Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy 9380118147, 9789380118147

Citation preview

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.0rg/details/questionofstrateOOOOunse

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2

0

13

THE SOCIALIST REGISTER Founded in 1964 EDITORS LEO PANITCH GREG ALBO VIVEK CHIBBER FOUNDING EDITORS RALPH MILIBAND (1924-1994) JOHN SAVILLE (1916-2009)

ASSOCIATE EDITORS COLIN LEYS ALFFLEDO SAAD-FILHO ASSISTANT EDITOR ALAN ZUEGE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS BASHIR ABU-MANNEH GILBERT ACHCAR HENRY BERNSTEIN JOHANNA BP^NNER PAUL CAMMACK GEORGE COMNINEL BARBAPJV EPSTEIN BILL FLETCHER JR SAM GINDIN BARBARA HARRISS-WHITE DAVID HARVEY JUDITH ADLER HELLMAN NANCY HOLMSTROM URSULA HUWS CHARLES POST ADOLPH FCEEDJR SHEILA ROWBOTHAM JOHN S. SAUL HILARY WAINWRIGHT

CORRESPONDING EDITORS AIJAZ AHMAD, NEW DELHI ELMAR ALTVATER, BERLIN PATRICK BOND, DURBAN ATILIO BORON, BUENOS AIFLES HIDAYAT (GERARD) GREENFIELD, JAKARTA CHRISTOPH HERMANN, VIENNA MARTIJN KONINGS, SYDNEY MICHAEL LOWY, PARIS MICHALIS SPOURDALAKIS, ATHENS To get online access to all Register volumes visit our website http://www.socialistregister.com

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2 0 13 THE QUESTION OF STRATEGY Edited by LEO PANITCH, GREG ALBO and VIVEK CHIBBER

✓

i

H

THE MERLIN PRESS MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS FERNWOOD PUBLISHING

i

'

First published in 2012 by The Merlin Press Ltd. 6 Crane Street Chambers Crane Street Pontypool NP4 6ND Wales

www.merhnpress.co.uk

© The Merlin Press, 2012

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISSN. 0081-0606

Published in the UK by The Merlin Press ISBN. 978-0-85036-631-0 Paperback ISBN. 978-0-85036-630-3 Hardback

Published in the USA by Monthly Review Press ISBN.

978-1-58367-339-3 Paperback

Published in Canada by Fernwood Publishing ISBN. 978-1-55266-533-6 Paperback

Printed in the UK on behalf of LPPS Ltd., WeUingborough, Northants.

CONTENTS

Leo Panitch

Preface

ix

Greg Albo Vivek Chibber

Greg Albo

The crisis and economic alternatives

Sam Gindin

Rethinking unions, registering socialism

Jodi Dean

26

Occupy Wall Street: after the anarchist moment

Barbara Epstein

1

52

Occupy Oakland: the question of violence

63

Mimmo Porcaro

Occupy Lenin

84

Michalis Spourdalakis

Left strategy in the Greek cauldron: explaining Syriza’s success

Aristides Baltas

The rise of Syriza: an interview

Hilary Wainwright

Transformative power:

98

120

political organization in transition

137

Christoph Spehr

Die Linke today: fears and desires

159

Charles Post

What is left of Leninism? New European left parties in historical perspective

174

Stephen Heilman

Whatever happened to Italian communism? Lucio Magri’s The Tailor ofUlm

John S. Saul

On taming a revolution: the South African case

AtiUo A. Boron

Johanna Brenner

212

Strategy and tactics in popular struggles in Latin America

Susan Spronk

198

241

Tw^enty-first century socialism in Bolivia: the gender agenda

255

Socialist-feminist strategy today

266

Nancy Holmstrom Joan Sangster

Feminism, co-optation and the

Meg Luxton

problems of amnesia: a response to Nancy Fraser

288

Eli Zaretsky

Reconsidering the American left

310

Alex Callinicos

Alain Badiou and the idea of

Michael A. Lebowitz

communism

326

The state and the future of socialism

345

CONTRIBUTORS Greg Albo is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. Aristides Baltas is a philosopher and a coordinator of Syriza’s policy plan¬ ning committee. Atilio A. Boron is the Director of the Latin American Programme of Distance Education in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Johanna Brenner is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University. Alex Callinicos is a professor of European Studies at King’s College, London. Jodi Dean is a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York. Barbara Epstein is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sam Gindin is the former Research Director of the Canadian Auto Workers Union and Packer Visiting Chair in Social Justice at York University, Toronto, Canada. Stephen Heilman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. Nancy Holmstrom is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Meg Luxton is a professor in the School of Gender, Sexuahty and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. Michael A. Lebowitz is a professor emeritus in the Department of Economics at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Mimmo Porcaro is a grassroots union activist m Turin and a member of Rifondazione Comunista.

Charles Post is a professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York (CUNY). Joan Sangster is a professor of Gender and Women s Studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. John S. Saul is a professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. Christoph Spehr is the Spokesperson for the Bremen State Organization of Die Linke. Michalis

Spourdalakis is a professor of political science at Athens

University. Susan Spronk is an assistant professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Hilary Wainwright is a Senior Research Associate in the International Centre for Participation Studies at the Department for Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK. Eli Zaretsky is a professor of history at The New School in New York City.

PREFACE

T

he previous two volumes of the Register were focused on analyzing the roots of the ongoing economic crisis. It was clear by 2010 that if there

was going to be a recovery, it would occur on the backs of the poor and working people. Even more, ruling parties pushed through programmes of privatization and anti-labour legislation that, until recently, would have been considered too draconian to be feasible. The question asked in the Preface to the 2012 Socialist Register was whether the left could fashion any sort of effective response to state-imposed austerity and attacks on public services and workers. This, the 49* volume of the Socialist Register examines the choices faced by the left today, the models of strategy available to it, and the innovations that are being made by groups as they organize in diverse settings. The regions at the epicentre of the crisis have indeed witnessed the emergence of quite significant social mobilization.

The most dramatic of

these was probably the Occupy movement, which began on ^JV^all Street in the autumn of 2011, and then spread at its peak to over 200 cities across the world. But this movement was preceded by the dramatic mobilization and occupation of the Capitol in Madison, ^A/^isconsin the year before, by the extraordinary winds of change that swept across the Middle East in 201011, whose radical potential was highlighted by the epochal demonstrations in Tahrir Square; and in Europe, by the determined resistance of the Indignados in Spain, which has continued now for several years, extending to neighbourhood assemblies and general strikes; and in Greece, by the two years of street protests and strikes which eventually led the stunning near¬ victory of Syriza at the polls in the spring of 2012. These movements had much in common, not the least of which was that their organizers saw themselves as being part of the same global upsurge. Placards in Madison paid homage to Tahrir Square and the activists in Occupy Wall Street took inspiration from Madison. What stood out the most was that, for the first time since the 1980s, social movements put the question of capitalism back on the political agenda.

The Occupy movement even

X

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

introduced a new concept into the poHtical lexicon, with their chant: ‘We are the ninety-nine per cent’. Their slogan captured the pubhc imagination as no other has in recent years, with its indictment of the obscene inequality - of wealth, income and above all, power — separating the ruling classes from the mass of working people.

It is hard to overestimate just how profound

was this achievement, when we compare it to the actual size and duration of the mobilizations. Two years ago, we could still only hope that socialists might be able to insert the language of class into public debate. Then, as if by decree, these very issues, which had disappeared for so long from political discourse, suddenly returned to centre stage. The movements have created a climate where it is possible, once again, to place class power at the centre of the left’s political strategy. But what political strategy? If movements are emerging once again, what is the strategic vision that is employed by, and available to, the anti-capitahst left today? As several of the essays in this volume attest, the anarchist

milieu

has been more concerned with process and tactics than with strategy. There is an intense preoccupation with the micro-pohtics of meetings, making sure that they abide by certain principles that are held to be sacrosanct — but less with issues of organization building, or of state power. There is also a tremendous appreciation of spectacular events to capture popular imagination, but a strong resistance to thinking about their long-term consequences. MC^hile activists in this milieu have played a very important role in energizing this explosion of mobilizations, one can only be dismayed at the denigration of strategy, per se. We have to acknowledge the fact that the two strategic conceptions that dominated the left during the twentieth century — social democratic parliamentarism and Leninist vanguardism —have both failed as vehicles for anti-capitahst politics. The mass social democratic parties that oversaw the post-war welfare states have long ceased to have any connection with mass mobilization, much less with anti-capitahsm. This is but the culmination of a very long trajectory through which social democratic parties have changed their orientation from one of transforming capitalism, to better managing It. Where once they at least gave lip-service to socialism, they now tout their credentials as guardians of competitiveness and social discipline. Across Europe, the traditional labour parties, and the unions attached to them, have no vision except a return to some kind of guided capitalism. In Greece and Spain, it is Socialist parties that have been the overseers of cut-backs and retrenchment since 2007; and in France, the new Socialist administration of Francois Hollande, while imposing new taxes on the wealthy, is itself embarking on its own path to fiscal consolidation.

PREFACE

XI

To their credit, the political organizations coming out of the Leninist tradition have been sharp and sometimes insightful critics of the social democratic parties.

But it is hard to deny that these groups have been

handicapped by their own strategic vision, one which stridently promises that the dangers of reformism can be avoided by engineering a break from capitalism.

While an insurrectionary rupture might someday be possible.

It hardly seems in the realm of possibility anytime in the near future.

For

now, in this world, the hard reality is that capitalism is in economic crisis, but politically secure — even if some regimes are experiencing instability. Whatever political and organizational innovations emerge, for the present we have to assume that capitalism will continue to structure the environment in which we function. W^hat, then, should an anti-capitalist strategy look like, when capitalism is likely to shape the landscape of social and political struggle, at least for the middle run?

Is it possible to find a way toward

socialism through a combination of reforms, building mass organizations, confronting capital and its power centres, i.e., a strategy that is inevitably aggregative but which avoids the fate of the social democratic parties? We certainly do not pretend to have all the answers to the question of strategy. Yet it is important to at least pose the question.

A good many of

the essays in this volume address the broader theoretical and normative vision that continues to undergird the socialist project today - the conception of the state, of social transformation, and of politics itself

A number of the

essays take up the strengths and weaknesses of the Occupy movement’s strategic vision, or lack thereof, while others direct their attention to some of the theories that have been influential in the promoting the new Zeitgeist of honzontalism. One of the major tasks m this context is clearly to assess the emergence of new socialist parties in light of the legacy of Leninist and social democratic traditions. Several essays confront this issue generally, while others do so through the examination of individual cases, not least Syriza m Greece. A number of essays also address the strategic lessons to be drawn from various disappointments of revolutionary hopes in the South, from the Zapatistas in Latin America to the ANC in South Afnca, the latter appallingly highlighted by the slaughter at the Rustenburg mines as we go to press. Another prominent theme in this volume is the importance of feminism as an integral part of anti-capitalist movements, both within the advanced capitalist world and m the Global South. What the experience of feminist organizing has been, and the challenges that confront it, are at the heart of several of the essays. We want to thank all the contributors for their essays, while pointing out that neither we nor they necessarily agree with all the arguments presented.

xii

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

We also owe thanks to Eric Canepa for his translation ofMimmo Porcaro’s essay from the original Italian; and to John McLeod for the transcription of the interview with Aristides Baltaz.

Finally, we want to thank once again

Merlin Press’s Tony Zurbrugg and Adrian Howe for their efforts, and Louis McKay for his cover design; as well as Alan Zuege, our assistant editor, and especially Adam Hilton who has now come on board as editorial assistant. LP GA VC August 2012

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES GREG ALBO

S

ince 2008, the world market has been wracked by a degree of economic turbulence unusual in its scope, depth and duration. Although uneven in

its recessionary impacts, no comer of the global economy has been untouched by this. In the central economies of North America, Japan and Europe, this period has been universally demarcated as a ‘major crisis’, comparable to the ‘great depressions’ of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s and the stagflation of the 1970s. Even as the crisis now presses into its fifth year, economic prospects remain highly uncertain. In cataloguing obstacles to a renewal of economic growth in various parts of the world, the July 2012 IMF World Economic Outlook observes, with a tone of understatement, that ‘the global recovery, which was not so strong to begin with, has shown further signs of weakness’.’ As in other major turning points in the history of capitalism, powerful forces for restmcturing the state and the economy have been set in motion. From both sides of the political spectrum, governments have been falling like dominos. In Italy and Greece, ‘technocratic governments’ were stmck while in others something like a ‘common front’ formed between centreright and social democratic parties to back the bailouts of the financial system and secure long-term policies of‘fiscal consolidation’ (read austerity). This has kept even more interventionist economic policies within the parameters of‘exceptional monetarism’ (along the lines advocated by Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve), thereby seeking a balance between fiscal austerity and the ‘quantitative easing’ of monetary policy and debt consolidation to stabilize the financial system. This has allowed governments to attempt to reconstruct their broader neoliberal policy frameworks and power structures on a new foundation. For some observers, this has marked a ‘return of the state’, after years of‘free markets’. But it mainly reveals how important the state has always been in capitalist economies, even in the neoliberal era. Still, the politics of the crisis has renewed the critique of neoliberalism.

2

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

and even capitalism, and opened up new spaces of political opposition. An impressive array of struggles against austerity have erupted, and continue to emerge, from the global Occupy movement to the Indignados in Spain, UK Uncut, and Blockupy Frankfurt, demonstrating a tactical inventiveness that the left very much could use. The radical left has, moreover, managed to re-establish a degree of national prominence in the electoral arena and the broader field of political parties — Syriza in Greece, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Left Front in France, the Socialist Party in the Netherlands, the RedGreen Alliance in Denmark, to name the most prominent examples — that it has not held in decades. Thinking about fundamental economic alternatives - something that had been declared as either utopian or improbable speculation even on the left - is again receiving attention. The theoretical and political questions of sociahst strategy have returned, including how centrally a strategy for not just challenging but changing the state must figure in them. Renewed interest alone, however, does not make the metrics for assessing alternative economic programmes - from Keynesian reflationary policies to socialist transitional reforms — particularly transparent. When even Martin Wolf, the Financial Times commentator who is one of the more progressive voices m the mainstream media, says that no ‘credible alternative’ currently exists,^ it is well to bear in mind that this assessment pivots around whether ‘credible’ means only those alternatives that, as Istvan Meszaros has put it, ‘first acquire legitimacy as a capital asset’, so as to foreclose thinking ‘beyond capital . But it is certainly true that the left is still sputtering m producing — never mind anti-capitalist projects — even such alternative economic policy proposals as might successfully sustain anti-neohberal alliances in the current conjuncture, and thereby block the ways state power and economic policy are now being deployed in austerity exits to the crisis and forestall further attacks on the working classes. Yet even just a consistent politics of fighting austerity will open space for new and broader struggles, while debating economic alternatives, at this moment, can be important to the left’s regaining an organizational presence as a social force capable of advancing the organizational and programmatic basis for an anti-capitalist oppositional bloc, forwarding structural reforms capable of cracking open space m the state for struggles over the very definitions of democracy and needs, and thereby pointing the way not just to impeding but potentially transcending capitalist power.

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

3

KEYNESIAN DEPARTURES Critics of the neoliberal rescue and exit strategies have become more numerous and more vocal as the crisis has worn on. Keynesian analyses have argued how bursting asset bubbles and financial meltdown led to flagging effective demand as individual market actors simultaneously slashed spending and de-leveraged debt loads, turning specific market failures into generalized recession, with an excess of labour and productive capacities in all parts of the world. In this setting, as in the 1930s, new gross investment, or net exports for individual states, cannot be expected to spur new growth. Consumers remain overextended and fearful for their jobs. Capitalists prefer to sit on ‘money hoards’. And the world market has a depressive configuration; the US is now exhausted as ‘consumer of last resort’; China’s imbalances have been exposed; and the EU remains locked in its banking and currency crisis. Uncoordinated strategies of currency realignment risk slipping into ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ devaluation wars. Neoliberal policies of fiscal consolidation to reduce government debt mistake symptoms for causes and, in fact, reinforce the crisis. The economic authorities, according to the Keynesian dissidents, have failed to understand what is distinctive about this unique market failure and thus utterly lack a coherent strategy to move from emergency financial stabilization to steady growth and economic rebalancing. To counter the slide into further economic chaos, policies for exiting from the crisis need to abandon the short run fixation on austerity, adjust the policy mixture and timing of restraint and expand the scale of economic intervention. This perspective has informed the newly elected Sociahst government of Francois HoUande, for instance, which campaigned on an anti-austerity (not antineoliberal) platform of reorienting the eurozone to ‘growth-led’ policies, while still promising to meet fiscal commitments, through increased use of the European Investment Bank, EU project bonds, issuance of eurobonds and an EU-wide financial transactions tax. The new government’s immediate move to increase taxation, notably via a 75 per cent tax on the richest brackets, and modestly increase public expenditures, with a half million new public housing units a pnonty, stands out against the withering conformity to the realpolitik of austerity elsewhere. A host of financial commentators — Nouriel Roubini, Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau to name just three - have been more audacious in their proposals than such left-of-centre governments and parties. Proceeding from a pessimistic (bordering on alarmist) assessment of the rigidity of global imbalances and the adequacy of debt consolidation by moving it from the private banking system into the state sector, they insist that weak

4

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

global demand can only be compounded by government restraint. Any ‘fiscal compact’, as being proposed for Europe, needs to be a long-term objective, preceded not only by steps toward a banking and fiscal union, debt mutualization through the European Central Bank, and greater resort to the European Stability Mechanism for orderly default by sovereign debtors (including allowance for exit from the euro), but above all by a short-term ‘growth compact’, wherein governments need to undertake sustained fiscal borrowings to expand public infrastructure spending to offset private sector financial surpluses. But since, in many countries, the lack of effective demand is compounded by structural current account deficits and the US can no longer continue as a net importer m the same way, they argue that a fundamental rebalancing of the world market will be essential to any new phase of growth. As Wolf warns against the enticements of austerity for ruling elites, ‘this will be a lengthy and fragile recovery. A far greater danger exists of premature retrenchment than of excessive delay. As weekly columnist for the New York Times, the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has come to occupy the mantle as the foremost Keynesian critic of austerity. In innumerable columns and two recent books, he argues that the US and other core countries have been in a depression since 2008, following J.M. Keynes’s definition of a depression as a ‘chronic condition of subnormal activity'’ that is self-sustaining, for Krugman, this calamity is ‘basically a technical problem, a problem of organization and coordination... Solve this technical problem, and the economy will roar back to life’.^ Deficit reduction needs to wait until the medium-term, he argues, and governments in the capitalist core countries instead need to soak up the excess savings from the private sector, and find ways to spend it, particularly as interest rates are low or negative, and financing is negligible. When governments do too little or turn to austenty too soon (as occurred in the US with the Obama stimulus and in the eurozone under Gemian pressure), the slump is only reinforced. Notably, for all the emphasis Krugman places on growing inequality and financial deregulation in causing the crisis, proposals for dealing with these are not central to his agenda for solving it. Krugman’s schemes are technical and rather conventional: expand the scale of the fiscal stimulus and the necessary debt and deficit levels to fund it; develop a programme of mortgage relief; bump inflation targeting up from 2 to 4 per cent; continue the monetary policy of quantitative easing by having the central bank purchase long-term bonds, private debts and government securities; set a long-term target of low interest rates on bonds, and, in the case of the US, devalue the currency. for all the heated commentary from Krugman and other Keynesians, what is offered is far from an alternate model of global development. It is

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

5

possible to level a battery of targeted, if somewhat standard, ripostes to the Keynesian proposals: a monetary policy openly declared to be less concerned about inflation cannot induce investment; expansive fiscal policy will eventually cut into profit rates; and the pumping-up of demand to offset the economic shock in itself will do little to address the distributional inequities of neoliberalism. In more Marxist terms, one could say that the distribution of taxes, debt relief and public goods provision are not technical questions but the outcome of political struggles; that the realization of value cannot be separated from the conditions for production of value; interventionist policies need to be structured so as to support the restructuring of the capital stock through economic planning; and there is no technical policy matrix by which to transform a neoliberal state back into Keynesian welfare state.^ In fact, as this last point suggests, it is the ‘back to the future’ quality of the Krugmanite strategic conception that really stands out. As in the old Keynesian state, it would leave us, once quantitative easing and bank recapitalization have done their work, with financial institutions as private agents acting in a global market environment. Since this would only be modified via some separation of banking functions and greater transparency in regulation of secondary markets, there is little here that even sounds like Keynes on the ‘euthanasia of the rentier class’.^ In any case, pohcies that pnmarily address the scale of debt restructuring, and the timing of fiscal consolidation and debt management on the part of the finance ministries and central banks, cannot amount to a rupture with the era of neoliberal globalization.*^ These are emergency ‘national/international recovery plans’ to rescue capitalism from the crisis produced by the contradictions of neoliberalism. Certainly any strategy for getting ‘beyond capitalism’ is completely absent from their strategic field of vision. SOCIAL DEMOCILACY FfEBOOTED? Social democratic parties have offered little opposition to austerity in the way of programme and nothing in the way of political mobilization. All the way from Europe’s southern penphery to the Nordic social democratic heartland, governments have implemented austerity and, by and large, accepted the European Commission and ECB approach to the euro crisis, albeit with the HoUande government in France still to be really tested. They have even failed to unite behind a modest financial transaction tax, nor agreed to a campaign for a general ‘crisis tax’.^ Alternative proposals within the social democratic milieu have, instead, mainly come from union confederations, social movements and left policy groups and thinkers. In contrast to the Keynesians, who are agnostic on any number of features of global capitalism.

6

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

these seek to recreate social democratic strategies that would amount to a rupture with neoHberal global capitalism. Drawing on post-Keynesian theories, notably the financial instabiHty thesis associated with Hyman Minsky, this approach more often stresses the inherent logic in financial markets that led the ‘regulated’ postwar system to give way to the ‘deregulated’ one in the neohberal era.^° It is recognized that this was buffeted by new economic policy dogmas such as the ‘efficient market hypothesis’, ‘rational expectations’, ‘inflation targeting’, ‘risk dispersion’ and others - aU encouraging a highly-leveraged, highlyspeculative financial architecture. And that this was related to a larger political project of advancing competitiveness amidst free trade via labour market flexibilization, liberalization of markets and commercialization of the state. All this had the effect of erasing national pohcy divergences and distributional bargains, while allowing reckless risk-taking on the part of credit institutions and speculators. It is the speculative logic inherent in financial markets and promoted by neoliberal policies, then, that is the central obstacle that alternative exits to the crisis must confront. It is not possible to track here all the progressive advocates or schemes to re-embed finance since the crisis exploded. Led by the ATT AC network in Europe, but also by the International Trade Union Confederation, the demand from social movements for a financial transactions tax, varying in its rate, scope and country involvement, has long been front and centre. In the context of the crisis, greater emphasis has been placed on linking the refinancing of pension funds to government stimulus measures to rebuild public infrastructure. The financial reforms proposed by various progressive think tanks extend well beyond bank recapitalization to focus on reforming the bailout process to introduce distributional concerns; taking partial equity positions in financial institutions to extend public ownership; reforming the process for dumping ‘toxic assets’ into ‘bad banks’; reducing ‘moral hazard’ incentives to financial institutions; re-regulating financial institutions to restrict bank mandates and increase transparency in secondary markets; and forming new supranational mechanisms (especially in the eurozone) to restructure sovereign debt. In other words, the case is reinforced that the social democratic agenda must be to increase extra-market public governance over finance while scaling back the governance of finance over markets. There is a pivotal theoretical-strategic point to be noted here. For post-Keynesians, it is the collapse in credit markets and its impact on the creation of money that is central to the aggregate demand shock. The creation of money, apart from whatever stimulus central banks undertake, is fundamentally disrupted: credit is central to the monetary realization

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

7

of profits. So, even if Keynesian policies to boost aggregate demand are important, it is the financial system that needs to be addressed. But not merely by debt mutualization and bank recapitahzation, and modifications to the regulatory structures of secondary markets; this will merely provide a new foundation for the speculative casino to start up again. There is a need to re-embed firmly finance in a responsible system of pooling savings, spreading risk and financing the investments of the real economy. But there is another theoretical-strategic point at work here. The credit bubbles, particularly in sub-prime mortgage markets and consumer loans, are understood to have been based on the real stagnation of wages under neoliberalism, as workers resorted to credit to try to preserve living standards. Since the banks still needed customers and required new financial mechanisms — such as the myriad forms of securitized debt instruments — to compensate for riskier portfolios, rising asset prices allowed consumers increasing leverage further stoking credit markets and over-indebtedness, while the corporate sector followed a different, if parallel in its consequences, path of leverage through a short-term fixation on shareholder value. This was reinforced at the international level by structural trade imbalances with East Asian and Gulf state surpluses being recycled back to finance the US as ‘consumer of last resort’. The EU formed its own neo-mercantihst dynarmc between ‘core’ Europe and its periphery. In light of this, the agenda offered for a social democratic alternative exit from the financial crisis is often presented as requiring an exit from neoliberal capitalism via an alternate distributional bargain inside states and the rebalancing of the world market and global effective demand between states. This can only be realized by re¬ establishing ‘golden age’ conditions of growing wages and the capital stock in line with productivity growth which, it is stressed, is the foremost means to provide stable effective demand. The progressive union and social movement proposals for a redistributional exit from the crisis stress new initiatives for a basic citizenship income, strengthened unions and workplaces, an attack on precarious work and a vital role for the state in controlling finance and governing markets. The overall brace of policies might be summed up as a ‘wage-led, high-road, finance-repressed’ alternate exit strategy to the crisis.

xhis is not just an

anti-austerity agenda, but also an anti-neoliberal course and, in this sense, it lies outside the parliamentary calculations of actually existing social democratic parties. Although taking its bearings from within historical social democratic political horizons, these proposals, and especially the strategic vision, have commanded little attention from social democratic parties in practice.

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

beyond looking to them for temporary and exceptional measures to reverse collapsing demand and little else. And it needs to be said that the strategic scope of the proposals coming from this milieu is itself limited in important ways. The proposals for constraining finance, for example, tend to ideahze postwar regulatory regimes and project them forward into this new context. This follows from the way they pose a stark dichotomy between a predatory, unstable financial economy and a ‘real’ productive economy. Given the spatial and temporal differentiation in the production and realization of new value, capitalism is inconceivable without finance and speculative futures markets. Modern credit-money systems, within flexible exchangerate regimes, expand directly the material interests of all capitahsts in the monetary moments of accumulation. Financial capital occupies not just a speculative role, but also a dominant command and control role of allocating the surplus and adjudicating risk. This is an economic function performed with highly imperfect results; it is also a deeply political one of imposing social discipline and defending the general interest of capitahsts in money as value. Those whose ambition it is to strike a compromise with industrial capital around the political terms of exit from the crisis will find finance cannot be politically isolated from the rest of the power bloc.^^ The proposals to remake a social democratic alternative, then, not only lack support from the social democratic party leaderships but are in themselves problematic in terms of a coherent left strategy. Bank nationalization and socialization are pushed to the margins; industrial policy for restructuring relies on incentive subsidies and credit structures rather than beginning from new planning capacities; pension policies are left unduly reliant on private funds and financial markets. It is difficult not to locate these exit strategies in relation to the ‘competitive corporatism’ schemes of the 1990s. They do not offer - even as an all-purpose strategic objective - an anti-capitalist vision. Rather, they attempt to specify the institutional foundations for a ‘leashed capitalism’ where competition can be harnessed to work ‘better’ as the relationship between the state and the market is rebalanced. This is social democracy rebooted to defend the immediate interests of the working class against austerity. The practice of politics as part of a strategic vision of a democratic transition beyond capitalism has gone missing. RADICAL PROPOSALS To draw too sharp a distinction between the sorts of economic policy proposals discussed above and those coming from the radical left would be inaccurate. There is a common priority attached to anti-austerity struggles and new controls over finance. The relative weakness of the socialist

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

9

movement as a political force, moreover, makes the advocacy of more radical interventions scattered and hard to pin down. The central difference resides in the Marxian insistence that instability and crises are recurrent, and indeed necessary, features of capitalist development. The origins of crisis always reside, in a general sense, in a process of overaccumulation as the limitless imperatives to accumulate capital runs up against the limited basis for producing and reahzing value. But crises are always unique historical conjunctures, with the state as the decisive point of concentration of the contradictions exposed by the crisis. Following from this premise, radical alternatives need to be grounded in analysis that sees the neoliberal phase of expansion that started in the early 1980s as forming its own dynamic of accumulation through a massive restructuring of the social-spatial organization of production in the central economies. The ensuing destruction and renovation of the capital stock, alongside favourable conditions to raise the rate of exploitation, restored growth; but the overall accumulation regime amplified the contradictory relations between austerity, internationalization and fmancialization. Rather than being comparatively regulated in a national fomiation allowing a divergence in cost structures and distributional bargains (aided by currency valuations), international competitive imperatives placed increased pressure on wages and tax and expenditure regimes and continual rationalization of the capital stock and value chains. International export markets and an explosion of credit, both underpinned by a host of questionable financial innovations, compensated for aggregate demand weakness within an overall world market configuration that could be characterized as ‘competitive austerity’. The collapse in high-risk mortgage markets triggered the wider economic crisis, and exposed the overaccumulation occurring beyond the financial sector in steel, autos, construction and others. There has been any number of Marxian analyses offered on the crisis that takes up these themes, albeit in ways that involve considerable divergences in interpretation of the causes of the crisis.'"^ They vary in insight and emphasis across the spectrum of Marxist cnsis theory - stagnationism, ovennvestment, declining productivity of the capital stock, the centrality and volatility of finance to global capitalism, and so forth. Yet, for all the polemic, it is not so easy to identify radically divergent programmatic agendas. Indeed, the general demands that ‘workers should not pay for their crisis’ and to ‘occupy the banks’ are universally invoked. There is nothing as ambitious as a transitional programme that would mark an anti-capitahst intervention on the part of the radical left. This holds as much for (post-) Trotskyist formations like the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and the Fourth

10

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

International grouping of affiliates/^ as it does for the umbrella Party of the European Left at the EU level and the parallel annual EuroJVlemorandum project/^ The ‘broad left’ radical parties in Europe, such as Die Linke, Front de Gauche and Syriza do each present a programme of coursed’ In the case of Die Linke, party-building has meant putting together an extensive programme, as well as a series of statements and studies, including on the means and goals of socializing finance in Germany. The Front de Gauche has a more scattergun approach to forming its planks reflecting its status as still largely an electoral alliance with little organizational or strategic depth. Syriza has the most comprehensive programme worked out over several years through broad internal and external consultations, which has guided its anti-austerity electoral platform centred on rejection of the Memorandum for structural adjustment of the Greek economy sponsored by the Troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF. In the capitalist core outside of Europe, in North America and Japan, the radical programmatic field is largely barren, reflecting the marginality of socialist political forces. There have been, however, a number of individual interventions, of varying political sympathies and analytical loci, which have provided a frame of reference for the radical left. A predominant theme has been the reassertion of the traditional critique from the left that financial instability and credit cycles and the private allocation of the social surplus require not just nationahzation of the banks, but also their sociahzation. This has led several writers, such as Leo Panitch and Robin Blackburn, as well as the late Peter Gowan, to invoke a ‘public utility’ conception of the banking system under democratic control, given the systemic tendencies internal to its operations to crisis and ‘moral hazard’ (taking the monetary gains from financial speculation but offloading the risks onto the public sector via bailouts), and the indispensible functions with respect to the production of money and credit.

Similarly, researchers at the Research on Money and

Finance Group (RMF) at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Political Economy Research Institute have been placing the socialization of finance in the context of quite detailed alternate outlines of strategies for debt default and restructuring, regulatory controls over finance and capital controls.'^ The crisis has also revitalized a range of alternatives that combine the extension of public ownership of the financial system with popular planning initiatives to meet social need, as well as with work-time reduction, capital controls and community reinvestment and a radical democratization of the state and workplaces.This had already figured in the ‘new theory’ of the transition to socialism,^' and in a number of schemes directed at a ‘new deal’ from the climate justice and radical urban movements.^^

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

11

None of these strategies can be said to cohere into a transitional programme held across the radical left, and certainly have not been taken up as a set of focused campaigning demands animating the movements. But it is possible to signal a few core positions coming to the fore as integral to a distinctive socialist contnbution to struggles over an exit to the crisis. Debt Audits and Default: The fight against austerity immediately confronts credit relations, the debt buildup and the distribution of losses. If the mountain of pseudo-values represented by credit is preserved, whether it is household or sovereign debtors, the political initiative will remain with financial capital. They will have the capacity to continue to insist on austerity. Shifting the debt on to central bank balance sheets stabilizes the banks, but just poses the same issue from a different vantage. In each state, the precise form of anti-austerity struggles varies between cases, say, where mortgage and student debt dominate and other cases where sovereign debt is at the forefront of political struggle. The key political question, however, concerns the distribution of losses from the fictitious credits still in circulation as obligations; and control over the reshaping of monetary policy and credit relations. At least as regards sovereign debt, there is a growing consensus on the radical left along these five dimensions; (1) debtor-led default to take the initiative away from financial capital, and to halt further cuts; (2) monetization and mutualization of debts by central banks as necessary, with an initial cessation of payments on specific tranches of debt; (3) systematic audit of debt to establish odious and illegitimate debt, the relationship of the debt to arms expenditures and corporate subsidies, who owns the debt and priorities for debt relief and restructuring; (4) the default, relief and restructunng of debt; and (5) extension of democratic controls over the central bank, state financial agencies and public finances.^^ Bank Nationalization and Democratic Control: The banks have been at the centre of the economic crisis, and even with the shifting of private debt into sovereign debt they remain so. The measures taken have included partial nationalizations of financial institutions to sustain their solvency, with the plan to liquidate the public equity stake as soon as possible. A key anti¬ capitalist demand that has gained general favour on the radical left is the permanent nationalization of the banking system and other leading financial institutions. As socialists well-know, nationalization of the banking system in itself may solve nothing if state banks follow - as they often do - the same management models as privately owned capitahst banks. The position of financial capital within the neoliberal power bloc, however, makes

12

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

nationalization under political control a struggle of the first order. It is also an indispensible condition for reorienting the economy and financing an anti-austerity exit strategy to the crisis. New strategic directions being put forward are pushing beyond the old limits. As a consequence of the crisis, there is now a general understanding of the features of too-big-to-fail, moral hazard, gaming-the-system and public good features endemic to banking. These characteristics repeatedly propel the banking system into bailouts and scandal. This can lend broad public support to a ‘public utility’ conception of banking in particular. But the distinct socialist intervention must be that the banking system is a public resource to be brought under democratic control as a central component of breaking the power of financial capital. In a complex economy, whether thoroughly collectivized or mixed, this cannot be conceived as a giant single bank. This suggests the need for establishing a mix of general purpose banks with a range of public objectives and organizational structures with more specialized financial institutions dealing, for example, with housing, project funding for a ‘green transition’ and community and regional development. All these could be linked to various social fund and reinvigorated public pension plans, and all coming under the scrutiny of regulatory agencies which are both ‘red and expert’. These kinds of reforms, so long as they emerged organically out of the stmggle over an alternative exit to the crisis, could potentially pose a rupture with capitahst control over investment and the capitalist fomi of the state. The Cuts and the Public Sector. For the radical left, the struggle against

austerity amounts to more than the Keynesian case for stimulus to improve the conditions for private sector profits and employment. The radical case against the cuts begins from a defence of income transfers, employment, equity and non-market provision of needs. The alternate exit strategies advanced must be linked to the insistence for a long-temi transition to a capital-financed expansion of public goods via democratic planning. Given the stagnation and mass unemployment in this phase of the crisis, there is the need for a planned determination of investment, supply and demand. This can be done in a way that radically expands ‘de-commodified’ and ‘de¬ carbonized’ public goods. Also, a programme of public works can address the systemic underfunding of public infrastructure, schools, hospitals, parks and so forth under neoliberalism. Further, the expansion of public goods and employment can target barriers located in processes of racialization and gender inequality. If the initial financing of a public sector expansion must come from deficit financing in the context of stagnation, there is a need from the start to reverse the neoliberal damage to public revenues, and

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

13

expand all forms of the taxation of capital, with the initial demand being a ‘crisis tax’ on finance. The organizational form, participatory processes and composition of public sector output that constitute an alternate fiscal policy, even in narrow Keynesian terms, is a point where the socialist contribution to anti-austerity struggles can be decisive. IVorkers’ Plans and Green Transitions: Pubhc ownership and the formation of workers’ plans and control have been central to the socialist economic intervention for decades. They have not figured as prominently in current debates, despite the massive restructuring in major manufacturing and resource sectors. The internationalization of value chains and the erosion of the political potency of the industrialized working class have set this back. But workers’ plans, in both the public and private sectors, remain important for fighting concessions and building capacities, as well as initial blueprints for agendas of workers’ control. Workers’ co-ops can play a similar role of defending employment, raising new dimensions of production and building capacities; and so can public ownership and social planning. In fact, both overlap with current concerns of union activists with framing sectoral strategies to leverage more endogenous development, occupational and wage upgrading and limiting precarious work.^^ The most distinctive socialist contribution around exit strategies has linked climate justice and anti-austerity struggles by combining proposals for a ‘green new deal’ with alternative recovery plans which address climate change and ecologicallyresponsible production. This allows for; (1) a focus on climate jobs and industrial conversion rather than carbon emissions trading; (2) ‘green’ adjustment and retraining funds for workers in ecologicaUy-destructive industries; (3) mass expansion of public transit with an extension of free access; and (4) reduction of work time as a central anti-carbon strategy.^^ Confronting the World Market: The anti-capitalist struggles and demands identified here do not emerge abstractly at the level of the world market. They materialize in local workplace and community conflicts and struggles over the concentration of power in the state. But these struggles also have to be strategized in their global dimensions since they involve struggles against capitalist classes operating in the world market. Liberalized commodity and capital flows put pressure on ‘internal devaluation’ and export-led growth even with flexible exchange rates. This forms the world configuration of ‘competitive austerity’ that works against nationally initiated reflationary policies. Conversely, anti-austerity alternatives face immediate strategic questions about the capacity for reflation and endogenous development.

