections on Political Identity, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Parker, A. (ed.) (1992) Nationalisms and Sexualities, New York: Routledge.

8 | ‘OP I U M O F T H E P E O P L E ’ : M A RX IS M A N D RE LI GI O N

There are very few social and political forces in the world today more important than religion, yet it receives scanty attention from socialist or Marxist analysts. The reasons seem quite deep-rooted. As Terry Eagleton notes ‘the Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions – death, suffering, love, self-dispossession and the like – on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence’ (Eagleton, 2009: xii). The level of debate around religion – say in relation to radical Islam – is so partisan in a reductionist political sense that it adds little in terms of a ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’ as Lenin always called for. It is, of course, understandable that when the global self-appointed policeman goes around the world sowing terror, the left will react defensively. I think it is time, though, for a mature reflection of what Marxism (and Karl Marx in particular) can add to an understanding of religion which is surely the largest mass mobilizer in the world today. This chapter begins with an analysis of ‘Marx and faith’ which shows his thinking of religion to be far more complex than a simpleminded atheism. We note also the importance of this analysis for his own wider work and the concepts of reification and alienation in particular. Other Marxist thinkers are also considered briefly, including Engels of course but also Antonio Gramsci, who was greatly concerned with religion in Italy. We move on to ‘Socialism and religion’, where we examine how the socialist states, primarily the Soviet Union but also Cuba, dealt with religion once they had seized state power. We also consider to what extent Marxism itself became a form of religion. The next section on ‘Liberation theology’ deals with the singular rapprochement between Marxism and Christians which occurred in the late 1960s and has continued to be influential to the present day. Finally, in ‘Religion returns’ we turn to the current revival of religion across the globe as a political force and seek a Marxist understanding of it. By way of example we carry out a cursory analysis of the politics of contemporary radical Islam.

ma rx i sm an d rel igion | 175 Marx and faith For most supporters and opponents of Karl Marx, what he thought about religion is summed up in the phrase ‘religion is the opium of the people’ in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (Marx, 1843 [1970]). We do not know much about Marx’s familiarity with opium consumption in the London of the 1850s but we can only presume that he equates religious faith with drug taking. Religion as pure illusion is the message we are meant to take. Yet just before that (in)famous phrase, Marx had written that ‘religious suffering is at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’ (Marx, 1970: 244). Marx cannot really be portrayed a simple-minded atheist. In fact he refused the dichotomy of believer/atheist because he did not see socialism as having a vital stake in that particular conflict. Socialism does not need to posit the ‘negation of God’, it needs no such mediation, because ‘it is the positive self-consciousness of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion’ (Marx, 1974: 358). Religion, for Marx, is a reflection of the real world and it expresses real needs, even as it misconstrues these needs. It is not just an illusion or mystification; it is certainly not just the result of a clerical conspiracy to dupe the masses. The believer does not, for Marx, live in a mere make-believe world, as the opium smoker would. As Denys Turner puts it ‘the believer relates not to a false world by means of an alternative to the real world but to the real world in and through the prism of belief in a false word’ (Turner, 1992: 324). Religion provides an inverted picture of the world but that is only because the world is itself inverted. Thus religion, for Marx, is never relegated to some form of ‘false consciousness’ as it is by some of his followers. Those who are believers in some form of God live out their social relations in a distorted form but they relate to real social needs in the real world. As Marx put it in the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, ‘to call on them to give up their illusions about their conditions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions’ (Marx, 1970: 244). Even in a cursory reading, we can see how Marx’s analysis of religion feeds into his wider political philosophy. Jacques Derrida draws our attention to ‘the absolute privilege Marx always grants to religion, to ideology as religion, mysticism, or theology, in his

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analysis of ideology in general’ (Derrida, 1994: 148). It is the analogy with religion that allows Marx to grasp fully the autonomization of ideology under capitalism. To the anti-clerical socialists of his day, he counterposed a critique of their fantasy of religious omnipotence. In a polemic with Max Stirner, Marx argued that ‘he forgets that he has only destroyed the fantastic and spectral form assumed by brain, but that he has not touched these ideas, insofar as they express actual relations’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 199). Marx bids us move from the critique of Heaven to the critique of Earth. This involves not least the deconstruction of commodity fetishism that is not something in our minds but part of social reality itself. Religion acts for Marx as a means to grasp the autonomy of the ideological. Or, as Derrida puts it, ‘it is impossible to dissociate the appearing (or what appears) from the spectrality of the spectral’ and thus the ideological, as the religious domain is ‘at root as indestructible as it is non-delimitable’ (Derrida, 1994: 156). The Marxist theory of ideology is thus probably impossible without Marx’s critique of the critique of religion. In today’s geopolitical situation a reconsideration of the question of religion from a socialist perspective is clearly of some urgency. The return of religion, both in its aesthetic and ‘fundamentalist’ modalities, demands a rethinking of the simplistic atheist position that seems to be the default mode of many modernday Marxists. As we have seen, Marx engaged with religion in ways quite distinctive from the standard Enlightenment position, that it is simply obscurantism that can be wiped away through the cold light of science (for modern-day exponents of this view see Dawkins and Hitchens). Ultimately Marx’s objective was an analysis of capitalism and he develops an analysis of religion and the rise of capitalism that predates Max Weber’s famous Protestant Ethic theory. Thus in the Grundrisse, which precedes Capital, Marx writes that: ‘the cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice-economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, the temporal and fleeting pleasures, the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism or Dutch Protestantism and moneymaking’ (Marx, 1973: 232). As with Weber he saw an ‘elective affinity’ between certain forms of Protestantism and the emerging capitalist mode of production. In Capital itself Marx is even clearer when he states:

ma rx i sm an d rel igion | 177 For a society of producers, whose general social relations of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labors into relation with each other as homogeneous human labor, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting religion. (Marx, 1976: 156) Commodity production – and its apparent autonomy – thus fits in some way with certain types of Protestantism. That does not mean that Catholicism and Islam are somehow incompatible with capitalism but that is another issue altogether. These sociological insights are hardly original and the main issue as Toscano notes is to set them ‘in the context of Marx’s methodological revolution, his formulation of an historical-materialist study of abstractions based on the real abstractions of the value form, abstract labour, etc.’ (Toscano, 2000). Neither better pedagogy, militant secularism, nor the shining values of the Enlightenment, can shift the illusion of religion. Or as Marx puts it eloquently in Volume 1 of Capital: ‘The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form’ (Marx, 1976: 173). Marx’s long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels often took up topics that Marx seemed not to focus on (such as military affairs), and religion was one of these topics. Given his pietist upbringing he seemed more interested in religion than Marx and, in particular, its relation to the class struggle. Engels always highlighted the contested political nature of religion. Thus in his analysis primitive Christianity was the religion of the poor and the oppressed. He greatly admired the sixteenth-century theologian/peasant leader Thomas Müntzer, who sought the immediate establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and the English Puritan movement of the seventeenth century. Karl Kautsky, known as the ‘Pope of Marxism’, wrote interesting studies of primitive Christianity but he also tended to view religion as a simple ‘garb’ or ‘envelope’ for real class interests. Rosa Luxemburg, for her part, claimed that it was the socialists who were most faithful to the early Christian values of equality and freedom and not the

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conservative clerical orders that supported capitalism and the rich. This was a truly political approach to religion. Lenin was a practical revolutionary and did not have much time for religion. For Lenin ‘atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism’ and to be more specific: Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism on religion. All modern religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class. (Lenin, 1971: 41) There is none of Marx’s subtlety or nuance here, not much to debate about. Lenin only relented pragmatically towards religion when the Father Gapon-led demonstrations in 1905 showed the power of popular religiosity among the masses. It was left to the Austrian Marxists such as Otto Bauer (see Chapter 7) to adopt a far less hostile attitude towards religion, partly perhaps because they operated in a multicultural situation. As a philosophical belief they even believed that Marxism could be compatible with some forms of religion. Looking to the future and the emergence of liberation theology, there are a number of Marxist theorists who began to develop a more nuanced view of religion. First among these is Antonio Gramsci who engaged closely with popular and state Catholicism in 1920s Italy. His focus was not, primarily, historical but on the purchase of Catholicism among the masses in contemporary Italy. The young Gramsci, brought up in the Mezzogiorno, was sympathetic towards Christian Socialism but his later works, the Prison Notebooks notably, reflected a fully formed Marxist and communist organizer outlook. His sharp dislike for the Jesuits was balanced by an appreciation of the utopian dimension in other forms of Catholicism. He thus writes: ‘Religion is the most gigantic utopia … that history has ever known … Thus do ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty ferment amongst men … In every radical stirring of the multitude in one way or another, with particular forms and particular ideologies, demands have always been raised’ (Gramsci, 1971: 328). Gramsci was also, it must be noted, a firm supporter of Luther and Calvin, as against the Renaissance, that he saw as a reactionary movement.

ma rx i sm an d rel igion | 179 Ernst Bloch (1970) was probably the first Marxist thinker to develop a properly complex understanding of religion. While fully maintaining a Marxist stance and methodology Bloch did not just see religion as a mere ‘cloak’ for class interests. Bloch posits two distinct politico-ideological formations: the official theocratic religion of the rich and powerful and the subversive and heretical religious beliefs of the oppressed. For Bloch, as Michael Löwy comments: ‘in its protest and rebellious forms, religion is one of the most significant forms of utopian consciousness, one of the richest expressions of the principle of hope’ (Löwy, 1996: 15). Herein lies the root of contemporary options for a religion of the poor. Later, in the mid-1950s, Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God (1955) also began to explore how religion should not be reduced to social class interests but needed to relate to the whole existential condition of a social group which, for a whole series of reasons, might express a particular religious worldview. The move against class essentialism might be deemed to have started here. Socialism and religion Lenin was not known for his subtle analysis of religion and the Russian Revolution would be characterized in the early days by an uncompromising hostility towards all forms of organized religion, even though up to one-third of the population were professed Christians or Muslims. Perhaps half the population were professed atheists (gozateizm) including of course all members of the Communist Party. In China, after the revolution of 1949 the Communist Party maintained a hostile attitude towards religion which was, with good reason, seen as emblematic of foreign domination and colonialism. After the Cultural Revolution this attitude was relaxed and the 1978 Constitution guaranteed ‘freedom of religion’, albeit with some restrictions. In the 1990s there was a wide-scale programme of reconstruction of Buddhist and Taoist temples, even though the ruling party remained explicitly atheist. The state socialist tendency towards atheism was taken furthest in Albania which, under Enver Hoxha, declared all religion as alien to Albanian culture and thus banned. Marx carried out an analysis of religion which, despite his own atheism, showed a good grasp of the importance of religion and a recognition that it could not simply be dismissed as fantasy. Religion expressed real social oppression, albeit in a distorted manner.

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Religion had also been a motivating ideology in many popular revolts historically. Now that Marxism – or Marxism-Leninism or one of its national variants – controlled state power it seemed to view religion as, quite simply, a competing ideology. No doubt Lenin and most (but not all) of the Bolsheviks viewed religion as a pernicious form of obscurantism and a cover for reactionary forces but there was also a clear interest in removing any competing ideologies to that of state socialism in terms of influencing the subaltern classes. As with nationalism (see Chapter 7) Marxism and socialism took theoretical positions but always guided by Realpolitik, in the realization that religion (and for that matter nationalism) had a power of interpellation across the popular masses that they saw as a threat. The reality of the state socialist regimes from 1917 onwards was that – to varying degrees – Marxism-Leninism (or other Marxist variants) became a form of state religion. There is no other way to describe the way in which state ideology was consciously produced and reproduced through its material practice. And dissenters would be punished with as much ‘legitimacy’ as, from a religious perspective, were the victims of the Spanish Inquisition and other religion-driven purges of dissenters or possible dissenters. The cult of the leader, present across most of the state socialist regimes, could only heighten that feeling of omnipotence and the belief that right and wrong could be decided from on high. Of course Stalin’s purges of the 1930s represent the epitome of this authoritarian perversion of Marxism, but the sense that there was only one truth was widespread across socialist regimes and movements. Even opposition currents shared a dogmatic belief that their group’s political position was the only correct one. The closest parallel to this form of belief is quite clear, namely, religion. When we then examine the way in which the socialist leader and the ruling socialist ideology was raised onto a pedestal, the only parallel system of belief is precisely religion. Dissenters were branded heretics and, even when they were not shot or imprisoned, they were declared beyond the pale. There were odd moments of relaxation of this regime such as in the Yugoslavia of the 1960s when dissident intellectuals (such as Djilas) were allowed some space to argue against the accepted wisdom. But that was largely because the regime itself was beginning to turn against the Soviet Union. Likewise in Cuba in the early 1960s some figures (notable Ché Guevara) were

marx i sm a nd rel igion | 181 even openly critical of Soviet economic nostrums. But then again Cuba has been notoriously repressive of political, social or religious dissenters. State socialism thus assumes a religious form – truth and error have no grey areas – and the one true path towards socialism can brook no dissent even from a supportive position From Lenin’s era onwards there has been a much more accommodating position adopted by the Soviet state towards Muslims in Central Asia. Sultan Galiev, a local political and ideological leader, became an important Bolshevik figure in relation to the national question for example. For Lenin the revolution in the East would inevitably have a national and, though less often stated, a religious colouring. This stance reflected a broader Bolshevik belief that one did not need to insult believers (whatever the error of their ways) as that would only harden the religious fanaticism which was innate in all faith-based ideologies. The revolution in the East benefited from this pragmatism and a genuine national-popular movement for social transformation emerged. Once Stalin came to power any form of tolerated dissent would disappear. Sultan Galiev was arrested in 1927 and eventually executed. A unique Marxist-Islamic rapprochement was thus summarily halted. The early 1920s position of the Soviet state towards the Russian Orthodox Church was based on the premise that the Church (and its believers) were supporters of the Whites, backed by imperialist powers to dislodge the Bolsheviks from power. Thus all the Orthodox Church monasteries and educational establishments were confiscated by the state. Many religious were killed and believers were harassed. Part of this campaign was undoubtedly ideologically driven such as the move towards the suppression of miracles (believers would have to be persuaded that they had not seen bleeding or crying statues of Jesus for example). The Bolsheviks set up the League of the Militant Godless to fearlessly pursue the believers in God and persuade them of the error of their ways. But the state campaign against religion per se was never a priority and the official state position was sometimes contradictory, insofar as it usually allowed constitutionally for the freedom of expression and of belief. Ultimately the state socialism engagement with religion had everything to do with state politics and very little to do with Marxist ideology. Stalin’s regime in the 1930s heralded an era of forced collectivization and the stifling of any dissent within the Communist

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Party. This did not preclude strategic alliances with powerful influential forces that could help his mission. Thus in 1930 a major Orthodox Church leader, Metropolitan Sergei, made his peace with the regime. The Soviet regime could thus persecute those Orthodox followers who did not follow Sergei’s opportunistic peace-making initiative with the regime. The issue was mainly around prohibiting the ‘social outreach’ work of the church and not its prayer meetings in recognized places of worship. No extraneous force was to be allowed access to ‘civil society’, to use modern language. By the 1940s the Soviet regime probably realized that religious beliefs were more deeply rooted than they had thought in the 1920s. The socalled Chairs of Scientific Atheism at universities were done away with and a more relaxed atmosphere gradually emerged. However, declared religious affiliation had declined from around 80 per cent in the 1940s to 75 per cent in rural areas and 50 per cent in urban areas by 1970. Cuba’s engagement with religion is an interesting one to follow, not least because of the international significance of theology in Latin America. However when the Fidelista revolution succeeded in 1959 the new regime rapidly passed laws restricting religious practice in the workplace and the universities. Within a few years, around three quarters of Catholic and Protestant priests and ministers had left Cuba for the United States. This was, of course, part of a wider process which saw much of the middle class and many professionals leave the island due to what they saw as a communist revolution which would restrict property rights. Religious congregations were suspected of harbouring counter-revolutionaries and were severely curtailed especially around the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Overall, religious observance fell considerably during the early revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s and the state promoted an official policy of atheism. Grass-roots neighbourhood associations also discouraged church attendance. Cuba’s stance on religion changed in the 1980s with a landmark being the publication of a book Fidel and Religion (Castro, 1987), comprising conversations between Fidel Castro and Frei Betto of Brazilian theology liberation fame. Fidel Castro had already, in 1977, during an address to Protestants in Jamaica, promoted a much more open relationship to religion than had prevailed earlier. Now, in conversations with Frei Betto he came across as someone brought

marx i sm a n d rel igion | 183 up in a Christian household, totally conversant with the Bible and someone who believed Jesus Christ was a revolutionary. That he himself had never had ‘faith’, as he put it, did not change an analysis which saw Christianity and socialism flowing in the same direction. It is likely that it was the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 – where not only were many priests involved but the insurrection had official church blessing – that tipped Fidel Castro towards a more open and supportive engagement with liberation theology and a view of the church as a valid institution of civil society. In the 1990s and 2000s Cuba moved even further toward a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. By 2013 the state had officially recognized the right of all citizens to profess and practice any religious beliefs within a framework of respect for the law. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had withdrawn much of the logic for Cuban Marxism-Leninism. The historic visit by Pope John Paul II in 1998 was part of an ongoing reconciliation between the state and the organized Catholic Church in Cuba. The Pope, significantly, roundly criticized the US embargo of Cuba during his visit. The diplomatic role of the Vatican was to culminate in 2014 in an historic rapprochement between Cuba and the US, brokered by Pope Francis from Argentina. In a Latin America where religious observance at a popular level is widespread, Cuba is only following the general practice of tolerance of, and even considerable sympathy with, religious faith seen as compatible with socialist ideologies of transformation. Liberation theology ‘Capitalism is intrinsically evil, because it prevents the integral development of human beings and the development of solidarity among the people’ (cited in Löwy, 1996: 30). This is not a Marxist but a Christian statement of principle. This statement was made in Brazil in 1968 by the Workers Catholic Youth but it was a widespread sentiment at the time across Latin America. Any consideration of Marxism and religion needs to come to terms with this particular ideological confluence in this particular region. Much of the explanation lies in the concrete situation of dependent capitalist development and widespread popular religiosity. International Catholic politics also played their role but it is doubtful that, on their own, these international shifts within Catholicism could explain not

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only the emergence of liberation theology, but also its long-standing embeddedness in the politics of Latin America. Certainly, looking forward to future Marxist engagements with religion, this experience in Latin America is absolutely vital. There have, of course, been many attempts in the past to fuse or synthesize Marxism and Christianity. Famously philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre set out to prove in the mid-1950s ‘that Marxism does not stand to Christianity in any relationship of straightforward opposition’ (MacIntyre, 2001: vi). He reads Marxism as building on Hegel’s secular version of Christian theology and thus Marxism can be seen as a Christian heresy, rather than as a system based on non-Christian unbelief. Marxism is seen as a doctrine with the same moral scope as Christianity, uniquely among the post-Enlightenment doctrines. It is a world-view that encompasses an understanding of humans and nature and even has its own version of evil. Good Christians should strive to resist the ‘wickedness’ of fascism and to champion social justice. Eventually MacIntyre abandoned his personal project to be a consistent Marxist and Christian at the same time. But his reading of Marxism from a Christian optic is not totally devoid of interest even today. In Latin America there is an important precursor of liberation theology in José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian thinker-activist who died in 1930. Mariátegui was a Marxist but was also very influenced by the political philosophy of Georges Sorel. Mariátegui was forward-looking, dazzled by modernity and seduced by the Futurists. However, unlike Lenin he maintained a strongly supportive attitude towards religion and spirituality. He criticized modernity soundly for what he saw as its irreligiosity. He certainly saw no contradiction between faith-based ideologies and a commitment to Marxism as an ideology of transformation. As against what Weber saw as the ‘disenchantment of the world’ as capitalism and modernity progressed, Mariátegui called for a ‘re-enchantment of the world’. Of course there is an idealist or romanticist tendency within Marxism, from Lukács onwards, but Mariátegui went much further in imagining a Marxism which was not atheist, secular and profane. In a Latin America characterized by popular religiosity and ‘magical realism’ this philosophy does not appear particularly out of place. In his 1925 essay ‘Two Conceptions of Life’ Mariátegui lays out and justifies his rejection of economistic and rationalist philosophies and

ma rx i sm an d rel igion | 185 rejects what he saw as the superstitious idea of progress. Mariátegui was, at one level, rejecting the mechanical Marxism of the Second International and throwing in his lot with the Russian Revolution which he saw (much as Gramsci did) as re-injecting an element of mystique into socialism. Mystique and faith spring from the lexicon of religion but, for Mariátegui they are equally valuable to a politics of transformation. How else to explain the total commitment to the cause of many militants or the willingness to put one’s life at risk for a greater cause? What Mariátegui was essentially seeking to achieve was to refute the binary opposition between materialism and idealism or that between faith and atheism. Clearly Mariátegui would be in the background when the theology of liberation began to take shape in the 1960s, first in practice, then in theory. In terms of the immediate intellectual founders of liberation theology in the 1970s, Gustavo Gutiérrez is the name that stands out. A Peruvian Jesuit, Gutiérrez had been educated at the Catholic universities of Louvain and Lyon and was strongly influenced by the Vatican II Council of 1962–65 which began to loosen some of the old dogmatic certainties. His Liberation Theology: Perspectives (Gutiérrez, 1973) laid out systematically the ideology which had been maturing in practice throughout the 1960s. The poor – in exile in their own land – could not wait until the Kingdom of God was declared to achieve redemption. The ‘preferential option for the poor’ meant their needs were primary and they would be the agents of their own emancipation. A social revolution was necessary to overcome capitalist dependency and all forms of reformism had been found wanting. A profound transformation of the ownership system was needed, not least in the agrarian pattern of latifundia and minifundia then prevailing in Latin America. From the Bible it is the passages of Exodus which inspired Gutierrez, and act as a paradigm of a people’s liberation from slavery. The 1972 meeting of Christians for Socialism, held in Santiago, Chile, made one of the clearest programmatic statements on the role of Christians in the struggle for socialism in Latin America. It rejected the notion of a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism and argued for Marxism as an analytical and revolutionary method. It also rejected the notion that class struggle is incompatible with Christian unity. It argued for ‘a new reading of the Bible and Christian tradition which presents anew the basic concepts and symbols of

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Christianity in such a way that they will not hinder Christians in their commitment to the revolutionary process but, on the contrary, will help them to assume it creatively’ (Christians for Socialism, 1975: 50). It is clear that this Christian left leaves party politics to the political parties, also that it is idolatry and not atheism that is their main enemy, and that their political project is not that different to Cuban Revolution-era politics of liberation in Latin America. It was in Brazil where liberation theology probably reached its maximum influence. It had its roots in a particularly turbulent, but also creative, period in the early 1960s leading up to the 1964 military coup. It began in the class, ‘catholic left’ along French lines but rapidly took on a distinctively Brazilian character. The 1964 coup was designed to save Brazil from atheistic communism but it actually encouraged the dissemination of Catholic socialism. Brutal repression of these militants began to force the Catholic Church hierarchy to distance itself from the military regime. By the early 1970s, in the midst of torture but also resistance, some bishops, notably Dom Hélder Câmara, were going into full blown opposition and a 1973 statement by bishops and provincial leaders of various religious orders denounced the dictatorship but also its ‘root cause’ namely capitalism. In the 1980s Catholic militants were to play a key role in the formation of the Workers’ Party and also the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST), the landless peasant leagues. Liberation theology in Brazil now acquired a distinctive philosophy and organizing model. It was Hugo Assmann who most clearly linked Christian faith and Marxist praxis in a series of writings Löwy rightly dubs ‘among the most radical and coherent documents produced about liberation theology’ (1996: 88). The two Boff brothers, Leonardo and Clodovis, from the Franciscan and Redemptorist orders respectively, also began to provide both political and spiritual leadership during the 1970s as Brazil moved inexorably towards redemocratization. In terms of the organizational model, Brazilian liberation theology was also both original and radical. The Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (Base Ecclesiastical Communities) began to form in rural and urban (favela) settings as well as among worker circles. They provided a major impetus to the emergence of the Workers’ Party in 1980 and inculcated the values of grass-roots mobilization and bottom-up politics which would be a characteristic of the so-called new social movements.

marx i sm a n d rel igion | 187 It is common to hear today that Latin America’s liberation theology is a phenomenon of the past. There appears to be neither the level of activity nor the political influence that there once was. At one level there is clearly not the visibility that one would have seen in Central America in the 1980s where Catholic priests were often closely involved with insurrectionary movements. But, at another level, what we might be seeing is the ‘mainstreaming’ of liberation theology, now very much part of the ‘common sense’ of transformation politics. We can even argue that the election of a Latin American Pope in 2013 (Jorge Bergoglio or Pope Francis) is inconceivable without the influence that liberation theology has achieved globally. Bergoglio was hardly a radical as a Jesuit in Argentina under the military dictatorship (to put it mildly), but he is still seen, and acts the part, of someone who is committed to the ‘Church of the Poor’ as liberation theology preached in the 1970s. Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the late 1960s in a particular historical and ideological conjuncture. It shares many of its views of development and underdevelopment in Latin America with the radical dependency perspective then emerging (see Chapter 3). It was critical of any mechanistic views of progress and certainly did not see capitalist development as a generally progressive force. It was also a reflection of the widespread political ferment characteristic of the era. The ‘option for the poor’ was a logical choice for many practising Catholics who did not identify with an extremely conservative hierarchy which was often close to the armed forces. While never a majority force, liberation theology created a new common sense in which a Christian-Marxist confluence, or even cross-over, made sense across society. Religion returns Religion, as Terry Eagleton puts it, is ‘the single most powerful, pervasive, persistent form of popular culture human history has ever witnessed’ (2009: 52) and yet analysis is on the whole very weak and patently partisan. Any project for social transformation today needs to engage openly – dare I say sympathetically – with religion if it is to have any chance of reaching people where their actual feelings are at. The story of liberation theology in Latin America can be told many times over in other regions and countries. Indeed, since the acceleration of globalization in the 1970s there has been