14

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

The kinds of policies required to deal with this are well-known - controlled trade, particularly over the transnationals; capital controls; greater autonomy and security of exchange rates in relation to a plurality of hub currencies; regional blocs reinforcing diversity of development paths; and symmetncal adjustment of trade balances. They cannot be avoided in any country or zone attempting an anti-austerity exit. The confrontation with the liberalized world trading system, dominated by the core capitalist powers, remains an integral part of the strategic calculation of any alternate economic programme.

OQ

THE POLITICS OF ILADICAL ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES IN EUROPE Although these themes materialize in opposition to a crisis which is quite singular in its features, there is a clear antecedent in the various ‘alternate economic strategies’ proposed during the crisis of the

1970s.

These

programmes had diverse sources, such as the ‘Programme Commune’ of the French left, the Meidner Plan from left social democracy in Sweden and the various versions of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) from the Bennite and independent left in Britain.In a context where insurrectionary political movements emerging out of parallel networks outside parliaments had become historical relics as much as strategies relying exclusively on parliamentary graduahsm legislating inroads into capitalist power via an expansion of a bureaucratic state, these programmes had in common some notion of ‘structural reform’. This was based on the recognition that the only possible means of getting ‘beyond capitalism’ in the core capitalist states where liberal democracy prevailed involved staging of a series of political ruptures via the combination of radical political parties committed to transforming the central state organs with extra-parliamentary struggles and workers’ plans at the base. The key strategic direction for alternate economic plans pivoted around new forms of coordinated planning at the centre of the state; the nationalization of core sectors of industry and the formation of planning agreements; constraints over the financial sector and over the allocation of investment and credit; tranches of capital and import controls over the traded sector; decentralization and popular participation in community and workplace planning; and a far-reaching democratization of the state. With the onset of neohberal globalization and the setbacks of the left from the 1980s, strategies for structural reform were sent off to the political archives. In many quarters of the left, especially in the core countries of Europe, it was avowed that the weight of sociahst strategies had to shift at least

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

15

toward the regional if not the global level. All that could be accomplished at other scales was various supply-side measures to improve competitiveness via extending worker participation inside the labour process and over firmlevel strategies, or by building up extra-market institutions that would fortify the relative ‘embeddedness’ of capital via a range of‘stakeholder’ (as opposed to just ‘shareholder’) coordination mechanisms. For other sections of the left, these developments confirmed longstanding views on the impossibility of‘socialism in one country’ and the need to widen the scope of insurgency and the scale of transitional programmes. These positions represented, on the one hand, the gathering of the radical left parties around the Party of the European Left, and, on the other, the case for a socialist United States of Europe. The struggle against neoliberalism in the ‘global south’ kept the debate about structural reforms an active concern of theory and struggle; and the crisis across Europe has further renewed it.^' The RMF group, and Costas Lapavitsas in particular, has provoked intense debate by arguing that staying m the eurozone is now a dead loss for the Greek working class as well as the rest of the countries in the European periphery. Launching a single currency across a heterogeneous group of states with radically diverged economic competitiveness and state capacities, they contend, was a terrible mistake. It was a project of European capital in the core states to launch a new ‘world money’ for imperial ambitions, while trade competiveness and labour mobility as well as untrammeled capital flows alongside an EU-wide system of transfers and industrial policies actually produced more uneven development than economic convergence between the European core and periphery. This accounts for the accumulation of debt in the periphery, whether by the private or state sector, and for the specific form of the European financial cnsis, as banking sector insolvency and sovereign debt crises have interacted. The room for manoeuvre for the states of the European periphery was eroded by the single currency, without the possibility of devaluation as a necessary mechanism to adjust unit labour cost differentials. Rather than addressing these issues, RMF argues, the Troika of the EU, the ECB and the IMF compounded the problems: they address the symptom of liquidity problems through emergency loan facilities and austerity. But the former avoided the radical restructuring of the banking sector and the latter worsened the recession. The overall structural adjustment package (such as the two Memorandums adopted by Greece, or that taken up by Ireland), moreover, gutted state capacities. Hence, in any sober assessment, exit from the euro, as part of a ‘debtor-led default’ cannot be avoided if an anti-austerity strategy is to meet working-class needs in Greece and the

16

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

European periphery more generally.^^ But there have also been numerous interventions, of varying scope and depth, which instead back the recasting of the EU project m response to the crisis. The appeal For Another Road for Europe, supported by a range of intellectuals close to the Party of the European Left, for example, is largely calculated on what can be coordinated across the European political space to block the worst features of austerity and, in particular, the EU ‘fiscal compact treaty’ of January 2012 attempting to ‘constitutionalize’ further neoliberal policy norms.For Elmar Altvater, this has less to do with the feasible space for reflation, and more that ‘sovereign territories as spaces for regulation are no longer consistent’ with the economic reach of financial markets and corporations. The euro as a form of world money, moreover, is a component of building a multi-polar world where alternate developments wiU not be constrained by the hegemony of neohberahsm and the US. Exit from the euro is, from this vantage, a regressive step. This is so even for the EU periphery whose debt is denominated in euros and whose structural economic problems would remain whether the circulating currency is the euro or the drachma, escudo or lira. For Ozlem Onaran, the need for an EU strategy falls less on the functionality of the economic space given the scale of markets, and more on the potential political capacities to address the distributive sources of the crisis. In this sense, the wage and social policies of cohesion, and the industrial and tax policies for equalizing competitiveness, are the basis for a ‘progressive alliance for an alternate Europe’, routed through expanding EU institutional capabilities to reorient economic pohcy. Michel Husson accepts these parameters, but adopts a different strategic sensibility - a ‘strategy of extension’. It is struggles at the national level which are still crucial to push socialist reforms, but these have to be calibrated, from the outset, with respect to both their international consequences and support to avoid political isolation and setback. Good policies’ — such as progressive debt restructuring; bank nationalizations; incomes policies which divide productivity increases into equal thirds of wages, public goods and work¬ time reduction; making all incomes subject to taxation - have to be backed by cooperative efforts at extension across the EU economic space. Failing that, nationally based capital controls, national protectionism, challenges to EU rules and even exit from the euro, should be reserved as counter¬ measures.^'^ These

supra-national

strategies

work

from

the

premise

that

the

institutional framework that has been the central vehicle for enforcing neoliberal economic pohcy across the space of the EU can now enable a convergence to increasing differentiation of national distributional bargains

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

17

and development models. If exit from the euro and devaluation (as, say, Greece returns to the drachma) carries no direct benefit to the working classes (with import costs rising, living standards will fall), neither does remaining inside the euro m itself The pressures for internal devaluation wiU continue alongside the increased sums to support the financial system; and even with a default and restructuring of debt inside the eurozone, it is not clear how the divergences in economic capacity can be addressed without a European-wide development strategy and decisive change in the balance of political forces and approach to economic policy. Indeed, deeper integration may very well continue along the paths of neoliberalization in the case where budgetary policy and a federal fiscal union are more fully constituted at the EU level to provide the sovereignty to backup the space of the currency. The minimal programme of an EU-wide reflation may be quite as unrealistic in the short to medium run, given the severity of the crisis and the massive problems of the EU governance structure, as more ambitious programmes. In any case, neither economic events nor political struggles are likely to wait out any supra-national bargaining process. The unevenness of the crisis and political resistance means that some national class struggles will advance and force the contradictions over the crisis to a direct confrontation with the national ruling blocs, supported by the wider network of transnational political forces. Debt default and an alternate economic programme in the EU (or any other supra-national body for that matter) are more likely to be opposed than facilitated or even narrowly accommodated. It would be politically foohsh for any left government pursuing anti-austerity strategies inside the eurozone not to leave exit from the euro as a plausible option. If Husson IS nght that confrontation with the capitahst classes still takes place primarily on a national basis, but the resistance and retaliation from the capitalist classes comes also in the form of international resistance, then the strategy of the left must always be one of extension of both programmatic intervention and political support. But if ‘good’ programmes to meet working-class needs cannot forever wait upon a ‘good’ Europe (or a good balance of international forces), then counter-measures must be allowed for. In an alternative economic strategy against austerity in this conjuncture, the default and restructuring of debt, the nationalization of the banks, the break with public sector cuts and a ‘green transition’ constitute the core of ‘good’ socialist demands. In Europe today, especially in the European periphery, exit from the euro cannot be assessed as a necessary prerequisite to pursue any of these projects. But exit cannot also be left out as a strategic consideration for the future. Political priorities cannot be set by a pre-given

18

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

stance toward certain scales of human relations, particularly in terms of the spaces formed by a common currency. Primacy given over to a certain scale of politics IS one of the most debihtating strategic essentiahsms on the left today. For socialist strategy, precedence must always be given to struggles. These strategic divisions on the European left, being foremost evinced over confronting the eurozone crisis of austerity, should not be dismissed as alternate ‘rescue strategies for capitalism’. The charges of left reformism or left nationalism or insurrectionism do not take us very far. Any of these radical demands today take the pohtical form of a rupture from the prevaihng forms of capitalism. There is a need to sharpen strategic debate over credible objectives and constructive plans for politically ‘moving on’.^^ MOVING ON The left, in its broadest cast, initially greeted the financial crisis with confidence that the era of neoliberal economic policy was over. The critiques that had previously been leveled at ‘free market’ policies had been proven right. The forward march of labour could recommence with the extra¬ market institutions and policies for the repression of finance, stimulation of effective demand and increasing welfare compensation as re-establishing a social foundation to economic policy. While the critique of neohberal pohcies preparing the ground for the crisis has many telling points, the corresponding political conclusions have been entirely too mechanical. Indeed, they have misread fundamentally the political transformations that the period of neoliberalism had wrought: the degree to which the ruling classes remained united behind neoliberal globalization; and the extent to which the oppositional bloc remained disorganized in its capacities of response in both mobilization and programme. The counter-offensive from the ruling bloc has focused on mobilizing state power to attempt to conserve the neoliberal modes of regulation of the capitalist sector. This has been done by reorganizing the state apparatuses and branches and adapting neoliberal economic policies — initially largely on an emergency basis - in an effort to settle the crisis.^’ There is no guarantee that any of this will work; indeed, the strategy of permanent austerity is likely to be sustained well beyond the inmiediate conjuncture. In taking this course, there has been no fracturing of the class or institutional unity of the state. It is remarkable that even the mediations between the financial sector and their corresponding state apparatuses, although under considerable strain, have not broken down; indeed, they have deepened their inter-linkages and reworked their modes of operation. Moreover, the social democratic parties, and to a surprising extent even their associated unions, have

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

19

remained incorporated within the efforts to conserve the existing economic regulation via wage restraint and social austerity. In short, the ideological discrediting of neoliberalism and the public antipathy toward the banks has not corresponded with major fissures in the state or power blocs. The citadels of power, and notably the fortresses protecting the banking sector, remain relatively unscathed. The resistances arising from the ‘movement of the squares’, from Tahrir Square to Syntagma to Zuccotti Park, have reinvigorated tactical debates in anti-austerity struggles. But there remains prominent on the left an appeal to economistic reasoning that every economic crisis erupts into a crisis of the state where political power is — or soon will be — at stake.This view has often formed quite distinct strategies and conclusions. On the one side, this has often led to strategies of ‘defensive consolidation’ to mobilize parliamentary opposition and wide fronts to block even more violent public sector austerity and right-wing politics in a moment of political turbulence; a series of tactical ‘wars of position’ is needed to establish an alternate coalitional bloc to recapture the state and put in place a more socially rational economic policy. On the other side, it is presumed that the crisis provides an opening for more ‘militant offensives’ of street protests and general stakes; this gives rise to expanding the scale of political actions in a ‘war of manoeuvre’ that can further seize political space from the state and capitalists via an emergent counter-power - or ‘anti-power’ created in the ‘flow of doing’. In strategic debates today, this is often framed as realistic parliamentary programmes of reform as opposed to extra-parliamentary struggles of resistance and vision. The juxtaposition of the two is utterly false. There is no linear passage from anti-austenty fightbacks to anti-capitalist movement to transitional post¬ capitalist programme on either an incrementalist or insurrectionist strategic point of departure. As for the maximalist assertion of the ‘communist hypothesis’ today, this is, in fact, a philosophical claim largely without reference to strategic issues and political programme. The capitalist state constitutes a specific political field of power and struggle; it cannot be evaded in strategizing alternative exits from the crisis. Indeed, the strategic guide must be the formation of a ‘different kind of state’ where the formal institutions of liberal democracy and modes of capitalist rule no longer constitute the limits of setting ‘economic policy’ in liberal democracies. The decisive strategic notion must be institutionalizing and collectivizing struggles while deepening democratic controls, consistent with a series of ruptures through a long revolution of developing workers’ capacities for self-management and control integral to democratic socialism.^^ This is to insist that conjunctural struggles and tactics find their bearings

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

20

in longer-term socialist objectives and calculations.The socialist critique of neoliberahsm and austerity, for instance, is indispensible to explain the linkages between capitalism, the financial crisis and the cuts; and also to insist that an anti-capitalist alternative to meeting social needs is viable and, indeed, necessary. This approach is also central to the formation of alhances and fronts. It should, for example, inform anti-austerity struggles. These start from different angles; public sector workers defending wages and jobs, users of services seeking to improve the level and quality of provision and communities seeking more capacity for input and control over administration. This suggests a potential convergence of producer-user-community alliances in anti-cuts struggles. An alternate socialist strategy and programme has a crucial role to play in identifying and connecting specific tactics of fighting austerity, to aUiance-building and the imperative of a transformational rupture in the administration of the state from commercialization and privatization. The need to connect defensive measures with radical ambitions and programmes is also illustrated by struggles over ecological justice. The turn of green movements toward locahst and market-based strategies led to a remarkable — and unexpected — convergence with neoliberahsm, via promoting changing individual behaviour in response to prices, and/ or a self-regarding communal localism. This has locked the approach to climate change, in the most prominent example, almost entirely along the axis of ‘pricing carbon’ and incentives to shift technology from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources. The critical question of expanding noncommodified social relations as an ecological strategy through reduced work time, extending free public transit, continual learning through free education and so forth, was left out of the programmatic proposals and struggles over climate change. Such strategies do not just appear. They need to be built strategically through finding points of convergence between anti-austerity and climate change struggles. This can only occur in the explicit field of politics over programme and strategy. There is nothing inherent in the logics of economic crisis or global warming that takes the left to that point. The central economies have entered a period of protracted struggle over austerity. For many on the left, only the most minimal programme of financial re-regulation and Keynesian reflation are ‘feasible’. For others, every demonstration of resistance against existing powers is another rupture as the

multitude’ forms itself into an emergent anti-power. Both these

approaches have long served as an excuse to leave key strategic questions to the side — these questions no longer matter, as the answers are already known. Tactics with respect to existing parliamentary forces or organizing the next demonstration take precedence. Yet what is really needed to move

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

21

forward past defensive struggles and begin to think seriously about alternative strategies in the long battle against the austerity we now confront is the kind of socialist thinking, inspired by visions of possible futures, and developing strategies of critique and proposal as guides for realizing them. This is to insist on the primacy of politics — rather than letting the mechanics of falling profit rates and credit crises work out a strategy and programme — in establishing intermediate objectives and conjunctural tactics and proposals. The left is beginning to chart important new directions. Sociahst strategies need to set an ambitious course — programmes that serve as a guide to action, an education about alternative ways of living and a practice through which people and movements themselves can develop the capacities to challenge and transcend capitalist power. NOTES 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8

International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Update, 16 July 2012, at www.imf.org. Martin Wolf, ‘Seeds of Its Own Destruction’, Financial Times, 8 March 2009. Istvan Meszaros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009, pp. 188-9. Martin Wolf, ‘After the Bonfire of the Verities’, Financial Times, 2 May 2012; Martin Wolf, Fixing Global Finance, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010; Wolfgang Munchau, ‘The Only Possible Solution to the Eurozone Crisis’, Financial Times, 1 May 2012; Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics, New York: Penguin, 2010. Paul Kmgman, End This Depression Now!, New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, pp. X, 22; The Return to Depression Economics and the Crisis of2008, New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. See also Paul Kmgman, ‘Money for Nothing’, New York Times, 26 July 2012; Paul Kmgman and Richard Layard, ‘Time to Speak Up: A Manifesto for Economic Sense’, Financial Times, 28 June 2012; Samuel Bnttan, ‘You Don’t Need to be a Lefty to Support Kmgman’, Financial Times, 8 June 2012. Gughemo Carchedi, ‘The Fallacies of Keynesian Policies’, Rethinking Marxism, 18(1), 2006; Simon Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, London: Edward Elgar, 1988; Anwar Shaikh, ‘An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories’, in U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, New York: URPE, 1978; and the sustained commentary by Michael Roberts at http://thenextrecession. wordpress.com. J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, New York: Harcourt, 1936, chapter 24. This is so even m the case of Joseph Stiglitz who, in often penetrating critiques of the World Bank and financial markets, myopically calls for a ‘new capitalist order’ stmctured largely around full employment, reassertion of the values of the welfare state and a new system of multilateral governance anchored

22

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 by a new global reserve system. See his Freefall, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010; and the so-called Stiglitz Commission Report (2009) prepared for the UN; Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, at http://www.

9

un.org. For a survey of national cases see: Steffen Lehndorff, A Triumph of Failed Ideas: European Models of Capitalism in the Crisis, Brussels: European Trade Union

10

Institute, 2012. Hyman Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, New York: McGraw-Hill,

11

2008. ATTAC-Germany, Manifesto on the Crisis of the Euro, March 2011, available at www.attac.org; ITUC, Global Unions’ Statement: Take Action on Jobs to Sustain the Recovery, June 2010, available at www.ituc-csi.org; A Progressive Program for Economic Recovery and Financial Reconstruction, Amherst; Political Economy Research Institute, January 2009; Center for Popular Economics, Economics for the 99%, New York; CPE, 2012.

12

International Labour Organization,

Promoting Employment Recovery

While

Meeting Fiscal Goals, Geneva: ILO, 2010; United for a Fair Economy, State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?, Boston: UFE, 2011; European Trade Union Confederation, Why Europe Needs a Fairness Pact and Not a Competiveness Pact, Economic Discussion Paper N. 4, 2011; and the various issues of the Global Labour Column at http;//column.global-labour-university.org. For other North American variants of the analysis that informs these see: Arthur MacEwan and John MiUer, Economic Collapse, Economic Change: Getting to the Roots of the Crisis, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2011; Kevin Phillips, Bad Money, New York: Penguin, 2009; Levy Economics Institute at www.levyinstitute. org. 13

See the insightful assessment of Wolfgang Streeck, ‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism’, New Left Review, 71 (September/October), 2011.

14

See The Crisis This Time: Socialist Register 2011, Pontypool: Merlin, 2010; The Left and the Crisis: Socialist Register 2012, Pontypool: Merhn, 2011; John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009; David McNally, Global Slump, Oakland: PM Press, 2011.

15

Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism, London: Bookmarks, 2009; Alex Callinicos, Bonfire of Illusions, Oxford; Polity, 2010; Laurent Carasso, ‘Report on the International Situation’, International Viewpoint Online, March 2010. In contrast see Alex CaUinicos’s earlier contribution. An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Oxford: Polity, 2003.

16

Party of the European Left, ‘Crucial Times for Europe — Crucial Responsibilities for the Left’, Executive Board Declaration, 14-15 July 2012, at www.europeanleft.org; ‘EuroMemorandum 2012: European Integration at the Crossroads’, Transform’: European Journal for Alternative Thinking and Political Difl/o^we, January

2012. 17

For Die Linke see http://en.die-linke.de; and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation at http://www.rosalux.de. For the Front de Gauche, see http://www. placeaupeuple2012.fr. For Syriza: http://www.left.gr; and ‘Syriza’s 40 Point

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

23

Program’, is available at http://links.org.au. Developments can be followed via the Transfomi Europe Network at http://wvvw.transform-network.net. Leo Panitch, ‘The Financial Crisis and Democratic Public Finance’, Tlie Bullet, N. 157, 25 November 2008, available at http://www.socialistproject.ca; Peter Gowan, ‘Crisis in the Heartland’, New Left Review, 55 (January/February), 2009; Robin Blackburn, ‘Crisis 2.0’, New Left Review, 72 (November/ December), 2011. Research on Money and Finance, Breaking Up? A Route out of the Eurozone Crisis, Occasional Report N. 3, November 2011; Gerald Epstein, ‘Finance without Financiers: Prospects for Radical Change in Financial Governance’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 42(3), 2010. See the Irish People Before Profit Alliance, An Alternative Economic Agenda, 2011, available at wwwpeoplebeforeprofit.ie; as well as Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, Oakland: PM Press, 2010. Pat Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, Boulder: Westview, 1988; Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy, New York: Routledge, 2005; Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Ashley Dawson, ‘Why We Need a Global Green New Deal’, New Politics, 11 (4), 2010; David Harvey, The New Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; David Harvey, ‘Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition’, World Social Forum, 2010, at http://davidharvey.org. Research on Money and Finance, The Eurozone between Austerity and Default, Occasional Report N. 2, September 2010; Eric Toussaint, ‘The Debt in the North: Some Alternate Paths’, Comite pour I’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde, February 2011, at www.cadtm.org. For this discussion see: Albo, Gindin and Panitch, In and Out of Crisis; and Gowan, ‘Crisis in the Heartland’; Blackburn, ‘Crisis 2.0’; Epstein, ‘Finance without Financiers’; Fred Moseley, ‘The U.S. Economic Crisis: Causes and Solutions’, International Socialist Review, March/April, 2009. Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi, ‘The Real Subsumption of Labour to Finance and the Changing Nature of Economic Policies in Contemporary Capitalism’, mimeo, 2010; Damien Cahill, ‘Beyond Neoliberalism? Crisis and the Prospects for Progressive Aternatives’, Neiv Political Science, 33(4), 2011; Anwar Shaikh, ‘The First Great Depression of the 2P‘ Century’, Socialist Register 20il.

26

Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the State, London: Seagull Books, 2009; Abo, Gindin and Panitch, In and Out of Crisis; Rick Wolff, Occupy the Economy, San Francisco: City Lights, 2012.

27

28

One Million Climate Jobs Now', London: Campaign Against Climate Change,

2009; Michael Brie and Mario Candeias, Mobility: Postfossil Conversion and Free Public Transport, Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2012; Labor Network for Sustainability, at www.labor4sustainability.org. Robert Wade, ‘From Global Imbalances to Global Reorganisations’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33(4), 2009; Duncan Foley, ‘The Political Economy of Postcrisis Global Capitalism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(2), 2012.

24

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36 37

38

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

For recent assessments, see Ingo Schmidt, ‘There Were Alternatives. Lessons from Efforts to Advance Beyond Keynesian and Neoliberal Economic Policies in the 1970s’, Working USA: Journal of Labor and Society, 14, December 2011; Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination, Pontypool: Merhn, 2008. And for earlier ones see: Carl Boggs, The Socialist Tradition, New York: Routledge, 1995; Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, New York: New Press, 1996; and Leo Panitch and Cohn Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour, London: Verso, 1997. Alain Lipietz, Towards A New Economic Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; Ernest Mandel, Europe vs. America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. See Samir Amin, Delinking, London: Zed Books, 1990; Walden Bello, Deglobalization, London: Zed Books, 2002; Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006. The debate was also sustained across the annual volumes of the Socialist Register. Costas Lapavitsas, et al.. Crisis in the Eurozone, London: Verso, 2012; Riccardo BeUofiore, et ah, ‘The Global Crisis and the Crisis of European Neomercanthism’, Socialist Register 2011. And for a rather technocratic approach to a Greek exit from the euro, see: Michel Aghetta, ‘The European Vortex’, New Left Review, 75(May/June), 2012. Another Road for Europe, May 2012, at http://www.anotherToadforeurope. org; Rossana Rossanda, ‘Proposals for Another Europe’, Revolting Europe, 28 June 2012, at http://revolting-europe.com; Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, 31 January 2012, at http:// www.european-council.europa.eu. Elmar Altvater, ‘From Subprime Farce to Greek Tragedy: The Crisis Dynamics of Financially Driven Capitalism’, Socialist Register 2012; Michel Husson, ‘Exit or Voice? A European Strategy of Rupture’, Socialist Register 2012; Ozlem Onaran, ‘Fiscal Crisis in Europe or a Crisis of Distribution?’, Research on Money and Finance, Discussion Paper, N. 18, 2010. Husson, ‘Exit or Voice?’; Greg Albo, ‘The Limits of Eco-Localism: Scale, Strategy, Socialism’, Socialist Register 2007, Monmouth: Merlin, 2006; Alex Callinicos, ‘Austerity Politics’, International Socialism Journal, N. 128, 2010. As Ralph Miliband suggested in the midst of the last great crisis: ‘Moving On’, in Socialist Register 1976, London: Merlin, 1976. Greg Albo and Bryan Evans, ‘From Rescue Strategies to Exit Strategies: The Struggle over Public Sector Austerity’, Socialist Register 2011; Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Polity, 2011. This has two somewhat opposite sources. A range of radical Keynesians have always contended that neoliberal policies are inherently wrong in their understanding of capitalist markets and thus doomed economic policy. Numerous Marxists have had a parallel view of a long crisis - or ‘relative stagnation’ — of some 30 or 40 years in length. In both cases, a neoliberal economic expansion did not occur, the capitalist class is weak, resistance

THE CRISIS AND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES

39

40

25

growing in strength and the state slipping into a deep crisis. In neither scenario is there much space devoted to rethinking political organization or advancing alternate economic strategies. In contrast, some have argued that the era of neoliberal expansion needs to be seen in relation to a crisis of the left. See Sam Gindin, ‘Turning Points and Starting Points; Brenner, Left Turbulence and Class Politics’, Socialist Register 2001, London; Merlin Press, 2000; Greg Albo, ‘Contesting the “New Capitalism’”, in David Coates, ed.. Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, London; Palgrave, 2005. Leo Panitch once referred to this as a strategy ‘of building the institutional forms of struggle and control which presage socialist democracy’. See his ‘The State and the Future of Socialism’, Capital and Class, 11, 1980. Daniel Bensaid, ‘On the Return of the Politico-Strategic Question’, International Vieivpoint Online, February 2007; Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left, London; Zed Books, 2007.

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM SAM GINDIN fter three decades of the waning of trade unions as a social force, their jT^generally anaemic response to the Great Financial Crisis cannot but be registered. With the failure to build on the golden opportunity offered up by Occupy’s demonstration that audacious action can touch a popuhst nerve punctuated by the eventual defeat of Wisconsin labour’s recall electoral strategy over a year after its exemplary occupation of the state assembly (which predated Occupy Wall Street by six months) - the left today confronts a more discomfiting question: does the rejuvenation of unions still really remain possible, or are unions now exhausted as an effective historical form through which working people organize themselves? To be clear, the issue is not whether unions and union-led struggles are about to disappear. Unions will stagger on, sometimes very heroically. They will carry on organizing, bargaining and filing grievances. And they will continue to strike, march, demonstrate and on occasion remind us of working-class potentials. But trade unions as they now exist no longer appear capable of adequately responding to the scale of the problems working classes face — whether the arena of struggle is the workplace, the bargaining table, the community, electoral politics or ideological debate.' Although a recent symposium on unions in developed capitahst countries concluded that ‘the declining trend is visible everywhere’, this essay will focus on the impasse in US labour.^ The last time the US working class faced a comparable economic and internal crisis, during the 1930s, industrial unionism came to the fore. What new form of working-class organization might explode onto the agenda this time? Then, communists and socialists were vital to the formation and orientation of unions, at a time when radical organizers were inspired by the notion that workers could become the historical agents of a new society and unions might become schools for socialism. Is it still credible, in light of recent history, to believe that working people might one day be at the centre of radical social transformations?^

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

27

Such questions are intended to be sobering rather than defeatist. Offered in the spirit of having ‘no illusions but not be disillusioned’ these questions rather express the extent of what needs to be taken on if union and workingclass renewal is to be seriously addressed, and impel a closer consideration of the interplay between the condition of unions and that of a left committed to moving beyond capitalism. The chasm between the socialist idea on the one hand and socialist organizational capacities and popular sentiments on the other, seems to foreclose for now — particularly, but not only, in North America - any mass recruitment of workers and young militants to an explicitly socialist party or even explicitly pre-party formation. This points to a seemingly more modest project; how can unions once again serve as even effective reformist organizations and - directly related - how can the socialist idea once more become part of serious political debate? In today’s context, the realization of even such restrained objectives would necessitate bringing radical perspectives and institutional innovations to the struggle, creating new openings for restoring the left’s relevance. An underlying barrier to this, however, is the long-standing critique that unions are at their core sectional organizations: though they emerged from the working class, they do not represent the class as a whole.This is not likely to change through any dynamic only internal to unions; nor can we expect new working-class parties to arise suddenly to solve the problem. What is possible, and urgently needed, is the introduction of new intermediate institutions — more than unions, short of a party — committed to building the working class as a social force both in and beyond the workplace. NEOLIBERALISM AND EATALISM The extensive union renewal literature of recent decades has generally focused on the need to combat bureaucratization with more internal union democracy; more inventive militancy to surmount the division between the economic and political in union tactics; and developing community outreach and broader coalitions.^ Each is indisputably vital to any attempt to rejuvenate the unions as social actors. Yet bureaucratization can only go so far in explaining why there have been so few revolts within unions (if workers can’t deal with their own bureaucrats, how can they be expected to transform society?). Also, unions can be more democratic and combative yet this may only translate into more aggressively pursuing their own specific needs, what Raymond Williams called ‘militant particularism’.® And too often, overcoming the gap between the economic and political in union strategies only means shifting mobilizations into the mainstream electoral

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

28

or lobbying domain. As for coalitions, however positive their roles around specific issues and campaigns, bringing together groups that are themselves weak and not truly mass movements is unlikely to produce, in any longerterm strategic perspective, an overall positive sum greater than the inadequate parts. The more fundamental problem in a good deal of the renewal hterature is the lack of engagement with the capitalist context that leaves workers enmeshed in a dependence on private capital accumulation: capital does the investing, organizes production, manifests the application of science and technology, provides the jobs and generates the growth and tax revenue for social programmes and pubhc employment. The understandable inchnation of workers with only their labour power to sell is to accommodate to this naturalized reality, and this is expressed in the union form as the instrumental mechanism to meet their needs. Unions bring together subsections of the working class with diverse interests, levels of class consciousness and political preferences, and union representation is often inherited with the job rather than exphcitly fought for and chosen. Unity is built around specific demands internal to the group, generally revolving around the commodity price of those workers’ labour power and specific working conditions, thereby constituting a narrow kind of solidarity.’ It is true that states have reinforced such sectionalism by limiting secondary picketing and poHtical strikes, and employers have likewise reinforced a narrower outlook by their readiness to concede to workers on economic demands while steadfastly refusing to negotiate broader demands. But the basic problem remains. Though there have indeed been very significant moments when unions reached beyond their sectional limits and demonstrated an inspiring potential to think and act like a class, as unions ‘matured’ and institutionalized those remarkable moments — while not disappearing — tended to become rarer and more fleeting. The point is that unless the root sectionalism of unions is confronted, union renewal will flounder. Members who see their union in instrumental rather than class-building terms will treat dues as equivalent to their payments to an insurance agency. And leaders who may, also for instrumental reasons, need to mobilize their members from time to time will still retain concerns that such mobilization not ‘get out of hand’. Even the coalitions which unions establish or join primarily forge relationships that maintain segmented interests rather than build class interests and construct any long-term collective project.® While at times in the past it was possible to make certain gains in spite of the liabilities of sectionalism and to have those gains spread to other workers, today sectionalism is a decisive barrier even to defending past gains. Limited

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

29

in their vision and fragmented in their structures, unions have been no match for the offensives of employers and, above all, those of the state. In this respect, the first significant defeat the American labour movement suffered after the mobilization and reorganization of the 1930s came not in the 1980s but immediately after the Second World War, when a strong capitalist class confronted a strong working class. It involved the defeat of the radical left within the unions, amid anti-communist repression and the aU-too-ready accommodation to it by most of the union leadership. This was sustained by a growing belief among workers, made credible by the postwar experience, that the gains in wages and benefits that unions achieved at this time proved that capitahsm could provide much of what socialism promised — and do so at very much less risk. But as high employment in the 1960s provided space for a rank-and-fde militancy, which often rejected the narrow terms of the so-called social contract that had been forged between unions and management, this came to be seen by capital as an obstacle to profitability, just as capitalist globalization was already accelerating. Over the following decades, as the resolution to the crisis of Keynesianism took the fomi of a turn to neoliberalism, the capacities labour had developed in the good times proved woefully inadequate in the face of this. As it turned out, both the way unions had embraced the social contract and the hmited form the rebellion against this took had set the stage for the second defeat of labour one that this time was not limited to the so-caUed radicals within the labour movement but rather extended to unions as institutions and beyond them to the working class as a whole. As rank-and-file militancy was broken, worker fatalism replaced the old social contract as the key to reproducing capitalist social relations; as Terry Eagleton has put it, ‘It was not illusions about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive’.^ Workers still resisted, but such resistance was now intermittent. The number of strikes fell (right across the developed capitalist countries) and the repertoire of resistance saw less and less of work-to-rule campaigns, sitdowns, plant takeovers, and mass secondary picketing. Ambitious demands largely disappeared from working-class politics, a development one worker descnbed as ‘leaving aU our hopes outside in the ram and coming into the house and just locking the door - you know, just turning the key and “click,” that’s it for what we always thought we could be’.'° Such resignation reflected a collective failure by unions and the radical left to come to analytical and organizational gnps with neoliberalism as not just an alternative ideology and set of policies but, as Greg Albo has put it, a historically specific form of social rule.” For capital, the quarter century

30

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

preceding the current crisis was (notwithstanding widespread notions on the left of capital’s prolonged profitability crisis) a second ‘golden age’, involving remarkable restructuring of industry amid technological advance and global capitalist competition and interpenetration. For working people this new golden age of capital brought permanent insecurity, the grossest inequahties, the destruction of community, and the subordination of democracy and the social imaginary to both the ideology and practice of ‘competitiveness’ and to keeping bond markets happy. The very gains made by unionized workers over the postwar period left them open to trying to save the greater part of those achievements by accepting concessions.'^ The lack of any sustained counter-response gave credence to the view that neoliberahsm was ‘the most successful ideology in world history’.'^ That ideology was given decisive weight by the material changes neoliberalism wrought in people’s hves, above all by extending and deepening the commodification of labour. Absent collective alternatives that is, absence of a vision and especially the practical mechanisms through which to fight — working-class families found individualized ways of‘getting through’ that reshaped working-class consciousness and contributed to the reproduction of the neoliberal ethos. Working hours increased dramatically, young workers stayed at home longer, married couples moved in with parents to save for a mortgage, credit cards became ubiquitous, families increased their debt loads. Housing became an asset to be used to obtain even more credit; stock markets were anxiously watched for their impact on pensions; tax cuts were welcomed as the equivalent of wage hikes. Intensified competition and worker dependence on ‘their’ corporations weakened class solidarities, as did two-tier wages within the workplace (alienating the very young workers that union renewal would depend on). Economic restructuring, in forcing relocation in search ofjobs, broke up working-class communities. As picket lines and demonstrations gave way to these individualized responses to retain access to consumption, solidaristic sentiments faded and collective capacities atrophied; Marx’s account of capitalism as a system that ‘dissolved the world of men into a world of atomized individuals, hostile to each other’ never looked more accurate than in recent decades.''' The fall in unionization along with cutbacks in social programmes and intensified competition in labour markets not only increased social inequality between labour and capital, but also within the working class.Even when the most powerful and unionized sectors made concessions, this only led to still greater concessions from workers in weaker positions. W^hile after-inflation wages among auto assemblers, for example, were flat in the three decades before 2007, in manufacturing as a whole they fell by 10 per cent, in retail

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

31

by 17 per cent, and the federal minimum wage fell by 26 per centd'’ Those outside the workforce fell even further behind. These growing inequalities, exploited by the cynical electoral tactics of the Republican Party, fostered mutual resentments between the lower-paid (who no longer believed they could approach the levels of unionized workers), and the higher-paid (who resented the taxes they paid to support others).^’ The frustrations over inequalities among working people were often expressed through a discourse of identity politics that tended to obscure the relevance of class itself Class in the concrete does of course always include differentiations by gender, race, legal citizenship, age, etc., and the life experiences and concerns of working people — and therefore the potential spaces for organizing — extend beyond workplaces. But ascriptive identities and class are in fact, as Adolph Reed Jr. has insisted, mutually constitutive.'® The increased academic emphasis on identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s was especially ironic since it coincided with a simultaneous deepening of the salience of the underlying class foundations of capitalism.''^ Neoliberalism’s most profound achievement was the degree to which the North American working class was divided, demobilized, disoriented and left ineffective. UNIONS IN THE NEOLIBEITAL ERA It was the persistent workplace and workforce restructuring - intensified management control, downsizing and outsourcing, relocation of production and recomposition of the workforce into various degrees of precariousness — that made worker resistance and the expansion of unionization so much more difficult.^o

thirty years before 2007, manufacturing employment

fell by 28 per cent but employment in plants with 1000 or more employees (i.e. those workplaces that were previously more amenable to unionization) fell by almost 60 per cent.^' The location ofjobs shifted to the low-wage and anti-union US South, but the job turmoil continued even there, as in many cases China’s even lower wages helped make China the ‘new US South’.In 1980, there were 7.5 million unionized workers in US manufacturing and, had this matched the growth in the workforce, this would have increased to 11 million by 2007; in fact, this fell by a stunning 6.1 million to only 1.4 million, more than 80 per cent below the 1980 level.^^ By 2011 union density in the private sector was below 7 per cent — a third of its level at the end of the 1970s and below where it was over a century ago.^'' There is no denying the extent of the external pressures on unions, but that emphasis has also tended to let unions themselves off the hook. Unions’ too-ready acceptance of there being no options is fundamental to any honest account of the crisis they are now in (even during the Great Depression, economic restructuring had opened some doors to union

32

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

success). Though the share of jobs that US MNCs located outside the US was growing — in the twenty years since 1989, 64 per cent of their jobs growth occurred abroad — foreign-based MNCs like Toyota, Siemens, and Samsung simultaneously offset some of this with investments in the US.^^ Much of the job relocation since the early 1980s remained internal to the US and if the industrial unions only had followed and organized the factories in their traditional sectors, this would have contributed to reversing one of the American labour movement’s most momentous earlier failures, that of organizing the American South.While the outsourcing of components undermined one group of workers, workers at the new sites often emerged with potentially more power since they could now shut down a large number of assemblers. And if the reduced size of workplaces has made unionization in manufacturing more difficult, there were new opportunities in the service sector, where the average size of workplaces (like Wal-Mart) has actually grown.In fact, though manufacturing workplaces are more susceptible to the threats of closure brought on by globalization, seven of every eight jobs are now in services (private and government), a good portion of which cannot simply pack up and leave to escape unions.^® Unions that are narrowly focused on their dues base, rather than building the power of the working class, are unhkely to mobihze the energy, resources, cross-union cooperation, community support and strategic creativity needed to unionize in these more difficult times. As well, the particular bargaining and campaign strategies of such unions have often further weakened the goal of expanding unionization. For example, the UAW bargaining tactic of trading off workplace rights for (minimal) protection of wages and benefits undermined unionization in the Japanese transplants where the key to unionization rested on the very promise of workplace protections against arbitrary management practices (management was quite happy to pay near union wages to keep unions out and retain full workplace authonty).^'^ The most significant factor in undermining the ability of American unions to defend values distinct from that of capital was the intensification of competitive pressures.There are two issues here. First, competition has an asymmetric class impact. When particular businesses lose out to more effective competitors, capital as a class emerges stronger. For workers, however, competition undermines their most vital asset - their solidarity and so leaves them weaker as a class. Second, the emphasis on being competitive implies strengthening American corporations and sacrificing or undermining specifically worker concerns. This also applies to public sector workers, where the argument is that too much spending on social services and public sector wages diverts resources from, and damages, private sector

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

33

competitiveness. There are of course circumstances in which workers don’t have the bargaining power to simply say ‘no’ to concessions, and temporary defeats are unavoidable. What is crucial, however, is that unions have all too often internalized competitiveness as a goal rather than treating it as a real-world constraint that may call for tactical retreats and demand responses beyond collective bargaining. Once making concessions becomes central to protecting jobs in the name of the ‘new reality’, unions themselves become vehicles for lowering the expectations as well as disciplining recalcitrant workers. This effectively shuts the door to discussing alternatives; making concessions becomes the only alternative to job losses, and membership mobilization is channelled into lobbying to fortify corporations (e.g. support for subsidies) rather than challenging corporate power.^’ Occasional flights of radical rhetoric aside, union leaders have all too often come to play a disturbing role in socializing workers into accepting the limits imposed by the constraints of competitiveness. The practice of contemporary unionism has not only left workers especially vulnerable to the entrapments of neoliberalism, but the prospects of escaping this through unions’ own devices are distressingly dim. All the factors that traditionally produce tendencies on the part of union leaders towards cautious behaviour are amplified today because the more radical strategies, tactics and organizational changes that are needed to effectively respond might bring even greater internal instability to their institutions, and their own place within them. An especially frustrating aspect of this is how little institutional time unions set aside, in spite of their obvious plight, for a genuine rethink of their structures and strategies. A good many union leaders seem to have learned that the general lowering of expectations over the past three decades has actually made their life easier. Nor, in spite of certain admirable attempts by pockets of militants at building rank-and-file oppositions, are there many signs that these activists are winning the battle for transforming unions. It is not difficult to understand why: such initiatives quickly have to confront the isolation of workers from each other even inside single workplaces - never mind across the companies and sectors their unions represent — and this is not easily overcome given the limited access ordinary members have to the information and analysis available to the union leadership.^^ And apart from their limited organizational capacities, oppositional caucuses have generally exhibited limited perspectives beyond their own unions.The general absence of a class-based frame of reference, with connections to past experiences and lessons, is reflected in the lost strategic capacities and confidence that come from sustained opposition across unions and take workers beyond sporadic localized rebellions.

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

34

BEYOND FATALISM: WORKERS’ ASSEMBLIES Workers are neither innately radical nor inescapably conservative, but often a confused mixture of both. This reflects the daily-lived contradictions workers experience by virtue of being dependent for their own and their family’s day-to-day wellbeing on a system that undermines their own sense of humanity. Having hopes that a better world is possible is a dimension of overcoming this, but hopes are, after all, still only hopes. The great unresolved dilemma is the absence of the kind of structures through which workers can overcome their debilitating fatalism and gain the confidence to ‘concretize hope’.^‘^ For socialists, engaging in efforts to rebuild an effective, even if reformist, trade union movement is a moral imperative (defend working people) as well as a general strategic principle (remain grounded in the ‘actually existing’ struggles of the working class). But it is ever more a practical necessity for achieving even those small victories that keep the left going as a social force. In fact socialists will be essential to overcoming the labour movement’s demoralizing fatalism,

bringing

a

vision

beyond

the

immediate,

an

understanding of the capitalist context within which unions are acting, and a class perspective on what needs to be done. This means reversing the postwar marginalization of socialists within the trade union movement: the class outlook of socialists that was formerly rejected is now a condition for union revival. The polarization of options under neoliberalism pro\ddes potentially fertile organizing ground, and socialists will have much to contribute to its tilling and seeding. More radical ideas now have the potential to take on a relevance that is not just ideological; as the moderate is exposed as being impractical, what does become practical is the radical. The argument that unions need to think bigger even to win small is not a matter of sloganizing but accurately reflects the actual conditions. And this applies not just to policies but also to tactics and strategies. W^ithout downplaying how difficult the terrain has been for socialist interventions, the contradictions that have emerged out of the very successes of neoliberalism have created openings for building a base within unions around relatively radical practical reforms. The notion that a priority for socialists should be the renewal of reformist unions needs to be seen differently than a project of renewing social democracy. Social democracy also presents itself as standing for reform, but in offering alternatives that are only ‘less worse’ and in channelling frustrations almost exclusively towards electoralism, social democracy sells illusions of alternatives. That is why, in spite of initial trepidations, capitalists have come to live with and sometimes even welcome social democrats. Unions, on the other hand, are now under constant and severe attack and

RETHINKING UNIONS, RJEGISTERING SOCIALISM

35

that is because even their moderate demands and tactics - whether they be limiting the commodification of labour power in the workplace, defending the social wage or engaging in strikes that temporanly disrupt the right of owners to manage their property — are today seen as negatively impacting accumulation and possibly even opening the door to more dangerous questions about capitalism. Militant unions, unlike a modernizing social democracy, are viewed as a threat to capital (even if they are only a threat to the level of profits). One strategic direction often proffered for union revival, in light of neoliberalism’s twinning with globahzation, involves unions’ institutional extension across borders. This is inisconceived. A working class that cannot build solidarity domestically cannot do so internationally. Moreover, such goals as extending domestic bargaining to the international level can lead to the reproduction of business unionism: that is, trying to raise standards within a particular international sector rather than — and often at the expense of — building domestic class solidarities. As Raymond Williams has observed, ‘A new theory of sociaHsm must now include place. When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed’.Internationalist sensibilities are certainly very important, but there is no substitute for taking on the fight at home and thereby creating greater space for struggles abroad (as opposed to making concessions and undermining workers elsewhere). Though the struggle is always international in substance (what happens in one country affects the balance of forces in another) it is nevertheless always national in form (struggles are local and engage the national state); as Marx and Engels understood, ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’.^^ This is not a matter of directing all strategic attention to Washington and Wall Street. It is a matter of building an organizational infrastructure for developing class cohesion, anti-capitalist perspectives and socialist strategy. One crucial part of this is an educational infrastructure. The renewal of unions, with its requirements for establishing, sustaining and linking activists across unions and m the community, necessitates accountable structures and an extensive infrastructure of support: cadre development, reading material, regular communication, forums for exchanging experiences and strategic discussions, backing for specific strikes and campaigns. This is no less true in trying to carry out the kind of educational work that might break the hegemony of capitalist culture. For example, when the crisis first hit, an effective educational response would have required immediately initiating dozens of forums in each of hundreds of cities with a capacity to not just get people out, but provide facilitators and the most informed resource people

36

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

on a grand scale and also have mechanisms in place for evaluating ’what the forums revealed about popular understandings and readiness to act, which questions needed better answers and what kind of follow-up, in terms of both education and protest, might be most effective. This is why we raise the fundamental significance of estabhshing some form of intermediate institution such as workers’ assemblies. The notion of turning to class-based, community-rooted assemblies as a response to frustrations with the stagnation of unions had been raised at a Washington meeting of North American labour activists in 2005 and it inspired, in the wake of the financial crisis, the formation of the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly (GTWA).^® This was conceived very differently from the types of assemblies associated with the widespread explosion of protests in pubhc squares - from the Indignatos in Spain to Occupy in the US, and most recently in the Quebec student strike (where it also motivated the formation of supportive neighbourhood assemblies) — which have been much more reflective of an incipient Zeitgeist. The type of assembly raised here was primarily inspired by the goal of building a left rooted in the working class and changing the role of unions. The workers’ assemblies need to be distinguished from coahtions of progressive groups meeting to represent their particular interests and political perspectives and negotiate specific and temporary campaigns. The workers’ assemblies must, rather, be based on individuals coming together to develop a new layer of politics.^® Whatever union and community activism these individuals were previously involved in would continue; the assembly would be a space where they are committed to rebalance their time to include the search for a broader politics and are open to this experience affecting politics in their home activity. That these assemblies are to be community based expresses an explicit determination to go beyond the primacy of building specific union caucuses so as to focus instead on building networks of activists across workplaces and sectors, incorporating non-union as well as unionized workers, and mobilizing across the widest spectrum of social and econonuc needs. Nor is this a matter of a localist turn away from national politics; the expectation is that, given the limits on solving problems locally, the various urban, suburban and rural assemblies would ultimately federate in a nationwide assembly of assemblies. W^hile the assemblies would be engaged in campaigns flowing from immediate needs, the growing understanding among activists that capitalism is itself the limit on genuine reforms implies measuring success not only in terms of the reforms achieved, but in terms of the development of the class capacities to challenge and eventually transform capitalism.

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

These

four

elements — individual membership,

37

community-based,

class-focused and anti-capitalist in the ultimate goal — are the foundational elements of workers’ assemblies. The distinction between such assemblies and other non-union but worker-oriented formations like Workers Action Centres (WACs) and Unemployment Centres lies not in any antagonism but in their scope. For all the crucially important services they provide, their focus is on an otherwise neglected section of the class, not the class as a whole.The impressive and innovative tactics often introduced (many of which include lessons for assembly members) are meant to replace, in less favourable circumstances, what unions might have or should have done. Though their experiences vary considerably, WACs have been limited by their dependence on external funding; weak organic links to unions; makeshift ties to the largely precarious workers they serve; the difficulties of cadre development when worker turnover is so high and the consequent heavy dependence on staff; and a general inability to move beyond their local base.'*’ This issue of limited scope is also a factor in assembhes that are primarily concerned with process in the context of sustaining protests, rather than the strategic organizational and capacity-building questions that arise in relation to supporting but also moving beyond protest. Trying to develop the strategic and organizational capacity to change unions is aiming high. But unlike the near-term fomiation of a mass socialist party in North America, it is imaginable. The party question can perhaps only re-emerge organically - out of the practical experience, knowledge gained and strategic questions posed by the uncertain dynamics of such intermediate organizations between the workplace and the party-political sphere. If sponsored by a political party, the pressures to subordinate such intermediate organizations between the workplace and the party-political sphere to the ‘higher understandings’ of the party would risk undermining the organic development of their participants - something witnessed with both social democratic and communist parties as well as in union organizing fronts. Even should such intermediate institutions express a ‘lower level of consciousness’ than a revolutionary organization, the space to experiment, act and learn (including from their mistakes) is crucial. That said, it is through such developments that the first waves of recruiting individuals to a radical party might be nurtured. Yet even once such a party came into being, these intermediate institutions would remain critical. Given the great gap between those ready to form a party and its potential recruits, the danger is that the party would institutionalize a relationship between a minority confident in their own leadership role and an uncertain majority looking to follow. As Lucio Magri once put it:

38

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Between the party and the masses there must be a third term, which mediates the relationship between them;

autonomous and unitary

political institutions of the working-class. These institutions must emerge right across society (factories, offices, schools), with their own structures — in which the party then acts as an element of stimulus and synthesis... a creative revival of the theme of soviets is today essential to resolve the theoretical and strategic problems of the Western Revolution. The process of initiating and sustaining workers’ assemblies is bound to introduce a number of problems. To begin with, in the absence of a wave of workers in struggle, the assembhes cannot themselves easily invent struggles that open the door to engaging the working class. There is as well often a geographic disjuncture between a left active in the urban core and potential constituencies often spread throughout the suburbs. Moreover, the dormant political legacy of recent decades has left activists with a dearth of organizing skills, especially those crucial to making inroads into unions with their protective bureaucracies, and also into diverse, fragmented and individuahzed communities. Perhaps most serious, the very looseness of assembhes in terms of the diversity of political views, levels of political development and degree of commitment makes it extremely difficult to develop organizational coherence. This in turn leaves the assembly vulnerable to the familiar hyper¬ activism of running between struggles without any sense of priorities and perspectives; to barriers, because of the lack of consensus, to developing cadres who are both activists and organic intellectuals; and, as a consequence of a lack of ideological and organizational clarity, seeing commitments fade and members slipping back into private lives and more comfortable (because more immediate) earlier activism. These dilemmas highhght the significance of continuously re-evaluatmg the activities and structures of the assembhes and giving the greatest weight to trying to develop a degree of coherence, however imperfect. They also bring to the fore the importance of unifying demands which in the process of mobilizing to realize them, concretely pose the questions of purpose and strategy. Crucial here are the kind of‘structural reforms’ which, as Andre Gorz best explained, are designed to ‘modify the relationship of forces, the redistribution of functions and powers, [and introduce] new centers of democratic decision-making , all conceived in a manner than can ‘prefigure a socialist transformation of society and move towards it’.^*^^ ^Ji/hat gives any such reform its radicalizing potential is the combination of its content and the ideological and organizational historical context, which is to say it depends on the abihty of capital and the state to accommodate a particular set of

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

39

demands and the relative capacity of proponents to frame their demands in ways linked to broader solidarities and more profound changes. There is a vital distinction between working-class demands for what might be termed static reforms that are oriented to moving society from one equilibrium to a quantitatively higher (better) equilibrium, and dynamic reforms which are inherently contradictory and unstable because they affect the capacities, balance of power and expectations among the participants and so invite further changes and new uncertainties. The strategic challenge of an intermediate political programme is to stretch static demands in a dynamic direction and introduce new sets of demands rooted in the current state of the struggle but with a strategic dynamic potential. In light of this, the directions emphasized below are as much orientations as policies. Their focus is on trade union renewal through bringing a class perspective into union activities, and linking this to new directions that, in taking us beyond the narrow political culture that currently dominates policy debates, reach towards the socialist idea. 1. From bargaining to jobs ‘The last 30 years have changed us’, the CEO of Gallup recently noted by way of introducing what he described as one of the firm’s most consistent polling results: ‘The primary will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that’.'^'* The implication for unions could not be more profound since unions have traditionally been structured around the conditions and price of workers’ labour power, not whether they have a job in the first place. This inability to address their members’ top priority is a problem in itself and, because of the related insecurity, also underimnes the union capacity to deliver on what they are allegedly structured to do - defend and improve wages, benefits and working conditions. There can be no union renewal without addressing access to decent jobs. Unions had previously avoided this contradiction by looking to growth and Keynesian stimulus to provide the jobs while the union concerned itself with negotiating labour’s price. Though fiscal stimulus does have currency at this particular moment - even many economists, mainstream commentators and corporate heads have come to see that fixing the banks is not enough to restore growth and save capitalism from itself - Keynesianism is dead and buried as a long-term strategy for addressing worker job security. Capital has made it abundantly clear that its strategies for growth now rest on worker discipline, containing inflation and increasing international competitiveness - all of which militate against worker job and social security. There has been growth in recent decades but, driven by the restoration of profits and weakening of unions, it

40

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

has brought ever greater inequality while not delivering the levels of private investment that can bring anything close to full employment, never mind well-paying secure jobsd^ The point is that job security and job quality can no longer be responded to without directly confronting free trade and market deregulation, private control over workplace closures and outsourcing, tax policy, capital controls and especially the power of financial institutions over the allocation of society’s profits and savings. This implies not just better pohcies but a rethinking of how unions see themselves and relate to the overall working class. Consider, for example, the recent auto bailouts. Rather than hnking jobs to saving General Motors, this could have been framed as saving communities and the impressive productive capacity that resides in the skills of workers and the potentially valuable tools and equipment sitting idle. Rather than accepting competitiveness as the arbiter of our material lives, what should have been raised was democratic planning within an expanded pubhc sector. Instead of supporting private profits by way of getting more cars on the road, auto unions in the US and Canada should have been mobihzing the public — along with other unions like the United Steelworkers as well as the construction unions — for the planned conversion of the hundreds of facilities that are being closed to address long-neglected infrastructural needs, especially the oft-cited environmental demands that will dominate this century: transportation and energy grids, the design and retrofitting of housing, modifications to the equipment and processes employed in factories and offices. This demand could have been reinforced by reminding workers and the public of the technically remarkable conversion of auto and other plants during the war and back again after.'^^ 2. From jobs to community development The development of plans for a particular sector necessarily involves a spatial dimension. Raising the question of community/regional impacts opens the door to issues that go beyond jobs’ in the abstract to addressing what might be produced, for whom and with what environmental implications — that is, an overall community plan to address what common sense suggests any society should provide: productive work or training for anyone who wants it. It is generally assumed that everyone has the right to an education and it IS not a stretch to aggressively insist that everyone has the right to a job. One way of institutionalizing this is through establishing elected local institutions — job development boards — to take on responsibility for canvassing the community for unmet needs and unused skills, providing technical expertise to convert plants in danger of closing and running economic literacy classes

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

41

to expand the capacity for broad participation/^ As with any radical proposal that challenges capitalist logic yet is implemented within a society that is still capitalist, this will soon come up against barriers if not outright contradictions. In such circumstances the key is to push on those barriers, rather than accept them as parameters that fence us in. For example, one such barrier is funding; without funding no serious plans can be implemented. This brings us back to the need to challenge bankers’ control over the distribution of society’s savings and profits and the importance of replacing that private control with a banking system that is a democratically run public utility. This is also intimately related to the way workers savings are now integrated into capitalist finance. Consider for example the erosion of workers’ pensions as corporations forsake commitments made to workers in order to preserve commitments to stock and bondholders.'*® The intensification of competition has rendered dysfunctional the ‘private welfare state’ which developed out of collective bargaining under the old social contact. Companies with shrinking workforces and carrying rising numbers of longer-hving retirees cannot maintain pensions against companies with no pension plans or with a much younger workforce — aU the more so now that the asset inflation which fuelled the growth of institutional funds has been so compromised by the current crisis in global finance and the low interest rates on safe sovereign bonds. The pensions of workers should clearly be supported (defensive reforms), but a number of cascading contradictions point to more far-reaching demands (structural reforms). One is that the minority with private pensions is vulnerable to political isolation, so the focus must be on universal pensions. But if based on past income, this reproduces worklife inequalities; a more solidaristic principle is needed. Then there is the question of how pensions are funded and the monies invested. Investing pension funds with an eye to social priorities, and especially the kinds of job creation and industrial conversion goals and agencies as outlined here, would challenge the way capitalist financial markets function, and help sustain broader demands for turning financial institutions into public utilities for democratic economic planning. 3. Public sector leadership A key programmatic focus for structural reform must be public services. Here too jobs are at stake but the strategic question is the potential leadership role of unions in the retention and expansion of the services rather than the sectional issue of the jobs. Public sector unions generally understand the importance of playing some leadership role on this terrain and getting the public on their side. But press releases and convention resolutions won’t do

42

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

it. A cynical public needs to be convinced that this isn’t just opportunism; unions need to redefine and prove their commitment to the ‘general interest'. This entails changing every aspect of how these unions function: how they allocate resources, the focus of their research and the role of union staff and appropriate staff training. It involves developing the confidence and capacity to place the level, quality and administration of services on the bargaining table, to criticize inadequate services and proposals on how to make them better, to establishing supportive links between front-line workers and those who depend on the services they provide and involving them in discussions on union bargaining demands and how strikes are conducted."^^ Unions might, for example, not just reference the importance of services as they go into negotiations but actually make the level, quality and democratic administration of services a priority bargaining demand. And in contemplating strike action, unions must come to grips with the contradiction of positioning themselves as defenders of pubhc services and then withdrawing those services when negotiations break down. Direct actions may be unavoidable but at a minimum, creative ways must be found to inject class into the form that strikes take (and to demonstrate to the public that withholding services is a last resort). Garbage collectors might refuse to pick up garbage in the most affluent neighbourhoods, or drop the garbage off in the financial centre to make the connection between finance and austerity. Postal workers might strike but (as they did in a 1990 strike in Canada) still deliver pension and welfare checks. Bus drivers have on occasion refused to collect fares, introducing passengers to transit as a decommodified service. Tax assessors might use their knowledge to expose corruption in the tax system, establishing themselves as whistleblowers in the service of the public. Long-term care workers might replace a strike with a work-in: instead of withdrawing services, workers would be brought into particular workplaces to demonstrate the kind of care that is possible if we really took patient care seriously. And, to cite another Canadian example from the nineties, when workers administering unemployment insurance (UI) were given quotas to lower the number of insurance recipients, the union prepared pamphlets to be given to recipients outside UI offices on how they should respond to questions so there could be no regulatory basis to cut them off Union staff distributed the pamphlets rather than the union members working inside the UI offices, thereby protecting the latter workers from being disciplined. While strikes involving the withdrawal of services will still sometimes be necessary, public sector unions must never ignore the fact that they are not just negotiating with ‘an employer’ but with the state. What must end is the

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

43

practice of allowing the state, in strikes with a broader strategic significance, to take on locals one-by-one. Such struggles only have a chance of winning — as opposed to going through the motions of demonstrating some resistance — if they involve the resources and capacities of the union as a whole: mass demonstrations that mobilize the community around the services (as opposed to primarily union wages and benefits), rotating strikes across locals and sectors, extending the solidarity to the rest of the public sector unions and eventually also bringing private unions into direct actions. 4. Building the class It is one thing to emphasize the crucial importance of providing workers with organization through which to struggle; it is another to collapse union renewal to a growth in union members. Making union growth into a strategic priority has sometimes been successful on those narrow terms, but its overall legacy has been weaker unions and few compensating breakthroughs in new sectors. This particular path to renewal has included accommodations with corporations that have sacrificed workers’ needs, and a reallocation of resources to organizing at the expense of servicing commitments and treating strikes as costly diversions from that priority — followed by curbing internal democracy when that single-minded direction was challenged. Yet at the same time, there are the failures right on unions’ doorstep: unions currently don’t even retain contacts with those members who lose their jobs, a practice that leads to resentment carried into other work experiences (‘the union only cared about me when I was paying dues’). The reason for such neglect lies in the uneasiness m dealing with the frustrations and expectations of workers who have lost their job when it seems there is nothing to do about it. But this very response raises disturbing questions about union commitments to organizing: if unions can’t even mobilize former members can they really be expected to mobilize new workers? A unionism with a class sensibility would prioritize making their union halls into social spaces for laid-off members - places to stay in touch with co¬ workers, get information and support in accessing social rights, see films, participate in educationals and mobilize for jobs. When the CIO made its breakthroughs in the inauspicious 1930s, the key was thinking ambitiously and reaching beyond sectional interests. The issue was not only organizing ‘more’ workers but also giving institutional expression to what John L. Lewis grandly referred to as ‘this mighty surge of human sentiment’. The goal was organizing unskilled as well as skilled workers, independent of race, gender or ethnicity and doing so across the mass production industries, from mining through auto, steel, rubber.

44

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

textiles and electronics (the first thing the miners did once they made their breakthrough was to send hundreds of organizers — a good many of whom were communists - to support the unionization of steel). The unions then established were still sectional organizations, and as the unions were institutionalized that bias became aU too clear, but the spirit of class that pervaded the period was unmistakable and had real effects on society. It is necessary to rekindle this to make union organization viable today in lowwage private services or in the anti-union US South. It is true that workers looking to join a union are themselves pragmatic; they are not looking to ‘build the class’, but to address the specifics of their own direct oppression. The point, however, is that success in bringing workers into unions increasingly depends on the union itself having a larger strategic orientation - one centred, in fact, on building the class. What a class-based unionism introduces is a broader range of creative tactics to bring workers in, even if a business-minded ‘cost-benefit’ calculus (i.e. low dues base and high servicing costs) suggests otherwise. It requires organizing campaigns based on regional cooperation across unions rather than the counterproductive competition among unions. It requires locating the appropriate organizing space for a better integration of workplace issues with concerns over societal conditions like housing and public transportation, opening further avenues to reaching and mobilizing workers.And where the main concern is to make sure that workers without collective bargaining recognition are part of the labour movement, the door must be opened to introducing individual membership in unions, particularly for precarious workers. If a concentration of membership develops in a particular workplace, this can become the base for a traditional organizing drive and the new bargaining unit could subsequently choose to join whichever union it prefers. But even where the organizing potential is limited, the positive initial contact and goodwill established may pay dividends in future organizing drives in other sectors involving this or other unions. 5. Retrieving time Recovering time away from work is a precondition for all struggles. The working class cannot act as an agent for either union renewal or social transformation if workers do not have the time to read, think, attend meetings, discuss, analyze, strategize, dream and act. Yet such time is incessantly shrinking. Through the 1980s and 1990s, when the US population grew by 25 per cent, hours of work in the US increased by 46 per cent; the rise in hours of work per family (primarily the hours of women) was more important than debt in explaining how working-class families maintained

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

45

consumption during these two decades.In Europe and Canada, earlier trends to reduced work time were generally halted or reversed.^'* Men could once depend on a gendered division of household labour to allow them time for activism, but with spouses in the workforce and feminism’s positive impact on the labour movement that patriarchal option has largely vanished. Radical calls for reduced work time such as ‘30 for 40’ (thirty hours work for 40 hours pay) do not get us very far. In a movement that can barely keep up with inflation, such a demand smacks of empty sloganeering and would quickly be marginalized. Moreover, such a general demand ignores the differences and inequalities within the workforce. Some workers are concerned with getting more, not less, hours of work because they are stuck in involuntary part-time work or their wages are simply too low to meet needs. This suggests that breakthroughs in work time will have to be part of cultural changes that give greater weight to control over time relative to control over purchased goods; that see the relatively higher-paid workers leading the way by committing to fight for productivity gains in the form of time off rather than wage increases; and a reallocation of gains in paid time off so it impacts daily life as opposed to being concentrated on periodic breaks (vacations) and at the end of workers’ lives (retirement). As well, work-time issues are inseparable from other social issues. The expansion of full-time jobs is a time-saver for those now running between two or three jobs. Management pressures for worker flexibility — essentially the deeper commodification of labour power - must be countered with an alternative notion of ‘worker flexibility’ that speaks to accommodating work and work schedules to the rhythms of active lives beyond work. And concerns with getting to work and back, socializing family responsibilities and access to non-commercial goods - that is accessible and affordable transit, child-care and well functioning pubhc spaces — are all also time demands. CONCLUSION Soon after the introduction of the auto assembly line, the head of Henry Ford’s Department of Sociology (sic) cheekily declared that ‘Mr. Ford’s business is the making of men and he manufacturers automobiles on the side to defray his expenses’.The ‘making of men’ particular to capitalism’s requirements was in fact one of capitalism’s central challenges and achievements, and this raises the most daunting question confronting socialists. Can we really expect workers to contemplate, let alone achieve, an alternative society - shaped and limited as they are by capitalism, their capacities fragmented and narrowed, their imagination privatized and expectations withered, their dependence on bosses and elites confirmed on a daily basis, and their consumption of commodities now compensating for the surrender of their power to do?

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

46

We can look for a measure of hope in the numerous contradictions of capitalism, optimism in the many acts of human kindness and solidarity we experience, and confirmation in the continuity of popular resistance. But history adamantly asserts that resistance and social transformation are a painfully long way apart and that we cannot draw comfort from any convincing proof that socialism is inevitable or even possible. The best that can be said is that there is also no proof of its impossibility. Socialism is a contingent idea that depends on the broadly defined working class coming to recognize that the personal costs tolerated under capitahsm, the dreams set aside and the surrender to arbitrary authority were and are sacrifices wasted — and then acting on that understanding. Workers may or may not provide the spark for new possibilities, but if socialism is possible, it is only so if the working class comes to be at the centre of the struggle. Is this assertion of possibility merely socialists’ secular inflection of rehgious faith? To the extent that it means acting in the context of uncertainty and without any guarantees of success, a degree of faith is indeed involved. But the profound difference lies in the fact that emancipation is not expected from an external force but from human agency, and that the socialist project can’t override material reality. The socialist project is subject to the test of experience and new knowledge and therefore needs continuously to be modified; it is made within history. In this regard, it may seem from current observations that ‘human nature’ confirms socialism’s improbability. But the question, as Gramsci phrased it, is not ‘what is man?’ but ‘what can man become?’ In that sense, the project of remaking the world is not only made within history but it also challenges history. It is contingent on what humans learn (and unlearn), the choices they make and their collective ability to invent new structures for both self and social transformation. This involves the existential choice to live our lives as if working-class potentials to create a new world can in fact be realized.®^ NOTES 1

The recall fight in Wisconsin has prompted a broader discussion of these union weaknesses. See the intense exchange between Gordon Lafer, Doug Henwood, Jane McAlvey, Bill Fletcher Jr., Adolph Reed and Mike Elk in OpmionNation, Labour s Bad Recall’, 15 June 2012, available at http;//www.the nation.com; as well as Michael Yates’s response, ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an “Anti-Labor Leftist’’?’, Counterpunch, 2 July 2012, available at http://www. counterpunch.org.