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a resurgence of religion as a form of identity and a motivation for political mobilization. A Marxist analysis cannot simply put this return of religion to the centre of global politics as a manifestation of false consciousness, clerical manipulation or any other simple explanation. This section will now seek to provide a sketch of what might be called for in terms of a concrete analysis of the situation in terms of the rise of political Islam. Our starting point needs to be a global historical one such as that provided by Manuel Castells in his sweeping trilogy on how globalization has impacted contemporary economics, politics and culture. Contrary to the common sense of the Northern urban professional, around 2000 across the globe only 15 per cent of the population considered themselves atheists or non-believers. We have only to look at the rise of religious fundamentalism in the one remaining superpower, the United States, supposedly a bastion of liberal enlightenment. Or, for that matter, consider the dramatic rise of religion in politics in Eastern Europe since the collapse of state socialism. The promoters of globalization advanced the notion that national, ethnic, class and religious differences would fade away. But, as Castells puts it: ‘the world is not flat unless a superpower flattens it by force (be it military or economic) to shape it in its image’ (1998: 38). Difference and complexity are only deepening and religion is a major form for the construction of political and cultural identity across the world. The dominant liberal – and to some extent Marxist – analysis of contemporary political Islam tends to view it as a natural outgrowth of Muslim societies. Supposedly Muslim societies do not have the traditional separation of religion and politics characteristic of Western Judeo-Christian societies. Yet any cursory analysis of Muslim societies sees distinct, yet still separate, political and religious domains. It is assumed that it is an ill-defined ‘hatred of the West’ which ties in with Samuel Huntington’s (in)famous ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. His co-revisionary Bernard Lewis set out this right-wing analysis in an essay ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ (Lewis, 1990) which argues that Muslim Societies lacked the advantage of the Enlightenment as a scientific and philosophical system that would prevent the rise of Christian fundamentalism. So what we see today is a clash between a secular West and a religious East. Essentially the West has a rational understanding of the role of religion in society and the East does not.

ma rx i sm an d rel igion | 189 With Marxism, in its popular form, it is hard to contest this view given an inextricable linking of Marxism to atheism and a rather poor understanding of the complexity of religion in social, political and cultural terms. Islam, as envisioned by Muhammad, had a political and a religious dimension which were, or became, de facto separate. Later a clear division was established between the ‘men of the pen’ – which included religious and bureaucratic orders – and the ‘men of the sword’ tasked with defending the empire and violating political power. Thus, contrary to Lewis and others, there was a clear division of labour between the political and religious domains. Furthermore, modernization and secularization impacted on Muslim societies as much as in the West, even if the end result might be different. The Muslim rulers of the Persian, Ottoman and Egyptian empires responded to their defeats by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century with a decisive move towards modernization and secularization. Epitomizing this veritable revolution was the triumph of Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk, in 1923 when he declared the first republic in the Middle East in Turkey. He replaced the Islamic Sharia laws with the Swiss civil code and carried out a transition from a feudal to a capitalist order driven by a developmentalist state. In the great wave of anti-colonial movements following the inter-imperialist Second World War, Muslim societies played a leading role. Not least among them was Egypt, where in 1952, Gamal Nasser and fellow officers came to power on the back of worker and student strikes as well as generalized Arab resentment over the Western powers’ creation of the state of Israel. Nasserism was a classical radical nationalist Third World movement. Above all Nasser provided a tangible, but also immense symbolic, blow against Western imperialism (and Britain in particular) with the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 against British, French and Israeli opposition. Following this strong nationalist stance, Nasser called for the establishment of a socialist order in Egypt and a regional movement for Arab socialism was born. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria and Sukarno in Indonesia likewise demonstrated the power of a popular nationalism backed by a developmentalist state, where religion was only a background issue. Muslim societies do not necessarily lead to radical Islamic politics.

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Radical Arab nationalism was part of the counter-movement from the South to curb the growing power and expansionism of the Unites States. It had parallels in Latin America during the 1950s and early 1960s, with the rise of radical nationalist regimes promoting individualization and opposed to US neo-colonialism seeking to step into the shoes of British and French political colonialism. What is most notable about this wave of popular nationalism, from around 1945 to 1965, is that it was quite hospitable to the ideas of socialism. These Muslim majority societies saw a significant rise of the left, albeit most often in the shape of Soviet-oriented communist parties who would inevitably prioritize Soviet state policy. Many Muslim scholars argued that Islam and socialism are compatible, not least in relation to the questionable status of private property and banking in both ideological systems. Political Islam would have to deal with the existing alliance between a secular radical nationalism and the socialists before it could become a pre-eminent political force. The rise of a secular, nationalist Arab politics was brought to an abrupt halt by the Western-backed Israeli victory over Egypt in the 1967 ‘six day war’. Already in 1965, the Western powers had backed the dictator Suharto in Indonesia in his massacre of the secular communists. But it was the unconditional backing of Israeli external expansionism and internal apartheid – Zionism – that provided the most fertile ground for the emergence of political Islam. As Maxime Rodinson puts it: Both Nasserism and Ba’thism [in Syria] failed to achieve Arab unity and to resolve the problem of Israel and the Palestinians. Nowhere was economic performance brilliant … The new classes in power were often painfully reminiscent of the old. The June 1967 fiasco raised the question of the adequacy of old ideas for solving the pressing problems of the day. (1979: 115) It was time to search for new ideas and these would come from Islamic thought and politics. Western aggression and nationalistsocialist weakness created the basis for the rise of contemporary Islamist politics, in all the variants. The link between the Israeli-Arab war of 1967 and the present is, of course, Iran. Since the 1953 CIA-backed coup which restored the monarchy and eliminated both communists and social democrats,

marx i sm a nd rel igion | 191 the Shah ruled autocratically. For twenty-five years Iran symbolized what US-backed ‘secular’ rule looked like in a Muslim country. For the Shia Muslim leader, Khomeini, to declare that armed insurrection was a legitimate means to overthrow this Western backed autocracy was a landmark decision. The Islamist revolution of 1978 was thus, quite clearly, not a result of innate characteristics of a Muslim country but the result of imperialist and neo-colonial power politics. It also changed the separation between political and religious domains as Khomeini reversed the previously dominant understanding of politics as primarily electoral. The failure of political nationalism in terms of delivering national democracies – whether due to their own failings or through imperialist intervention – was also a prime cause for the rise of what today is known as ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, even though this is a rather reductionist phrase. The emergence onto the world scene of a new radical Islamic politics occurred in 2001 with the audacious attacks on symbols of US power, both financial and military, by Al Qaeda. When the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 we saw the global Islamic movement at its high point. Former CIA assets, such as Bin Laden, then began to implement their own political programmes. The radical Islamists arise out of the defeat of secular nationalist or socialist alternatives by Western armies. They come to fruition in countries where colonial occupation has decimated national potential, where their rulers have squandered the national income and mortgaged the nation’s future to the Western powers. In the face of US and Zionist aggression, and the ineffectiveness of their own national governments, the transitional Islamic movement that arrived after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the so-called Afghan Arabs, seems a logical alternative. Their widespread support, at a popular level, across the Muslim world needs to be explained politically and not just by the glib denomination of terrorism. Today Western powers, and much of the Western public, is in a panic over the rise of radical Islam. We might safely argue that this radical Islam is not on the same trajectory as Marxism and thus a confluence, as we saw with liberation theology, is unlikely. Religious ideologies have no necessary political alliances (and vice versa we might presume). Thus radical Christianity in Latin America during the 1970s was heading towards socialism but radical Islam in the 2010s is not. Having said that, the politics of radical Islam is complex

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and cannot be summed up in simple terms, in the same way that we cannot really speak of ‘Western liberal democracies’. So a Marxist analysis can neither go along with the ‘clash of civilizations’ analysis and support imperialist invasions on the basis that civilization itself was at stake (as happened around the so-called ‘9/11’ events) or adopt an opportunist policy which says that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. A more complex, nuanced and ultimately more effective policy is gradually emerging. We might argue that the task at hand is more urgent than any other. References Bloch, E. (1970) A Philosophy of the Future, New York: Herder & Herder. Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, London: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2009) Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Castells, M. (1998) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III: End of Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell. Castro, F. (1987) Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto, New York: Simon and Schuster. Christians for Socialism (1975) Social Scientist, 4(2). Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gutiérrez, G. (1973) A Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Lenin, V. I. (1971) ‘About the Attitude of the Working Party toward the Religion’, in Collected Works, Vol. 17, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lewis, B. (1990) ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, Atlantic Monthly, 266(3). Löwy, M. (1996) The War of Gods:

Religion and Politics in Latin America, London and New York: Verso. MacIntyre, A. (2001) Marxism and Christianity, London: Duckworth. Marx, K. (1970) Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), ed. J. O’Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. (1974) The First International and After: Political Writings, Vol. 3, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) ‘The German Ideology’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Rodinson, M. (1979) The Arabs, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Toscano, A. (2000) ‘Rethinking Marx and Religion’, www.marxau21.fr/index. php/textes-thematiques/religion/5rethinking-marx-and-religion (accessed 20 January 2015). Turner, D. (1992) ‘Religion: Illusions and Liberation’, in T. Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9 | AF TE R THE CR I S I S : M A R X I S M AND THE F U TU RE

In 2008/2009, barely twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the ‘end of history’, according to some, the new unfettered global capitalism was entering an unprecedented crisis. Those who had extolled the brave new world of globalization and had argued that it had broken the up-down swings of the past were now turning to Karl Marx for an explanation of what had gone wrong. The first section of this chapter deals with ‘Marx renewed’ and what his conceptual tools might add to an understanding of the present in terms of capitalism’s dynamics and crises. Today’s capitalist crisis has a clear antecedent in the Great Crash of 1929 and the recession of the 1930s. This crisis is examined in the section ‘Last time round’ to establish its dynamics and, most importantly, its political aftermath where we deploy the suggestive framework developed by Karl Polanyi. This is followed by an analysis of the recent ‘Great recession’, its causes, its unfolding and its ramifications. We note in particular the impact in terms of the rise of the ‘new economies’ such as China, India and Brazil. Finally, we turn to life ‘After capitalism’, not in a simplistic sense that ‘the end is nigh’ but to show that Marx’s analysis of capitalism, as a historically limited mode of production, was and is correct. While granting capitalism’s ability to reconfigure, and to come out of a crisis stronger than before, we now see signs that capitalism is reaching its social and natural limits. Marx renewed The ‘crisis of Marxism’ became a central feature of the debate around Marx in 1979, announced by Louis Althusser with great fanfare (Althusser, 1978). This crisis was blamed entirely on ‘the enemies of the labour movement’ even though Althusser does admit that the effects of Stalinism were also significant. It was the ‘lacunae’ and ‘enigma’ in Marx’s own work which were ultimately responsible for this crisis. Of course, from a long-term historical perspective, there had been many previous engagements with this crisis, notably

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Karl Korsch’s text on the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ (Korsch, 1931). Althusser’s critique could only be called theoreticist in keeping with his championing of ‘theoretical practice’. There was little said about the evolution of capitalism and the nature of the contradictions, and only ritual incantations about the ‘masses’ rather than an analysis of the changes under way in the composition of the working class since the crisis of 1973, and the mutations then beginning. At that point, Althusser was still a member of the French Communist Party and it is safe to assume that there were some things he could not question. A more profound crisis would emerge, as everyone knows, in 1989. As Eric Hobsbawm put it at the time: ‘We are seeing not the crisis of a type of movement, regime and economy, but its end. Those of us who believed that the October Revolution was the gate to the future of world history have been shown to be wrong’ (Hobsbawm, 1991: 117). There seemed very little to be salvaged from the wreckage. There did not appear to be a single theoretical strand worth saving, an ethical stance worth defending, nor any point in articulating a Marxist understanding of the world. This historic defeat (whether it was selfinflicted or not) of the first, and most decisive, attempt to break with the capitalist order was definitive. Only a few minor political strands tried to convince themselves that this crisis represented opportunity, and that now the false Soviet god had fallen the one true faith could be restored. When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’ in 1992, by which he meant the end of alternative visions to liberal capitalism, he actually captured a widespread mood at that moment. Capitalism unleashed, and not fearing any alternative, could now expand globally. The world of the 1990s was a paradoxical one for anyone who subscribed to Marxism in any way. Globalization – a ‘revolution’ comparable to the Industrial Revolution – began a process of economic, political, social and cultural transnationalization, which hugely accelerated the expansion of capitalism. The once off-limits territories, where self-proclaimed socialist regimes prevailed, were brought back into the capitalist fold. So too were the national development states of the global South, which had found some space to develop semi-autonomously between the so-called First and Third Worlds. The dismantling of the Keynesian social contract in the North was matched by the assiduous removal of any form of national protectionism in the South. This was capitalism, red in tooth and

ma rx i sm an d the fut ure | 195 claw, doing what it was programmed to do: expand continuously, remove any impediments to its untrammelled progress and use whatever means necessary to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production at the global level. The rise of the new globalized, informationalized capitalism posed a challenge to Marxism but also an opportunity to renew its theoretical armoury. We were now back where Marx had been when he looked out at the nascent capitalist world of the Industrial Revolution. Marxism could return to its point of origin in carrying out the most effective critique of the capitalist order. One of the most influential analyses of the new order was the three-volume study by Manuel Castells, The Information Age (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998). For all of its critique of traditional Marxism, and discovery of a new vocabulary to describe the new order, his language was still unmistakeably Marxist. Castells argued that ‘in a nutshell’ the new capitalist order was based on a three-pronged strategy: ‘deepening the capitalist logic of profit-seeking in capital–labour relationships; enhancing the productivity of labour and capital, [and] globalizing production, circulation and markets’ (Castells, 1996: 19). At the core of the new model was the relationship between capital and labour and, in that sense, there was nothing really new about it. The decade of the 2000s was to prove pivotal for this new model capitalism but also brought some of the basic insights of Marx to the fore once again. What we were calling globalization had been foreseen by Karl Marx as a tendency: ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome’ (Marx, 1973: 408). Even clearer was the diagnosis of the Marx-influenced Karl Polanyi who wrote at the time of the Second World War that, with the expansion of the unregulated market, ‘The true implications of economic liberalism can now be taken in at a glance. Nothing less than a selfregulating market on a world scale could ensure the functioning of this stupendous mechanism’ (Polanyi, 2001: 145). Globalization can thus be seen as inherent to the expansive tendencies of the capitalist system. According to Marx, opposition to it could come from the proletariat which the system generated while Polanyi sees it coming from an inherent counter-movement through which society as a whole protected itself from the destructive impact of the unregulated market.

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Capitalism in its current incarnation has been deemed a ‘new’ globalized, informationalized and networked order, quite different from the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution that Karl Marx knew and sought to understand. Clearly we are in a new phase of capitalism and analysts, such as Manuel Castells, are right to develop a new language to understand its dynamics and contradictions. And yet, as Duménil and Lévy have shown, the Marxist toolkit can help explain the tendencies and transformations of contemporary capitalism (Duménil and Lévy, 2009: 105). Marx, in Volume 3 of Capital left us, according to these authors ‘with an especially sophisticated analysis of what he called historical tendencies of capitalism (tendencies as regards technology, distribution, accumulation, production and employment)’ (Duménil and Lévy, 2009: 105). In particular Marx was well aware of the counter-tendencies in capitalism that would allow it to overcome the tendency of the role of profit to fall, such as the development of joint-stock companies. Marx provided a still valuable account of the ‘general laws’ of capital accumulation, its relationship to employment, inter-capitalist competition and the impact of the capitalist cycle. He was clear also on what he called the ‘anarchy’ of capitalism: its propensity to develop dramatically the forces of production but its inability to control the forces it unleashes. If we think of globalization and its expansive tendencies, we can see why this boom could not be regulated in a sustainable manner. If we examine the sorry contemporary record of the major capitalist nations, we see how they underestimate the dramatic impact of climate change and appear powerless to take the necessary measures if this might in any way interfere with the profitability of capitalist corporations. In light of the recent tendency towards financialization (making money from money and not via production), we might also highlight Marx’s analysis of money and his clear-cut distinction between financial activities and the real economy, in terms of wealth creation. It is in relation to the nature of the crisis in the capitalist economy that Marx would be in a position to provide the clearest lessons for the new situation faced by global capitalism today. All economists understand that the progress of capitalism is cyclical and that there are ups and downs. But they tend to always find circumstantial (rather than structural) causes for depressions or recessions. The distinctive feature of Marx’s theory of crisis is the ‘emphasis on the necessity of

marx i sm a n d t he fut ure | 197 crisis as an essential and ineradicable feature of the capitalist mode of production that defines the objective limits of capitalism and the necessity of socialism’ (Clarke, 1994: 7). The crisis is not contingent but, rather, expresses the contradictory nature of capitalism. However there is no one agreed Marxist theory of crisis and, in his exhaustive analysis, Simon Clarke comes up with at least three explanations: • under-consumption: refers to the tendency of capitalism to expand while limiting the consumption of the working masses; • disproportionality: part of the revisionist drive after the death of Marx that posits an imbalance between capitalist sectors which could be corrected; • falling rate of profit: criticizes the above two as being based on distribution issues and ignoring the fundamental capitalwage-labour relations. What is perhaps most remarkable is the way in which Marx returned to the debate, even among mainstream economists, following the great recession of 2008–09, particularly in relation to his theory of capitalist crisis. Current theories, seeking to account for economic stagnation since those events, are very similar to the Marxist underconsumption theories of the 1970s. Recently Laurence Summers, who had led the financial deregulation drive during the Clinton era and was a close ally of Wall Street, has proclaimed stagnation theories as a correct explanation for the current crisis. Echoing the contemporaneous under-consumption analysis of the US left (see Foster and Magdoff, 2009), Summers posed the question in 2013: ‘Too easy money, too much borrowing, too much wealth, was there a great boom [in the 1990s]? … Somehow even a great bubble wasn’t enough to produce any excess in aggregate demand’ (cited in Streeck, 2014: 57). When this architect of financialization and de-regulation declared that secular stagnation would become the new norm, very few mainstream economists dissented. The almost total marginalization of Marx and Marxism from mainstream (even most oppositional) discourse lasted more than twenty years but by the end of the 2000s they were taken seriously once again. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, who had despaired over any relevance for Marxism earlier, was by the time of his last book in 2011, arguing that in the end Marx was to make a somewhat unexpected

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return in a world in which capitalism has been reminded that its own future is now in question. This was not as a result of ‘the threat of social revolution, but by the very nature of the untrammelled global operations to which Karl Marx has proved to be so much more perceptive a guide than the believers in the rational choices and self-correcting mechanisms of the free market’ (Hobsbawm, 2011: 398). It was the basic contradictions of neoliberal globalization, financialization and a belief in the ability of the market to correct its own excesses that a Marx-inspired analysis can contribute most towards elucidation. Last time round In the immediate aftermath of the 2008–09 great recession there was intense debate, especially in the United States, around the nature of the crisis ‘last time round’, that is the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Recession of the 1930s. Such was the impact of the shock of the events that began in the US with a subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 (see the next section ‘The great recession’) that the immediate reference point was that historic crash. Many of the top managers of the US economy had considerable familiarity as academics or practitioners with these landmark events. The reason why the great Crash of 1929 is so significant in global terms is that it marked the end of the phase of British global domination stretching more or less from the 1870s to the 1920s. The US emerged strengthened from this economic débacle and started a reconstruction process that would see it as global hegemonic power by the mid-1940s. We cannot, of course, draw immediate parallels from the post-1929 events and the likely post-2008–09 events but there are lessons there for us if we examine the record critically. Karl Marx was always focused on the next crisis of capitalism. In 1857 he was even worried that the commercial crisis he foresaw would occur before he had a chance to publish Capital. That did not happen but capitalism has ever since progressed through cycles of booms and busts. When the crisis of 1929 erupted after a long period of relative stability it followed, predictably enough, the runaway boom of the 1920s. As with the 1990s subsequently, it seemed the boom-bust cycle had been broken, the stock market would always rise and speculative bubbles across a range of commodities and assets would produce a veritable cornucopia of bounty. When the

marx i sm a n d t he fut ure | 199 crash came it was spectacular and its social impact massive. It began with the biggest drop in share prices ever recorded and ensued with a long-lasting recession that contemporaries thought would never end. In the US epicentre of this new type of capitalist crisis, over a quarter of the workforce were to become unemployed as businesses and banks closed down and foreclosure on home and farm loans caused massive social misery. The depression of the 1930s was a cataclysmic event which still has a marked effect on global economic policy decision-making. The US government of the day, under President Herbert Hoover, adopted what was to become known as a ‘do nothing’ policy. Governments could not get in the way of the automatic healing mechanisms the market would generate. If the slump had to get deeper and more people had to become unemployed before profitability could be restored so be it, according to von Hayek, widely seen as the intellectual precursor of modern neoliberalism. However, wiser council prevailed. Milton Friedman would later argue, and was supported by fellow researcher Ben Bernanke (who was in charge of the Federal Reserve when the 2008–09 crisis occurred), that contracting the money supply exacerbated the crisis. Never again would central banks contract the money supply and ‘financial easing’ became the governmental response to crisis. If the financial crisis could at least be stopped from going into freefall then the real economy might not be infected. Economists and political leaders were, understandably, divided over ‘how to respond’ to the 1929 crash and subsequent depression. For Joseph Schumpeter, a conservative who knew his Marx well, it was essential to let events take their course (Schumpeter, 1976). This was the classic liberal position – the market needed to be allowed to restore equilibrium. Toxic debts must be purged, resources reallocated and the boom would be restored. This Schumpeter called a process of ‘creative destruction’. John Maynard Keynes on the other hand, just rising to the fore as economist and policy adviser, argued that the economy needed to be kick-started by any means necessary, including inflation. Both the United States and Germany took this path with strong interventionist measures. Thus was initiated the ‘Keynesian’ approach which produced around thirty years of stability until the early 1970s when a renewed cyclical downturn led to the emergence of a new dominant wisdom, namely neoliberalism based on a minimalist state and non-interference in market mechanism.

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Following the election of Franklin Roosevelt as President in 1933, the US moved towards a more interventionist policy known as the New Deal. While it was not successful in overcoming the depression, due mainly to the crisis now having become global, it did set a new tone. With the collapse of the gold standard, the US could now focus on the domestic economy. Keynes had won the battle of ideas and it was accepted that fiscal measures should be used to stimulate demand and that a redistribution of income to boost mass spending power was a good thing despite its ‘socialist’ connotations. In terms of broader economic policy, the 1930s were seen as a failure of the international economic order with one power (the UK) having lost the capacity to restore order, and the other (the US) not yet having acquired the will to do so. The growth of national protectionism, and of great power rivalries in terms of markets, was the alternative as indeed happened, as the depression led to the Second World War and the subsequent horror it inflicted on humanity. The impact of the 1930s Great Depression was quite different in Latin America, then shifting out of the British sphere of influence and the traditional international division of labour which had traditionally consigned the region to agricultural producer. The agro-export model that had served the dominant classes so well from 1870 to the First World War was no longer viable, given the massive disruption to international trade caused by the depression. While there was a residual commitment to outward-oriented growth (which persisted in Central America), 1930 onwards saw a decisive shift towards importsubstitution individualization and an inward-oriented growth model which was to include popular consumption. Thus Brazil, after 1930, saw a dramatic drop in the volume and price of its coffee exports and thus the turn towards manufacturing, including heavy industry, was a logical shift. This was also the period in which international economic debates became dominated by Keynesians as the ‘magic of the market’ lost its lustre. The political economy of national development under its importsubstitution model had, as its correlate, the substitution of the oligarchic state by a national popular state. This could take a more or less progressive political position but it created a political space in the gap between the end of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in the 1930s and the consolidation of US neo-colonialism in the 1960s. At that point, and more decisively in the 1970s and 1980s, a new global

marx i sm a n d t he fut ure | 201 order around the Washington Consensus led to a rejection of both the expansionary economic policies and inclusive political regimes of the earlier period. Today, once again these issues are back on the table. The point is that, just as in the 1930s, in the current crisisridden period we can expect to see alternative economic and political models emerging. We need only think of the Chinese development model to understand that a new hegemonic Washington Consensus is unlikely to emerge after the collapse in 2008–09 of the monetarist model first essayed in Pinochet’s Chile after the 1973 military coup. If we wish to take a broad view of the 1930s and its possible implications for current patterns of power and conflict, we might start with Karl Polanyi’s contemporaneous account (Polanyi, 2001). In The Great Transformation, Polanyi analyses the rise of the self-regulating market following the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of laissez-faire as the dominant economic ideology in the West. This doctrine of economic liberalism would seek to commodify land, labour and money and remove the state from any regulating role it may have had in the past. This ‘stark utopia’, as Polanyi called it, would destroy both society and nature as the laws of supply and demand drove an ever deeper commodification of all social relations. This social order that emerged around 1870 came crashing down in 1929 with the events on Wall Street and further afield. Polanyi’s uniqueness is that he posited a simultaneous counter-movement or double movement whereby society, and social groups therein, fought back against the social devastation that a totally unregulated market would lead to. Polanyi had based his analysis on his close reading of Britain’s Industrial Revolution but, when The Great Transformation emerged in 1944, the main interest was what lessons the makers of the emerging post-war order would learn. Polanyi’s hope was that the horrors of fascism would be overcome by an ordered and regulated new global order. To some extent that occurred with a more managed and regulated economic order lasting until the early 1970s. But what is more interesting, from a contemporary perspective, is that Polanyi saw various forms of counter-movements. Thus the crisis of economic liberalism in 1929 he saw as leading to the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist order in the Soviet Union and the New Deal under Roosevelt in the US. What occurred in 1930, according to Polanyi, was the inevitable unravelling of the various attempts to restore the