2

Lucio Baccaro, ‘Does the global financial crisis mark a turning point for labour’, Socio-Economic Review, 8(2), 2010, p. 347. See also Hans-Jurgen Urban, ‘Crisis corporatism and trade union revitalization in Europe’, in Steffen Lehndorff,

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

47

ed., A Triumph of Failed Ideas: European Models of Capitalism in Crisis, Brussels: European Trade Union Institute, 2011. 3

See Bill Fletcher Jr., ‘Labor’s renewal? Listening to the 1920s and the 1930s’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 1(3), 2004, excerpt from address to the Labor Notes Conference, Detroit, Michigan, 12 September 2003.

4

The recognition of this stretched in the twentieth century aU the way from Lenin’s critique of‘economism’ in What is to be Done?, onginally published in 1902, to Eric Hobsbawm’s Marx Memorial Lecture, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, first published in Marxism Today, September 1978.

5

Persuasive articulations of the crucial link between union democracy and working class power are articulated in Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism, New York: Verso, 1988; Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle, Democracy is Power: Rebuilding Unions from the Bottom Up, Detroit: Labor Notes, 1999; and Steve Early, Embedded with Organized Labor, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. But see also the earlier challenge to a tooeasy declaration of the centrality of internal union democracy by Steve Fraser, ‘Is Democracy Good for Unions?’, Dissent, 45(3), 1998, and the subsequent replies by Stanley Aronowitz and others.

6

Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope, London and New York: Verso, 1989, p. 242. The notion of militant particularism was famously elaborated by David Harvey in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, chapter 1.

7

For a general discussion of this, see Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett, ‘Canadian Labour and the Cnsis of Solidarity’, in Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, eds.. Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada: An Introduction, Halifax:

8

Femwood, 2012. For rich case studies of the limits of coalitions, see Stephanie Ross, ‘Social Unionism m Hard Times: Union-Coalition Politics in the CAW s Windsor Manufacturing Matters Campaign’, Labour/Le Travail, 68(Autumn), 2011; and Ian McDonald,

‘Labour and the City: Trade Union Strategy and

the Reproduction of Neoliberal Urbanism’, Doctoral Dissertation, York University, Political Science, Toronto, October 2011. 9

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven, CT: Yale University

10

Press, 2011, pp. 5-6. Dewey Burton, an assembly-line worker at Ford, cited in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, New York: The

11

New Press, 2010, p. 13. Gregory Albo, ‘Contesting the “New Capitalism’”, in David Coates, ed.. Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, New York: Palgrave Macrmllan,

12

2005. There was nothing new in this. An article in the February 1971 Canadian edition of Time Magazine cynically captured the disciplining and expectationlowering impact of downturns: ‘Adversity has its uses: the recession has played a calming role in America. Looking for a job takes precedence over looking for trouble. Unemployment undermines the counterculture’s confidence in a cornucopia able to forever satisfy both the straights and the dropouts. And

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

48

in subtler ways the recession has lowered the general tolerance of uproar, enhancing the concern for private welfare at the expense of political concerns and street theatrics. Sidewalks are too narrow for [both] protest marchers and 13

food stamp lines’, p. 23. Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, 1 (January-February), 2000, p.

14

Cited in Ralph Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, The Socialist Register 1965,

15

The decline in union density varied across the developed countries but the

17. London: Merlin Press, 1965, p. 281. trend of dechne was general. See John Schmitt and Alexandra Mitukiewicz, ‘Politics Matter: Changes in Unionization Rates in Rich Countries 1960-2000’, Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Pohcy Research, November

2011. 16

US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CES (Historical), Table B-2: ‘Average Hours and Earnings’, available at http://www.bls.gov; and US Department ofLabor, Wages and Hours Division, ‘Changes in Basic Minimum Wages’, available at http://www.dol.gov.

17

Frances Fox Piven, ‘The New American Poor Law’, The Socialist Register 2012,

18

Adolph Reed Jr., ‘Unraveling the Relation of Race and Class in American

Pontypool: Merlin, 2011. Politics’, in Diane E. Davis, ed.. Political Power and Social Theory, Volume: 15, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2002, plus the accompanying critiques and rejoinder. See also his Class Notes, New York: The New Press, 2001. 19

‘The paradox of our times is that the more class position determines people’s lives, the less people think of themselves as members of a class’. Mimmo Porcaro, ‘Labour and Life: Memorandum for a Future Investigation of (Class?) Consciousness’, Transform, 2, 2008, p. 45.

20

As Delphi autoworker Gregg ShotweU put it speaking to precariousness even within organized mass industries: ‘We are all temps. We are all disenfranchised. We are immigrants in the land where we were bom’. Gregg ShotweU, Autoworkers Under the Gun, Chicago: Haymarket, 2011, p. 142.

21

Thomas J.

Holmes,

‘The

Case

of the

Disappearing

Large-Employer

Manufacturing Plants: Not Much of a Mystery After All’, Economic Policy Paper 11-4, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, July 2011, Table 1, p. 6. 22

Richard Deitz and James Orr, ‘A Leaner, More SkiUed U.S. Manufacturing Workforce , Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 12(2), Febmary/March, 2006; and Holmes, ‘The Case of the Disappearing Large-Employer Manufacturing Plants’, p. 22.

23

The decrease m unionized workers in manufacturing was in roughly equal parts due to the decrease in jobs and the decrease in unionization. Though manufacturing output increased faster than GDP, its higher productivity growth led to a 38 per cent decrease in the numbers employed while unionization in manufacturing feU from over 35 per cent to under 11 per cent. From 19802007, the private sector workforce outside of manufacturing increased by 41 million while the number of manufactunng workers fell by 8 million and the number of unionized manufacturing workers fell by over 6 million.

FLETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

24

49

Steven Greenhouse, ‘Union Membership in U.S. Fell to a 70-Year Low Last Year’, New York Times, 21 January 2011. The headline actually understates the historic low; union density was higher in 1901 than it is today. For data on the early 1900s see Leo Troy, ‘Trade Union Membership, 1897-1962’, Review of Economics and Statistics, February 1965, Table 2. (The 1901 data is for the nonagricultural workforce; this has no substantive effect on the comparison).

25

Kevin B. Barefoot and Raymond MataloniJr., ‘Operations ofU.S. Multinational Companies in the United States and Abroad: Preliminary Results From the 2009 Benchmark Survey’, Survey of Current Business, November 2011, available at http://wvvw.bea.gov. As of 2009, US MNCs had 10.3 million employees abroad and foreign MNCs had 5.3 million workers in the US.

26

On the domestic restructuring, as opposed to the disappearance of the US auto industry, see Nicole Aschoff, ‘A Tale of Two Crises: Labour, Capital and Restructuring in the US Auto Industry’, The Socialist Register 2012, Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2011. On the impact of American labour’s failure to unionize the South see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, New York: Verso, 1986; and Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

27

Samuel E. Henly and Juan M. Sanchez,

‘The U.S. Establishment-Size

Distribution: Secular Changes and Sectoral Decomposition’, Economic Quarterly, Richmond Federal Reserve, 95(4), Fall 2009, p. 433-4, available at http:// www.richmondfed.org. 28

Steven Tufts and Mark Thomas, ‘Worker Power in an Age of Uneven Austerity’, The Bullet, No. 541, 5 September 2011, available at http://www. socialistproject.ca.

29

Similarly, the union’s ‘Buy American’ campaign identified American-based corporations as ‘good’ and Japanese-based assemblers inside the US as ‘bad’, alienating workers they were trying to organize and also confusing its own members, who regularly shipped components to the Japanese plants alongside shipments to CM, Ford and Chrysler.

30

The chief executive officer of Caterpillar recently articulated the latest stage of corporate aggressiveness, ‘You really have to aim the guns out no matter where you are, whether it is government, private business or whatever institution it is - your school for that matter - and really look at your competitor and beat them because if not, they are going to beat you’. Douglas Oberhehnan, quoted in Jeff Gray and Kevin Carmichael, ‘Bracing for trouble on the picket line’, The Globe and Mail, 1 January 2011. Chrysler, whose majority owner is Italianbased Fiat, led the charge in a special Super Bowl ad to put aside ‘differences’ and restore American competitiveness ‘in the second-half. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, 83,000 workers competed for 2500 jobs paying $30,000 a year. UAW president Bob King said that in such circumstances, unionization ‘is ultimately up to the companies’ (i.e. on making a deal at the top). Bemie Woodall and Ben Klayman, ‘UAW organizing drive targets VW, Daimler in

31

U.S.’, Reuters, 29 December 2011. A particularly significant example is the two-tier system, which discriminates against and alienates new, generally younger workers - the very workers that renewal will depend on. By 2015, the maximum wage rate for a new hire at the

50

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 Detroit Three auto assemblers will be about one-third below a veteran worker doing the same work and after inflation will remarkably be below where it was sixty years ago. For a passionate workplace-rooted critique of the UAW’s descent into selling concessions to its members, see the collection of articles in Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun.

32

The publication Labor Notes has made a brave attempt, through the neohberal years, to link these opposition groups.

33

For an excellent discussion of the strengths and hmits of recent reform caucuses see Jane Slaughter, ‘The Vision Thing: Keeping Union Reform on Track’, Labor Notes, T1 April 2012.

34

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Transcending Pessimism: Rekindhng Sociaflst

35

Williams, Resources of Hope, p. 242.

36

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Rendelsham, UK:

37

Along the lines of what was advanced, on the eve of the crisis, by Stanley

Imagination’, The Socialist Register 2000, London: Merhn Press, 1999.

Merlin Press, 1998, p. 11. Aronowitz, Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006. 38

The Washington meeting established the Center for Labor Renewal and included trade unionists, representatives from Worker Action Centers and a few academics; Bill Fletcher Jr. introduced the case for class-based community assembhes. This was further elaborated in Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gaspasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path to Social Justice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 170-9.

39

One of the important differences between the proposal laid out by Fletcher and Gaspasin {Solidarity Divided) and the GTWA was that the former was seen as a coalition while the latter is based on individual membership. The GTWA emerged out of a series of meetings among socialists and activists through 2008 who were increasingly frustrated by the hmits of what they were each involved in — however positive much of that was. The Assembly meets twice a year with interim general membership meetings once a month, holds coffee house educationals and forums, and its campaign work is carried out primarily through committees (currently on free public transit, interventions against the attack on public sector unions, and feminist action). It is expressly anticapitalist, which in practical terms means openness to radical alternatives, and committed to balancing intellectual and activist work. For an overview of the GTWA, see Herman Rosenfeld, ‘The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly: A Hopeful Experiment’, New Politics, XIII-3(51), Summer 2011.

40

Ninety per cent of the 137 WACs in the US service low-wage, non-unionized immigrant workers. See Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006; and Jenny Brown, ‘Can Labor Organize the Unemployed?’, Labor Notes, 14 February 2012.

41

There are, nevertheless, some exciting experiments among these centres with important organizing lessons for the left, e.g. the Los Angeles Labor Community Strategy Center, the Miami Worker Center, POWER in San Francisco, and the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia.

42

Lucio Magri, ‘Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolutionary Party’,

RETHINKING UNIONS, REGISTERING SOCIALISM

51

New Left Review, 1/60 (March-Apnl), 1970, p. 128. 43

Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, p. 58.

44

Jim Clifton, The Coming Jobs War: What Every Leader Must Know About the Future of Job Creation, New York; GaUup Press, 2011, pp. 11, 185.

45

Even at relatively low unemployment rates, decent jobs are no longer necessarily provided — in 2004, the unemployment rate was down to 4 per cent but workers were no less insecure because restructuring was so intense (the positions were opening up were either inferior or not accessible to workers newly unemployed). The reserve army is no longer just the unemployed but also includes the precarious and low-paid in a context of accelerated restructuring. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury, 2011; and John Evans and Euan Gibb, ‘Moving from Precanous Employment to Decent Work’, Discussion Paper 13, Global Union Research Network, Geneva, 2009.

46

Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010, chapter 5.

47 48

Leo Panitch, ‘Reflections on Strategies for Labour’, The Socialist Register 2001, London: Merlin Press, 2000. For a discussion of the potential role of public pensions in ‘a way forward’ see Robin Blackburn, ‘Crisis 2.0’, New Left Review, 72(November-December), 2011, pp.51-3.

49

Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin, ‘The Assault on Public Services: Will Unions Lament the Attacks or Lead a Fightback?’, in Michael D. Yates, ed., Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012.

50

Steve Early and Rand Wilson, ‘Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America’, in Wisconsin Uprising; and Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?, Chicago; Haymarket Books, 2011.

51

Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, New York: Verso, 2007,

52

See Eric Mann, Playbook for Progressives, Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.

53

US Population Census, available at http://www.census.gov; US Bureau of

chapter 11.

Labor, ‘Employment, Hours and Earnings’, Table B-4: Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls, available at http://www.bls.gov. It was only towards the end of the 1990s that debt became more significant than hours in their impact on family budgets. 54

Christoph Hermann, ‘The Political Economy of Work Time: A Political, Theoretical and Historical Account’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Vienna, 2012.

55

Reverend S. Marquis, Director, Ford Department of Sociology, cited in Wayne Lewchuk, ‘Men and Monotony; Fratemalism and Managerial Strategy at the Ford Motor Company’, The Journal of Economic History, 53(4), December 1993.

56

Daniel Bensaid aptly described this as the ‘strategic hypothesis’. Daniel Bensaid, ‘On a Recent Book by John HoUoway’, International Viewpoint, 379(June), 2006, available at http://www.intemationalviewpoint.org.

OCCUPY WALL STREET: AFTER THE ANARCHIST MOMENT JODI DEAN he Occupy Wall Street movement unfolding in the fall of 2011 reanimated the US left. People outraged by the fact that ‘banks got bailed out’ and ‘we got sold out’ installed themselves in the financial heart of New York City. Occupying the symbol of capitalist class power, they ruptured it. Hippies with tents and cops with barricades turned lower Manhattan into a chaotic mess. Those seeking to combine the people’s work, debts, hopes, and futures into speculative instruments for private profit confronted a visible and actual collective counterforce. Just two years earlier, everyone had been asking, ‘where’s the outrage?’ Whether complacent or stunned, working and middle-class people hadn’t really reacted to the collapse of the housing market, the rise in foreclosures, persistent unemployment and the trillion-dollar bank bailout - all part of the deepening ‘Great Recession’. The nght-wmg Tea Party tried to channel anger over the bailouts in a populist direction (an effort quickly revealed as corporate-backed Astroturf), but the left was largely absent, apparently unwilling or unable to confront the allied political power of financial and business elites. After the occupation of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and the rapid spread of occupations to cities all over the world, no one had to ask ‘where’s the outrage?’ anymore. It was everywhere, and it was targeted at Wall Street.' I The initial success of the movement suggested the efficacy of an anarchist approach to political action.^ As David Graeber explains, anarchist groups ‘operate on the assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert another person completely to one’s own point of view, that decision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and therefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining egalitarian processes and considering immediate questions of action in the present’.^ One feature

OCCUPY WALL STREET

53

of these processes is consensus, the orientation of discussions toward com¬ promise so as to generate outcomes acceptable to everyone. At the Occupy movement’s outset, activists embraced consensus as well as additional anarchist values of inclusivity, honzontality, and leaderlessness.'* Consequently, many of the newly politically involved felt like they were recognized, their voices heard. Rather than entering politics at the bottom of an established party, rather than working hours upon hours on a campaign dreamed up by someone else, occupiers were vital participants in the construction of a new politics. No one was superior to another; no prior history or ideology established the terms of discussion in advance. Everything was up for grabs. Anarchism created a political opening that for decades had eluded the left’s sectarian parties, issue-based and identity politics and fundamentally anodyne approach to protests. The anarchist features that help account for the movement’s initial uptake, however, produced problems of their own. Consider the emphasis on inclusion. It first expressed itself in Occupy’s rhetoric of post- and nonpartisanship. Attractive to people alienated by the stalemate in US politics between two parties so united in their underlying support of capitalism that they have to manufacture extreme disagreements so as to differentiate themselves to voters, the language of non-partisanship tried to cover over actual political disagreement by inciting enthusiasm for common acts of protest united under a common name — occupation. Fundamental divisions between hbertarians seeking to abohsh the Federal Reserve, progressives trying to restore Glass-Steagall, and socialists pushing for a massive ‘Jobs for All’ campaign were repressed, as if common cause on a name and a tactic made goals irrelevant. Even as the language of non-partisanship helped Occupy carve out a new political space for itself, there was a certain disingenuousness to the language of non-partisanship. Mainstream commentators recognized the movement as a left version of the Tea Party. The aesthetics of the protests are leftwing: occupiers look like hippies, radicals, and hipsters. The hardcore of Occupy Oakland called themselves the Oakland Commune. In New York, the biggest marches resulted from union participation. The legal responses to occupations and actions clearly come from the right - arrests, pepper spray, evictions on the grounds of ‘hygiene and safety’. Fox News hated Occupy because the movement is committed to everything Fox News hates - economic and social equality, respect for people of different races, ethnicities, and sexualities, ecologically sound management of our common environment. Occupy Wall Street is clearly on the side of the oppressed, on the side of a part of the people, on a partisan side.

54

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

The repression of political differences in the guise of their inclusion inserted an incoherence into Occupy that made taking up questions of strategy difficult. Basic issues of what the movement opposed remained unanswered, precisely because posing them would rupture the consensus Occupy wanted to build. Is the movement against capitalism or the state? Do we have a corrupt political system but a basically solid economic model? Is the problem with specifically neoliberal capitahsm, which has let inequality soar and banks and corporations exert undue influence in government, or is the crisis one of capitalism itself as it encounters its own hmits — the dechning rate of profit, growing immiseration and proletarianization and the impossibihty of continued capital accumulation? Terms like ‘economic justice’, which became more prominent as the movement advanced, muddied the issue, providing the salve of an idea everyone could support precisely because they displaced attention from the class antagonism the movement asserted and mobilized. Occupy dealt with the clash between inclusion and consensus in several ways. It jettisoned full consensus for modified consensus (90 or 70 per cent agreement) for some decisions. It advocated forking, that is, pursuing separate projects and goals rather than working toward common goals. And, it turned in on itself, obsessively reflecting on its failures adequately to include — people with full-time jobs couldn’t attend all the meetings; undocumented people and immigrants could not risk arrest in ways that others could; hierarchies of gender, race, and class repeated themselves within the movement — thereby letting questions of process take the place of discussions of action. The incompatibility between inclusion and consensus was not the only difficulty resulting from the prominence of anarchism in the movement. Emphases on horizontality and leaderlessness also hindered the movement’s abilities to organize itself Adherence to horizontality heightened scepticism toward organizing structures like the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, ultimately leading to the dissolution of both. Assertions of leaderlessness incited a kind of paranoia around leaders who emerged but who could not be acknowledged or held accountable as leaders.^ Conversely, the absence of structures that could legitimize leaders set a stage wherein any person or group could issue calls or undertake actions in the name of Occupy. The Canadian magazine Adbusters, for example, published frequent tactical briefings denouncing the impotent old left, warning against cooptation, and proclaiming insurrection.^ In sum, rather than solving the problem of left political organization by focusing on process and immediate questions of action, as anarchism suggests. Occupy Wall Street poses it anew. Occupy Wall Street began as a left politics for a neohberal age, an age

OCCUPY WALL STREET

55

that has championed individuality and excluded collectivity. The anarchist moment was a ‘vanishing mediator’ between a politics focused on individual preferences and one oriented toward a collective will.^ It couldn’t persist its basic tenets undermined large-scale collective organization — but it was crucial, even necessary, to igniting a new anti-capitalist movement in the US. Anarchism appealed to individuals (not classes or identity categories), bringing them together as a collectivity of those whose work, homes, and futures are threatened by predatory capitalism. This bringing together happened as specific outdoor urban places were claimed as explicitly common and political spaces. Prior designations as public or private ceased to matter (for a time). People became visible as not-belonging to the very urban and public spaces they occupied. In the context of the changes in US capitalism that shifted industry offshore, increased the role of computerization and automation in factories, amplified the role of communication technologies, accelerated growth of low-wage, low-skill service sectors jobs, and attempted to compensate for wage reductions by expanding credit, the anarchist moment of Occupy mobilized not a proletariat bound to the factory but the proletarianized extended throughout unequal, uneven cities.* It demonstrated the resurgence of a left political will to insist, disrupt, take and create. Anarchist emphases on individual autonomy appealed to people who had grown up under neoliberalism, who had been taught to celebrate their own uniqueness and who had found themselves stuck, losing and increasingly desperate.^ The individual was supposed to be able to make a difference, to control its own destiny, yet capitalism made that impossible. Prior to Occupy, the left had spent decades bemoaning its lack of ideas, its fragmentation, incapacity and demise. Even worse, it had treated collective political will as the problem rather than solution. Once the new left delegitimized the old one, it turned speaking for another into the crime of representation; it made political focus on class conflict into the crime of exclusion; it rendered condemnation as the crime of dogmatism; and, it construed rejection of capitalism as the crime of utopianism such that failures to concede that ‘there is no alternative’ were tantamount to totalitarian advocacy of genocidal adventurism. The anarchist moment broke through this impasse: it valorized individuals and in so doing turned left incapacity into an opportunity. At the same time, because its power came from the multiple, dispersed and divergent fragments it brought together under Occupy, the anarchist inspiration of the movement couldn’t persist, but would have to conduce to another politics, the class struggle that was also part of the movement from its inception. Differently put, anarchism was important as a ‘vanishing mediator’ that

56

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

could usher in a politics, even if its own terms undermined it. It incited people toward collectivity and political will, although the pohtics it offered eschewed bringing them together in a concrete political form. II Specifically identifying its enemy as Wall Street, the Occupy movement re¬ centred left pohtics by claiming the fundamental division of class struggle. Its central slogan. We are the 99%’, transforms a statistic into a crime. The slogan takes an empirical fact regarding a numerical determination of the one per cent’s degree of prosperity relative to that of the ninety-nine per cent and politicizes this fact, separating it out from the information stream as a fact that matters, that is more than simply one among many innumerable facts. Contrast this slogan with Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign’s ‘Change We Can Believe In’ and ‘Yes We Can’. Filled in by his emphasis on unity, on coming together in ‘a more perfect union’, these slogans obscure division, attempting to repress and depoliticize it. Occupy cut a hole in this ideological image of unity that made the underlying division appear. Pohticians lamented the turn to class warfare — but they couldn’t deny it. The one per cent complained that they shouldn’t be hated for being rich — but they couldn’t hide the dramatic increase in inequahty. A 2012 Pew Research Center poll found that 66 per cent of Americans think that divisions between rich and poor are strong or very strong, an increase of 19 per cent since 2009.^“ Not only is this view held in every demographic category, but more people think that class division is the principle social division than they do any other division. In addition to bringing class struggle to the fore, and thus taking socialist politics further than the fragmented groups on the US left had been able to do in a generation, Occupy’s primary tactic, occupation, enabled the movement to unfold in a perhaps surprisingly Leninist way. The demanding full-time task of occupation, of sleeping out of doors in an urban setting, of maintaining a camp and using it as a base for direct pohtical actions, made occupiers into a self-selected vanguard. They took on functions Lenin attributes to professional revolutionaries: establishing and maintaining a continuity, a persistence, that enables broader numbers of people to join in the work of the movement. This continuity combats the fragmentation, localism and transitoriness of much of contemporary left politics. Further, occupiers have been flexible and adaptive, creatively responding to the challenges of pohce, law and weather. One example here is the People’s Mic (whereby those around a speaker echo her words so that others in a large crowd can hear them). Initially a response to the prohibition on

OCCUPY WALL STREET

57

unpemiitted amplifiers and bullhorns, the People’s Mic became a powerful galvanizing practice and a new political tactic in its own right as groups used it to disrupt official speakers m various fora. Finally, the tactic of occupation unified and disciplined activists. This unity was practical rather than ideological, the effect of consciously sharing an organizational form of affiliating in a common political practice fundamentally opposed to its political and economic setting. Because Occupy doesn’t mobilize people as workers but rather as those who are proletarianized and exploited in every aspect of their lives - at risk of foreclosure and unemployment, diminishing futures, increasing debts, and accelerated dependence on a system that is rapidly failing (as pensions are eliminated when corporations file for bankruptcy, for example, or as the safety nets of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are politically threatened) — in other words, because people are mobilized as the 99 per cent, the attack on capitahsm takes different forms. This fits with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s view that in contemporary capitalism ‘society as a whole is the chief site of productive activity and, correspondingly, the prime site of labor conflict and revolt against capital’.“ Occupy’s encampments disrupted everyday ‘partitions of the perceptible’, people’s sense of what could be expected in specific urban settings.'^ Rather than a Wall Street fiUed with bankers, traders, and their support staff. Occupy brought in drummers, students, dancers, and philosophers willing and able to spend countless hours discussing alternatives to capitalism. For occupiers and their supporters, the movement opened up new possibilities of connection not mediated through capitaUst exchange; people’s kitchens, libraries, clinics, technology, legal and mediation working groups emerged to help maintain the occupations, in the process adding to the skills and capacities of participants. While some of the marches followed scripts familiar from the alter-globalization and antiwar protests, Occupy’s experiments in shutting down ports and delaying the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange targeted flows of capital and commodities. As the movement extended through the fall and winter of 2011-12, the variety of groups and actions in the name of Occupy pointed to the extent of capitalism’s subsumption of society as they blocked foreclosures, disrupted meetings aiming to close public schools, interrupted art auctions and museum exhibits, issued reports and recommendations on banking and finance, and sought to address the emerging student debt crisis.

58

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

III Occupy’s multiple actions did not result from a coordinated, top-down political plan (although they seemed to follow a ‘civil society organization and ‘non-government organization’ path already familiar from the alterglobahzation movement and Jubilee 2000 movement for third world debt relief). They emerged from dispersed groups and actors. Some were active well before Occupy WaU Street got started - there was already an initiative to try to get money out of politics via a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United; activists were already fighting against foreclosures and budgets cuts. Actions important for building the movement’s momentum similarly drew from organizations and events already in the works separate from Occupy, whether the organizations were unions, anti-death penalty, or anti-pohce violence groups (the convergence of Occupy Wall Street with marches protesting Georgia’s execution of Troy Davis in September and the shooting of sixteen-year old Trayvon Martin in Florida in February helped connect occupiers with organizers already active in African-American communities). That multiple, dispersed groups were active before and adjacent to Occupy poses the question: if the movement is comprised of such groups, what does the fact of their combining as Occupy add? There are at least three ways to answer this question. An answer committed to an ontology of immanence would say that Occupy adds an additional struggle to the ongoing ‘cycle of struggles’.'^ The tactic of occupation is one among many creative practices of resistance aiming to bring a new world into being. Rather than concerning itself with the political subjectivation specific to Occupy, this first answer places all struggles on a horizontal plane; aU are instances of what Hardt and Negri call a ‘multitude fonn’. An answer that sees Occupy as bringing together different struggles might say that it adds a brand or common name.''' Whereas the answer from inmianence declines to differentiate Occupy from other struggles, whether prior or adjacent to it, the answer from branding fails to differentiate Occupy from its capitalist context. This second answer is fundamentally collaborationist and depoliticizing. A brand is an identity to be produced, marketed, sold and consumed. It’s for consumers to buy into, not for critical agents collectively remaking the world. A brand might incorporate an extra dimension of belonging, identity or lifestyle, but this incorporation does not contest or attempt to break with capitalism. On the contrary, brands reproduce capitalism. To reduce Occupy to a brand, then, is to treat radical pohtics as just another form of consumption and to block the subjectivation Occupy sets in motion by treating those who come into the movement as nothing

OCCUPY WALL STILEET

59

but naive pleasure-seekers, as idiots swayed by a logo, a catch-phrase or a mood rather than militants active in their own remaking. A third answer to the question of what Occupy Wall Street adds thus turns on subjectivation, on the movement’s ability to rupture its setting and enact a new collective subject. Because of Occupy, we now appear to ourselves as us — we say ‘we’, even as we argue over who we are and what we want. We say ‘we’ knowing that there are divisions and differences among us that we express and the temi ‘we’ expresses. Because of Occupy, we have been able to imagine and enact a new subject that is collective and in so doing appear differently to ourselves. We now see ourselves as changing the situation we are in and so see our setting differently. It doesn’t look like it did before — it’s ruptured, open. Our setting is no longer fixed and given as the intractable reality of capitalism. Writing about the Paris Commune, Alain Badiou observes that a political rupture is always a combination of a subjective capacity and an organization of the consequences of that capacity.*^ The rupture brought about by Occupy combines the courage to manifest ourselves as a collective political presence with the elimination of the supposition that we will go along with the status quo, that we will stand by and do nothing as we are dispossessed of our lives and futures. The immanent and branding approaches to Occupy Wall Street can’t account for the emergence of a new subjective capacity. They occlude the way Occupy deploys a certain repetition, reflexivity or self-inclusion. To paraphrase Badiou, Occupy ‘imposes itself on aU the elements that bring about its existence’.'^ Occupy is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the parts and the sum. Those who resist attempts to represent the movement, its politics and constituencies, voice this ‘extra’ dimension of the movement, the way that the movement is an element of itself Likewise, those concerned with the General Assembly’s ability to decide for the movement, or to be the body capable of making the movement’s decisions, especially as attendance dropped off (there was never a list of members or a quorum for decisions) and factions exerted more influence, similarly express the sense that the movement is more than those who gather and act in its name. Occupy exceeds the wide array of actions taken in its name. Whether as the red thread that ties them together, an umbrella or big tent covering them aU, or the radical vanguard that sees the class character of the various struggles. Occupy provides a political form for the incompatibility, the irreducible gap, between capitalism and the people. To conceive Occupy as a political form is to think of it as a configuration of opposition within a particular social-historical setting (so, there are different configurations of opposition within different settings). To call Occupy a political form for the

60

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

incompatibility between capitalism and the people is to say that it has a specific

and fundamental content and that this content consists in the concentration of intensities around a gap - the gap of capitahsm’s failure as an economic system adequate to the capacities, needs, demands and common will of the people. On the one hand, this emphasis on the gap between capitahsm and the people locates the truth of the movement in class struggle, in the antagonism between the exploiters and the exploited, those who own and those who do not, the rich and the rest of us. On the other, the emphasis on the gap between capitahsm and the people marks a change in the setting of class struggle, a difference in setting such that to refer to the two great hostile classes as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is no longer as obvious and compelling as it once was. It now appears as if everything is capitahsm and this makes capital appear in its communicative, social and affective, that is to say its common, dimensions. IV The problem ofpolitical organization to which Occupy supplies a provisional answer is that of mobihzing and structuring opposition to capitahsm. Anarchism’s emphases on consensus, autonomy and horizontahty drew in people convinced by thirty years of neoliberahsm of the primacy of the individual. Instead of insisting on a party hne or requiring rigorous study of party history, it inspired and galvanized people where they are. At the same time, this very inspiration claimed the division between the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent and named it as the wrong or crime of inequahty, exploitation and theft, thereby placing the core of socialist and communist pohtics at the movement’s heart. There had been multiple, horizontal, protests and groups before 17 September 2011. These horizontally dispersed struggles were not the difference that made a difference. The political culture of the US — whether with respect to the issue and identity politics characteristic of the left since 1968 or the mainstream’s emphasis on volunteering, civic¬ mindedness and service - has celebrated grass-roots, local and communitybased actions for decades. Occupy made dispersed struggles register as a common struggle. To this extent, as it became a common name, it started to operate as a nascent party, one in the process of being formed and directed by people in the course of political movement. The movement’s ability to galvanize a left politics across a broad social terrain also points to the potential viability of a broad left party. People wanted to combine their actions; they wanted to be part of something bigger, something aiming to change the system at its core. The success of Occupy Wall Street in opening up a new political space suggests that a

OCCUPY WALL STREET

61

new party could arise out of the practical activities of people working in its name. Drawing from the sense of collective power that many differentiated groups and individuals experienced as they came together in Occupy, as they repeated common slogans, built a common language, and shared common space, a common party could enable the persistence of Occupy as a collective political subject (in and through the common divisions that constitute it). A party names and expresses the movement’s subjective capacity over and apart from the specificities of its actions, encampments, working groups and individual participants. In making Occupy explicit as a political form for the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, moreover, a common party could introduce new opportunities for accountability and coordination, new potentials for enabling multiple actions to reinforce rather than work against each other. Exactly what processes are best for insuring accountability, for making the fact of leadership transparent, and for guiding participants to the roles and activities for which they are best suited, is an open question. There are multiple models; not every model is best suited for every group, decision or action. Thinking of Occupy as pointing toward the possibility of a new party doesn’t solve this problem; it acknowledges it as a problem we can solve. Occupy Wall Street brought into being a new political subject. It gave the left the courage to say ‘we’ again. Maintaining the political opening Occupy created won’t be easy, but it will be possible if and as the movement shapes itself as a new communist party. NOTES 1

See the articles published as a special supplement to Theory & Event, 14(4), 2011, edited by Jodi Dean, James Martel, and Davide Panagia, available at

2

http: / / muse jhu. edu. David Graeber, ‘Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots’, 30 November 2011,

3

David Graeber, ‘The Twilight of Vanguardism’, The World Social Forum:

available at http://www.aljazeera.com. Challenging Empires, ]une 2001, available at http://www.choike.org. 4

See Marina Sitrin, ‘Horizontalism and Territory’, Possible Futures, 9 January 2012, available at http://www.possible-futures.org.

5

See Sarah Resnick’s contribution to ‘Scenes from an Occupation’, in Astra

6

Available at http://www.adbusters.org.

Taylor, Keith Gessen et ah, eds., OccupiedI, New York: Verso, 2011, p. 54. 7

Fredric Jameson, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’, New German Critique, l(Winter), 1973, pp. 52-89.

8

For a discussion of proletarianization see Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then

62

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013 as Farce, London: Verso, 2009, p. 92.

9

For a powerful account of the popularity of a liberal individuahst hfestyle anarchism as a form of accommodation to capitalism, see Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, San Francisco: AK Press, 1995.

10

Rich Morin, ‘Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor’, Pew Research Center, 11 January 2012, available at http://www. pewsocialtrends.org.

11

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 292.

12

Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, translated by Julie Rose, Minneapohs: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

13

See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘The Fight for “Real Democracy” at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street’, Foreign Affairs, 11 October 2011, available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com.

14

Arun Gupta, ‘How to Rebrand Occupy’, Socialistworker.org, 2 May 2012.

15

Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, translated by David Macey and

16

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 208.

Steve Corcoran, London: Verso, 2010, p. 227.

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE BARBARA EPSTEIN he explosive growth of the Occupy movement, in the fall of 2011,

1

took everyone by surprise. No movement of the left had possessed

such momentum since the antiwar movement of the late sixties and early seventies. As has been widely pointed out, the Occupy movement changed public discourse, making it impossible for the rapidly escalating concentration of wealth and power to continue to be pushed under the rug. The movement was most visible during the fall of 2011 when occupations inspired by, and mostly modelled on. Occupy Wall Street, appeared in cities around the country. By late November and December every occupation had been closed down, leaving Occupy activists to look for new tactics and means of maintaining the momentum of the movement. During the winter months demonstrations continued, but the movement was much less active than it had been: this was in a sense a time of hibernation, a time of intense discussions of what form the movement should take next, what its foci should be. Many local Occupy movements saw May Day as the moment for the movement to re-emerge in public view, to show that it had not disappeared. The results were inconclusive. In New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, demonstrations planned by Occupy and allied movements drew thousands, but did not reach the size or have the impact of actions of the fall. Occupy activists in many places are demonstrating against banks and corporations, stalling foreclosures and evictions, organizing student protests against tuition increases and mobilizing support for labour strikes. There is no question but that political activism will continue to be central in the lives of large numbers of participants, especially young people, and that networks formed through the Occupy movement will continue to function. Whether Occupy, as a movement with a more or less coherent identity and focus, will continue, is an open question.