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pre-1914 ‘Golden Era’ of liberal capitalism. Certainly, today, we should not expect any direct replication of the events of the 1930s and nor can we assume that the US will lose its hegemonic position even though new global powers are emerging. Nevertheless, if anything like the 1930s is on the cards, we can, at least, expect some major realignments. A turn towards isolationism and de-globalization now looks unlikely, although it cannot be ruled out in the longer term. The mid 1970s capitalist crisis was overcome quite readily by the Western powers, at least in part because they had the spectre of the Soviet Union to sharpen their resolve. But it is the political options faced in the 1930s that perhaps provide the most salient perspectives for today. If Nazism, Stalinism and the New Deal were all, albeit in very different ways, responses to the flaws shown up by the events and repercussions of 1929, so then we can today expect a range of options based on the current geopolitical ambitions of China, Russia, Brazil and India, the crisis of the European Union and the divided political order of the United States. The great recession Around 2005–06 there were a few voices predicting an ‘overheating’ in the US housing market, but overall there was a belief that money could generate money endlessly. A system had been created – a self-regulating market, financialization, turbo-capitalism or globalization – that would be perpetually dynamic and expansive. If no one interfered with it – such as intrusive national governments or overbearing international agencies – it would continue to bear the fruit of the new capitalist order and its supporters. In terms of previous eras of global capitalist prosperity, this one seemed a veritable Golden Era. Even those countries, and parts of the world, once seen as the Third Word, the underdeveloped world or the global South, would partake of this bonanza: they were to be the ‘emerging economies’. Even the ‘poorest of the poor’ in sub-Saharan Africa would benefit as the new global capitalism brought this region under its wing, its population acquired smart phones and capitalism, and inter-regionalism emerged triumphant into the new day. This was the dominant vision of the world as we moved into 2007. The crisis began to unravel in what was known as the US subprime mortgage sector, which is where families on modest incomes were offered mortgages that they would not be able to pay back

ma rx i sm an d the fut ure | 203 unless property prices continued to rise for ever. The financial model would, as part of its logic, create bubbles, the most famous one being the 2000 dot.com shares collapse. But now the housing bubble was to be hit by interest rates going up from 1 per cent in 2004 to 6 per cent in 2007. Restricting credit was meant to reduce the risk of inflation but it also led to house prices falling and the number of homeowners defaulting rising to record levels. On this fragile basis, the banks and financial institutions had built an enormous edifice of investment bonds, based on securitizing these loans. Freddie Mac, one of the main mortgage lenders with an AAA rating, guaranteed these loans. When the collapse of the housing market led inevitably to the collapse of the investment bonds, Freddie Mac (and another housing bank, Fannie May) had to be bailed out by the government. But it was too late and a massive credit crunch was under way, as banks were unwilling to trust each other enough to grant the normal inter-bank loans. The whole financial system was in jeopardy, given the interlinked nature of the whole financial sector and the banks in particular. Already in mid-2007 Bear Stearns, a ‘big name’ as an investment bank, announced a total loss in two of its hedge funds. By the end of that year, the US Federal Reserve had announced a major loan package to assist the banks, but it was too little too late. By early 2008 a massive drop in all the major stock markets had occurred. While the epicentre of the storm was in the US, banks in the UK began to collapse with Northern Rock being nationalized early in the year. By the autumn of 2008, things had turned critical with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s leading investment banks. There was no intention to save it, as the loss of financial discipline was deemed too risky for the future of the system. Another ‘big name’ financial company, Merrill Lynch, was taken over by the Bank of America. By now, Wall Street was in freefall and gradually the government was forced to take action. Interest rates came down to zero, the politically sensitive car industry was bailed out and 700 billion US dollars was spent buying out toxic debt. That these events were unprecedented was clear to all concerned. The danger of a capitalist meltdown was real enough. As Robin Blackburn put it, ‘The banks’ needless pursuit of short-term advantage led to the greatest destruction of value in world history during the Great Crash of 2008’ (2011: 35). This was clearly a systemic crisis and not just part of a normal business cycle. Unlike the situation

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in 1929 the major capitalist economies, and particularly their financial sectors, were so interlinked that there was no possibility of containing the crisis. The much vaunted technological New Age had not materialized and capitalism had not escaped its cyclical nature. The flotation of Facebook and the emergence of a renewable energy sector could hardly be the engines of a new phase of capitalism. In the past Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ had allowed capitalism to emerge stronger and renewed from a crisis, as was the case after the 1930s. Now it seemed that the whole model of globalization, financialization and privatization was being brought into question, with no alternative on the horizon other than a managed or reregulated version of the same strategy. The reaction to this unprecedented set of events was mixed. At first there was disbelief, some economists even argued that the unregulated market regime had not been implemented systematically enough but, on the whole, there was a keen awareness that the new global capitalism was now facing a systemic crisis. There was talk about us ‘all being Keynesians now’ as the obvious need for state intervention to avert catastrophe was clear to all. The international financial institutions and groupings of the leading economies met and agreed that measures needed to be taken to avert a return to national protectionism. In the event, as Robin Blackburn noted soon after, ‘Government rescue measures were to offer unlimited liquidity to the financial sector, while leaving the system largely intact’ (2011: 35). For all the talk about the need to regenerate the financial sector to avert another catastrophe, after a few years it became clear that no major measures could be agreed transnationally. Soon it would be time for ‘back to business’ with new schemes to make money out of money and with handsome bonuses being paid to the architects of this dangerous machine. In terms of its longer-term impact in reacting to a shift in the power relations between the major imperialist powers, the picture is as yet unclear. We are unlikely to witness anything comparable to the shift from the UK to the US global economy which occurred after the last major capitalist crisis. Most analysts would probably agree with Andrew Gamble’s verdict that while ‘the United States may be suffering a further relative decline – many of its capacities and its structural power are weaker than they were – there is still no clear challenger to take over’ (Gamble, 2009: 139). While the European

ma rx i sm an d the fut ure | 205 Union has an economy of a similar size, its ever increasing political divisions make it an unlikely contender to take on the role of new global hegemon. As to China, its economic potential is huge and, on the basis of its present course, it will probably emerge as the world’s largest economy. However China is not poised for global leadership as the United States was in 1930 and it faces the massive social and political contradictions of its classical Marxist industrialization and urbanization processes. One of the most interesting aspects of the global crisis was the newfound interest in the ‘emerging economies’. For many mainstream economists, the BRICS and others would buck the trend and help the global economy get back on track. The former Chief Economist of the IMF even declared that ‘The situation in desperately poor countries isn’t as bad as you’d think’ (cited in Breman, 2009: 30). Not only does this statement dangerously downplay the impact of the crisis across the global South, transmitted by all the networks created by globalization, but it also betrays a dangerous complacency. It is true that some countries, less integrated into the dominant financial centres and their risky financial practices (such as Canada for example), were less immediately and less severely impacted. It is also a fact that China, Brazil and India found some space to manoeuvre during the worst of the 2008–09 crisis and that they are the capitalist growth areas of the future. However, overall, a global slowdown is bad for the countries in the global South and they have diminishing capacity to take measures to protect themselves after twenty-five years of neoliberalism with its aim of ‘hollowing out’ the state. The aftermath of the economic crisis was more prosaic than was believed at the time. Conservative governments were voted in to office with the promise that ‘austerity’ would put the economy back on track. Deflationary measures became de rigueur as did the demand that the population had to ‘tighten its belt’ as though their profligacy, and not the banks’, had led to the crisis. This anti-people policy has created a serious political backlash (for which read Greece) the effect of which is still undecided. For radical Islamic political currents, this crisis simply confirms the decadence of the West and strengthens the demand for delinking. For much of Latin America there is now a need to establish independent economic and political regimes not subservient to US neo-colonialism. In the capitalist heartlands

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themselves, there has been a wave of revolts from the Occupy movement in the US to the Indignados in Spain. A social countermovement of such scope makes it unlikely that austerity policies will deliver the stability based on mass impoverishment the managers of the crisis wish for. It is, of course, too early to draw definitive conclusions around the long-term impact of the 2008–09 capitalist crisis on future global history and we clearly cannot draw immediate parallels with 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. But we note how the business press continues to ponder the future of capitalism (which had been a term not used much previously by polite commentators) and refer to a new spectre haunting Europe (and the rest of the world), namely ‘the destruction of much of the institutional framework of globalization and undermining of the post-1989 international order’ (Davis, 2011: 2). It does now seem a very different world indeed from that envisaged in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama when the ‘end of history’ was deemed nigh and economic and political liberalism would rule uncontested. Barely twenty years later, the world looks a different place: the US defeated in one after another colonial war, the state of Israel appearing to be the colonial implant it always was (‘Arab Spring’), vast regions in revolt (Islamic State, Latin America) and the youth of the imperialist heartland in 1968 mode (Occupy, Indignados). Taking a more long-term Polanyian view of the impact of 2008–09, we might conclude that society will be creating countermovements to protect itself from further commodification and disembedding of the economy from social relations. The crisis has revealed the failure of neoliberal polices to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth. On the other hand, the failure of national regulations to control the financial sector points towards a crisis of the nation-state. No model of social change, based on an assumption of stability and equilibrium, will be adequate to the task of both understanding the current crisis and creating alternatives to it. Instead, one needs to foreground instability and complexity, and understand that the Polanyian counter-movement is always at work to protect society from commodification and disembededness, characteristics of late capitalism that were evident to all during the events of 2008–09 and their aftermath in different parts of the world.

marx i sm a n d t he fut ure | 207 After capitalism Not so many years ago, to even refer to life ‘after capitalism’ would be enough to be dubbed a utopian reality-denier or worse. And yet today there is a deep and widespread sense that capitalism, as we know it, is reaching its limits. Capitalism is even being named, and few analysts – conservative, radical or liberal – now hide behind the euphemism of ‘market society’ or entrepreneurialism. What we are now witnessing is a general awareness that capitalism is crisis prone, it is not timeless, and serious questions can be asked about life after capitalism. Essentially, we can argue that the very success of capitalism’s ‘globalization revolution’ since 1989 coupled with the crisis of 2008–09 is creating the conditions for its demise, at least in its current forms. There are no new frontiers – geographic, economic or social – that can create the conditions for a new expansive phase. All parts of the world have been brought under the sway of the capitalist mode of production and most spheres of social life that can be commodified have been. And, in the background, Polanyi’s double movement continues to operate and contradictions build up. Overall, we note a set of interlinked tendencies: a continuing decline in the rate of economic growth (even before the 2008–09 crisis), a persistent increase in governmental and non-governmental debt and a continuing rise of both wealth and income inequality (Streeck, 2014: 35). These trends, particularly taken together, given that they are self-reinforcing, go against what has traditionally been considered essential for a stable capitalism, namely solid growth, ‘sound money’ and a steady decline in inequality to increase the proportion of the population directly benefiting from capitalism. These characteristics cannot be projected indefinitely into the future; to be blunt: something has to give. The crisis of 2008–09 provided an opportunity for global capitalism to reconsider the problems caused by excessive financialization and insufficient economic democracy. In the event, very little changed and even the timid calls for better regulation of the financial sector failed to gain traction. No agency seems capable of turning the situation around. For Streeck the ‘end of capitalism’ is ‘already under way’ even though an alternative cannot be discerned (Streeck, 2014: 47). In terms of what economic, political and social order might emerge ‘after capitalism’ Karl Marx is often taken to be a hopeless utopian.

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The legacy of Leninism and the Marxist-Leninist state weighs heavily in that regard. On the one hand, we have a popular view that Marx distinguished between a first post-capitalist stage called ‘socialism’ and a second called ‘communism’. While this view has no textual support, it was codified in the Marxist-Leninist manuals. On the other hand, a utopian quotation about the post-capitalist order being about working in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and reading in the evening is taken out of context, making Marx seem hopelessly unrealistic and not cognizant of the huge difficulties to be faced in the non-capitalist future. In fact, Marx had a very realistic view of the post-capitalist era and was certainly not prone to build castles in the air. Indeed, he was fiercely critical of contemporary socialist thinkers who believed an image of the future could be imposed, rather than socialism being about the organic development of democratic elements within capitalism. In other words, Marx did not want to foist some vision of a utopian future on the proletariat but, rather, he wanted it to build its own future: ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what according to this being it will historically be compelled to do’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 37). Communism is thus not a vision of a future society but, rather, a movement inscribed in the social struggles of the present. Marx in his late writings, for example on the Paris Commune of 1871, makes it very clear that he is not expecting the state to create socialism as became the case with ‘actually existing’ Soviet state socialism. The ‘new society’, which Marx continually referred to, would be based on the transformation of labour and social relations. Labour is not abolished but freely associated individuals decide on their priorities and seek the reconstruction of society. There is a common belief that Marx did not really spell out how he envisaged the post-capitalist future. While he did not write anything comparable to Capital on the topic, his views can be discerned from a close reading of his later works in particular. Says Peter Hudis, who has carried out a meticulous analysis of Marx’s writings on socialism: His concept of the alternative to capitalism flows from the same normative concerns that govern his critique of capital itself. Just as he opposes any social formation that acts behind the backs

ma rx i sm an d the fut ure | 209 of individuals, so he opposes any social solution that imposes itself irrespective of the self-activity of the subject. (Hudis, 2012: 208–9) Socialism is a lot more than the abolition of private property or the market for Marx. Central to Marx’s vision of life after capitalism is his radical conception of freedom in which the free development of the individual is conditional on the removal of all constraints on their autonomous power. The alienated social relation of capitalism must be surpassed if freely associated producers are to create a society that goes beyond capitalism. However, as Lenin was fond of saying ‘the tree of theory grows grey my friend, the tree of life grows green’. Since 2008–09, global events have really been quite unpredictable. The Arab Spring of 2011 was not expected by anyone and we would have to go back to the great European revolutionary wave of 1848 to find an historical parallel. For Asef Bayat ‘the extraordinary sense of liberation, the urge for self-realization, the dream of a just social order, in short, the desire for all that is new, this was what defined the very spirit of these revolutions’ (Bayat, 2013: 78). In the short term, many of these revolutions were derailed by conservative forces and political Islam is the great beneficiary of them. However, in the long run, these events will be seen as a turning point in the great counter-movement that is emerging to challenge the neoliberal order after its self-inflicted débacle in 2008–09. Karl Marx would certainly recognize these democratic revolutions as harbingers of dramatic social transformations to come and proof that millions of people around the world want to see a life ‘after capitalism’. If we were to seek to offer a means to understand life ‘after capitalism’ today, we would need to start with the limitations of Marx and Marxism. Not least in terms of the capitalism with which he was engaging. Nancy Fraser has called for an expanded conception of capitalism that acknowledges, not only the economic contradictions articulated by Marx, but also the background conditions for capital accumulation that include social reproduction, ecology and political power (Fraser, 2014). Another way of putting it is that a revitalized Marxism for the twenty-first century will need to engage much more closely with feminism, ecology and post-colonialism. I believe one also needs a less necessitarian analysis of capitalism where, rather