64

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

The purpose of this essay is not to survey the movement as a whole but to place it in the context of an evolving anarchist-oriented form of radicalism among young people, and to address some of the issues that this movement faces, including the balance between nonviolent tactics and mihtancy, between a focus on tactics and internal process on the one hand, and on goals and strategy on the other, and the question of how to respond to pohce violence, through a discussion of two prominent local Occupy movements: Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy Oakland (OO). My main focus, however, is Occupy Oakland. The Occupy movement has led to wide recognition of the influence of anarchism on young activists. It has been widely pointed out that anarchist-inchned young activists (including some who avoid using that label but whose perspectives are influenced by the anarchist tradition) have played central roles in initiating the movement and in sustaining it.^ In fact anarchism, and anti-authoritarianism, closely connected to anarchism, have been ascendant among young radicals in the US - and elsewhere — for at least three decades. In the late seventies and eighties, the anti¬ nuclear activists who blockaded and occupied nuclear plants and nuclear weapons facflities, and who called themselves ‘the direct action movement’, subscribed to a philosophy that blended participatory democracy, consensus process, anarchism, feminism, environmentalism and nonviolence. These components of a pohtical perspective were regarded, by the great majority of activists, as not only mutually compatible but in effect inseparable. The idea was that movements against nuclear power and nuclear weapons would expand into a much broader movement for nonviolent revolution, which would lead to an egahtarian and non-militarist world. This turned out to be vastly over-optimistic. In fact the movement became closely tied to its tactic, direct action, i.e. mass nonviolent actions leading to mass arrests. When such actions reached their limit, having attracted as many people as were, at least at that time, willing to participate, the movement went into decline. But meanwhile many of the movement’s ideas, especially the use of consensus decision-making process, a focus on the creation of egalitarian communities and a deep suspicion of the state, and an association of these perspectives with feminism and more generally with radical politics, had been widely adopted by young activists in other movements. The next major wave of anarchist or anarchist-oriented youth activism, in the US, was the anti-globalization movement, more accurately described as a movement against global capitalism and the austerity measures associated with it. The radical component of the Seattle protests of 1999-2000 was organized by the Direct Action Network, a coalition of West Coast anarchist and anti-

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

65

authoritarian groups, part of a broader activist youth culture that inherited much of the outlook of the earlier anti-nuclear direct action movement, but also transformed it in some ways. Issues of race and of racism were more prominent for the anti-globalization movement than they had been for its predecessor, due to rising levels of immigration and the importance of organizing in immigrant communities. Nonviolence, regarded by the earlier wave of activists as inseparable from anarchism, became detached from anarchist pohtics. The Black Bloc, young people dressed entirely in black, wearing black masks, appeared at the Seattle protests, where they broke windows of corporate chain stores and ran to escape capture by the police. This tactic, inspired by its use at earlier German protests, had also been used previously in the US but never with the media attention that it achieved in Seattle. Some in the Seattle protests pointed out members of the Black Bloc to police in an effort to keep the protest from being tainted by these tactics. Others, who regarded the Black Bloc as a legitimate part of the movement, were outraged by these actions. In the ensuing debate that took place within the anti-globalization movement, these attempts to stop the Black Bloc were castigated as acts of betrayal of comrades and Black Bloc actions were defended as an element of a ‘diversity of tactics’ ranging from the least to the most militant and provocative. Over the course of the nineties nonviolence had ceased to take the form of mass protests and had come to mean small, highly scripted demonstrations, with predictable outcomes. Anti-globalization activists wanted more militant tactics, and many were uncomfortable with the idea of some movement activists placing constraints on the actions of others. At least on a rhetorical level diversity of tactics won this debate, largely due to its ability to make a more convincing claim to radicalism. Though most activists continued to adhere to nonviolence. Black Bloc actions became a regular component of anti-globalization protests, reinforced, in the US, by the regular use of Black Bloc tactics in demonstrations in Europe, in particular Greece, Spain, and Italy, where violent clashes between protesters and police were more accepted by the public than in the US. The anti-globalization movement, which emerged into public view with the Seattle protests, flourished bnefly before being cut short by 9/11. After Seattle, the Direct Action Network, previously focused on the West Coast, went on to mobilize national protests against the World Bank, the IMF and the Republican National Convention, all in 2000. In New York and Washington, DC, Reclaim the Streets protests took place, inspired by the British movement that aimed to regain public space for the public. In New York City a group of activists, many of whom would be among those

66

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

who would accept the invitation of the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters and organize an occupation of Wall Street, organized the No More Walls coalition in response to the government bailout of major banks in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The aim was an anti-Wall Street action in the fall of 2001. September 11 and the atmosphere of fear, and repression of dissent, that followed it, intervened. The attempt to mobilize an anti-Wall Street action collapsed, and the anti-globalization movement, at least in the US, went into decline.^ The focus of activism soon shifted to antiwar activity, but after massive protests in the days leading up to the US attack on Iraq, antiwar protest dwindled. In the years that followed the left reached its lowest ebb for many decades. The economic crisis of 2008, the bailouts and the austerity policies that followed raised the same issues as those that had led to the anti-globalization movement but with even more urgency, especially for young people. The wave of tuition increases and student protests, including occupations of university buildings, were the immediate background to the Occupy movement; anti-austenty protests in Europe, demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, on behalf of the nght of pubhc workers to organize, and the Arab Spring all provided inspiration. Media coverage of the Occupy movement helped, but the momentum of the movement, especially in its early days, had more to do with the fact that it spoke to a widely shared concern over an issue that had been festering for years. In the US, the Occupy movement is the third post-sixties wave of radical, anarchist-oriented politics. Probably only a minonty of Occupy activists identify as anarchists; some who identify with the legacy of anarchism call themselves anti-authoritarian instead, concerned that the term ‘anarchism’ has been taken over by a youth culture more interested in alternative lifestyles than in radical politics. Nevertheless it is clear that an anarchist perspective unites many core Occupy activists, and that many more share important elements of it, including its insistence upon egalitarianism, its suspicion of the state and aversion to mainstream institutions and culture, and its emphasis on the creation of alternative communities, intended to be, as far as possible, beyond the reach of the state and mainstream society. New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Oakland, are both centres of radical youth culture, and Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland both became major centres for the Occupy movement as a whole. Both attracted wide and enthusiastic support. Both faced the problems of how to respond to police violence and repression and how to direct movements that were growing much more rapidly than anyone had expected. Both have suffered the loss of momentum and focus that has affected the entire movement

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

67

since the widespread closures of occupations in the late fall, and have faced the question of how to maintain a pubhc presence. Since then both have continued to hold demonstrations and have also engaged in a range of organizing projects. In other respects the two movements have taken quite different paths. The proposal for an occupation of Wall Street on 17 September 2011 by the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters was taken up by a group of activists, many of them anarchists, who had been meeting for some time to consider actions against the power of finance, and who embraced the slogan of the 99 per cent, put forward by one of their number, David Graeber. They promoted and prepared for, the impending occupation. Marina Sitrin, one of this group of organizers, told me that protest was in the air, and it was clear that many people would come, but no one expected the approximately two thousand who showed up. The Adbusters poster for the demonstration had asked, ‘What is our one demand?’ A General Assembly was held in Zuccotti Park, and this question was raised. But so many demands were suggested that a decision was made not to elevate any demand over the rest as the central demand of the movement. The absence of a central demand, or of any official list of demands, became an earmark of the movement, reflecting a widespread preference for diversity and a concern that choosing one demand over others might alienate some participants. Furthermore, some participants, including some of those who facilitated the first General Assembly, oppose making demands on grounds that the solutions must come from the movement, not from those in power. Others in the movement believe that it is necessary to make demands if one wants to bring about concrete changes. But not identifying any central demand was a way of including both perspectives as well as of including a wide range of specific concerns. But wide use of the 99 per cent slogan made it clear that the movement had arisen in protest against the centralization of wealth and power. The protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park, renaming it Liberty Square, and the next day embarked on daily marches to Wall Street.^ The police, by overreacting, inadvertently did a great deal to spread the movement. On 24 September, during a march up Broadway, a policeman pepper sprayed several young women protesters who were doing nothing more than standing on the sidewalk. His act was caught on videotape and quickly bounced around the Internet, inspiring indignation and support for the protesters. On 1 October a march of more than 1,000 protesters was trapped on Brooklyn Bridge, where approximately 700 were arrested, some reported having been guided onto the bridge by the police. Those arrested were taken to Jail and kept overnight in overcrowded cells. This experience

68

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

reinforced commitment to the movement. Occupations began to be formed around the country, in solidarity. In New York, nearly daily demonstrations of thousands took place, in solidarity with the occupation, involving students, trade unionists and others, endorsed by student and faculty organizations, trade unions and community organizations. It was clear that the occupation had won very wide support over a very short period. Several OWS participants and sympathetic observers whom I interviewed told me that a major concern of the movement has been to sustain a mix of militancy and restraint, to express defiance while remaining within the bounds of nonviolence. Carwil Bjork-James, a graduate student organizer and OWS activist, told me that for years many demonstrations in New York were in danger of being smothered by the pohce, who, he said, would surround the area of a demonstration with barricades, essentially creating a protest pen in which it was impossible to move around. OWS managed to overcome this stalemate through ‘a careful mix between commitment to nonviolence and extreme assertiveness’. Sometimes, he said, demonstrators would pick up barricades and move them; sometimes it was possible to evade them. Marches could zigzag in unpredictable ways, staying ahead of the police and thus avoiding being surrounded. It was also important, he said, to maintain a balance between the militant marches associated with OWS itself, and the larger and more controlled marches sponsored by others, such as labour unions and immigrant rights groups, which enabled people who wanted to be confident that they would not risk arrest to participate in the movement.'* Alex Vitale, a sociologist who studies the pohce, also emphasized the importance of maintaining both the militant edge of the movement and the nonviolent posture that has given it moral authority; a mix of the two, he argued, has been crucial to the movement s influence and to sustaining the wide pubhc support that it won in its early days.^ OWS, he said, has not in civil disobedience in the staged way that has become familiar, but nevertheless has maintained the moral high ground. ‘It has been clear’, he said, ‘that the protesters have not been attacking the police, it is the police who have been attacking the protesters. This has had enormous symbolic importance. OWS activists are not interested in a street fight, won’t throw things at the pohce, but might go over and around a police hne; a pohce line IS

not considered sacred’. The most important feature of the movement, he

argued, has been its character of defiance. OWS changed the discourse, he said, not by talking about the 99 per cent, but by the level of defiance of its activities, and because of the degree of police repression brought on by that defiance, but not by violence on the part of the protesters. ‘If major labor

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

69

unions had called a permitted march about inequahty and 10,000 people had shown up’, he said, ‘nothing would have changed. But 500 young people held a march with no permit, walked in the street without police permission, resisted attempts to disperse them, and as a result were met by repressive force. This led to an entirely new moment. This was reinforced a week later when 700 people got arrested under similar circumstances. The occupation itself was an act of defiance.’ Vitale pointed out that despite OWS’s emphasis on maintaining a tone of defiance, care had been taken not to allow a focus on the behaviour of the police to divert attention from opposition to the power of the banks and corporations. In the wake of the pepper spraying of protesters and the arrest of 700 on Brooklyn Bridge he and a friend had organized a demonstration against pohce mistreatment of protesters, not under the aegis of OWS, but in the name of New York labour leaders, intellectuals and artists. Even though the demonstration was not organized under the aegis of OWS, some Occupy activists opposed it on grounds that it might shift the focus of public debate. This, Vitale said, was the first and last demonstration connected with OWS that focused on the police. The widespread support for Occupy Wall Street was inspired by the occupation itself, a miniature society built on solidarity, equality and mutual care, as well as by the wide resonance of its protest against the concentration of wealth and power. General Assemblies were held virtually every day; anyone, whether or not living in the park, could take part. Decisions were made on the basis of a modified version of consensus process, requiring 90 per cent support for a proposal to be accepted. An elaborate set of hand motions were developed so that participants could express a range of responses to what was said by speakers without the interruption of applause. Since the occupation had no permit, the use of a megaphone was not legal. Since the first General Assembly, on 17 September, the ‘human mic’ had been used as a solution to the problem of gatherings far too large for the voices of facilitators or speakers to carry to their far reaches. The speaker or facilitator would express a thought and pause while those near enough to hear it would repeat it, in unison, so that the words would carry to those further back. The use of the human mic in particular, but more than that of the whole experience - the occupation, the consensus process, the sense that this was a movement in which everyone had a voice — was to create a very powerful sense of solidarity. Matt Presto, a young teacher and OWS activist, told me that General Assemblies have often had an almost unworldly flavour.^ I had experienced the same in General Assemblies at Occupy Oakland, usually held at dusk, for

70

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

maximum participation. Especially in a darkening outdoor setting, a General Assembly could feel like a taste of a different world. Occupations that popped up elsewhere tended to model themselves on Occupy Wall Street, adopting, along with the tactic of encampment, the General Assembly, some modified form of consensus process, the hand motions, the use of the human mic. These, together, became the signature of the movement. Each of these elements of Occupy’s collective identity also has its disadvantages. The human mic, if used consistently, makes meetings twice as long as they would be otherwise, promotes simple, declarative statements that can be repeated easily, and gives the impression of a unity of opinion that does not necessarily exist. Consensus process works well when there is a high degree of agreement but also enables a minority, even a very small minority, to block a position supported by the majority. If every decision has to be approved by a General Assembly, meetings are hkely to be long, tedious — and cold, if held outside, at dusk. The occupations themselves, while providing a glimpse of what a cooperative, non-consumerist society could be like, attracting media attention and making possible virtually 24 hour a day contact between occupiers and the pubhc, also led to problems. They attracted growing numbers of homeless people, to whom they offered greater safety than hfe on the streets, food, medical care and companionship. The presence of homeless people highlighted the social problems that Occupy was protesting. But homeless people also brought needs, and in some cases mental health problems, that strained the resources of the occupations and often introduced a level of conflict that protesters were not equipped to deal with. By the time the vast majority of occupations were closed down by local authorities, m the late fall of 2011, many political occupiers found their closure a relief. In the Bay Area, Occupy San Francisco (OSF) was formed soon after OWS. Among the initiators of OWS were activists who had participated in the anti-globalization movement and, in at least a few cases, also in the nonviolent direct action movement of the seventies and eighties; they recommended the use of the General Assembly, consensus process and a commitment to nonviolence, and these were adopted. An occupation established in San Francisco’s financial district became both a mobilizing point for demonstrations against San Francisco’s banks and major corporations, and a magnet for homeless people; soon OSF was providing hot meals for hundreds of people daily, funded by donations. Relatively amicable relations with the San Francisco City Council provided the basis for negotiations over conditions m the encampment. By the time OSF was closed down, on 7 December, it had become largely a homeless camp. Since the closure OSF

OCCUPY OAKLAND; THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

71

has continued to organize protests against major banks and corporations. It has demanded that Wells Fargo declare a moratorium on foreclosures and has won the support of the City Council. In April and May, in two separate actions, OSF activists briefly occupied abandoned buildings belonging to the city’s archdiocese, announcing that they planned to use them as havens for the homeless. Soon after the establishment of OSF word went out among Bay Area circles of mostly young radical activists that a more radical occupation was to be estabhshed in Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by OO activists, in reference to the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant, a young black man, by a policeman in 2009, and to the protests against police violence that had subsequently taken place at the plaza.^ The Oscar Grant protests had included groups of anarchists and other radicals, which boasted some degree of racial diversity, as well as groups of blacks. In the early days of OO, protest against police brutality was a major theme and General Assemblies were strikingly racially mixed. The Oakland police have a record of violence that is exceptional even at a time when police violence is a problem in many places; the main targets, in Oakland, have been young black men. A focus on police brutality made sense to OO activists who wanted to draw more blacks, as well as other people of colour, into the movement. But there has been a failure to distinguish between effective opposition to police brutality and angry outbursts at the police, a tendency, on the part of many Occupy activists, to equate the latter with radicalism and anti-racism, and to make the unwarranted assumption that such outbursts would find favour with Oakland’s black community. OO also drew on the recent protests against sharply nsing tuition in

California’s

public

universities,

especially the

wave

of university

building occupations that took place in 2009. Activists calling themselves Insurrectionary

Anarchists,

Insurrectionary

Communists,

or

simply

Insurrectionists, had played key roles in these occupations. At the time many other activists, some of them anarchists, some not, had questioned the focus on occupations, arguing that such actions were premature, likely to bring severe repression from the university authorities and cut short the growth of a student movement. But the Insurrectionists had a compelling tactic and their critics did not, so the occupations became the centre of the student movement. During the 2009-10 school year demonstrations against tuition increases, and occupations, took place on many campuses, especially California’s public universities where student fees were sharply increased. The student movement died down in the wake of severe repression of the occupations.

72

SOCIALIST MGISTER 2013

Insurrectionists played a major role in the formation of OO and have remained the dominant influence in the movement, although they are only one of a large number of groupings within OO. The Insurrectionists are closer to a social network of like-minded activists than an organization, and in this they are similar to other groupings within the movement. But they have influence beyond their numbers, due to their role in the formation and early days of OO and also their close ties with one another, based, in many cases, on their involvement in the earlier student occupations, and, for some, on experience in protests abroad, especially in Greece; some regard the 2009 anti-austerity riots in Athens as a model that they would hke to rephcate in the US. The influence of the Insurrectionists, in OO, also derives from the fact they have been the strongest voices for a highly confrontational pohtics, and for escalation; for many OO participants maintaining and increasing the radical tone of the movement is a high priority. An OO Insurrectionist told me that the aim of the Insurrectionists is to mobilize spectacular conflicts with the pohce. The purpose of such actions, he said, is not to defeat the pohce, which they reaHze cannot be accomphshed in this way, but to ‘send a smoke signal’ to those who would support the Insurrectionists’ revolt, in particular to gang members and street kids, in Oakland and elsewhere. He added that the Insurrectionist movement is split between social and anti-social wings. Social Insurrectionists are willing to join movements that include those of other political perspectives, and understand the problem as capitahsm, or, in some cases, industrial society, ■^riti-social Insurrectionists remain aloof from other movements,

and

understand the problem as society itself. Insurrectionism has had more influence in OO than in any other occupation, he said, because of the numbers of Insurrectionists m Oakland, and because most of them belong to the social wing. Elsewhere most Insurrectionists belong to the anti-social wing, and do not join movements like Occupy. Among the tenets of anarchism is a deep suspicion of the state and a strong preference for extra-parliamentary politics, but this does not necessarily entail a hostile attitude toward progressives who engage in electoral politics, or preclude a willingness to make demands upon and negotiate with organs of the state. Carwil Bjork-James told me that Occupy activists don’t want the movement drawn into electoral politics, but that most Occupy activists will vote. He told me that he doesn’t think that electoral politics is the means by which large-scale changes will take place in the US, but he recognizes that there are many people who want such changes who will not join Occupy. ‘If we can’t get them to occupy the streets this year’, he said, ‘I’d be happy if they could swing the election to the left.’ He added that not everyone m

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

73

Occupy is against making demands on the state.

Those of us who are occupying from within institutions, for instance those of us at CUNY, are making some pretty serious demands on public resources. The same goes for people facing student debt and foreclosures. If you want to make a difference in people’s lives, you have to make demands. But if we want to keep Occupy from becoming a support organization for reformist demands, we have to address the question of what our vision is — is it to keep tuition at the level it’s at, or are our demands connected to a broader vision, for the university as a whole, or for society as a whole? Whatever discomfort people have with the state, there’s close to universal support for more resources for pubhc services, for a politics of pubhc goods. There’s a crucial issue in the relation of anarchist activists to public institutions that’s been raised by Occupy. Those of us defending public institutions are simultaneously seeking to expand something currently under the aegis of the state and to shift power downward, in this case to faculty, students and adjuncts.® OO has from its inception been identified with a refusal to engage in contact with elected officials, including members of the Oakland city council, and progressive local politicians. On 15 October 2011, soon after the Oakland occupation had been estabhshed, a local coalition of left-liberal organizations held a march in protest against spending for war and cuts to social spending, and in favour of job creation. Plans for the march were initiated long before the occupation took place; it was to end with a rally at Frank Ogawa Plaza. In negotiations prior to the march OO agreed that the rally could take place at the Plaza as long as no elected officials spoke. At the rally a staff member of the progressive, antiwar Representative, Barbara Lee, read a message of support from her. Afterwards an OO activist mounted the flatbed truck being used as a platform and said that OO wants nothing to do with elected officials. Not long after this, the Oakland City Manager sent a letter to OO raising a number of issues having to do with health and safety in the encampment. The letter was discussed at a General Assembly; a debate took place about the question of whether OO should respond to a city official. About two thirds were in favour of responding to the letter; about a third opposed it. But majority support was not sufficient; the modified consensus process required 90 per cent. No letter of response was sent. Refusal to communicate with elected officials, even progressive ones, is driven by repeated experiences of betrayal on the part of Democratic Party candidates who make promises that they do not deliver; reluctance

74

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

to work with progressives who engage in electoral politics is driven by a view of electoral politics as a waste of time or worse and/or by the suspicion that progressives who engaged in electoral politics are out to co-opt radical movements. These two views tend to blend together; suspicion of elected officials extends to suspicion of those who engage in electoral politics, especially those who support Democratic Party candidates. The words ‘liberal’ or ‘middle class hberal’ and ‘reformist’ (and also ‘pacifist’) tend to be used as reproaches, and applied widely, often to people who would not describe themselves in these ways. In fact the group that organized the 15 October march had no intention of co-opting OO. The march drew many more people than the organizers had initially expected, because for many who were not prepared to join the occupation, the march was an opportunity to express support for it. There are grounds for the view, held by many young activists, anarchists and others, that the electoral system is broken and that, especially in the absence of more militant forms of protest, elections are not likely to bring about significant social change. But the results of elections nevertheless matter, and a suspicious attitude toward progressive groups that engage in electoral politics deprives OO of potential allies. Early on the morning of 25 October the Oakland police attacked the Oakland occupation and drove the occupiers out of the camp. That afternoon more than a thousand people, occupiers and supporters, gathered to protest the eviction and to try to retake the camp. The protesters engaged in little if any violence. The police used tear gas and beanbag projectiles, causing many injuries, including a skull fracture m the case of Scott Olsen, an occupier and Iraq ^iVar veteran. More than 100 people were arrested. A surge of public dismay at police violence and support for the occupiers prompted city authorities to allow the re-establishment of the occupation the following day. At a General Assembly of more than a thousand, attended by hundreds of supporters as well as occupiers, a ‘general strike’ (actually, a day of demonstrations, supported by a number of labour unions as well as the Alameda Central Labor Council) was overwhelmingly approved, including a blockade of the Port of Oakland; the local International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) chapter had sent word that it would" cooperate with a blockade if enough protesters were to picket the entrances. The General Strike, taking place a week later, on 2 November, brought out upwards of20,000 protesters, diverse in terms of race, age and occupation. Many working people took the day off to attend; this was especially the case among teachers, as many East Bay schools had let it be known that they would understand if teachers were to call m sick. As demonstrators marched to shut down the port an air of euphoria prevailed. It felt as if the

OCCUPY OAKLAND; THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

75

Bay Area left, long in the doldrums, was back. Protesters climbed to the top of cranes and danced. One sign read, simply, ‘Finally’. Other than an ‘anti¬ capitalist march’ in the mid-afternoon, during which some Wells Fargo and Whole Foods windows were broken, and graffiti was scrawled on walls, the demonstration was nonviolent. But in the evening, after the port had been closed and the great majority of protesters had gone home, many activists gathered at an abandoned building near the port, many dressed in black, with black masks. Some entered the building; others started a bonfire in the street. The police arrived, clashes ensued, and over a hundred were arrested. For some time the encampment remained and General Assemblies remained large. But conditions in the camp were growing more difficult as increasing numbers of homeless people moved in. On 10 November a man was fatally shot just outside the encampment. On 14 November police again evicted occupiers from the encampment. A vigd was estabhshed, and General Assemblies, smaller than in the past, continued to be held in the amphitheatre next to the grassy area where the encampment had been, but the occupation was not re-established. The focus of OO shifted to organizing demonstrations and to a series of organizing projects, including work with unions to support strikes, support for immigrant rights, opposition to school closures and efforts to stop foreclosures and evictions. Following the Black Bloc action on the evening of the General Strike a debate raged on the Internet, at General Assemblies, and ultimately, at a public event in an Oakland church, on 15 December, entitled ‘How Will the Walls Come Tumbling Down? Diversity of Tactics versus Nonviolence in the Occupy Movement’, at which eight activists presented their views before an overflowing audience.^ The framing of the question as a choice between ‘diversity of tactics’ and ‘nonviolence’ tended to confuse the discussion. In fact the issue was not whether the movement should employ diverse tactics or just one tactic - which no one suggested - but rather whether Black Bloc tactics, including those designed to provoke police violence, should be employed by the movement. The inclusion of such tactics has often been defended on the grounds that whatever violence follows need not affect demonstrators not engaged in these tactics, as long as they are some distance away from those employing Black Bloc tactics. The problem is that in the heat of a demonstration maintaining such divisions can be very difficult, and even when a Black Bloc action takes place at a different time, its association with the movement can taint the movement as a whole. In the debate within OO, supporters of ‘diversity of tactics’, meaning Black Bloc tactics, pointed out that breaking windows is violence against property, not against people, as if this point would demolish the critique from

76

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the supporters of nonviolence. And, unfortunately, it did. Starhawk, one of the speakers at the church debate, a leading activist in the nonviolent direct action movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and since then a nonviolence trainer, pointed out that nonviolence is strategically necessary if one wants to build a mass movement: most people will not attend demonstrations at which there is likely to be violence. Other than one comment from the audience, from another veteran of the nonviolent direct action movement, there was no further discussion of the implications of provoking police violence for attempts to build a mass movement. Many said that they were in favour of occupying vacant buildings, but opposed subsections of the movement calling and carrying out such actions in secret, without the knowledge and involvement of the rest of the movement. It was proposed that in the future such actions would be planned by OO as a whole. This seemed to satisfy the majority. The issue of provocative behaviour was not raised. My impression, m this discussion and others, is that for many OO activists, and for some in other Occupy movements as well. Black Bloc actions are associated with courage, with a wiUingness to take risks. In OO the Insurrectionists and others with similar views are most Hkely to participate in Black Bloc actions, but many others do as well. A Black Bloc action does not always involve breaking windows. Sometimes members of the Black Bloc position themselves in the front row of demonstrators, facing the pohce, so as to shield others. An Occupy activist in Southern California told me that he belongs to an affinity group that participates in Black Bloc actions and is committed to nonviolence. In OO, proposals that the Black Bloc be excluded from the movement have been emphatically rejected by the majority, who regard those who participate in Black Bloc actions as members of the movement, as much as anyone else. There is a widespread view that it is possible to criticize particular Black Bloc actions, but not to call for their elirmnation or for the exclusion of those who participate in them from the movement. And in fact many OO activists have participated iti Black Bloc actions at one time or another. I have never heard a discussion of the impact of Black Bloc actions on public support, except on the part of those perceived as marginal to OO. But I have heard the view expressed that the opposition to fighting with the police comes from middle-class liberals, or reformists, who in any event do not belong in the movement. On 12 December 2011, OO held a second port blockade, this one coinciding with blockades of ports elsewhere on the West Coast, and tied to support for an ILWU local in Longview, Washington, engaged in a battle with Export Grain Terminal (EGT), a company that imports grain and other raw materials. The involvement of Occupy with this struggle apparently

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

77

frightened EGT, which offered to negotiate; a contract was signed. In Oakland, the port shutdown drew around 12,000 demonstrators, a substantial number but many fewer than those drawn by the General Strike, the decrease in numbers due in part to ILWU opposition to the shutdown. Within OO it was argued that OO had the right to override ILWU opposition because the opposition was coming from union bureaucrats, or because the port was public property and Occupy represented the Bay Area movement for social change, or because ‘we are the 99 per cent’. All of these arguments reflected a degree of hubris. The next major Occupy demonstration, on 28 January 2012, was planned as an occupation of an abandoned building. A committee of OO was established to plan the action; the committee included many who were either Insurrectionists or sympathized with their perspective. The date was announced but other details, including the location of the building to be occupied, were kept secret, in what turned out to be a futile effort to prevent intervention by the police. On 28 January some 1500 to 2000 protesters were led through the streets of Oakland, eventually arriving at the Kaiser Convention Center, under construction and thus empty. Police guarded all of the doors to the Center. Minor scuffles took place and it seemed clear, to me at least, that both sides, protesters and police, were gearing up for a clash, and that the action would not be complete until this took place. I left, and later heard that the protesters were again led through the streets, in search of another building to occupy, leading to clashes between the police and the protesters. A ‘Fuck the Police march’ was announced; marches of this sort, in which insults are shouted at the police, were by this time taking place weekly. In the evening the police surrounded, and arrested, some 400 protesters. Most were released from prison early the next morning, but many of the arrestees, as well as others, were left asking what had gone wrong with the planning of the intended occupation, and with the movement.” Some in OO believe that the occupation of the Kaiser Center was planned to fail, so that there would be a clash with the police. It is hard to imagine that the police would not become aware of the target of such a widely publicized action. Furthermore if one wanted to successfully occupy a building, one would presumably send a small group to enter it quietly, without being noticed, before sending a thousand or more supporters. Since the closure of most of the occupations around the country in the latter part of November, the Occupy movement as a whole has lost momentum. In both OWS and OO, as in other local Occupy movements that survived the closure of their encampments, organizing projects took on prominence. O^Jt^S now has neighbourhood assemblies scattered

78

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

through the city, some with several hundred regular participants, and with a range of foci; a neighbourhood assembly in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, started by and consisting largely of Chinese and Latin American immigrants, addresses immigrant rights. Student organizing has also become an important focus for OWS activists. The State University of New York has announced sharp increases in student fees; Occupy activists, students and some faculty, have been mobilizing resistance. On 21 November an open hearing was held at Baruch College; some students got inside while others who demanded to be admitted were confronted by CUNY security and New York poHce. On 28 November, when a second meeting was held, the Baruch College campus was closed. The most concrete, and perhaps the most successful, of OWS’s organizing efforts has been that in relation to housing. OWS activists keep tabs on a municipal hst of forthcoming evictions, and the night before one is scheduled to take place, a message goes out on an anti-eviction phone tree. OWS activists gather at the location where the eviction is to take place and prevent marshals from entering. Some evictions have been prevented, at least temporarily, by this tactic. In order to stop foreclosures, OWS activists enter courts when foreclosed houses are to be auctioned and sing a song, ‘Mr. Auctioneer’, written, for this purpose, in the style of a gospel civil rights song, implonng the auctioneer to stop. This disrupts the sale; the speculators who are interested in buying protest but this usually leads to the sale being rescheduled by court officers, who are often sympathetic to the action. Typically the OWS activists are arrested, ticketed and released. OWS has a long list of projects m addition to these. OWS has also helped to inspire organizing projects that are not officially linked to OWS, such as efforts m Long Island, on the part of community activists working with local city councils, to establish community centres and other public projects. Occupy Oakland is also engaged in a number of organizing projects. There have been efforts to stop the closure of a number of Oakland schools; a protest march drew perhaps 5,000 people. OO, like OWS, planned a number of May Day demonstrations; both hoped that May Day would show that Occupy was back, and in both cases, the results were uncertain. In Oakland a rally was held in Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza, while an immigrant rights march set off from the barrio, which was to stop briefly at San Antonio Park, where it was to be met by an Occupy contingent; the plan was that the immigrant rights march would then continue on to join with Occupy. But there had been conflict about the question of whether a permit would be obtained. Many OO members are in principle against obtaining permits for marches and demonstrations. Immigrant rights activists, inside and outside

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

79

OO, pointed out that many immigrants are unwilling to participate in illegal marches. In the end a permit was obtained. But when the immigrant rights march reached San Antonio Park, most of the immigrants left the march. Whether due to the conflict over a permit or for other reasons, it was clear that there was little enthusiasm for joining an OO march. The most successful of OO’s organizing projects has been in relation to labour. The efforts of a number of OO activists were central to winning union endorsements of the General Strike; these endorsements were crucial to the massive mobilization that took place that day. The second port shutdown, on 12 December, highlighted OO’s willingness to mobilize its own membership in support of labour struggles. The OO labour support committee has also mobilized support for striking workers closer to home: a liquorice factory in Union City with mostly Latino workers, several of whom had asked OO for support, and others. Currently OO members are working for solidarity between bus drivers and riders around the issue of fare hikes. Neither the OWS nor the OO projects provide the foci for activist energy, momentum, or public visibility that was provided by the occupations. The Occupy movement as a whole faces the problem of any movement whose identity is tied to a tactic and an internal process rather than to a clearly defined goal: what to do when the tactic reaches its limits and the process loses its glow, when internal differences, or fatigue and declining numbers, call for more stable forms of organizing, a structure that does not presume unity, a clear goal or set of goals and a conception of how to reach them. OWS, OO and many other local Occupy movements have faced this problem since the closure of the encampments. OWS’s projects continue to involve considerable numbers of activists and its demonstrations, while nowhere near their earlier size, continue to draw significant numbers. OWS has maintained widespread public support. OO as well includes circles of committed activists pursuing promising organizing projects. But these are less visible to the public than OO’s recent demonstrations. To many who once enthusiastically participated in or supported OO, these demonstrations convey the impression that OO has become trapped in a no-win conflict with the Oakland police, and the eagerness to engage in clashes with the police appears juvenile. Some OO activists have suggested that the movement is reaching its end.’^ My guess is that in New York and in Oakland, and no doubt elsewhere as well, the Occupy framework will recede while projects and networks of activists formed within it will continue to function. OWS leaves not only circles of activists engaged in projects but also a positive afterglow, a large periphery of former participants

80

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

inspired by their experience and presumably looking forward to the reemergence of mass protest. OO leaves a residue of former participants who have distanced themselves from the movement, many of whom no doubt feel a bit burned by their experience. CONCLUSION The gap between the wealth and power of those on the top and everyone else continues to widen. Sooner or later, probably sooner, there will be another upsurge of protest, and anarchism will undoubtedly play a major role in shaping its politics. The question is: what kind of anarchism? The anarchist vision of an egahtarian, decentrahzed society, with no state serving as central authority, leaves open the question of strategy. There are many activists in OO, including anarchists, who are critical of the Insurrectionists. Nevertheless Insurrectionism and other closely related ultra¬ left currents are the most talked about versions of anarchism; confrontational tactics are hard to ignore. Insurrectionism has attracted considerable interest from among the newest generation of anarchists; older generations tend to be more sceptical. The Insurrectionist strategy is associated with ‘propaganda of the deed , that is, with the promotion of spectacular challenges to authority on the part of small groups of mihtants, in the expectation that such actions win inspire others to rise up in revolt. Many anarchists and anti-authoritarian activists argue, however, that a politics that hinges on the super-mihtant actions of a few is imphcitly hierarchical, or vanguardist, and not consonant with the principles of anarchism. It is my impression that the influence of Insurrectionism among OO activists has less to do with Insurrectionist strategy than with the appeal of a highly confrontational pofltics. In the early days of OO several activists whom I spoke with described OO as the most radical occupation in the country. Asked what made OO the most radical, each of them said, ‘OO is against the police, against the state, and is unwilling to renounce violence’. They pointed out that police were not allowed into the encampment and that OO refused contact with any representatives of the state. Though for several months OO had substantial public support, and attracted many participants whom many would no doubt regard as mainstream liberals, OO s core constituency consists of Bay Area radical activists and in particular Oakland s anarchist-oriented, counter-cultural youth population. I think that the appeal of a highly confrontational politics mostly has to do with the desperate situation of a generation of young people. In recent years Oakland has become a magnet for young people with a deep sense of alienation fiom mainstream culture and politics and, in many cases, an

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

81

orientation toward anarchist politics. These circles are mostly white but more interracial than has in the past usually been the case among young anarchists. The economic crisis of 2008 and the austerity measures that have followed, including skyrocketing tuition and the scarcity of jobs, have hit young people hard, leaving many with few options and considerable scorn for the mainstream and also for anyone who hopes to bring about change through established channels. The frequently violent behavior of the Oakland police and frustration with the compromises and failures of Democratic politicians, on the local and national level, contribute to a politics built on impatience with the system. OO’s radical edge was a major element in its appeal, especially in its early months, when it managed to blend militancy with outreach and inclusiveness. But over time the outreach and inclusiveness were lost. The question of violence is key to the prospect of building a mass movement for social change, and also of inspiring broad public support. Few people are willing to join a movement that is hkely to expose them to violence; most people find nonviolence much more inspiring than scenes of violent conflict. Traditionally the term nonviolence has meant an absolute avoidance of violence against humans (and for many, other living creatures). Violence against property can be part of nonviolent politics, if it sends a message that is crucial to making a political point — such as damaging a nuclear missile. Nonviolence has also meant establishing whatever communication is possible with one’s opponents and, toward that end, maintaining a bearing of dignity and restraint. Nonviolence is tied to prefigurative politics, the effort to exemplify the values that one hopes will hold sway in a better society. Nonviolence, in this sense, is not always possible or advisable. But tactics that are certain to lead to clashes with the police cannot be described as part of a nonviolent pohtics. Most Occupy movements understood that adhering to nonviolence is necessary to sustaining the movement itself and public support for it. But there is a failure to go beyond this and argue that provocative actions generally should be excluded from the repertoire of the left. My concern with OO, and with the radical left in the US as a whole, is that it has been so long since we have been able to achieve any concrete goals that radical activism has ceased to be oriented in this direction. The aim of radical movements has come to be understood as resistance rather than social change. The two follow different logics. Resistance, measured by the intensity of opposition, calls for drama, performance, spectacle; change, measured by what opposition accomplishes, calls for thinking about how to get from where we are to the society that we want, or at least to one that is

82

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

more livable and sustainable than the present. It seems to me that the latter question deserves more attention than it gets from the radical left. NOTES I would like to thank the editors of The Socialist Register for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as Matt Edwards, Sasha Lilley, Ona Stonkus, Jack Stuart and Eddie Yuen. 1

David Graeber, ‘Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots’, Aljazeera, 30 November 2011, available at http://www.aljazeera.com.