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than reify it, we deconstruct it and explore its very real limitations and contradictions. As Marx defined communism as the tendency for liberation in the present, we can find multiple forms of resistance and also transcendence of capitalism on a day-to-day basis across the globe. In terms of the counter-movements now afoot that potentially point towards a life ‘after capitalism’, we might start with those directly building on classic Marxist foundations. Globalization meant the expansion of capitalism worldwide and with it the massive extension of the capital-wage-labour relation. While in 1980 there were 1.7 billion people employed through a wage relation worldwide that number had increased to 2.9 million by 2010. The end of the traditional North–South international division of labour since the mid-1970s had generated a massive industrial working class outside the capitalist heartlands of the OECD countries. While the workers of the global North now struggle to retain the social progress they made during the great post-war boom, those in the South are struggling, very much as the workers in Marx’s Capital did, to secure a decent life. A dramatic way of capturing this future potential challenge to capitalism is Mike Davis’ statement that ‘Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing)’ (2011: 11). The second wave of counter-movements sprung from the mechanisms identified by Karl Polanyi as societal responses to the depredations of the unregulated market. They are the populations engaged in production outside the formal sector, often deemed ‘surplus populations’. They are the landless peasants, the slum dwellers and the vast casualized workforce of the global South. They may also include the newly politicized Amerindian population of the Andean countries, defending their traditional rights against a rampant neoliberal capitalism. In the North as well, as youth unemployment rockets since 2008–09, the movement of the Indignados in Spain and other countries such as the US Occupy movement challenge the legitimacy of an economic order that leaves them with no future. These movements tend to be defensive and they are often inchoate. But they introduce a dangerous degree of instability into capitalism’s future scenarios. We need only recall that the Egyptian revolt of 2011 began with the call for bread, just as the Russian Revolution

ma rx i sm an d the fut ure | 211 of 1917 did. As yet, alliances across these sectors and with the more traditional working classes have not been forged, but they are by no means impossible to envisage. The third wave of counter-movements identify themselves explicitly as ‘anti-capitalist’, building on the heritage of 1968 and the new social movements. The World Social Forum began this critique of the North’s epistemological arrogance and proclaimed that ‘another world is possible’. The Chilean protests of 2011, those in Greece in 2012 and then in Brazil in 2013 all showed signs of being movements of educated, young people. As in 1968, the critique of consumerism is central to the philosophy of these diverse social and cultural movements. Global climate change, the destruction of the world’s oceans and urban pollution are all issues that concern these layers, disaffected from mainstream capitalism. Concerns with the quality of life, work–life balance and an end to precarity all motivate these protestors. The political dynamic of these mobilizations can be quite mixed: progressive in the Chilean protest against the privatization of higher education, less so in the Brazilian case where the target was the progressive Workers’ Party. To date these diverse currents have not been unified and have not engaged with more traditional labour movements or the revolt by the ‘wretched of the earth’. We could do worse than end this reconsideration of Marxism, as we head towards 2020, with the definition of communism articulated by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology: ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premises’ (1976: 49). References Althusser, L. (1978) ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, trans. Grahame Lock, Marxism Today, 22(7). Bayat, A. (2013) ‘Revolution in Bad Times’, New Left Review, 80. Blackburn, R. (2011) ‘Crisis 2.0’, New Left Review, 72. Breman, J. (2009) ‘Myth of the Global Safety Net’, New Left Review, 59. Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol.

I: The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II: The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1998) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III: End of Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell. Clarke, S. (1994) Marx’s Theory of Crisis, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

212 | n i n e Davis, M. (2011) ‘Spring Confronts Winter’, New Left Review, 72. Duménil, G. and Lévy, D. (2009) ‘Old Theories and New Capitalism: The Actuality of Marxist Economics’, in J. Bidet, and S. Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Foster, J. and Magdoff, F. (2009) The Great Financial Crisis, New York: Monthly Review Press. Fraser, N. (2014) ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode’, New Left Review, 86. Gamble, A. (2009) The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobsbawm, E. (1991) ‘Goodbye to All That’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, London: Verso. Hobsbawm, E. (2011) How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. London: Abacus. Hudis, P. (2012) Marx’s Concept of the

Alternative to Capitalism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Korsch, K. (1931) ‘Crisis of Marxism’, www.marxists.org/archive/ korsch/1931/crisis-marxism.htm (accessed 8 March 2016). Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975) The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) ‘The German Ideology’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Polanyi, K. (2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Beacon. Schumpeter, J. (1976) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Beacon. Streeck, W. (2014) ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, New Left Review, 87.

IND E X

abortion, legalization of, 106 accumulation through dispossession, 94 Adler, Victor, 160, 161 Afghan Arabs, 191 Afghanistan, 67; defeat of USSR in, 191 African National Congress (ANC), vii Albania, religion banned in, 179 Algeria, 16, 21, 152 all power to the soviets, 14 All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 13 Althusser, Louis, ix, 18, 125, 126, 137, 193–4 anarcho-syndicalism, 80 Anderson, Benedict, 167 Anderson, Perry, 19 androcentrism: in Marxism, 97, 98, 166; of nationalism, 168 Angola, 64, 67 Anthias, Floya, 169 anthropocentrism, 47; in Marxism, 33 anti-development perspective, 71 Appadurai, Arjun, 171 Arab Spring, 209 Aral Sea, drying of, 34–5 Argentina, Cordobazo, 19 Aricó, Jose, 139 Armand, Inessa, 106 art: bourgeois, 129; status of (as part of superstructure, 126–7; questioned, 125) Assmann, Hugo, 186 atheism, 174, 175, 179, 186; in Marxism, 178, 189; promoted in Cuba, 182 austerity, 205–6 Austro-Hungarian empire, 157 Austro-Marxism, 160 autarky, costs of, 65 Averbakh, Leopold, 130 Bad Godesberg programme, 10 Badiou, Alain, vi

Bahro, Rudolf, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 36–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, 134 Bakhtin Circle, 134 Balibar, Étienne, 1, 4, 22, 78 Baran, Paul, 60, 64 Barrett, Michèle, 97, 113–14, 126, 136, 143 base/superstructure debate, 125–7, 135, 137, 143, 149; damage done by, 126 Basques, 152 Baudrillard, Jean, 140, 142 Bauer, Otto, xiv, 149; The Nationalism Question ..., 159; views of (on nationalism, 159–65; on religion, 178) Bauman, Zygmunt, 3 Baxandall, Ros, 91 Bayat, Asef, 209 Bear Stearns company, 203 Bebel, August, Woman and Socialism, 103–4 Benner, Erica, 158 Benton, Ted, 30–1 Berlin Wall, fall of, 17, 193 Berman, Marshall, 2, 6, 53 Bernstein, Edward, 8–9, 13; The Preconditions of Socialism, 9 Betto, Frei (Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo), 182–3 Bideleux, R., 65 Bidet, J., vii–viii Bin Laden, Osama, 191 biodiversity, conservation of, 45 Blackburn, Robin, 203, 204 Bloch, Ernst, views of, on religion, 179 body, as site of struggle over power, 44 Boff, Clodovis, 186 Boff, Leonardo, 186 Bogdanov, A., 129 Boggs, Carl, 16 Bolivar, Simón, 152

214 | i n d ex Bolshevik Party, 80, 81, 82, 83, 130, 131, 155, 156; women’s group, 105–6 Bolshevik revolution see Russian Revolution Bolshoi Theatre, 129 Bookchin, Murray, 38 bourgeois development, force of, 53 bourgeois epoch, concept of, 52–3 bourgeois society, replacement of, 76, 78 Brünn programme, 160–1 Brandt, Willy, 12 Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 91 Brazil, 200, 205; 1964 coup in, 186; liberation theology in, 186; political movement of 2013, 211 Bregoglio, Jorge (Pope Francis), 187 BRIC countries, 94, 205 Briz, Osip, 129 Bukharin, Nikolai, 34, 59, 61; Philosophical Arabesques, 34; Popular Manual, 135 Bund, 155 Butler, Judith, 119–20, 146 Calvin, John, 178 Cámara, Dom Hélder, 186 Canada, 205 capitalism: ‘after capitalism’, xv; as revolutionary force, 54; crisis cycles of, 198, 207; diversity of, 89–90; historical tendencies of, 196; penetrates all spheres of life, 92; ‘soft’, 141; viewed as progressive, 59 see also postcapitalism, and state capitalism Capitalism, Socialism and Ecology, 38 capitalist class, mission of, 56 capitalist development, natural limits of, 48, 49 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 12 Carlassare, Elizabeth, 41–2 Carr, E. H., 106–7 Castells, Manuel, 92, 94, 188, 196; The Information Age, 195 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 21 Castro, Fidel, 17, 182 Catholic church, 137, 183–7; ‘option of the poor’, 187 Caudwell, Christopher: Romance and

Realism, 127; Studies in a Dying Culture, 127 centre-periphery, as binary opposition, 145 Chairs of Scientific Atheism, 182 Chartist movement, 78–9 Chernobyl disaster, 35, 45 Chile, political movement of 2011, 211 China, 13, 67, 205; development model of, 201; freedom of religion in, 179 Chipko forest movement, 40 Christianity, 177, 183–7; attempted synthesis with Marxism, 184; common ground with socialism, 183; primitive, 177 Christians for Socialism conference, 185 Church of the Poor, 187 Chuzhak, N., Literature of Fact, 131 citizenship, engendered, 170 civil society, global, 171 Clarke, Simon, 197 clash of civilizations, 192 class: death of, 89, 93; decentring of, 93; ‘retreat from’, 88 class distinctions, elimination of, 57 class struggle, in relation to nationalism, 164–5 classes, criteria for belonging to, 77 climate change, 211 coalitions, building of, 94 Cohen, G. A., 77 Cold War, won by the West, 17 collectivization, forced, 181 colonialism, 11, 21, 56; Marx’s positive view of, 54 commodification, 206 Commoner, Barry, 35–6 communes: rural, 4; Russian peasant, 54–5 (Lenin’s view of, 58) communism, 2, 78, 79, 83, 101, 107, 208; and nationalism, 154–9; as utopia, 6; collapse of, 11, 158; definition of, 210, 211; in Marx, 76; in the East, 15 Communist Party of China, 179 Communist Party of France, 194 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 76, 181–2 Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (Brazil), 186

index | 215 Congress of the Peoples of the West, 15 counter-movements, 210–11 Coward, Ros, 103 creative destruction, of capitalism, 204 crisis: economic, 198 (Marx’s theory of, 196–7; post-2007, xiv, 48); of capitalism (ecological, 38–9; general, 2, 9) critique, as method of Marx, 6 Cuba, 16, 64, 67, 71, 180–1; religion in, 174, 182–3 cult of the leader, 180 cultural complexity, 145 cultural formation, multiple axes of, 145 cultural saturation, 145 cultural studies, 137, 143 cultural turn, in Marxism, 140–7 culturalism, 139 culture: in Marxism, xiii, 123–48; proletarian, 129; socialist, 123 cyclicity of labour-capital relations, 94 Czech workers’ movement, 160, 164 Czechoslovakia, 16; ‘Prague Spring’, 19; Soviet invasion of, 17 Daly, Mary, 41 Darwin, Charles, evolutionary theory of, 69; in Marxism, 8 Daszynski, a delegate at the Brünn Congress, 161 debt, 207; toxic, 199, 203 decentred workplace, 93 deconstruction, 23–4 de-linking, advocacy of, 65 Delphy, Christine, 109 democracy, 8, 9, 12, 69, 108, 150, 154, 155, 156, 158; direct, 14 dependency theory, 69–70, 71, 72–3 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 6, 20, 21, 23, 70, 110, 143–4, 175–6 development: as discourse, 72; concept of, to be questioned, 68; in Leninism, 58–63; Marxism and, xii, 52–74; noncapitalist mode of, 63; socialist, 67; theory of, engendering of, 70 see also post-development dialectical materialism, 5 dialectics: nature as proof of, 31; of nature, 28

Die Gleichheit, 104 difference, 118–19, 140 discourse, concept of, 143 disembededness, 206 distribution of income, 63 division of labour, 54, 58, 78, 87; gendered, 100, 107; in family, 101; North-South, 210 domestic labour: debate regarding, 91, 111–12 (issue of productive nature of, 111); of women, 91, 99 domination, non-binary view of, 143 double movement, concept of, 48 Douglas, Mary, 30 dual systems approach, 109–10, 113 Duménil, G., 196 dumping of hazardous wastes, 47 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, Cyber-Marx, 87 Eagleton, Terry, 125–6, 127, 128, 174, 187 ecofeminism, xi, 28, 39–44, 70, 112 ecology, ix–x, xi, 209; central to future of capitalism, 48; in relation to socialism, 33–9 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), 73 economism, of Marxism, 145 ecosocialism, 37–8 Egypt, 189; rising in, 210 Eisenstein, Zillah, 110 embourgeoisement of industrial working class, 87–8 ‘end of history’, vii, 193, 194 energy: consumption of, global, 44; renewable, 204 Engels, Friedrich, xi, xiii, 5, 58, 79, 104, 109, 110; and domestic violence, 101–2; Anti-Dühring, 5; as editor of Capital, 7; Dialectics of Nature, 8, 31–2; Graveside Speech, 8; Origins of the Family ..., 98–101 (critique of, 100); role of, in Marxism, 7; ‘Social Relations in Russia’, 57; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 8; The Condition of the Working Class in England, 7–8; The Peasant War in Germany, 7; views of (on gender, 97, 99; on Ireland, x, 152; on Mexicans,

216 | i n d ex Engels, Friedrich (cont.): 152; on nationalism, 150–1, 163; on Poles, 151; on religion, 177; on the family, 97–103; on women, 111) Enlightenment, 114, 115, 117, 142, 146, 176, 177, 188; spatial relativization of, 145 environment, global management of, 47 environmental agenda, 44–50 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus, 45; Critique of Political Ecology, 36 equality: concept of, problematic, 118–19; gendered, 119; in relation to difference, 118–19 Escobar, Arturo, 68, 72 ethnocentrism, 117 Eurocentrism, 37, 87, 171; in notion of development, 71; of Marxism, x, xii, 149, 165, 167; of nationalism, 168 Eurocommunism, 16 Euro-feminism, 168 European Union (EU), 204–5 evolutionism, Marxist tendency towards, 85 Facebook, 204 factory committees, 84 family: in writings of Engels, 97–103; suppression of, 101 family wage, concept of, 102–3 Fannie May, 203 Fanon, Franz, 16 Fascism, 137 feminism, ix–x, xi, 91, 97, 108, 113, 209; and ecology, 39–44; and socialism, 103–9; black, 116, 117, 118; bourgeois, 104, 106; critical research in, 111; first-wave, 114; liberal, 103, 115, 116; radical, 115, 119; relation with ecology, 28; socialist, xiii, 97, 109–14, 115, 120; ‘Third World’, 116, 117, 118, 119; working-class, 117 feminisms, multiple, 114 financial sector: failure to regulate, 206; regeneration of, 204 financialization, 196, 207 Firestone, Shulamith, 109 First Conference of Working Women of the Petrograd, 106

First Congress of Soviet Writers, 131–2 First Congress of the Peoples of the East, 156 First International, 25, 151, 153; dissolution of, 4 Fordism, 48, 61 Foucault, Michel, 5, 19, 21, 22–3, 24, 68, 119, 120, 139, 143; on ideology, 124–5 France, 152; May 1968 in, 19, 20, 22 Fraser, Nancy, ix, 146, 209 Freddie Mac, 203 freedom of expression and belief, 181 Friedman, Milton, 199 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) (Algeria), 189 Fukuyama, Francis, 194, 206 Futurism, 129, 130 Galiev, Sultan, 181 Gapon, Father, 178 Garcia Canclini, Nestor, 139 Gay Activists Alliance, 119 Gay Liberation Front, 119 gay rights, 146 Gellner, Ernest, 154 gender, analysis of, 111 gender equality, 107; rhetoric of, 116 Germany, 14, 80, 151, 156; East, 16; unification of, 150 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 89 global warming, 45; science of, 48 globalization, 12, 28, 75, 91–2, 170, 187, 188, 195, 202, 207, 210; as revolution, 194; foreseen by Marx as tendency, 195; workers and, 89–94 Glucksmann, André, The Master Thinkers, 20 Goldman, Emma, 106 Goldmann, Lucien, The Hidden God, 179 Gorky, Maxim, 131, 133 Gorz, André, 36, 37–8, 88; Farewell to the Working Class, 86–7 Gould, Carol, 100 Gramsci, Antonio, xiii, 8, 19–20, 84, 123, 134–40, 142, 143, 165, 174, 185; Prison Notebooks, 178; views of

index | 217 (on nationalism, 149; on philosophy, 136; on religion, 178) grand narratives: deconstruction of, 145; of emancipation, 116; rejection of, 143 Great Depression, 200, 202–6 Greece, 205; political movement of 2012, 211 Greer, Germaine, 109 Griffin, Susan, 41 growth, economic: declining rate of, 207; limits to, 44 Grundmann, Rainer, 30, 33 Guattari, Félix, 13 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Chè’, 180 Guha, Ranajit, 138 Gulf War, 18 Gunder Frank, Andre, 60, 72 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, Liberation Theology, 185 Habsburg Empire, 160 Hall, Stuart, 137, 140 Halliday, Fred, 17, 18 Harding, Sandra, 113 Harribey, Jean-Marie, 49–50 Hartmann, Heidi, 90–1, 112–13 Hayek, Friedrich von, 199 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 9, 30, 152, 184; concept of history, 69 hegemony, concept of, 136, 138 Hekman, Susan, 115 heteroglossia, 134 Hirst, Paul, 126 historical materialism, 5 history, Marxism’s view of, xi, 1–27 Hitler, Adolf, 201 Hobsbawm, Eric, 25, 159, 194, 197–8 Holub, Renate, 135 homophobia, 146 homosexuality, laws against, 132 hooks, bell, 116 Hoover, Herbert, 199 household, concept of, 43 housing bubble, 203 Hoxha, Enver, 179 Hudis, Peter, 208–9 Hungary, 16 Huntington, Samuel, 188

identity, politics of, 118 ideology: autonomization of, 176; concept of, 124, 135–6, 142; Marx’s engagement with, 123–9; Marxist theory of, 176; non-class, 143 Ignatieff, Michael, Blood and Belonging, 158 Illich, Ivan, 38 imperialism, 14, 56, 63; obstacle to development, 60; theory of, 55, 59 import-substitution industrialization, 61–2, 65 impossibility of society, 143 India, 11, 157, 205; Marx’s interest in, 54, 59 Indignados movement, 206, 210 Industrial Revolution, 75, 78, 153, 196, 201 industrialization, 67, 76; forced, 61; of agriculture, 29; of USSR, 34; perceived necessity of, 57; socialist, 62 see also import-substitution industrialization inequality, gender-based, 99–100 information, dominant in technological era, 92 information technology, 93 intellectuals, role of, 138 interest rates, 203 International Women’s Day, 105, 106 internationalism, 150, 153; socialist, 7 intertextuality, 134 Iran, 190–1; Islamist revolution in, 191 Ireland, 157; Engels’ views on, x, 152; Marx’s views on, x, 11, 56, 152–3 Islam: political (complexity of, 191–2; rise of, 188–92); radical, 174, 205; relation between religious and political domains, 189; seen as compatible with socialism, 190; sharia law, 189 Israel, 190, 206 Israeli-Arab war (1967), 190 Italy, 150; religion in, 174 Jackson, Cecile, 42, 43 Jameson, Fredric, 144–5 Jayawardena, Kuman, 168 Jesus Christ, viewed as revolutionary, 183 Jewish workers, organization of, 155 Jihad, 157

218 | i n d ex jobless futures, 93 Joyce, James, 131, 132 Kautsky, Karl, 1, 8, 10, 13, 32, 59, 160, 163; views on religion, 177 Kay, Geoffrey, 57 Kedourie, Elie, 166 Kemal, Mustafa (Ataturk), 157, 189 Keynes, J. M., 10, 199–200 Keynesianism, 194, 199–200, 204 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 191 Khruschev, Nikita, 67 knowledge, archaeology of, 143 Kolakowski, Leszek, 5, 7, 8, 159 Kollontai, Alexandra, 104, 105–7, 109 Kondratiev, Nikolai, 61 Korea, North, 67, 68 Korsch, Karl, 32–3; ‘Crisis of Marxism’, 194 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, The Woman Worker, 105 Laclau, Ernesto, 19, 24–5, 89, 142–3; with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialism, 142 laissez-faire, 201 language, as prime constituent of nationhood, 163, 163 Latin America, agro-export model in, 200 League of the Militant Godless, 181 Lefort, Claude, 21 Lehman Brothers, 203 Leibman, Marcel, 10 Leichtheim, George, 11 Lenin, V. I., 1, 13–14, 37, 52, 62, 94, 130, 136, 157, 159, 174, 179, 209; analysis of Tolstoy, 125; Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 129; The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 58, 58; Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, 81; ‘turn to the East’, xi; views of (on national question, xiii, 149; nationalism, 155–6; on party press, 131; on peasantry, 58; on religion, 178; on rights of creation, 129; on socialism, 81; on the working class, 80–4; on women, 105, 107)

Leninism, 108; and development, 58–63; as ideology of development, 62 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, La barbarie à visage humain, 20 Lévy, D., 196 Lewis, Bernard, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, 188 liberation theology, xiv, 174, 178, 182–7; mainstreaming of, 187 Lifschitz, Mikhail, 127–8 liminality, concept of, 169–70 Lipietz, Alain, 49 literature: at service of Five Year Plan, 130; Marxist theory of, 128 logocentrism, 70 Lukács, György, ix, 6, 13–14, 32, 128, 133 lumpen-proletariat, 77 Lunacharsky, Anatolii, 33, 129 Luther, Martin, 178 Luxemburg, Rosa, 36, 84, 94, 155, 156, 157; views of (on national question, 149; on religion, 177–8) Lyotard, Jean-François, 20–1; Libidinal Economy, 21; The Postmodern Condition, 21–2 Lysenko, Trofim, 28, 32, 36 Macherey, Pierre, 22 Machism, 130 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 184 Maconachie, Moira, 98, 100 male waged worker, assumption of, 102 Malthus, Thomas, 30–1 Mandel, Ernest, 35 Manifesto, Il, 18 Mao Zedong, 15 Maoism, 11 mapping, nationalism expressed in, 166 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 184–5; ‘Two Conceptions of Life’, 184–5 marriage, 101; as free union, 107; equality within, 106 Marx, Karl, xiii, 195, 196, 198, 207–10; account of laws of capital accumulation, 196; analyses of labour movements, 78–9; analysis of money, 196; Capital, 3, 4, 5, 31, 32, 84, 176–7, 196, 198, 210 (anniversary of, xv;

index | 219 Engels’ editing of, 5; impossibility of conclusion, 4; references to women workers, 102); Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 175; death of, 5; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 29; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 2–3; engagement with culture and ideology, 123; Grundrisse, 91, 176; not a Marxist, vi; not interested in forecasting, ix; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 124; seen as dominant philosopher, 20; Theories of Surplus Value, 3; theory of crisis, 196–7; views of (on development, 54, 72; on nationalism, 150–1; on nature, 28–33; on gender, 110; on Ireland, x, 11, 152–3; on literature, 123–4; on nationalism, 163; on Paris Commune, 4; on post-capitalist era, 208; on religion, 174, 175–9; on socialism, 208–9); with Engels (Collected Works, publication of, 25; Communist Manifesto, 2, 52, 54, 56, 62, 76; The German Ideology, 9, 29, 78, 101, 211) Marx-Engels Institute, 5 Marxism, 125, 195; and culture, xiii, 123–48; and nation, 149–73; and the future, 193–212; and women, 97–122; arrival of, in Russia, 80; as messianic eschatology, 6; atheism as part of, 189; compatibility with some forms of religion, 178; crisis of, vii, 18, 97; ecological, ix, 49; economism of, 140; gender-blindness of, 91, 102, 113, 116, 120; genealogy of, 1; in relation to workers, 75–96; limitations of, 209; many Marxisms, viii, ix; neo-conservative, 146; of the Communist Manifesto, 52–3; ‘open’, 20; orthodox, 7; part of modernist paradigm, 69; productivist bias of, 107; ‘queer’, 119; renewal of, 193–8; ‘scientific’, ix; seen as Christian heresy, 184; sexism of, 113; sources of, 1; today, 18–25; view of religion, 174–92; with capital