2

I owe this point to Mike Menzer, one of the organizers of the planned antiWaU Street protest in 2001, and an OWS activist. Interview, New York City, 10 May 2012.

3

Interview with Marina Sitrin, New York, 7 May 2012. For an account of the first two months of Occupy Wall Street, see Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America, Chicago; Haymarket Books, 2011.

4

Interview with Carwil Bjork-James, New York, 8 May 2012. See also Carwil Bjork-James, ‘Debating Tactics: Remember to Ask, “What Works?’’’, available at http://www.jadahyya.com.

5

Interview with Alex Vitale, New York, 9 May 2012.

6

Interview with Matt Presto, New York, 9 May 2012.

7

Many of the OO activists whom I interviewed were reluctant to be quoted by name due to concerns about security and/or the possibility that their comments might further inflame differences within the movement. I have therefore decided not to identify any of my OO interviewees by name.

8

Interview with Carwil Bjork-James, 8 May 2012.

9

An audio recording of this event is available at http;//www.radioproject.org.

10

In the weeks before 12 December, the question of whether OO should call for a shutdown, despite the opposition of the ILWU, was debated. See Cal Winslow, ‘Who’s Speaking for Whom? The Case of Occupy and the Longshoremen’s Union’, Counterpunch, 5 December 2011, available at http;// ivww.counterpunch.org; see also Oakland Commune, ‘Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts’, 7 December 2011, available at http:// ivww.bayofrage.com.

11

This moment of disorientation and reflection was well represented online by both OO participants and observers. See, among others, ‘The Visible Committee and Insurrectionary Vanguardism: An Open Letter to the Broader Occupy Community Regarding Occupy Oakland From a Small Group of Oakland Radicals’, available at http://hbcom.org; Marc Soloman, ‘Occupy Reality. Flow Oversocialization and Feelings of Inferiority Cripple Bay Area Occupations’, and Osha Neumann, ‘Occupy Oakland: Are We Being Childish?’, both in Counterpunch, 3-5 February 2012, available at http://www. counterpunch.org. See also ‘Santa Rita, I Hate Every Inch of You’, as weU as ‘Building the Red Army: The Death and Forbidden Rebirth of the Oakland

OCCUPY OAKLAND: THE QUESTION OE VIOLENCE

83

Commune’, both available at http://viewpointmag.com. Note that ‘The Visible Committee’ is a reference to a text widely read by Insurrectionists and others with similar views, by a group calling itself ‘The Invisible Committee’, The Coming Insurrection, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009, originally published as L’insurrection qui vient, Paris: Editions La Fabrique, 2007. 12

Josh Healy, ‘Occupy Oakland at a Crossroads: Rebirth or Self-Destruction?’, available at http://oaklandlocal.com.

13

See, for instance, ‘Occupy Oakland is Dead’, available at http://libcom.org.

OCCUPY LENIN MIMMO PORCARO

I

I n his History of the First Republic Aureho Lepre offers us a particularly interesting observation on the metamorphosis of the idea of revolution

in postwar Italy: ‘The myth of the revolution that spread in the immediate postwar period and was consolidated m the next two decades had a very unique character. The dream was of a revolution that occurred through external stimulus (the collapse of “imperiahstic capitalism”, or the final peaceful affirmation of the Soviet model) and not at the price of a third world war and civil war. A projection of this dream was the enormous consensus enjoyed, even at a mass level, of the theory of an irremediable crisis of the capitalist world, which, it was believed, could be delayed but not avoided. This allowed people to consider achievable, due to the force of historic processes, an objective that people did not want to give up but which, in concrete terms, seemed unreachable through any shortcut’.' Lepre adds that the very myth of Stalin actually had, in this sense, a tranquilizing effect. So much so that Elio Vittorini could counterpose the wise graduahsm of the Georgian ‘little father’ to the extreme revolutionary ngour ofLenin.^ That a strong evolutionism has been the protective, albeit veiled, deity of almost all anti-capitalist strategies for much of the twentieth century is hard to deny. Whether associated with working-class counter-power, progressive (and later participatory) democracy or the social economy, all these in their way presupposed a capitalism that tended by its very nature to die out, either from the slow-working poison of a historic crisis or because it is undermined by the new relations and new subjects that its own development is compelled to create. A similar commonality of strategies, moreover, is ironically made evident by the subtle nexus that ties the moderate Stalinism of post-1945 communists to today s hyper-democratic arguments for the multitude. However different otherwise, both of these reflected their temporal location within a long phase of the development of capitalism. In both cases, the

OCCUPY LENIN

85

subject of revolutionary transformation is not affirmed in the precipitation of the crisis (even if it is articulated over time) but in the development of the forces of production: in the first case, science, centralized production and the working class; in the second case, communication, social cooperation and the knowledge proletariat. In both, faced with the growing socialization of production, capitalism seems to become a mere formal shell. One can delude oneself that it is enough to be situated at the highest point of that sociahzation (the state for some, horizontal cooperation for others) to be able to live with capitalism itself, enucleating communistic social relations from within, working toward a progressive and definitive affirmation of what already exists. This abstract analogy, however, ends here. As leader of the Italian Communist Party, Toghatti knew that this evolution had to be accompanied by the construction of political, cultural and associative institutions totally different from those created by capital: the mass party, popular organizations and red municipalities. In Italy, we have long lived off this heritage and these structures, though duly criticizing their premises and results. The theorists of the multitude instead think that the latter is already carrying out communist cooperation. For them, there is no need of institutions other than those in which the multitude already produces and lives. We only need a universal guaranteed income to be able to do without capitalism.^ Therefore no revolution, not even evolution: just a revealing of the fact that the productive community has already absorbed within it all the powers of capital itself Too bad for this theory that in the meanwhile capital has seized for itself, in the most extreme way, all the basic conditions of production and of social reproduction. More

recently,

in

the

European

version

of the

thinking

called

‘altermondialist’ evolutionism has become all but complete.'^ The Latin American variant - as seen not only in the ‘another world is possible’ theme of the World Social Forums inaugurated there to counter globalization but also in specific articulations of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ - has sometimes exhibited quite different characteristics. The general theory of altermondialism, explicitly or implicitly, has had some success in guiding initiatives in Europe over the last decade. It presumes that capitalism works in favour of its antagonists, although with injustice and its own peculiar market disequilibria, because it in fact transcends the territorial and institutional boundaries of the nation-state and thus makes possible a transformation that has at once a global and a social dimension. Altermondialist theory assumes that the overcoming of nation-states, although it creates many problems in the beginning for the popular classes, nonetheless represents progress. Going beyond the nation-state is thought to make liberation from the restricted.

86

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

politicist and authoritarian form of state socialism possible, thus favouring a new alternative to capitalism, directly and immediately self-organized, social and global. The theory therefore assumes that society contains within itself the forces for organizing hfe independently of capital and of the state, and that, instead of the conquest of pohtical power, what should be pursued is the cumulative growth of society’s own potentialities. It thus envisions the progressive emptying out of the power of capital and of the state. All these assumptions contribute to the conclusion that there is no need for a different kind of ownership of the principal means of production or the creation of a new leadership of the state: capitalism will be substituted little by little by an associative economy, and its state will be replaced by the growth of selforganized democracy. There is no need of an anticipatory theory or of an organic project of an alternative society: everything will be resolved by the convergence of concrete experiences. And, finally, there is no need, even occasionally, to unify social forces in order to achieve determinate objectives, variable in different phases: the fundamental objective is the growth of the movement itself. This theory is not at all without some merit. But, due to its refusal to tackle the question of the construction of a state and an organic model of production for tomorrow, it is, paradoxically, dependent on the strategies of today’s capital and of today’s state and remains caught up in the practices of governance. In proposing partial and insufficient economic alternatives, it fails to understand the meaning and seriousness of the present crisis and of the significance and direction of the new popular revolts that the crisis has already produced. The following brief thoughts contend that the current crisis has now made outdated this kind evolutionary vision’ of the overcoming of capitalism, of the construction of a possible world’ which held sway, in variant versions, up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. II The crisis thus rings in, once again, the hour of Lenin. And the real dividing line is in fact the crisis: if its eruption brings us back to Marx, its momentary solution’ brings us to Lenin. That is, it brings us to the need to put classes, their struggle and the state at the centre of analysis and to imagine a social alternative that can no longer be just a corrective for the deeply ingrained present but which has to offer itself as a break with it, without dodging the responsibility of proposing a new and coherent mode of production. In fact, it is impossible to comprehend the reactionary form of the responses given to the crisis (greater centralization of capital, greater power of capitalists over the state, the intensification of exploitation and of the plunder of

OCCUPY LENIN

87

social and natural resources) if reality is analysed only in terms of‘objective processes’ and not also in terms of classes. It is not enough to speak of globalization and of crisis without also indicating (as the young Lenin put it in analyzing Russia’s capitalist development) precisely which class manages this process, precisely which class can oppose such a management and what different social order has to be built in order to make such an opposition effective. It is the fact that the classes responsible for the crisis remain firmly in power that generates reactionary responses; it is the greater hold of these classes on the state that makes such responses possible; and it will only be the expropriation of these classes and the conquest (and transformation) of the state at the hands of the opposed classes that will make possible both the beginning of alternative economic pohcies and the beginning of a diverse social order. Reform of the financial markets, the redefinition of enterprise structures, expansive fiscal policies, progressive industrial policies, the social and environmental reconversion of production — aU these and other sensible proposals become no more than agreeable notions if not cop-outs if they are not linked to the denunciation of the classes that make them impossible. But this also requires the identification of the classes which, by contrast, could make them possible, and the determining of the steps necessary for the conquest of the state and of the particular form that the state would have to assume to be able to serve the new purposes. From now on, therefore, the goal of the popular movements’ politics becomes twofold. On the one hand, popular grassroots institutions need to be developed. Forms of self-organization and of direct and/or participatory democracy need to grow. On the other hand, there must be coordinated action,

articulated in steps

and phases,

aimed at the

conquest and

redetermination of state power. On the one hand, a linear and cumulative time for the progressive growth of popular self-organized subjectivity; on the other hand, discontinuous and changeable time for intervention in the political conjuncture. On the one hand, cooperative action; on the other, strategic action. Without one you cannot have the other. Without the first, there is no accumulation of the knowledge of relations and of forces that allows the conquest and transformation of the state and of production, and there are no autonomous popular institutions, which, keeping their distance from the state, may influence it and transform it without reducing socialist politics to statism. Without the second there are no political, juridical and economic resources allowing popular institutions to construct a new social order and, before that, to survive the crisis.

88

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

III You may say that class and the state are not what they once were, and this is true. Class today is also intellectual work; it is a mass made of diverse fractions (but this is what it already was for Lenin); above all, class is not always the prism through which workers can best express their pohtical potential. And the state is no longer enclosed within the usual institutional and national borders. ‘Seizing’ the state is not equal to ‘making’ communism (Lenin knew this too), but most importantly involves an articulated strategy that is able to discern the different points (institutional and social, pubHc and private) at which stateness is wielded and is shifted, and able immediately to determine a new supranational space in which to bring a new stateness into existence. But without a class analysis (and struggle) and without the state it is impossible to go anywhere. The behaviour of the dominant classes illustrates this well. They too are quite different from their antecedents and also fragmented, but they are capable of ‘creating a bloc’ during the crisis, focusing precisely on the state as the final guarantor of their survival. The return of the problem, previously repressed or mitigated, of classes and state power, reminds us again that the overcoming of capitafrsm (that is, communism, or rather its concretely possible form, which is socialism) does not occur through evolution, but by rupture (or, better, through a series of ruptures, among which are those involving power and the form of the state). It reminds us that this overcoming does not occur by developing the potential of the given situation but by constructing a situation that does not yet exist. To effect such a rupture, or series of ruptures, certain things are necessary whose traces have long been lost: i) the determination of a precise goal, or rather of a concrete form of socialism, which takes account of the specific characteristics of every social formation; ii) the precise analysis of the concrete and variable situations, which in turn involves the relations among all the classes and between them and the state; hi) the determination of a tactic that could in each instance reunify the heterogeneous anti-capitalist forces, making them converge in the variable objectives that from time to time are seen to be decisive; iv) the precise analysis of the global context in which this tactic is carried out, and thus of the supranational space in which it can best be pursued; v) the construction (and continual reconstruction) of a unitary political subject that may guide this whole process. To face these problems it is inevitable that we turn to Lenin. IV Turn to Lenin, not to Leninism , which is a series of apparently cohesive and definitive theses (that is, embalmed and thus not Leninist) on imperialism.

OCCUPY LENIN

89

communism, dictatorship of the proletariat and party. Certainly, Lenin cannot be contemplated outside the field to which these theses belong, which is that of revolution. But what should interest us more, now, is not this or that thesis but the way in which each of them was produced. What should interest us is a style of thinking and action, a style that can be summed up as continuous and constant change in relation to the given situation. Lenin is the continuous redefinition of the given situation on the basis of the dynamic of the class struggle and of the spaces which open up from time to time, or which become closed, to the activism of the popular movement. Lenin is the minute attention to singularity, to the unrepeatabihty of each historic moment, to getting a concrete hold on an unprecedented condition, and thus to the constant mutation of the objective situation and of the subjects that act within it. Lenin, therefore, is a continuous movement of rupture in the face of convictions, of political lines and of organizational forms, which, having matured in a preceding situation, tend by inertia to repeat their problems and solutions and therefore to remain prisoners of the old class relations. This is the fundamental core of the concept of party (and therefore of communist politics) in Lenin: not the idea (received from Kautsky) through which the party is theory, therefore science and therefore a place of truth against empiricism and the illusions of the movements, but the idea of a politics that continually shifts the more simple and direct reactions of the movements and of the party itself raising them to the level at which it is possible to understand the reciprocal relations among all the classes and between all the classes and the state and therefore to understand the continuous change of these relations — for a communist goal, which, just because it is not a simple ideal, but a precise idea of a renewed society, is always itself subject to incessant redefinition. V In western capitalist society the most important change in relation to the preceding situation has been the passage from an ‘inclusive capitalism’, which redistributed the crumbs of its own profits (even if by now only in the precarious form of an insane consumer debt), to a ‘zero-sum capitalism’ in which the gains of the one are the loss of the other, that is, in which profits are secured either by further wage compression or (and increasingly) by the plunder of resources formerly distributed to workers through the social state. One cannot insist too much on the existence and importance of this shift which completely changes the scenario during which the activist generations (who remain political actors today) grew up, fonned their own convictions and defined their own interests and values. The change, even if gradual.

90

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

uncertain and slow (but in reality often clear-cut and bold) is such as to make increasingly less effective even the most diffuse, broad, detailed and refined system of control - much more diffuse, broad, detailed and refined than the nckety apparatus of guaranteed consensus between parties, unions and the state — which is the dazzhng and nonstop spectacle of commodities of which we have all been spectators for decades now. The lure of hyper-consumerism can coexist with bogus opulence but not with real immiseration; it becomes ineffective when those who are used to desiring everything find themselves able to own nothing. The fundamental mechanism of mass consensus in western society is beginning to crack at its very base. The divorce between consumers and commodities will further intensify the acceleration of the detaching of masses from parties and thus masses from the state, which is the true, profound novelty of this phase. This will make it easier to engage in a new politics without being constrained to reach people by acting in a space already firmly guarded by the large party and union organizations. No longer will it be enough to add the word ‘more’ to the mobilizations managed by others in this new context of mass detachment from the old institutions. Unprecedented conflicts among populations, often outside the traditional organizations, will inevitably be marked, in the beginning, by strong popuhst features. These conflicts will be exhibited in discontinuous explosive processes, ever more disorderly and tending to violence. This is not to say that aU conflicts will take this form or that all will immediately be so extreme. However, it is certain that only struggles of this kind will be up to the situation and that they can be interpreted and transformed only by the person who is able to propose both immediately unifying goals and future perspectives capable of responding to all the problems of a nation or of a supranational space. VI It is no longer a question, let us be clear, of a strategy which Gramsci associated in the western societies with the conquest of the sturdy ‘system of fortresses and earthworks’ of civil society beyond the state: these (the schools, the welfare apparatuses, cultural production, but also the factories and the working-class neighbourhoods) we already penetrated and sometimes even conquered in the 1970s.^ Our adversaries’ answer was first of all to destroy them, flushing us out to stand on new and exposed terrain, then inundating this terrain, miring us more than Napoleon at Waterloo. And finally^ thus mired and immobilized, they began to fire at us at point-blank range. Metaphors aside, the fortresses (or rather the ‘horizontal’ institutions of the state and the large structures of production and of social reproduction) have been disarticulated or dissolved by privatization, by flexibility, by decentrahzation.

OCCUPY LENIN

91

by the transformation of all cultural production into a capitalist enterprise. In fact, even if born as a means of discipline, the fortresses had shown that they could become places in which workers could, though perilously, assemble in a stable way, protecting themselves from the market and inventing new relationships. After the 1970s, the task of control was entrusted no longer to stable institutions, but to the seemingly ungovernable flows of finance, of commodities, of imagery, aU routed to the global network of communication. This is indeed a net in which today a large part of social intelligence is mired, in so far as it is believed that the partially free and equal relations (in reality mediated by communication enterprises), which have been established in the web, can compensate for the increase in real inequalities, or when a commitment to thought is substituted by the brief comment, by the constant changing of the subject, by binary logic (I like it/I don’t like it), which communication itself, in so far as it is a moment of the circulation of commodities, and thus of capital, necessarily imposes. This cannot be properly appreciated without comparing two models of revolution which have had wide currency, not least in Italy. The first results from a gradualist interpretation of Gramsci’s valid observation on the importance in capitalism of the management of ‘intermediary institutions’, different from state power but directly connected to it; schools, cultural and religious apparatuses, social reproduction structures and also factories (understood as loci of socialization) are intermediary structures that have to be conquered in a long ‘war of position’, before being able to conquer the ‘headquarters’, that is state power and political power of the state as a whole. In the gradualist interpretation the conquest of intermediary institutions substitutes for the conquest of political power through the state. The second model is that of post-Fordism and the so-called ‘liquid society’, according to which aU social relations are mobile and diffused throughout the whole society in the same way, without any one of these relations occupying a dominant position in respect to the others, and consequently the problem of conquering the headquarters is thought to be completely obviated by the fact that the headquarters does not exist, with power being evenly spread through the whole society. In my opinion, today the ‘war of position’ has been displaced by the ‘war of movement’, and the appearance of a liquid society governed by ‘flows’ is vanishing in the face of the ever more visible solid reality of institutions (governments, supranational agencies and corporations) which decide humanity’s destiny. With the worsening of the crisis, not even the ‘flows’ are enough to guarantee control; and thus the dominant classes have taken in hand the never really abandoned old instruments of economic coercion and of authoritarian

92

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

political decision-making, adapting them to the changed general conditions. Those who have interpreted the advent of the ‘flows’ as the beginning of the dissolution of power are way off the mark, for these flows are brought forth by terribly solid entities capable of thought and strategy: the ‘vertical’ apparatuses of the state (made still more effective by their supranational dislocation) and the big corporations. And today the governments, the supranational agencies and the corporations, though continuing to manage the soft power of ‘flows’, are further modifying the relations among classes and those among the diverse areas of capitahsm, having recourse, but now without restraints, to hard power, that is, to the heavy weapons of economic blackmail and of political force, which can by now skip the bothersome social mediations, appealing (in a framework of formal respect for democracy) to the constraints of the world market and its institutions. The so-called ‘flows’ thus are seen to have been only a preparation for the use offeree: the joint use of economic blackmail and of political force — which is force not because it is, at a given moment, violent but because it cannot be called into question — increasingly becomes the preferred form of action of the dominant classes in the era of crisis, and the refined procedures invented in the twentieth century to induce individuals into voluntary submission are giving way to the direct exercise of power. It is therefore not the fortresses of civil society that must be taken, nor can we delude ourselves that we can reach communism by navigating in capitalism’s flows. Rather it is the general headquarters of capital and the state that must be seized; it is to these that we have to get near, through steps and phases; it is against these that the volatile, changeable, disorderly reality of the future (though in reality already present) popular movements has to be aggregated each time. It is in the rupture (however uncertain, however partial, however reversible) of the relation between the masses and the state, in the need to converge against the enemy’s general headquarters (or rather against the point at which at a given moment the plurality of centres of enemy power is condensed), in the consequent need to propose a different social order, that the hour of Lenin, as we said at the beginning, is sounding again. But it is not, strictly speaking, either a return of Lenin to us or our return to Leninism. It is rather a return of that which we will call a ‘Lenin moment’, by analogy with the ‘Minsky moment’ that designates, with the name of the economist who predicted it, the inevitable and endogenous recurrent explosions of capitalist financial crises. It is the moment in which Lenin always acted, in the convulsive events of the two Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917) - a moment in which the state shows its own deep nature, all the previous beliefs of the popular movement are

OCCUPY LENIN

93

shaken, all the preceding alignments are redefined and in which the political subjects of the movement, if they want to be up to the challenge of the situation, have to radically change their ideas and style of intervention. But it is a moment, which we are obliged to face without Lenin, and this for at least three kinds of reasons. VII The return of the ‘Lenin moment’ is occurring in the absence (at times temporary, at times definitive) of many of the conditions present in the time of the Bolshevik leader. One could rather say — but this is no place to argue it — that all the single answers given by Lenin on the questions of imperialism — class, the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism - are no longer satisfactory. But we also have to add that aU of Lenin’s questions are stiU decisive and unavoidable: what global contradictions are opening up in the unequal development of capitalism, and how is it possible to use them? What alliance should be built among the different fractions of labour and between them and all the social strata hit in different ways by capitalism? How do we break the pohtical power of the dominant classes, and how do we build a new state that is also, and immediately, a ‘non-state’? And so forth. Among many other questions, there is a return to the question of the party. The fundamental demand of Lenin, in this respect, is to always differentiate between two modalities of popular and class struggle: one that remains within the logic of the reproduction of capital and the other which builds the organizational, cultural and political conditions to get out of it. Granted that Lenin’s response lies in counterposing organization to ‘bad’ spontaneity (though the theses of What Is To Be Done? are on this point infinitely richer), so that one can reasonably maintain that this response is today, as we often hear, ‘outdated’ (because the very ‘organization’, that is, the party, has all too often given a poor account of itself, because frequently non-party movements have shown more intelligence than party secretaries, because the functions which in the twentieth century only lay with the party are distnbuted today - almost as in the nineteenth century - among diverse and autonomous ‘movement institutions’). However, it is not possible to consider outdated the problem of distinguishing among the different forms of class and popular action and of selecting and generalizing those that are most appropriate. On the contrary, today it is especially necessary to struggle against the forms that still are asking for ‘good’ globalization, for a ‘good’ Europe, the ‘regulation’ of the financial market (as if it were possible to stop a tsunami with a dike made of straw) and so forth, and it is particularly necessary to effect a break

94

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

with the strategies which arose before the crisis. But this break no longer is between movement and party, between experience and theory, between spontaneity and organization, but across each of these poles, including party, and it can be brought to light today by a party, tomorrow by a movement, the day after tomorrow by a media net, on condition that in the parties, in the movement and in the ‘nets’ there are pohtical-intellectual groups of active workers, who are capable of leadership within a given conjuncture, that is, capable of performing what we might call the ‘Lenin function’. VIII And with this we come to a second reason why we are without Lenin. This is the fact that no Lenin exists now, and still more, that there are no groups which can perform the ‘Lenin function’. That there is no Lenin is not the most serious thing, even if we should not underestimate the role of personality in history, if for no other reason than the vast experience with the tragic effects of negative personalities. What is serious is that there are no political-intellectual groups capable of substituting for Lenin, or rather of being up to the new situation. But then this is partly inevitable: the leadership groups now active were formed in the previous period, that of evolutionism, of accommodation, of poetic declamation and prosaic practice, of fatuity and muddling through, of pluralism conceived not as a method to produce determinate ideas, but as an indeterminate mass of contradictory affirmations. Above all, these were years in which the ideology of communication substituted the commitment to thinking, and every new notion, as soon as it was put forward, instead of becoming the object of analytical elaboration, became information, input for the net, a currency with which to enter this or that environment, a jargon of reciprocal recognition, the sign of some specialization to be jealously guarded; years in which to say something, just to communicate it, seemed to absolve one from the task of doing it, of putting it to the test in a common and organized practice, of modifying it on the basis of experience. Years of communication - and not of political work. Our times are pressing us to take things seriously, because by now what’s at stake is our political existence and, maybe, not just that. And they compel us to form political-intellectual groups united by a common analysis of national and international problems, strengthened by a concrete and detailed project, of experts in all fields of knowledge, who can navigate all languages. And, as a consequence of all this, linked to each other by deep solidarity. Let’s be clear: we are not expecting heroes and heroines. It would be enough to get back the mentality of an honest communist or socialist militant of the 1970s: to be convinced by the fact that politics is the reahzation of an idea of justice

OCCUPY LENIN

95

and equality; that the realization of this idea can realistically be deferred in time, but that in every situation one has to do everything possible to get closer to it; that there needs to be substantial personal coherence; that to do politics one needs to study and to work; that in doing politics one should not enrich oneself or, at any rate, elevate oneself above one’s own class. Is this too much? Luckily no: many among us are already like this, many will be compelled by reality, besides being compelled by their own conscience, to conform to this sober model of activism; many young people wiU enter politics in this mode. However, to form leadership groups useful for this purpose these new or renewed activists need to be unified through a great subjective effort, in some respects Jacobin, and it has to be understood that groups of this kind, in order constantly to work out the strong ideas needed today, while obviously being open to discussions with aU, have also to be relatively tightknit. They have to be formed, in the beginning, more by selection than by election, and they have to acquire the will to make their own theses win the day. They may in certain phases split and disband, but they must nevertheless be in a position to ‘create a bloc’, especially in moments of crisis. Sound ideas are generally constructed and affirmed through such a process. There should be no fear of creating little sects, germs perhaps of oligarchic or semi-authoritarian regression - first of all because we are not speaking here of one sole group (in fact there is not one way only of telling the truth), but of different groups in cooperation and competition among themselves; and then also because every group does not necessarily found or regenerate a party, but rather has to gather members of diverse movement institutions; and next because the party would not in any case be the only political subject of the popular movement; and finally because the goal of each of these groups will have to be a pluralist socialism. Once the idea is accepted that the popular movement — and the society it is moving toward — has to be pluralist, then the cohesion of the groups constitutive of this pluralism, and their unequivocal commitment to a common direction, can only frighten those who confuse the dialectic of ideas with postmodern (and thus by now archaic) indifference to truth. IX And, finally, Lenin is always at the same time ‘without Lenin’. That is, he always acts without the conditions of his acting being guaranteed - the ‘Lenin function’, precisely because it continually detaches itself from the preceding situation, consists in negating the validity of the given political forms and thus in the incessant reconstruction of new ones, which are themselves always

96

SOCIALIST MGISTER 2013

transitory. The myth of the rock-like compactness of the Bolshevik party is, precisely, a myth: in all of the crucial moments of his activity, Lenin is ‘alone’ and in the minority, is often taken to be almost mad, is a menace for all those who stay on well-trodden paths. This presumed theoretician of ‘absolute politics’, this great builder of centrahzed and efficient pohtical machines, is in reahty also the greatest ‘dissolver’ of political forms with the aim of building better conditions for popular emancipation; in this sense he is the best critic of politics, exactly because he never defends any pohtical solution for its own sake, does not ever ‘accommodate’ himself to any of the organizations that he himself has built, nor gains any sort of personal position, but rather judges everything in terms of the requirements of popular emancipation — as witnessed by the ferocious, and often very ferocious, darts he throws at his own party, and against the very ‘proletarian’ state. For this reason we could say that all of our reflections on the form of pohtics, all our sacrosanct concern to avoid the means corrupting the end, and thus all of the necessary distancing from many of the individual ideas of Lenin on the party, on the soviets, on the proletarian dictatorship, will not achieve their purpose if they do not take up, on this point, Lenin’s style, if they do not lead to an understanding that any political form can be captured by the adversary and that even the most democratic of organizations can be transformed into its opposite when it remains a prisoner of the situation it has created - just as has happened today to the ‘democracy of the movement’ bom in Seattle, Porto Alegre and Genoa: a formidable element of the aggregation of new political subjects, a centre of expenmentation of that management of multiplicity which has become an irreversible gain for all popular movements, but up till now unable to go beyond its class hrmts, which can be summed up as being, notwithstanding significant exceptions, a movement of the ‘educated’, skilled segment of the people and not of the whole of the popular sectors, a movement for the negotiation of liberated spaces within a system that today must, on the contrary, be completely overturned, a movement that resolves everything through participation while most people no longer have the time and the resources to participate in anything. X These then are the reasons that lead us to say that even without Lenin his hour is being rung out aneM^ Thinkers of the Black Book of Communism sort will deny this evidence or consider it a herald of tragedy, but we are not dealing with them here.^ From the modernizers - as from what the Italian poet Eugenio Montale called the ‘squeaking mud’ produced by the ‘literary ultra-avant-garde’ - will arise the usual caw: ‘too old!’, ‘we need new air!’

OCCUPY LENIN

97

and similar banalities. To them we say, once and for all, that the opposition between old and new has no value — cognitive, political or ethical. On the contrary, since the continuous creation of new products serves to prop up a system based on old social relations, we should also say that today innovation is a form of reaction. But let’s put aside this talk. It is enough for us to say that what truly should interest us is neither the new nor the old, but rather the understanding of what is returning (because if it returns it means that it has something to do with what is essential) and of the inevitably original and fresh form that this return assumes. And it is exactly Lenin who was able to understand and cover, with a single political and theoretical gesture, both the re-emergence of capitalism’s unresolved contradictions and the unexpected and surprising aspects that these assume each time. It is for this combination of reasons that we must today ‘occupy Lenin’, or rather reconquer the space of political thought that Lenin inaugurated, bringing us back, differently from Lenin and without him, to the arena of the continuous re-presentation and continuous transformation of the issue of revolution.

NOTES 1 2 3

4

5

6

Aurelio Lepre, Storia della prima repubblica. L’Italia dal 1942 al 1994, Bologna: II MuHno, 1995, p. 46. Elio Vittorini was an important Italian intellectual, very close to the Italian Communist Party in the immediate postwar years. This was already evident from the conclusion to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; and repeated in their Multitude, New York: Penguin Press, 2004; and Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009. For European altermondalism see Massimiliano Andretta, Donatella della Porta, Lorenzo Mosca and Herbert Reiter, eds.. Global, Noglobal, New Global. Ea protesta contro il G8 a Genova, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002; as well as Paolo Ceri, Movimenti globali. Ea protesta net XXI secolo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002. See also Bernard Cassen, ‘On the Attack’, Neiv Left Review, 19(January/ Feburary), 2003; and Cassen, ‘ATTAC Against the Treaty’, New Left Review, 33(May/June), 2005. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 238. See also Joseph A. Buttigieg, ed., Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks Volume III, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 169, where the translation reads ‘behind [the state] stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’. See Stephane Courtois, ed.. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON: EXPLAINING SYRIZA’S SUCCESS MICHALIS SPOURDALAKIS Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road — Only wake upon the sea. Antonio Machado, ‘Proverbios y cantares’, m Campos de Castilla, 1912

F

ear and hope were the two dominant sentiments generated by the unprecedented recent electoral advances of the radical political coalition

of the Greek left, Syriza. On the one hand there was fear of the established hierarchies of capital, the profit-making forces within Greece and abroad, as well as of important geopolitical interests. It was a fear that became more explicit after the May 2012 election (when Syriza had already tripled its vote to 16.9 per cent from 4.6 per cent in 2009), when the prospect of winning the June election seemed quite realistically to be around the corner. It was then that the international institutions displayed their concerns and fears about the rise of the left to power. This could be seen in their hinting at certain concessions with regard to Syriza’s programmatic claims while at the same time waging a cheap propaganda war that intervened directly in the electoral campaign, alongside a degree of scaremongering by domestic business, intellectual and media elites that appeared to be inspired by the darkest sides of McCarthyism. The hope Syriza’s advances inspired, however, in good part counterbalanced all this. Against the backdrop of the ongoing

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GFLEEK CAULDRON

99

dramatic consequences of the austerity policies, with new social calamities a daily experience, Syriza appeared more and more to be the only viable hope for an alternative way out of crisis. In fact, given that part of Syriza’s plan was based on challenging both the predominance of neoliberalism and the democratic deficit in the European institutions, this feeling of hope spread among progressive forces on the continent, and beyond. The goal of this essay is to contribute to a better understanding of Syriza so its experience may constitute a fruitful as well as inspiring case from which to draw lessons for socialist strategy today.' To this end, after some general comments on the latter I wiU turn to the Greek case, beginning with the left’s evolution after the fall of the Junta in 1974, and especially its development since the collapse of‘actually existing socialism’ in 1989. I will then try to show why Syriza’s strategy was so successful as compared with other parts of the left movement, attempting to point out the characteristics of its strategy that may help overcome long-lasting disputes on the left and/ or discover ways out of the impasse that the current crisis has imposed upon us. I will conclude with an outline of the challenges faced by Syriza, and more generally by the radical left in Greece in the current conjuncture, which are in fact similar to those faced by socialists worldwide. STRATEGIZING ABOUT SOCIALISM Strategizing about socialism is an old habit on the left. The resultant debates have often led to deep and paralyzing divisions among leftists. Indeed, for a long time they had even become an obstacle to making full sense of the dynamics of capitalism. However, the depth and the diversity of the current global capitalist crisis are placing the question of the socialist strategy in a more positive way at the centre of the left’s agenda. This is not meant in the sense that the left is again being driven by the naive idea that severe crises are necessarily conducive to radical social transfomiation. If the left has learned anything from the history of economic crises, it is that inadequate or uninspiring responses to those crises have not only led to political ineffectiveness but to huge political and ideological defeats. The defeats of the 1970s and early 1980s contnbuted to the dispersion of radical left forces and consequently paved the way for neoliberal hegemony, the end result of which is none other than the current crisis. And as this crisis continues and even deepens, it is becoming increasingly clear, at least in the countries which find themselves at the epicentre of today’s capitalist cyclone, that there is no room even for policies of limited/tactical reform. Governing parties of neo-social democratic or right-wing conservative orientations cannot even promise ‘better days . In fact, as aggressive austerity

100

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

policies have become the rule of thumb and recessions with double-digit unemployment rates have settled in, government policies do nothing but undermine even the reproduction of middle-class strata. The dynamic of the situation is such that for the first time in the post-war era, governments cannot guarantee a stable social consensus, and often cannot help but find refuge more and more often in coercion — as seen in the brutality with which the police have been confronting social protest in southern Europe. It is here, where the austerity pohcies are more acute, that capitahsm appears to be testing its limits as well as the limitations of the democratic rule of law. If the above is not an exaggerated portrait of today’s sociopohtical dynamic, then one can reasonably claim that, at least for aU of those who had never beheved in, or had given up, the project of‘humanizing capitalism’, today’s deep capitahst crisis requires the development of radically new principles upon which the whole society is to be organized. This of course leaves us open to immeasurable uncertainty, but it should not paralyze us, as long as we continue to see the historical process as the outcome of socially multilayered and complex class conflicts; and as long as clear sociaHst strategic goals are at the top of the agenda — as they should be for any serious, non-sectarian, radical leftist organization today. The insistence that another world is not only objectively plausible but also necessary should in practice guide tactics, organizational structure and everyday policy proposals. Given the increasingly undemocratic practices of governments today, it is more than ever the time to recompose and put forward a vision of social transformation where the emphasis on democracy will not just be a tactical reference to avoid the mistakes of authoritarian communist regimes, but also a strategic compass to navigate the wide variety of difficulties facing all the political forces that are committed to securing democracy through a radical political programme of structural reforms and popular mobilizations. Of course, whether we call that new world communism or socialism, let alone the exact wording of the poHcy proposals, what we advance will need to comply with the specific cultural contexts within which political discourses take on signifying meaning. Against the relief of these grand issues of socialist strategizing, let us turn to the Greek experience. THE GP^EK LEFT’S YEARS OF INCUBATION Nineteen seventy-four was the turning point not only for the Greek left but also for the overall politics of the country. After the seven year dictatorship that concluded the already highly restricted democratic regime of the post¬ war and, in Greece, post-civil war decades, a genuine transition to democracy

LEFT STPJ^TEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

101

was inaugurated. This gave the left a chance to develop freely, especially through the legalization of the parties of communist origin and orientation on the one hand, and on the other through the newly founded Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok). In the context of the post-dictatorship radical environment, and thanks also to its charismatic leader Andreas Papandreou, Pasok gave the impression that it was not only further to the left than its European counterparts of the time but even more radical than some of the country’s communists. Pasok’s ‘socialism’, a mixture of populist radicalism and Keynesian reformism, was far from a class-based form of politics (without at the same time excluding those who subscribed to the latter). This was enough, however, to co-opt a large segment of the traditional left’s social base, although it was clear, at least relatively soon after they were elected to government m the early 1980s, that Pasok’s leaders were anxious to embed themselves in the old clientelism of the Greek state, and that their real policy ambitions did not extend beyond that of mainstream social democracy at the time.^ After a short interlude away from government, Pasok was elected again in 1993, but by this time Pasok bore almost no trace of the radical discourse it had embraced in the 1970s. And especially after 1996, under the leadership of Costas Simitis, who was a firm proponent of‘modernization’, the orientation of‘new Pasok’ (which dominated the country’s politics until Its defeat in 2004) was very close to that of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party.^ On the other side of the left spectrum was the Communist Party (KKE), the heir to the ‘glorious party’ that led the resistance during the Second World War and which was defeated during the civil war that followed. During the Junta years, it had undergone a major crisis, including the break¬ away of the group that formed the KKE-Interior (1968), which developed as a Eurocommunist party, while the KKE itself remained a typical party of the Third International tradition and clung to its old Soviet-inspired communism even after the coUapse of the Eastern European regimes, and even more strongly when the USSR itself collapsed in the early 1990s. In 1988, the two parties of the communist left and a number of other independent socialists formed Synaspismos (the Coalition of the Left and Progress - SYN). Three years later, after a series of contorted alhances that led to a disastrous attempt at an all-party ‘ecumenical’ government, the KKE left SYN, which in effect led to another split in the KKE since almost half of Its central committee and thousands of its members remained in SYN. What has distinguished the KKE to this day, apart from a strong stand against the EU, is a simplistic and often conspiratorial political discourse. To the KKE, all other parties, including SYN, are treated as equally guilty of promoting capitalism and wanting to reproduce the system, and this provides the KKE

102

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

with the rationale for ruling out any possibihty for cooperation, even in the trade union movement.^ In 2000, at the height of Pasok’s modernizing project, a number of small leftist extra-parhamentary organizations and looser groups, as well as a number of independent activists, formed a network for exploring the possibihties for cooperation (The Space for Dialogue for the Unity and the Common Action of the Left).^ In 2004, under the pressure of electoral considerations associated with helping SYN secure the 3 per cent threshold for entering parliament, the Coahtion of Radical Left (Syriza) was founded. SYN became pivotal to the Coahtion’s growth, not only due to its relative size but also by virtue of SYN’s turn to the left under the leadership of Alekos Alavanos. A former member of the KKE and a member of the European Parhament, Alavanos crafted a strategy to make Syriza the umfying agent for a broad ‘new left’ — a presence so strong that it would no longer feel squeezed between Pasok’s conformist govemmentalism and the KKE’s dogmatism. The strategy was founded on the principle of ‘empowering the powerless’, while at the same time trying to gain support from the labour and social movements, which the new leadership actively tried to strengthen by forming ties with them. No less notably, Syriza organizationally evolved through providing increased opportunities for positions to the party’s younger members, which was something quite unusual for the left of communist origin.^ The much criticized choice of Alexis Tsipras, then a thirty-two year old engineer, to stand as the party’s candidate for mayor in the Athens municipal elections in the fall of 2006 especially exemplified this.* The success of this initiative (Tsipras won an unprecedented 10.5 per cent of the popular vote) strengthened and stabilized Syriza’s overall strategy, the political impact of which was demonstrated during the 2006-07 mobilization of students against a constitutional amendment that would allow the establishment of universities by the private sector. Synza was pivotal in changing pubhc opinion to such an extent that Pasok was forced to change its position on the issue, a development that annulled the government’s efforts on the issue. Syriza s practice on this and other issues was especially important in indicating a clear departure from the traditional instrumentalism among parties on the left, completely preoccupied as they were with securing public office, while functioning inside the state institutions so as to separate their mobrhzation initiatives from their societal base. By mid-2007, it was becoming clear that Syriza was much more confident about the outcome of the upcoming elections, as was indeed bom out in September when Syriza won 5 per cent of the popular vote and 14 seats in

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

103

the 300 seat parliament.^ Six months later, at its 5'’’ Congress in February 2008, Tsipras was elected SYN’s leader over the moderate Fotis Kouvelis, while Alavanos however remained the leader of Syriza. Throughout that year, Syriza displayed a steady increase in its popularity, as all public opinion polls showed that the party had doubled its support since the 2007 election.'® Syriza had chosen a strategy which was open to the social movements as a model for both its survival and development. In fact, the symbiosis of the two cultures guaranteed the survival of the Coalition by forcing it to adopt the kind of functional and organizational practices that are closer to what has been called a ‘mass connective party’, in contrast with the old conception of the working-class ‘mass party’ whose main organizational trait was its capacity, or at least its ambitions, to unify all political, social, ideological and cultural anticapitalist expressions within it, and to channel them towards facilitating the leadership’s goals of challenging or managing the affairs of the state. The main organizational trait of the ‘mass connective party’ would reflect its ambition not so much to unify but rather to connect in a flexible way the diverse actions, initiatives and movements that embody these expressions into a stable federation, and to concern itself with developing popular political capacities as much as with changing state policy." Of course, at that point the ‘mass’ dimension of this organizational model appeared more to be wishful thinking than a realistic prospect. The KKE, on the other hand, chose to fortify itself against initiatives it could not control, and kept itself apart from the social movements, largely operating through a workers front organization (FAME) it had established in 1999.'^ Declaring that all the other parties are subservient to the EU’s dictates, the KKE not only refused to engage in any common initiatives with other parties but avoided even simple communication or deliberations on procedural issues or simple formalities (e.g. the celebration of May Day, or the commemoration of the students’ uprising against the Junta in 1973). This strategy of fortification sometimes became ridiculously sectarian as the KKE/PAME avoided mobilizing with, or even marching alongside, protesters who are not in their ranks. In December 2008 the killing, completely without provocation, of a fifteen-year-old high school student by a Greek policeman triggered widespread protests and student occupations of high schools and universities throughout the country over a two-week period. This youth uprising exposed the deep differences between the two strategies of the Greek left.'^ While Syriza actively supported the mobilizations, the KKE basically aligned itself with the puzzled establishment political forces, claiming that all the rebels were part of the ‘black bloc’ determined to recklessly set fire to Athens

104

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

and the other major cities. Even though it ■was severely attacked by the established media, and was well aware of the high electoral cost this might entail, Syriza continued to participate in the uprisings without trying to manipulate them. It criticized the insensitive pohtical system for not ‘hstening to the youth who are trying to tell us something’. However, the pohtical cost of this, at least as measured by surveys of voting intentions, was felt immediately as Syriza’s popularity fell. This exposed deep divisions within SYN between the parliamentary-oriented modernizers and the movementoriented left, and the subsequent bitter leadership contest between Tsipras and Alavanos resulted in Syriza’s poor performance in the May 2009 Euro¬ elections and the general elections in October of the same year (when its vote fell to 4.6 per cent). Yet in the midst of a serious internal crisis that placed Syriza’s future in doubt, SYN decided to put together a new programme, which it hoped would be adopted when offered to all the members of Syriza.'"^ Later published as an impressive, almost 400 page book - unusual for a political party programme - it dealt with almost all aspects of pubhc hfe as well as state policies, and was the collaborative product of hundreds of activists and experts from various constituencies both within and outside SYN and Syriza. In the 40-page introduction outhning the ideological coordinates, a vision of the ‘society of needs’ was juxtaposed to the existing ‘society of profits , and a call for the reclaiming of‘public space’ was put forward against encroaching privatization. Although this programme initially attracted little attention amidst an internal political crisis which exposed many organizational weaknesses, it was a strong indication of the strategic orientation of the huge majority of the activists in SYN. During that time there was another development in the ranks of the Greek radical left. In March 2009, some 10 small groups and parties formed another coalition, Antarsya (literally, the Anti-Capitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow). Composed primarily of university student activists in various communist organizations of orthodox Marxist, Trotskyist and Maoist backgrounds, as well of members of the relatively new rank-and-file unions outside the established bureaucracies of the official union structure of the country, it proved effective for activism in a broad range of mobilizations, but it never managed to achieve anything more than 1.8 per cent in the regional or general elections. Yet if Antarsya saw Syriza as too moderate, it was in fact in protest against its ‘ultra leftist’ orientation that at SYN’s 6* Congress in June 2010, Fotis Kouvelis (who had been defeated by Tsipras in the SYN leadership race at the 2008 Congress) led 3,000 (out of 13,000) members of SYN and four (out of 14) MPs to form a new ‘modernizer’s party’, the Democratic Left

LEFT STILATEGY IN THE GP^EK CAULDRON

105

(DEMAR). Soon joined by a number of Pasok modernizers disenchanted with the George Papandreou government, DEMAR hoped to replace Pasok on the centre-left of the political spectrum. But without any substantial social roots, DEMAR had to rely almost entirely on the media for its appeal, although in collaboration with Pasok it had made some gains in the 2010 municipal and regional elections. And it was just at this time, amid the increased social polarization generated by the gathering eurozone crisis, when the conditions were being set for Syriza’s great leap forward, which really changed the political map of the country. THE MEMORANDA: SHOCK THERAPY AND RESISTANCE No political strategy, no matter how innovative, comprehensive, wellplanned and weU-executed can be successful and effective if conditions are not conducive to it. There is no doubt that the overall social and political developments in Greece in the context of the ‘Stabrhty Programme’ of the Memorandum of Agreement between the Pasok government, the European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission and the IMF, passed by parliament on 5 May 2010, were, to a very significant extent, responsible for Syriza’s electoral advances. It was this event that signalled the developments that led to the radical change of the political balance of power in the 2012 election. The Memorandum promised Greece 110 billion euros over three years on condition that a set of draconian measures, aU of which, even those presented as administrative reforms, led to an open attack on the public sector: wage cuts in the public sector of at least 20 per cent; extensive programmes for the privatization of public property (e.g. ports, Olympic Airlines, public transport); unprecedented deregulation measures for business activity mainly in transport and energy; dramatic cuts in social services, health and education, pension plans, in combination with an increase in indirect regressive taxes. These measures were largely ineffective as a response to fiscal problems but they have had devastating social and economic effects. For example, recession became a permanent state of affairs (economic growth has been negative for five consecutive years and GDP is expected to approach a total decline of 7 per cent in 2012 alone); unemployment rose from 8.3 per cent to 12.6 per cent by the end of 2010 to reach un unprecedented high of 23 per cent by end of first quarter of 2012; bankruptcies of small shopkeepers reached a staggering 25 per cent; in Athens alone, 10 per cent of the population receives food from various social and charity institutions, another 17 per cent have found refuge for their everyday needs in the ‘barter economy’, and 60 per cent declare that they have drastically cut their food budgets; the number of homeless in Athens doubled, by the beginning

106

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

of 2012; the number of people at or under the poverty line increased by 50 per cent to some 30 per cent of the whole population. And as all this overwhelmed traditional kinship structures, still very important in Greece, the number of suicides rose by more than 40 per cent. The dramatic loss of legitimacy of the Papandreou government led to its resignation and the formation of a new government led by Lucas Papademos, formerly the governor of the Bank of Greece and ex-vice chairman of the ECB. This government was supported by both Pasok and the right-wing New Democracy, which until then had not supported the Memorandum, as well as by LAOS, a nationahst party of the extreme right. It was a government of‘limited scope and duration’, whose constitutional foundation was rather questionable. However, despite the ‘unholy’ political alliances on which it was based, the Papademos government managed to conclude a new Memorandum, which this time turned the screws on workers in the private sector by requiring severe cuts in minimum wages (22 per cent), as well as pensions and unemployment insurance, in addition to the virtual abolition of legalized collective agreements. The fiscal crisis was initially portrayed as an exclusively Greek phenomenon and the result of chentelism, the mismanagement of the public sector and the ‘privileges’ of the civil servants. But this new attack on workers in the private sector revealed that the previously dominant discourse, that the country’s problem was a sick public sector, was false. It became almost a common understanding that the governments and the political forces behind them cared only about saving the banks and nothing else. This realization became the basis of a tacit but increasingly visible social alliance among the various classes and strata (workers in the public and private sectors, shopkeepers, small and even medium-sized businesses, independent professionals, pensioners, precarious labourers, the youth and the unemployed). It was this wide, diverse and even contradictory social alliance that set the stage for the new election the Papademos government called in May 2012, only seven months after it came into office. The austerity measures required by the Memoranda had drastically undermined not only the main pillars of social inclusion but also the pillars of consent that had previously bound people to the old government parties, which in a cartel-like fashion have run the affairs of the Greek state. People already knew their politicians were deeply involved in cases of corruption, but they now saw them as undermining basic national dignity by acceding to the destructive conditions of the Memoranda and elevating the task force committee (the ‘Troika’) to the status of the real government. Thus, it was no surprise that despite the rusty and bureaucratized institutions of social

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

107

and political representation, Greek society displayed clear signs of political resistance. Besides the numerous civil disobedience initiatives of workers (mainly but by no means exclusively in the public sector), as well as some scattered mobilizations in the agricultural sector, there have been 15 relatively successful calls for general strikes (most for 24 hours but two for 48 hours) since May 2010. The demonstrations that usually accompanied these actions often gathered big crowds, despite being confronted by severe coercive actions on the part of the police.'® The general strikes were initiated by the Pasok-dominated Federation of Tabour and the Federation of Public Workers, but the vast majority of those who turned up to demonstrate were not union loyalists but precarious workers, rank-and-file militants, and members of public employees’ unions who had disassociated themselves from Pasok. Also indicative of the qualitative new dimension of the Greek people’s resistance were the now famous mobilizations of the ‘aganaktismeni’, i.e. the ‘frustrated or indignant in the squares’.''' These movements, which appeared in almost every major city nationwide, used new means of political mobilization (including the internet) and developed a poUtical language which was clearly hostile to the previously existing patronizing practices of the party system. In fact this hostility was frequently displayed by spontaneous verbal and even physical attacks on politicians of the governmental parties, which at times extended to representatives of the established trade unions and the KKE. THE DYNAMICS OF SYRIZA’S RISE The social and political developments caused by the Memoranda proved especially conducive

to

Syriza’s rise,

given its political background,

orientation and strategy. Syriza’s emblem is made up of three flags on a white background. The red flag symbolizes the tradition of the left movement, the green one represents the organizations concerned with the environment and the puiple one symbolizes its commitment to an alternative politics and the struggle against patriarchy. The white background expresses its commitment to the unity of these struggles. Syriza is clearly committed to the radical transformation of society; however it is not willing to reiterate an historical concept of communism or socialism in order to define its own social vision. This is due not only to the diversity of groups and parties and the possible divisive consequences within, but also because such a definition would have undermined the everyday defensive struggles being waged now by a huge number of people under threat of extinction from a wide range

108

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

of social locales and backgrounds. Implicit in its very composition, and only occasionally made explicit, is Syriza’s recognition that it draws on the overall heritage of the entire left, while at the same time leaving behind both the reformism of a bankrupt social democracy and the vanguardism of revolutionaries still dreaming of the storming of the winter palace. It hopes in this way to bridge the gap between reform and revolution and to define the radical transformation of capitalist society as a process of structural reforms directly connected to everyday struggles. As Syriza chose to deal with the challenge of political and ideological clarity in such fashion it seems to foUow a strategy that elsewhere I have called a ‘move against and beyond’ many of the old left currents and traditions.’® This is not only essential for a creative, efficient and historically grounded sociahst strategy but, as far Syriza is concerned, it is the key to developing a culture of tolerance among the previously competing left traditions. This has itself been necessary for creating the dynamic of diverse and innovative pohtical activities in Greece, which has proved so important in the current economic, social and pohtical crisis. In addition, moving against and beyond the left’s entire tradition laid the foundation for transforming Syriza’s particular organizational model of a ‘mass connective party’ into a genuine ‘mass connective party’. Syriza’s membership includes many activists with a strong Leninist background (of various Stalinist, Maoist and Troskyist varieties), who have great experience in organizing, a mihtant commitment to the cause of the left and are steeped in a political culture which makes them both loyal and reliable. These activists are also extremely important in the context of the strategy for the unification of the left in so far as they can objectively serve as a bridge to those who abandon the KKE and Antarsya. But in this context, moving ‘against and beyond’ means curbing tendencies to esoteric and almost masochistic splits, to narrow class and particularly economic reductionism, to instrumentalist understandings of pohtical power and opportunist approaches to democracy and civil rights, not to mention a quasi-revolutionary rhetoric which often has paralyzing effects since it puts off every transfonning reform until the apocalyptic D-Day of the grand revolution. But much of Syriza’s membership, in particular recently, also comes from the reformist left, which, despite its weak theoretical contribution, has a collective organizational culture useful both in the party building process and in attracting the people who abandon social democratic illusions. In this context, moving ‘against and beyond’ means confronting tendencies, held by more people than the others noted above, to naive parliamentarism and governmentalism, to the loss of any sense of the potential of working classes as historical agents and to the embrace of a certain market rationality that

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

109

can lead to acceding to ‘competitive austerity’ as a modernizing ideal, not to mention a wholesale rhetorical dismissal of ‘populism’ which overlooks the fact that behind various populist practices are peoples’ real social needs and demands. In the current conjuncture, going ‘against and beyond’ means showing that the Memorandum is not simply a technical matter or merely an error of the governmental parties’ leaderships, but the outcome of a global predatory capitalism which cannot be amended. We have already seen that the result of Syriza’s ‘shift to the left’ has been its involvement in the activity of social movements. Social movement activists and organizations within Syriza have offered their experience in organizing in the field, in providing new and innovative organizational and mobilization practices, which are particularly useful in the times of social upheaval that Greece is now experiencing. Within this context, Syriza’s challenge is to build on the experience of the social movements while also moving ‘against and beyond’ these movements’ hostility to or at least indifference towards the need for party organization; their penchant for a localism that ignores the importance of democratizing the central political institutions of the state; their limited and often single-issue approach to the political; and their so-called post-materialism which has led to self-indulgent practices or to communal isolationism. Although it was not a smooth process, Syriza managed to articulate and even capitalize on all these different backgrounds, traditions and experiences. While no one can pin down one key factor that allowed this to happen, it is possible to offer an analysis of how this was done, that is, to follow Syriza’s steps while it developed this admirable and unique dynamic. This involved practices of activism that brought the diverse background of its base together in everyday politics; the development of appropriate organizational structures; and the careful articulation of political cleavages and their transformation into a common call for structural change. Syriza’s everyday practices of activism, despite their inherent tensions, are especially instructive for the left elsewhere. They involved, first of all, a genuinely militant yet discrete participation in the social movements, that

IS

a type of participation which consciously avoided patronizing the

spontaneity and the innovations of the movements and almost never substituted their dynamic with Syriza’s own political choices. To put it differently, Syriza’s activists have been present, if not protagonists, in every movement of resistance, even before the Memorandum, but never used the party banner in those movements. During the mobilizations in the city squares, this became even clearer as various organized parts of the coalition (e.g. especially the youth organization of Synaspismos) organized several educational meetings in order to adjust and respect the new concerns raised

no

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

by the activists in the squares. In addition, when the government decided to crush the movement violently, it was Syriza’s membership and in many cases its prominent activists — not excluding Syriza’s MPs — who provided their political, technical and legal support and expertise — and in some cases suffered the consequences of the state’s coercive aggression. Secondly, Syriza also avoided the habitual reservations of the left towards the official and bureaucratized institutions of political and social representation. Its involvement in them, however, did not reveal the usual governmentahst practice: it was an active, respectful yet militant presence in all the institutions of social and political representation, especially in parliament. Indeed, despite the small number of Syriza MPs, the party put together not only the most studious and efficient opposition to the government but at the same time brought marginal social demands and issues to the forefront of mainstream pohtics. In addition to their presence in parliament, the participation of Syriza’s MPs in almost every social and political mobihzation was real and visible. In fact, they frequently used their status to protect activists from police harassment and violence as well as to legitimate initiatives that were undertaken. Syriza members operating within the official trade union movement engaged in similar practices, thereby escaping the constraints of the tragically conventional and govemmentalist structures of the union bureaucracy. A third dimension of Syriza’s strategic practice was its commitment to developing a programme, understood not as a fixed set of policies - ‘a static and timeless text’ — but rather as a political process — and even as such, not ‘a process of simply managing the current conjuncture’, but a ‘continuous process’ of movement building, designed ‘to cut new paths ... preclude new dangers ... make use of the possibilities’.'^ The programme, which was seen as a unifying factor, was the outcome of both experience from social struggles and experience and expertise acquired within the institutions of social and pohtical representation. The concern to develop a concrete yet open programme, wherein the balance between various defensive struggles was articulated to the principles outlined in the party’s alternative vision, had already been expressed in the programme put together by SYN as early as 2009. The programme functioned as a concrete alternative to governmental policies as well as offering a realistic perspective to those active in the movements and to the population at large. The programme was not only an answer to the attacks of the established political forces and to their propaganda but contributed to a framework where the idea of‘empowering the powerless’ appeared realistic and the idea of the ‘society of needs’ versus the society of profit making was concretized. Finally, the programme was

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

111

the linchpin between the active and militant presence of Syriza within and outside the public institutions and its claim to governmental power. A fourth dimension of Syriza’s strategic practice involved the call to take governmental power, based on the unity of the whole left. It was a call only put forward in a clear and intense manner by Tsipras a few months before the May election. This might have sounded unrealistic, however valiant and high-spirited, except for it having its roots in the widespread disenchantment of the population with the long-standing bipartisan political system. Tsipras’s claim that Syriza intended to lead a government of the left involved the recognition that this system was finally losing all its legitimacy in the wake of the Memorandum, which had come to be seen by more and more Greeks, along with the series of laws that accompanied it, not simply as an extremely bad political choice with regard to the economic problems of the country, nor even just an attack on social rights, but as nothing less than ‘treason’ on the part of the political elite. The effectiveness of this strategic practice, however, would not have been as successful if it were not for the key organizational traits of Synza. Despite Syriza’s many organizational deficiencies and internal frictions, the generic makeup of the Coalition necessitates a loose organizational structure very far from most versions of the mass Leninist-inspired party model that characterize almost all of the parties and organizations inside Syriza. The ‘mass connective party’ type of organization Syriza adopted could accommodate not only the diversity of the political entities already inside it, but also various constituencies outside the Coalition itself. Thus, although Syriza’s loose organizational structure certainly had its hmitations, its virtue was that it was precisely what allowed it to capitalize on the organizational assets of the Coalitions’ members - from the Synaspismos offices in almost every town and city of the country to various other political networks with the experience in mobilizing strikes and occupations. But no strategy, no matter how well articulated in everyday politics, and regardless of the appropriateness of the organizational model that accompanies It, can be successful without a clear call for an alternative future that resonates with people, that amounts to something that can correspond to an alternative answer to a pressing question or demand. This did not mean a concrete blueprint of a new social order of the kind left intellectuals sometimes try to develop to get beyond the often sectarian inclination of the radical left call for an abstract vision. Syriza opted for neither the abstract vision nor the concrete blueprint, both of which might have strong theoretical foundations but brings no immediate inspiration. Syriza put forward a threefold call that expressed urgent popular demands: the elimination of the Memorandum;

112

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

the call to end the ‘bipartisanism’ of the poHtical system and everything it represented; and the call for the preservation of citizens’ dignity. As the Memorandum was identified with austerity policies, Syriza’s call for their abolition was seen as clear and reaHstic. It made every other response seem either vague or unappealing, whether it was the call for ‘renegotiation’ by New Democracy and Pasok, for ‘gradual withdrawal’ by DEMAR or for ‘withdrawal’ from the EU and/or eurozone (Greece’s participation in which, to this day, enjoys an overwhelming popular support) made by the KKE and Antarsya. In a similar fashion, the call to defeat ‘bipartisanship’ was equally effective since all the problems of the country were attributed to the way the two governmental parties had run the country’s affairs. They were responsible for the phenomena of corruption, which were out of control, and for a system of mismanagement that had led to the dead end of the Memorandum. Thus, the anti-bipartisanship call functioned as the expressed demand for a new, more socially sensitive government. Finally, the call for dignity resonated not only in terms of how the aggressive austerity measures had disrupted the lives of so many individuals and famihes as well as overall social cohesion, but also in terms of the way these measures were imposed and supervised by the Troika, amounting to direct violation of national sovereignty and thus seen as an insult by the Greek people. THE ELECTIONS: AN ANTICIPATED ‘MIRACLE’ By early 2012, the severe social effects caused by the pohcies of austerity and the role of mainstream political parties had made it clear that a fundamental rearrangement of the party system in Greece was on the cards. The political ehtes’ attempt to absorb popular discontent through the formation of a technocratic coahtion government under the leadership of Papademos had clearly faded. The poHtical dynamic of this situation led to rapid withdrawal of popular support from the dominant parties. This was evident not only from the people’s spontaneous harassment of the politicians that had supported the government s policies, and the strengthening of various protest movements, but even from the growing distress of the backbenchers of the governmental parties and their subsequent attempt to organize new political parties. As it was Pasok’s social base that became protagonists in these protests, it became clear to Syriza that it had to adjust to the new political dynamic. Thus, as various ex-Pasok groups and individuals (including some MPs) started to organize, Syriza struck an agreement with them which was signified by the change in name of the Coalition. Thus, the Coahtion of the Radical Left (Syriza) appeared in the election as Syriza - United Popular Front. This extension was not an electoral and/or opportunistic move as it was in

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

113

complete accordance with the party’s call for unity of the anti-Memorandum forces. In addition, as one can see from various interventions from rank-andfile Syriza activists, it was a demand from below and not a mere leadership agreement. Syriza did not approach the new ‘comrades’ with an attitude of ‘I told you so’; but nor did it compromise its radical programmatic and political discourse. It thus avoided the traditional sectarianism of the selfrighteousness of the radical left towards social democracy, and capitalized on the experience, the expertise and the popular appeal of former Pasok members, many of whom stood as candidates while others participated in the organization of electoral campaigns or contributed to the programme. Syriza’s campaign was not much different from its campaign in previous elections. It used the entire available infrastructure and the organizational capacity of all the members of the Coalition. Once again, local Synaspismos offices proved extremely useful. In almost every square Syriza managed to set up kiosks which functioned as meeting points for the electorate, the distribution of electoral leaflets and starting points for the daily door-to-door campaigns. While television debates at the leadership level were avoided by the dominant parties, innumerable hours of TV programmes were dedicated to the elections, where the representatives of Syriza were confronted with extreme hostility not only by their opponents but frequently by producers and journalists alike. This of course was something to be expected since ‘the prospect of a radical left-reformist government ... [posed] a radical alternative to austerity and the crisis of capitahsm has provoked panic among the Euro-elites and the Greek ruhng class’.^® In these debates Syriza’s representatives displayed a relative weakness since they were not trained to confront such attacks. It was there that Syriza’s multifaceted background and loose organizational structures revealed their limitations, on which its opponents were happy to capitalize. In the June election, when Syriza’s victory was a real possibility, almost all the other parties made Syriza the main target of their electoral campaign. This included DEMAR and the KKE (‘Don’t trust Syriza’ was one of the KKE’s main electoral slogans). The DEMAR and KKE campaigns objectively undermined the unquestionable popularity of the call for ‘unity of the left’ and the formation of an anti-Memorandum progressive front. This revealed a serious contradiction in Syriza’s strategic call for the unity of the left, as it cast a serious doubt upon the realism of this call. Antarsya was less critical of Syriza, especially during the June election. Its main criticism, apart from that Syriza’s programme was neither sufficiently ‘anti-capitahst’ nor ‘anti-Euro’, was that Syriza’s repeated declaration that its intention was to keep the country in the eurozone but ‘not at all costs’ was not convincing.