M, tied to domination, 23 see also post-Marxism Marxism-Leninism, 62, 84, 125, 131, 155, 157, 208; becomes form of state religion, 5, 180 materialism: dialectical (diamat), 22, 32; historical, 13, 34; scientific, 8 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 129 meaning, always positional, 144 men, defence of nation assigned to, 168 Mengisteab, Kidane, 64 mental and manual labour, contradiction between, 128 Merrill Lynch company, 203 metanarratives, mistrust of, 141 method, of Marx, 6 Mexico, 13; war with United States, 152 micro-politics, 24 Mies, Maria, 41 migration, transnational, 170–1 militarization of labour, 82 miracles, suppression of, 181 Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 109; Woman’s Estate, 109 Mitterrand experiment, 11 modernism, 68, 71 modernity, 2, 16, 114 modernization, 69, 71 Mohanty, Chandra, 71, 116–17 monogamy, 101–2 Morgan, Lewis, 99; Ancient Society, 98 mother right, overthrow of, 99 Mouffe, Chantal, 19, 89, 142–3 Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) (Brazil), 186 Mozambique, 67 Muhammad, Prophet, 189 multi-phrenic intensities, 144 Müntzer, Thomas, 177 Muslims, in the Soviet Union, 181 Nairn, Tom, 149, 155, 166–7 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 189 nation: a relational term, 168; as community of culture, 164; as historical process, 165; as imagined community, 167; constructed as woman, 168; definition of, 162; Marxist

220 | i n d ex nation (cont.): view of, xiii–xiv, 149–73; psychological theories of, 162; represented as woman, 169 nation-state, seen as synonymous with democracy, 150 national character, 162–3 national identities, essentialist, 158 national liberation, 14 national-popular, 165; concept of, 136–7 nationalism, 12, 57, 64, 190; and gender, 166; Arab, 190; as discursive formation, 170; communism and, 154–9; demonization of, 158; Eurocentric and androcentric, 168; European origins of, 166; gender aspects of, 168; in post-colonial world, 167; Janus-faced phenomenon, 166; linked to modernity, 165; Marxist theory of, 155–6, 170 (viewed as a failure, 149); negative consequences of, 150; political, failure of, 191; post-1989, 158; sacred role of, 167; seen as false consciousness, 154; social reproduction of, 169 see also post-nationalism ‘nationness’, created by mass media, 165 nations: as subjects of history, 167; ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’, 151, 152–3, 165, 166 nature: dialectics of see dialectics, of nature; domination of, 29; Marxism’s engagement with, xi–xii, 28–51; relationship with culture, 115 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 67 neoliberalism, 49, 69, 94; emergence of, 199; failure of, 206 New Deal (USA), 200, 201 New Economic Programme (NEP), 61 new social movements, x, xii, 71, 90, 92 ‘new working class’ debate, 75 Nicaragua, 66; revolution in, 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 23, 30, 41 non-historic peoples see nations, ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’ Northern Rock company, nationalization of, 203 novel, as literary form, 128

Occupy movement, 206, 210 O’Connor, James, 38 Orientalism, 138 Orthodox Church, Russian, 181–2 Osinsky, V. V., 83–4 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 46 Pannekoek, Anton, 84 Paris Commune, 3–4, 81, 208 party: communist, emergence of, 13; organization of, 108 patriarchy, 100; concept of, 109 (problematic, 110) patrilineal clan systems, 99 peasantry, role of, 88, 210 People’s Charter, 78 periphery, capitalist, x ‘personal is political’, 118 Petras, James, 84–5 Petrograd Soviet, 81 petty bourgeois, use of term, 85 piecework, 81 planning, centralized, 66 Poland, 16; reunification of, 151; socialism in, 161 Polanyi, Karl, 48–9, 195, 210; The Great Transformation, 201–2 pollution: market in permits, 49; of air, 44 polyglossia, 134 popular front policies, in literature, 130 populism, 58 Portantiero, Juan Carlos, 139 post-capitalism, 207–11 post-colonial studies, 138, 145–6 post-colonialism, 24, 71, 209 post-development, 68–73 post-feminism, 114–20 post-Marxism, 18–19, 48, 69, 70, 72, 75, 89 postmodernism, 21–2, 24, 44, 71, 97, 114–16, 139, 141; aestheticization of perception, 142; as cultural logic of late capitalism, 145; definition of, 144; in relation to feminism, 114 post-nationalism, 165–71 poststructuralism, 73, 114, 170 Poulantzas, Nicos, 23, 86, 143 power, analysis of, 23

index | 221 pre-capitalist modes of production, 56 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 61 primitive accumulation, 56, 94 privatization, of higher education, 211 productive and reproductive spheres, integration of, 120 productive and unproductive labour, distinction between, 77, 86, 91, 99, 100, 107 productivism of Marxism, 110 productivity of labour, 83–4 professional revolutionary, figure of, 13 profit, falling rate of, 197 progress, metanarratives of, 72 Proletarian Culture, 129 proletariat, xii, 2, 6, 13, 53, 54, 55, 62, 84, 93, 131, 155, 156, 161, 163, 165, 195; as class and party, 76; as myth, 79, 90; as universal class, 78; as universal subject, 89; composition of, 77; crisis of, 86; definition of, 208; dictatorship of, 83, 84; in Marx, 75–6; international in perspective, 164; marriage within, 101; role of, in revolution, 58 Proletkult movement, xiii, 123, 129–34 Prometheanism, 28, 30 Protestant Ethic, 176 Protestantism: association with commodity production, 177; relation to emergence of capitalism, 176 Queer Nation, 119 race, subordination of, 146 Radek, Karl, 131, 132, 157 rationalist philosophy of science, critique of, 115 Reason, universality of, 142 recognition, 146; politics of, 140 recycling, 47 re-enchantment of the world, 184 Reich, Wilhelm, 107 religion: as ‘opium of the people’, xiv, 175, 178; as utopian consciousness, 179; definition of, 187–9; Marxism’s view of, xiv, 174–92; motivating ideology in popular revolts, 180;

perceived as false consciousness, 175; return of, 187–92; revival of, 174; separated from politics, 188; socialism and, 179–83 reproduction: conceptual confusion surrounding, 110–11; of labour power, 100; of society, 98, 209 resistance, ubiquity of, 90 revolution, 2, 4, 9, 17, 19, 20, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64, 78, 80, 89, 150, 151, 159, 198; necessity of, 185; permanent, 61; sociological survey of, 84–5; wave of 1848, 151–2; working-class participation in, 84–5 revolutionary subject, search for, 88 Rio Earth Summit (1992), 45 Rodinson, Maxime, 190 Roosevelt, Franklin, 200 Rossanda, Rossana, 18 Rowbotham, Sheila, 108 Russia, 15–16, 60, 64, 105, 136; arrival of Marxism in, 80; changes post-1989, 67; Marx’s view of, 54–5 Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, 130 Russian Revolution, xii, xv, 8, 10, 13, 14, 55, 60, 83, 84, 99, 106, 107, 108, 129, 155, 156, 185, 210–11; mistaken views of, 194; role of workers in, 75 Said, Edward: Culture and Imperialism, 138; Orientalism, 138 Sandinista movement, vii Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 134 Schleswig and Holstein, ceded to Denmark, 151 Schumpeter, Joseph, 199, 204 science, 124–5; as language of domination, 40–1; debates regarding, 41 Second International, 7, 82, 126, 163 self-determination, 64; right to, xiv, 151, 156 self-reflexivity, 72 Seliger, attendee at Brünn congress, 161 Sergei, Metropolitan, 182 sexual politics, 106

222 | i n d ex sexuality, 120; socialist, 107; subordination of, 146 Shiva, Vandana, Staying Alive, 39 violence, against women, 39 sisterhood, global, assumption of, 117 Sklair, Leslie, 47 slum dwellers, role of, 210 social democracy, 9–12, 13; Austrian, 165; German, 12 Social Democratic Party (SPD) (Germany), 5, 104 social movement unionism, 90 social struggles, plurality of, 89–90 socialism, 17, 65, 83, 85, 89, 108, 133, 155, 163, 190, 200, 208; and ecology, 33–9; and feminism, 103–9; and religion, 179–83; Arab, 189; byword for dirty development, 35; crisis of, 86; in conditions of underdevelopment, 63–8; in Lenin, 81; ‘in one country’, 60, 61; market socialism, 66–7; Marx’s view of, 63; mystique introduced into, 185; scientific, 8, 37; Stalinist, 66; utopian, 37 see also ecosocialism; feminism, socialist; and state socialism Socialisme ou Barbarie, 20, 21 Socialist Party (Spain), 12 Socialist Realism, 127, 132–3 Socialist Women’s International, 105 solidarity, international, 94 Solomon, Maynard, 132 Sorel, Georges, 184 soviets: formation of, 81; ‘plus electrification’, 52–74 speaking from one’s position, 118 Spender, Stephen, 127 Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 138–9 stagnation, theories of, 197 Stalin, Joseph, vi, 15, 32, 61–2, 106, 130, 132, 133, 180; Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 5; gigantomania of, 63–4 Stalin Canal, building of, 131–2 Stalinism, 133, 201 state, role of, interventionist, 204 state capitalism, 55

state power, 136 state socialism: assumes a religious form, 181; collapse of, 158 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 79 Stirner, Max, 176 Stites, Richard, 108 strikes, 81 structuralism, 139–40; Latin American, 73 sub-prime mortgage crisis, 198, 202–3 subaltern studies, 138 Subaltern Studies Group, 145 subject / object separation, in knowledge, 114 subsumption of labour: formal, 72, 87; real, 72, 87 Suez Canal, nationalization of, 189 Suharto, 190 Summers, Laurence, 197 superstructure, 123–48 passim sustainable development, 44–50 Swiss civil code, introduced into Turkey, 189 symbolism, 130 Taylorism, 81–2; impact on working class solidarity, 83 technology, new, 75 Third International, 14, 60, 82, 84, 156, 157 Third World, 56, 63, 68, 71, 88; feminism and nationalism in, 168; use of term, 11, 16–17 Third World women, use of term, 42 Third-Worldist perspective, 94 Thomas, Paul, 5, 25 Thompson, E. P., 77, 139–40; The Making of the English Working Class, 79 Tolstoy, Lenin’s analysis of, 125 Tosel, André, viii–ix trade unions, 54, 87, 90; as transmission belt for party, 82; conservatism of, 37; formation of unified confederations, 93; in Russia, 81; non-adaptability of, 92; reforms of structures of, 94; resurgence of, 93 transformation problem, 3 trees, embracing of, 40 Trotsky, Leon, 61, 82; views on art, 130

index | 223 Ukraine, 161 under-consumption, 197 underdevelopment, 64–5; as fictitious construct, 72; development of, 60, 69; socialism and, 63–8 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 80, 180–1, 190, 201, 202; collapse of, vii; debate about nature of, 15; ecological research in, 34; numbers of industrial workers in, 82; religion in, 174 Union of Soviet Writers, 131 United Kingdom (UK), ending of informal empire, 200 universalism, 116 United States of America (USA): consolidation of neo-colonialism of, 200; great recession in, 198; hegemony of, 202; overheating of housing market in, 202; relative decline of, 204; religious fundamentalism in, 188 utopia, post-industrial, 87 utopianism, viii, ix, 6, 36, 37, 38 value: labour theory of, 3; law of, 66 vanguard party, concept of, 156 Vietnam, 17, 64 violence, against women and children, 101, 102 Vogel, Lise, 112 Voloshinov, V. N., 134 Wages for Housework campaign, 112 Wall Street Crash, 198 war, reduced to images, 142 Washington Consensus, 201 water, quality of, 44 weakest link, theory of, 63, 64 Weber, Max, 5, 9, 176 Weiner, Douglas, 33–4 welfare state, 10 Williams, Raymond, 139–40; Marxism and Literature, 125, 126 woman: as unified subject, 115, 116, 117; as unstable construction, 119–20, 119 ‘woman question’, xiii, 97, 104, 105, 113

women: as reserve army of labour, 103; deconstructed as category, 120; domestic labour of, 99; essentialist view of, 42; in industry, protection of, 102; in Marxism, xiii, 97–122; killing of, 106; liberation of, 98–9, 100, 111; perceived as new revolutionary group, 113; protection of, 103; role of, in ethnic processes, 169; seen as related to nature, 39, 41; subordination of, 91; ‘Third World’, 117; under capitalism, 97; waged work of, 107 see also domestic labour, of women and nation, represented as woman women’s movement, 104 Wood, E. M., 88 Woolf, Virginia, 168 workers: new kinds of, 92; rights of, 12 Workers Catholic Youth (Brazil), 183 workers’ control, 80, 81–3 Workers’ Party (Brazil), 186, 211 workers’ state, degeneration of, 82 working class, 211; as revolutionary class, 88; composition of, 85–6; ‘death of’, 84–9; direct oppression of, 78; in Lenin, 80–4; in Marxism, xii, 75–96; new sectors of, 94; revolutionary participation of, 84–5; role of, 64; self-activity of, xii, 79, 85; unity of, 3 see also ‘new working class’ debate World Bank, viii World Councils, formation of, 93 World Social Forum, 211 Yemen, 67 Yugoslavia, dissidence in, 180 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 169 Zalkind, Aron, 107 Zasulich, Vera, 14, 54 Zetkin, Clara, 104–5, 109 Zhdanov, Andrei, 132 Zhdanovism, 134 Zhenotdel, 106 Zinoviev, Grigory, 156 Zionism, 190