114

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Even if Syriza’s electoral campaign was not all that different ffom previous ones, it was more effective this time because it could now use the experience, the know-how and the techniques of political mobilization acquired in its involvement in the social movements more than before. These new practices facilitated its discourse and its initiatives to bring to the fore the demands of the constituencies that had been harder hit by the austerity policies. An additional factor in making its electoral campaign more effective was that just as the other parties — especially the governmental ones — now avoided the traditional open rallies in major cities (due to their fear of small turnouts and the possibihty of popular harassment), Syriza organized many open rallies just about everywhere. Given the conditions in which the June 2012 election took place, the result was not a great surprise. Syriza secured 27 per cent of the vote, less than three percentage points behind New Democracy which was forced to form a coalition government with Pasok (12.5 per cent) and DEMAR (6.2 per cent).^^ The voters who defied the scare tactics of those within the country and abroad, and who pinned their hopes on Syriza to find a way out of the plight of austerity policies, saw the result as a defeat. However, there is no doubt that it was a victory for the left, with far-reaching effects felt well beyond the Greek borders. Many commentators think that Syriza’s electoral achievement was merely circumstantial - a result of the social consequences of austerity and the novelty of Tsipras’s appeal alongside the mistakes of the dominant elites who went overboard with their slanderous attacks on Syriza. However, such a verdict is behed by the positive motivations of Syriza’s voters. Thirty-eight per cent supported it primarily because ‘it expresses the demand for change’, a further 19 per cent because it was ‘against bipartisanism’ and yet another 14 per cent because it ‘articulates in an optimal way the hope for better days’.Moreover, 56 per cent of Syriza’s voters declared that they agreed wholeheartedly with its ideology and programmatic principles and proposals, which clearly pertain to its radical left orientation (e.g. nationalization of the banks, taxation of high income earners and big business, especially for ship-owners, etc). Syriza s vote was unusually well distributed geographically, so much so that its MPs (71 in total) now represent almost all constituencies and regions of the country. There was no constituency in the entire country where less than 14 per cent voted for Syriza, while in some of them its support was as high as 38 per cent, especially in working-class neighbourhoods. No leftwing party in the country s history, including the seminal performance of the Unified Democratic Left (EDA) in 1958 (24.4 per cent), had managed such a success since the civil war, as left-wing support was usually based in

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

115

urban centres and in a few areas with strong left-wing traditions. That said, Syriza’s vote was clearly class based, and what is notable about this was the close alignment of the social distribution of its vote with the programmatic and the political base upon which this vote was mobilized. Its support came not only from public employees (32 per cent), but also from private sector wage earners (33 per cent), from the unemployed (33 per cent) and from precarious workers (27 per cent). At the same time Syriza’s support proved that a social alliance has been in the making, as 32.6 per cent of small shopkeepers and artisans and 26 per cent of professionals voted for it.^^ Furthermore, distribution of the vote in all age brackets from 18 to 54 favoured Syriza relative to New Democracy. Among the electorate between the ages 18-24 Syriza received 45 per cent; between the ages 25-34 it received 30.1 per cent; between 35-44 it received 30.7 per cent; between 45-54 it received 32.4 per cent; but in the ages between 55-64, it received only 24.1 per cent, while among all those older than 64 years its support was a modest 13.8 per cent. No one within Syriza believes that the party has reached a plateau. Yet everyone in it also knows that its rapid electoral advance was not as smooth as its outcome suggested. The many cases of lack of coordination, the loose organizational structures and the consequent elevation of the Tsipras leadership to the almost exclusive source of decision-making power during the campaign are problems that require immediate attention. In addition, the fact that the huge number of citizens who supported Syriza and contributed to the campaign come from diverse constituencies and often contradictory backgrounds poses a major challenge in terms of how they can be included in the organizational structure in such a way as to capitalize upon their diverse political cultures and capacities. Lastly, Syriza has to coordinate its presence in parliament and promote among its new MPs the political and organizational culture that characterized its practices so far. This is not an easy task given how being the official opposition party will draw it into more conventional parliamentarist concerns and practices, with all the constraints that go with this for a mass connective party that has at the same time to maintain its presence in the social field and be even more effective in building sohdarity networks to support the victims of austerity. Shortly after the June election, Alexis Tsipras put forward a fairly concrete organizational plan to the plenary session of the Central Coordinating Committee of Syriza. The plan calls for transcending coalition structure via direct membership of Syriza itself through its local branches and union, student and professional organizations, with a founding Congress of the new and unified Syriza scheduled for the spring of 2013. Meanwhile,

116

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

there is already extensive speculation that the current government will be short-lived. In this context, the likelihood that Syriza’s intention to secure governmental power will quite likely soon be realized is comforting to its base, which is hoping for radical change. However, the political and social dynamics of the country, and especially Syriza’s organizational weaknesses, have led to scepticism with regard to its future. In this regard three possible scenarios have been voiced. The first scenario posits that within the pohtical and social dynamic of Greek society Syriza cannot become a majority party and the best it can hope for is to become the leading and well-established major opposition, like the Italian Communist Party in the 1970s. The second scenario denies this but claims that Syriza will eventually be dominated by its newer membership who came from Pasok and that it will develop into a new social democratic party for the twenty-first century. This scenario rests upon two mistaken assumptions: first, that ex-Pasok supporters are somehow politically fixed forever in positions to the right of Syriza; and second, that the reformism of a typical social democratic strategy can constitute a lasting response to the severe problems of Greek society. The third, and to me the most hkely, scenario is that the social and political shortcomings of the austerity policies will soon create conditions conducive to Syriza’s coming to power, and that when it does it wiU not look anything remotely hke a typical social-democratic government. STRATEGIC TESSONS FROM GREECE Socialism needs once again to be put on the pohtical agenda. But strategizing for socialism in the twenty-first century requires a critical evaluation of all the previous efforts as they were historically articulated by all traditions — from the Fabians to the Leninists. This is a critical discussion and one in which the left everywhere must engage soon, and the experiences of the Greek radical left may provide some lessons and perhaps a sense of direction. No matter what the future holds for Syriza, its successful strategy to this point may be useful for those trying to think about sociahst strategy elsewhere, provided it takes account of the following points:

1. Prefabricated models have very little relevance to the actual circumstances of any given social formation. Usually these ‘models’ (in effect reflecting an idealism inspired more by Plato than by Marx) overlook the dynamics of ever-developing contradictions, while at the same time producing paralyzing divisions stemrmng from steadfast adherence to specific radical theoretical traditions. 2. The actual social dynamics going on in any conjuncture should always

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON

117

be at the heart of socialist strategy. While social mobilizations should be supported regardless of their possible political cost, they should never been manipulated. They should always be treated with respect and yet without the kind of glorification that can only lead to a problematic populism. 3. All working people (public and private sector wage earners, part-timers and full-timers and the precarious) have to be the primary social base for socialist strategy. The possible and always necessary social alliances are the result of conjunctural dynamics and cannot be theoretically predetermined. 4. A concrete programme of structural changes is important to disseminate the left’s values and social principles, and to provide perspective for how the social base of the socialist project can be empowered. But too great an emphasis on concrete policy proposals risks rendering the programme too technocratic, and tends to alienate people, since it will be reminiscent of the dominant type of party politics. 5. Participation in the institutions of political and social representation is important; however, this should not be undertaken in a sterile fashion which reproduces formalism and governmentalism. On the contrary, radical left representatives should systematically promote social concerns and demands within these institutions. 6. The left should aim at establishing and consolidating the people’s trust and should eliminate the usual mainstream parties’ double talk: one before and another after the electoral campaigns. Discursive consistency is a great asset. 7. A socialist strategy, no matter how small the political party, should entail the realistic prospect of capturing governmental power. This will require the abandonment of the governophobia that is so common on the radical left. 8. A socialist strategy should not seek the expansion of its support by moving to the right. More than ever before, under today’s ‘total capitalism’, tactical moves towards the exhausted ‘alternatives’ of the modernizers of neoliberalized social democracy can only lead to strategic defeats. 9. The radical left should not be indifferent to all ‘modernization’. Given the positive connotation of the term, the radical left should redefine it by putting societal/class concerns and demands at the centre of political, institutional and administrative reforms. 10. Internationalism for the radical left is a genetic trait. This ideal is often put into practice through participation in existent supranational institutions; however, a socialist strategy should not see these institutions in an essentialist fashion and insist on ‘participation at all costs’. 11. Finally, no crafting of a socialist strategy can have any meaning without

118

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the parallel building of a pohtical party. But since the socialist party is effectively the seed of the polity and the social organization to be achieved in the future, close adherence to democratic process in party building is as essential as is building the strong yet flexible organization which can coordinate and translate the social struggles into political effectiveness. Here the idea and the practices as well as the actual shortcomings of the mass connective party will be more than useful. NOTES 1 The following analysis is mainly the result of accumulated experience more as an activist than as an academic. It is an attempt to make sense both of developments in a number of locales where I found myself in last ten years (itself the overall accumulated experience from my involvement in left-wing politics for some four decades now) and of the various theoretical and political exchanges that illustrate the problematique of the left since the crisis broke out. More specifically, it takes into consideration the developments on the Greek political scene, especially on the left, the exchanges that took place in the Theory Department and in the Programme Committee of the AUiance of the Radical Left (Synaspismos), in the executive committee of the Nicos Poulantzas Institute and the experience from the various meetings of Transform as well as from my experience as an active participant of the Greek, European and World Social Fomms, where I was lucky enough to participate. In that sense I have benefited, both directly and indirectly, from a number of men and women with whom I have shared efforts, struggles and dreams. Last but not least I am particularly grateful to Costas Eleftheriou and Helga Stefansson for their crucial editorial advice, assistance and encouragement. 2

Michalis Spourdalakis, The Rise of the Greek Socialist Party, London: Routledge, 1988.

3

Gerassimos Moschonas, ‘The Path of Modernization: Pasok and European Integration’, Jowmti/ of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 3(1), 2001, pp. 11-24.

4

Vassilis Kapetanyannis, ‘The Communists’, in Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Katsoudas, eds.. Political Change in Greece: Before and After the Colonels, London: Groom Helm, 1987.

5

Luke March, Radical Left Parties in Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 52-6; also Michael Karadjis, ‘Greece: Syriza, the Communist Party and the Desperate Need for a United Front’, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, available at http://links.org.au.

6

Costas Eleftheriou, ‘The ‘Uneasy Symbiosis”: Factionahsm and Radical Politics in Synaspismos’, paper presented at the 4"' Hellenic Observatory Symposium, London School of Econonhcs, London, UK, 25-6 June 2009, available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk.

7

M. Spourdalakis, ‘Left Prospects in the Post-Pasok Era’, Relay, October/ December 2008, pp. 28-31; Donald MacFhearraigh, ‘Syriza and the Rise of Radical Left-Reformism’, Irish Marxist Review, June 2012, pp. 104-6.

LEFT STRATEGY IN THE GREEK CAULDRON 8

119

Evi Markaki and Eleni Apospori, ‘The Case of Alexis Tsipras: Political Personality, Collective Identity and Political Marketing’, paper presented at the 5th International Political Marketing Conference, Manchester, UK, 27-9 March 2008.

9

Michalis Spourdalakis,

‘2007

Greek Elections:

Signs of Major Political

Realignment: Challenges and Hopes for the Left’, Studies in Political Economy, 82, 2008, pp. 171-86. 10

MacFhearraigh, ‘Syriza’; Spourdalakis, ‘Left Prospects’.

11

M. Porcaro, ‘A Number of Possible Developments and the Idea of Connective Party’, Turin, May 2011, mimeo; see also M. Porcaro, ‘The Third Actor: Moderate Left, Radical Left and the “New Global” Movement’, in Michael Brie and Cornelia Hilderbrandt, eds.. Parties of the Radical Left in Europe: Analysis and Perspectives, Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2005, pp. 33-41.

12

Myrto Tsakatika and Costas Eleftheriou, ‘The Greek Radical Left’s Turn to Civil Society: One Strategy, Dual Trajectories’, South European Society and Politics, forthcoming.

13

Rania Astrinaki, ‘“(Un)hooding” a Rebellion: The December 2008 Events in Athens’, Social Text, 27(4), Winter 2009, pp. 97-107.

14

SYN, Eor the 2P' Century Left, available at http://wvvw.syn.gr.

15

Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The Greek Cauldron’, New Left Review, 72(November/ December), 2011, pp. 24-7.

16

A. Tsakiris and V. Aranitou, “‘Can’t pay? Don’t pay!”: Civil Disobedience Movements and Social Protest in Greece during the Memorandum Era’, paper presented at the 16''’ Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference, Manchester, 18-20 April 2011.

17

Stathis Gourgouris, ‘Indignant Politics in Athens - Democracy Out of Rage’, Greek Left Review, 17 July 2011, available at: http://greekleftreview.wordpress. com.

18

M. Spourdalakis, ‘On the Conditions for the Development of the Left m the Beginning of the 2P‘ Century’, in A. Manitakis et al, eds.. Democracy Between Utopia and Reality, Athens: Savalas, 2011, pp. 124-36 (in Greek); and M. Spourdalakis, ‘Our common future is not going to be shaped according to the dictates of reality but against it. If..’, in M. Kousis et al, eds., Power and Society, Athens: Kastaniotis, 2010, pp. 159-69 (in Greek).

19

These were the words used by Giannis Dragasakis, the venerable economist who was coordinator of the programme committee, in unveiling the economic programme for the June 2012 election campaign. See Avgi, 3 June 2012, available in English as ‘The Economic Government Program of Syriza United Social Front’ at http://www.left.gr.

20

MacFhearraigh, ‘Syriza’, p. 103.

21

The other parties who passed the 3 per cent threshold and entered parliament in the June election were the Independent Greeks, who got 7.51 per cent. Golden Dawn (Chrisi Avgi) with 6.92 per cent and the KKE with 4.5 per cent.

22

G. Mavris (interview), Epohi, 24 June 2012.

23

C. Vernadakis, Avgi, 24 July 2012.

THE RISE OF SYRIZA: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARISTIDES BALTAS This interview with Aristides Baltas, the eminent Greek philosopher who was one of the founders of Syriza and is currently a coordinator of its policy planning committee, was conducted by Leo Panitch with the help ofMichalis Spourdalakis in Athens on 29 May 2012, three weeks after Syriza came a close second in the first Greek election of 6 May, and just three days before the party’s platform was to he revealed for the second election of 17 June. Leo Panitch (LP): Can we begin with the question of what is distinctive about Syriza in terms of socialist strategy today? Aristides Baltas (AB): I think that independently of everything else, what’s happening in Greece does have a bearing on socialist strategy, which is not possible to discuss during the electoral campaign, but which will present issues that we’re going to face after the elections, no matter how the elections turn out. We haven’t had the opportunity to discuss this, because we are doing so many diverse things that we look like a chicken running around with its head cut off. But this is precisely why I first want to step back to 2008, when through an interesting procedure, Synaspismos, the main party in the Syriza coalition, formulated the main elements of the programme in a book of over 300 pages. The polls were showing that Syriza was growing in popularity (indeed we reached over 15 per cent in voting intentions that year), and there was a big pressure on us at that time, as we kept hearing: ‘you don’t have a programme; we don’t know who you are; we don’t know what you re saying’. So our response was to come forward with a programme that would allow us to show clearly what we stand for. In the event, when we published the programme in early 2009, not a single newspaper in Greece, not a single TV station, not a single journalist ever mentioned the existence of this book. This shows the quality of the media in Greece. Now, I want to point out a number of things about this programme. First, it was formulated collectively, in the sense that, although there was a

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

121

committee responsible for formulating it over a year, it was done through a kind of open discussion with many groups, which offered suggestions from different points of view. We tried to synthesize them and then returned our drafts to them for comments, so it was re-discussed up until the moment we came up with the finished product. And I think it was a very interesting collective experience of how you can gather ideas of many people related to all the social arenas, and synthesize them in a kind of unique book. So this is one aspect. The second thing I want to say about this programme is that m the introductory chapter we tried to somehow trace an idea of socialist strategy in light of a number of methodological principles. We didn’t present the view, let’s say, in the sense of a theory predisposing us to take power by an uprising or by a general strike or by I don’t know what. But we wanted to foUow the social movement itself as it developed. Hence, we tried to participate in the movement and present our views so as to try to guide it while at the same time learning from it and following its objective rhythms. I think the phrase that would catch this idea is from Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet, who says: don’t ask what the road is; you make the road while you walk on it.

LP: Just to clarify, you were in this process before the uprising of the students erupted in December 2008? AB: That’s a phenomenon which in my view nobody has really understood as yet. Yes, we were in the process of creating the programme beforehand. And we took the decision not to discuss the uprising in the book, because we could not foresee its outcome and full historical dimensions. But we took it into account. For example, this uprising might have led to a real revolt, might have led to a seizure of power. We felt we should be ready for, and open to, even this kind of eventuality. But also to be ready when the thing cooled down, as we all understood it might well do. So it is not the main thing that we wait for this kind of uprising. It’s not preparing uprisings or things like that, but, as I said before, to try to follow step-bystep what is really happening in society. This is, I think, a way to get out of the old dilemma ‘reform or revolution’ while keeping fixed the strategic goal, namely socialism. In terms of the programme’s content itself, it first of all reflected the fact that we realized at the time what was happening in society had very much to do with what we call in Greece public space. There were important local movements, for example, to protect the city square as a place for people to walk in, to protect the trees there against the building of parking lots, or to protect a bigger area in Athens from the building of a big stadium, things

122

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

like that. And in these kinds of movements, ‘real people’ participated - and in this respect the distinction between ‘real people’ and ‘people of the left’ is one that does need to be made. We discovered that there is an interesting new, let’s say, dividing line within society between those who are for the public sphere, as it were, and those who stand for the private interest. So we tried to develop an idea of the public sphere -radically different from a statist conception - as what we should go for. A second dimension of the content of the programme followed from this, since this went together with distinguishing enterprises in the public sector from state enterprises that can be very badly run, with all kind of corruption. This is the kind of state enterprise we don’t want. But the situation in Greece is also such that what we have to take on here is the destruction of a state which is absolutely corrupt, beyond possible measure corrupt. So our own programme can be read also as saying that we’d like a society like Sweden, or like even Germany, because these kinds of problems - corruption, distinction between following rules and not obeying rules, etc. - have more or less been solved there. Of course, nothing’s perfect in Sweden or Germany, far from it, but they have more or less solved this kind of problem. So the radicalism of Syriza is also a kind of rationalizing force seeking to accomplish something that has been accomplished elsewhere in Europe by a bourgeois society. So you can read our programme both ways. And I think that’s good, because, in a given context, such a view can be quite acceptable to conservative forces in other societies. And given this, there was a third dimension to the content of the programme: the idea is that you must have the economic foundation of what we mean by public sphere. We called this the economy of needs - and the programme was about promoting economy of needs against promoting economy of profit. Of course, need is a big word. W e didn’t enter a theoretical discussion of how need is defined and aU that, but this was sufficient to make the point clear. And so with these ideas, and together with the standard idea that Greece is part of Europe - part of the whole world, of course, but what’s happening here especially influences what happens in the rest of Europe — we developed our idea of strategy. Whether change happens with an uprising or with elections or anything in between, or because something happens in a different country, we were conceptually ready to receive this and participate in this. Our ideology, which in the deepest sense is key to the coherence of a genuinely left group, is a non-dogmatic Marxism, one open to all kinds of new views, from Foucault to Zizek, to what you will. We try taking all this into account. We don’t close off the future into a theoretical box. These are, according to me at least, the main ideas of the programme.

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

123

LP: Especially because ofthe hinge point around nationalizing and socializing

the banks, it looks like you have a well-developed economic strategy. AB: I’m not an expert on that, although I can give you perhaps general conclusions. Regarding how we treated particular issues such as the banks and all that, well, the crisis had already started by the time we formulated the programme. It started, as we know, from United States subprime loans, then the Lehman Brothers default, and then it spread to the sovereign debt phase. At that time, we were perfectly ready with proposals for Europe and for Greece, perfectly ready. I mean in terms of what was happening to the banks at that time, what was happening in capitalism as a whole, what was happening in Europe, we had the best analysis, with solutions like the ones they’re discussing now: the European bonds or the moratorium for the debts, all these ideas which are just now becoming part of the public debate all over Europe and the United States. But at the time, to show you once again what the media system is here, whenever any of us formulated these ideas at the time, they said: ‘this is crazy; we don’t know who you are; you don’t know what Europe is; forget it; this is a unique street, this street of austerity’. All this is attested to in the record of the television discussion shows during that period. And this explains, in a way, the flow towards us: because memories are short, of course, but not that short. And so people recognize now that these Syriza people were saying then what everybody now is saying. LP: So what happened on the Greek left politically that set the stage for this

creativity? The radical elements in your programme have not been in your programme only since 2009. It’s always been in your programme. Where does this come from? AB: Those ideas have been lingering for decades, but they became important in the midst of the crisis. If we ask what are the roots of these ideas, and of Syriza generally, we should start counting from 1989. During the Gorbachev era, the old Communist Party was forced to enter into alliance with the other parts of the left. It was for only a short moment, which the Communist Party quickly retreated from, but this led to a big split. The one side became the KKE we have now. And the other side was Synaspismos, the major force behind Syriza today, which mainly for electoral reasons formed an alliance with smaller groups from the broad communist tradition, including from Trotskyist or Maoist backgrounds. The ideological identity might not have been very clear, but as we also came together in strikes and in the streets, this formed the seed for what is happening now. Despite all

124

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

kinds of internal tensions from time to time, this coalition stabilized itself, gave the sense to everybody that we all could work together. And this was a new kind of experiment in Europe; you couldn’t imagine some years ago that the Maoists, the Trotskyites, communists of different currents, feminists, all of this and all of that, would have succeeded in stabilizing their political alliance as they did in Syriza. Now, this is an especially interesting case, because Synaspismos was regarded by the other groups as a little bit too reformist. But when the moderate right wing of Synaspismos broke away and formed the Democratic Left a few years ago, this clarified that the majority of Synaspismos itself was not reformist. Another thing you might be interested in is that social movements in Greece have normally been politically centralized. What I mean is that it’s very rare that you have in Greece grassroots movements, not related to a party organization of the left. So it has been a new experience for us these two last years with demonstrations on a scale never witnessed before. These were different from the old kind of protests that were directly organized by one of the parties, or at least closely related to them. In the recent mobilizations, everybody was very careful not to say this is a Syriza demonstration, this is an Antarsya demo, just follow our flags and things like that. So people started to respect this political diversity. And I think this was an important part of how we got to where we are today.

LP: And the Zeitgeist that goes with the politics of protest demonstrations today, which reflects the anarchist rejection not only of the state but of parties, is that here? AB: Absolutely. And yet, we know - not from polls, because such things are not counted there - that almost all anarchists are actually voting, which was unimaginable a year ago for them. Some justify it by saying that the rise of the extreme right requires protection against, so we vote for Syriza. But this is a kind of ideological justification. What they are really realizing is that what fighting means right now is to vote. When an anarchist student told me, there’s no movement, I realized what he meant is that there are no demonstrations in the streets during the election. It’s absolutely peaceful if you walk around Athens right now. Everything is about the elections. But the fight is inside this and not outside of it, even if from a ‘classical’ point of view there is no movement. So the big question; how this non-movement creates havoc in capitalism in general? That anarchist student I had the discussion with later told me he started to understand that movement is not just you go on a demonstration. True, without the one, the demonstrations, you can’t have the other, the radical kind of electoral choice there now is here. You have to understand the dialectics of this.

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

125

LP: Yet once the student uprising waned, and the moderate parliamentary

types left Syriza to form the Democratic Left, your electoral standing fell back to some 5 per cent from the highs of 2008. And it did not revive immediately when the great wave of protests erupted in Greece over the last few years. What suddenly changed this year? Was it something you did? Was it a way of talking you discovered after the new government signed the second Memorandum setting out the conditions for austerity and structural adjustment agreed to with the so-called troika of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund? Was it how you responded to this in February and March? Or was it more that you just happened to be standing there while, as Lenin said about what the Bolsheviks realized in 1917, ‘power was lying in the street'? AB: I think there was one big moment in the campaign. There clearly was a slowly rising movement towards us even before the election campaign started. We had clearly been the most consistent opposition at all levels, inside the parliament and outside, in theory and in practice, and people, even polls, recognized this. And during the electoral campaign we noticed this movement towards us really growing. We started from 4 per cent, then 6 - and the initial expectation in the first week was optimistic - we’ll get 10 per cent. The second week, even more optimistic - we will get 12 per cent. But by the third week something really changed when our leader, Alexis Tsipras, suddenly said in an interview on the web, ‘we want to lead a government of the left’. At the moment he formulated it, everybody said, what do you mean government of the left, who will form it, what does it want, etc. But instead of falling back, Tsipras said, yes, we want the government of the left. We are ready. We on the left are not afraid of taking power. Nobody expected that such a stance would create the kind of mood it did. Most people in the party initially thought that if you put it like this, they will say you are crazy, you aim beyond your means. But this stance of Tsipras made a big difference. And I think the move from 12 or 13 to over 17 per cent reflected people saying, here’s a force which takes this possibility of governing the country seriously. We don’t care if they are leftists or revolutionaries or whatever. We like this kind of talk. We have tried the other people already, so let’s try these people, and see whether, in everyday things, they are honest and good people and clever people, and if they have the expertise. It was transforming the negative myths of the movement into something positive and something new, pointing a way out of the old corrupt structures of politics and the state that made the difference.

126

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

LP: So a very heavy burden of responsibility has come upon you in only a

few months really. Even in April, you had no sense you might be forming a government. AB: And what is worrying is that the party through the election campaigns has become even more amorphous than it used to be, because there are all kinds of things now which cannot be centralized in the standard way. As we respond to the needs of the moment, it adds to the amorphousness of the whole thing. For example, at a meeting yesterday I tried to formulate what I think Syriza’s line for the election is, but it might not be exactly the line, just more or less the line. LP: Okay, let’s turn to this. What is the line more or less? AB: The line more or less is what we do the next day after we are elected. If you follow the TV shows during these days, there is an incredible fight over words. We are saying that we can end the Memorandum; the Democratic Left is saying we will hook ourselves on the Memorandum to change it; the New Democracy says we wiU renegotiate the Memorandum; and Pasok also says something along those lines. All these people on TV are fighting over words. So the big issue is what do we really mean, what is the content of the words? Our line is, as I understand it, forget about those words. We say we will form a government, and when we have a majority we will strike out the laws, the particular laws which have had such a terrible bearing on social life, on minimum wages, on work relations and things like that. These will be the first steps of our government. If the European Union says you can’t do this, you have to abide by the Memorandum, then it’s up to them to find the means, both politically and legally, to expel us. Indeed, if they do try that, it would be legally and politically very difficult to do. So this is the line as I understand it. But you will hear it put differently, whether it is a party economist or a Syriza spokesman on TV. There’s a kind of fuzziness about the details of the line, and for good reasons. A group of our economists visited both the Bank of Greece and the Ministry of Finance. They got some information. They understood that the government has no Plan B for the country if an accident happens to the banking system or whatever. And so it’s a very slippery situation given the financial state Greece is in. I am confident in the expertise of our economists. I think they’re much better than the economists of other parties on all levels, there’s no question about that. But in aU conscience, I think we cannot say more, we cannot be more precise, until we can really look at the situation closely. There have been newspaper reports that say there is 2 billion hidden somewhere within

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

127

the state - it appears someone discovered this mysterious fund somewhere which nobody touched before. LP: That would make a big difference. AB: It makes a big difference. And on top of that there are all kinds of hidden games between those who are corrupting themselves and corrupting others inside the state. Unless we have a clear picture of that, we cannot in all honesty say what we will be able to do in any significant detail. LP: By one calculation, if you remove the payment on the debt completely, you only have a 1 per cent deficit. AB: Perhaps even less. But we will have to wait for the next weeks and see what happens. LP: But whether it turns out you have more or less room for manoeuvre, when you yourself say you are not an expert on economic policy, on economic strategy, this worries me, because this is going to be the first test of what you can do in government and where you will strike the compromises, especially if there is no clear Plan B in terms of what you will do if you are forced out of the Euro. AB: It could be said that capitalism itself at this stage has no, as it were. Plan B. Neoliberal capitalism with all the offshore companies, and the hedge funds and all that, has no real plan B even in the sense of returning to a kind of Keynesianism. LP: But thafs precisely the point. If you’re right in what you just said, will your economic policy be run by people who think capitalism can go back to Keynesianism? That’s the question: do they agree with you that it is impossible to accommodate the reforms in a way that will become stable within capitalism? AB: Two points here. One, we do have a Plan B. But, for reasons you understand, this cannot be made pubic at this stage. Two, what impresses me during this electoral campaign is that people in our base understand fully the situation. They’re not expecting more. They are not waiting for an immediate solution to their problems or for the big revolution. They are really down to earth, understand the difficulty and the reality both of Plan B and of Plan A, so to speak. I mean, the attitude is they can throw us out of the eurozone or whatever, but at least we keep our dignity. Ordinary people who populate our meetings say this. There s a lot of initiatives, a lot of spontaneity and a lot of people go to our talks in every neighbourhood

128

SOCIALIST PJEGISTER 2013

in the area of Athens or in the other big cities giving voice to such attitudes. LP: But what if you manage to strike a compromise that lets you stay in the

Eurozone and then you have to mask that in the language of compromise? AB: In the ‘official language’. LP: In the official language of compromise, are you not concerned you will

thereby lead your activists away from a socialist perspective? And if you are pushed out of the EU, on the other hand, are you really so confident that ordinary people are ready for Plan B and for the sacrifices that would come with it? AB: I am confident that we wiU maintain our discourse in any case. I am confident in our leadership in this sense. That we might be striking a compromise will be declared openly and sincerely. And from what I have seen during the campaign, I am confident that people will understand this. LP: Is the majority of the leadership really as radical as you are suggesting? AB: The inverse problem is the case. I mean on the central committee you have somebody who is a Maoist, somebody who is a Trotskyist of the A variety, somebody who’s a Trotskyist of B variety, somebody who comes from the communist traditions, somebody who is quasi-anarchist. So you need somebody there to balance off the strong left presence there, not the other way around. That said, the organizational structure is very amorphous - and yet despite all kinds of organizational issues, somehow we are not only surviving but thriving. LP: But the leadership who will become ministers if you win is a different

leadership than who is on your central committee, surely? AB: Not really. I hope that our ministers will have two broad aspects, one aspect being of the left and being recognized as being of the left, but also the aspect of assuring a kind of expertise. Taking over the state really means finding 10,000 people like this at every level of government. Even at the national level alone you need to find, let’s say, 1,000 people. Well, the kind of people we have in the party, they can organize a meeting, they can give a speech, and more or less talk intelligently about what’s happening in the world. But how many have ever thought of how to run a ministry? So we can have 1,000 ministers who are politically able, but very few who already have the expertise for running a state agency.

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

129

LP: The other problem is you might take those people out of the party into

the state and then leave the party without the talents of those people. AB; True. LP: So in light of that let me ask you then about longer-term strategic issues.

Just from what you said about the party programme, and the way it was formulated even before the crisis, there are a number of possible contradictions that you may have already faced in the making of the programme, but that you are surely likely to face now as you make a bid for state power. Maybe most important of these is the contradiction that arises because you are dealing with a state, like so many of the states that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire, that never developed a Weberian type of institutional apparatus. So what strikes me is the dissonance between socialist elements in the programme that say we need to take the banks into public control, and then at the same time elements that display an admiration for Sweden or Germany where the banking system, and the state's relationship to it, is very much capitalist. It is possible to think that what Syriza is really most impressed with is Swedish or German social democracy, what you really want is their modern welfare state, their class harmony and corporatism, along with their type of rational bureaucracy. This is what can create an impression that these guys are really only social democrats. They don't actually have an interest in a socialist strategy. AB: We have to understand Greek history since the revolution of 1821. The state created at that time was more or less based on what was happening in Europe and not really based on social forces and existing social relations in Greece. So this created from the very beginning all kinds of conflicts. For example, are we East or West? This has not been solved yet. I mean, some people are still saying East, some others are saying West. And if you take this at face value, you get crazy, because you have to make an impossible choice: modernization versus tradition, religion versus secular (and capitalist) modernism. This means also that whenever efforts at modernization were made in the past - of course this was capitalist modernization - there was a reaction against their implementation because nobody took the trouble of trying to synthesize these kind of forces so as to be able to come out with a viable bourgeois society of the Weberian type, as you said. So we’re carrying this burden from that time. But even this is, again, ambiguous. There are very strong community bonds in Greece. If I have a cousin, I have to help him in some kind of way. This is not entirely a bad thing, especially today, yet it is the kind of basis

130

SOCIALIST MGISTER 2013

from which clientelism can thrive. To give you an example, if somebody calls me and says ‘my nephew just did an exam in your class. Of course, I’m not asking you to change his grade, but he’s a very good boy, and he says he wrote well.’ So I take this phone call. If I were a Protestant, I would call the police. But I am Greek, so I say, okay, thank you for telling me. And then I grade the paper entirely independently of the phone call. If the paper passes, the guy thinks it’s because of the phone call. If the grade doesn’t pass, he gets a call from me: ‘I’m very sorry. I did my best, but I couldn’t’. This kind of ambiguity is something endemic in Greece. It’s aU over the place. If you are, say, a Protestant German, you can’t understand this. But among us, we know well, without the benefit of general rules, when the line of dishonesty is crossed. To explain this in all required detail we need to have a long discussion. And from this point of view, we realize that passing laws without taking into account this kind of situation will not deal with the massive corruption we are having. What I mean is that the kind of bonds I am trying to describe cannot be easily put in the Constitution. Because of this problem coming from the past, for some people Greece appears as, well, not modern, as pre-capitalist. For many people who are for the Memorandum, the main argument is that the Memorandum will finally modernize Greece. At the cost of a generation or two, but who cares? They wiU be sacrificed for a future that will be modern. This is the kind of fight we have. And they are calling us populists for trying to take into account actually existing social relations and strong community bonds: either you are for modernity capitalist, of course - or you are a populist. If you say you cannot stand any more unemployment, any lower wages, and so on, you are labelled a populist. So you can see the deep roots of this. LP: Very interesting, and it goes back to the way you defined tradition,

in terms of the ambiguity of how kinship relates to corruption, and your confidence about being able to handle this. As a professor you say, I don't confront this guy. I don't try to get the student expelled for the influence that his uncle was trying to use on me, but at the same time it doesn't really affect what I do. In saying you know how to handle this, it is good to have that confidence vis-a-vis the kind of attack you get from the bourgeois media about being populists against the modernizers. Nevertheless, it seems to me that dealing with this kind of tradition poses a bigger challenge, and a really difficult one. One wonders to what extent so many Communist regimes became authoritarian because there was no other way to overcome precisely this kind of traditional corruption. So the question arises, do you see such

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

131

capacities developing in the party and the movement in the next years that would lead you to think that you can overcome the negative side of the traditional Greek particularities? AB: This is a very interesting question, and it’s difficult for me to answer since I am too much inside the thing. You are looking from the outside, of course. And we have to find a kind of language to discuss these issues. The left in Greece has a deep history, going back to the Civil War and the resistance movement. And through this history, it became a big national force promoting certain values. Issues such as the ones we are discussing were addressed in practice and solutions were found. We have to look closely at them. Memories of that situation linger, generation after generation. And the general atmosphere today draws on such memories to demand dignity and respect, more than money. Of course we cannot live only with dignity. But the idea moving people today is that if you destroy us, you go to hell, we will regain our dignity. And I think this goes back to 1940 and the history of the Greek left. On the basis of the dignity I have in mind, clientelism cannot, perhaps, be eradicated immediately, but it certainly cannot thrive. And from the point of view of our main opponent, when New Democracy says we should regain the ideological hegemony from the left, it is that long tradition of solidarity and of dignity that they have in mind as their enemy. LP: Let me raise, in relation to this, a second possible contradiction. You say

you’re not dogmatic, and that’s obviously a good thing. But when you said you were open to Zizek or whoever when you were making the programme, this must also have meant, however, that you needed to have a very good bullshit detector. AB: That’s interesting also, because, yes, we do have to be flexible. When we formulated the political programme, we took into account that there are all kinds of controversial points of view at play. We tried to address the concrete situation so as to lay the ground, as it were, on which theoretical divergences could be profitably discussed. Let me also add that what we consider extremely important for Greece and perhaps for the whole of Europe is the need to have a big discussion of the fate of socialism in the twentieth century, why it failed in the Soviet Union, why it failed in China and why it failed in Eastern Europe. To try to find the roots of the failure at all levels - the economic, the social, the state structure, the party, etc. Because people here have suffered a lot, from the leftist uprising during the German occupation, the Civil War afterwards, etc., the feeling runs quite deep here that the left should reply as to the why of such failures. If

132

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

it doesn’t, then it’s very natural for people to say, okay, despite you now saying you are open to a variety of views, I don’t trust you. You are not up the task. Where is the guarantee you will not do the same thing? In the programme itself, we recognized this attitude, saying that we need to open this big discussion. This involves going as far back as it takes through Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin so if even we perhaps make new mistakes, we surely do not to repeat the old ones. And what we still need to develop is the kind of deep historical work that will yield, not perhaps an aU inclusive explanation, but a deeper understanding of the twentieth century history that would help us see better what is needed now for the development of socialist strategy at all the appropriate levels, and the appropriate timing for each level, with the appropriate forums for the corresponding discussions of each. LP: Yet this leads me back to your strong admiration for Northern European

social democracy. When you speak of the failures of the left, given the roots of Synaspismos and the other groups that formed Syriza, it is natural that you speak in terms of having to come to terms with Stalinism, with the broader failure of Soviet-style communism, and indeed with the problems with the Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist traditions even more broadly. As indeed you should. But given the electoral path that you’re on, it seems to me the more relevant failure to look at now is the failure of European social democracy, in the sense of its having giving up on socialist strategy. AB: You’re absolutely right. I think that’s a very good point. But you cannot have a social democratic party of the kind you mean in Greece due to the corruption here and other historical factors. I mean this quite literally. If you look at our party members from the top leaders to grassroots members, they are incapable of wanting a social democratic party of the European variety. They are too aware of what Pasok did: despite its ideological agenda and its rhetoric, once it entered the state within a short period it instituted clientelism at a level not approached before and immersed itself in corruption of the worst kind. LP: And you’re not worried about that happening to Syriza? AB. To individuals, it might happen. Institutionally, we find ourselves in a new situation. The social structure of Greece precludes social democratization of the Northern European type. There are not many second generation workers in this country, let alone third generation workers. We do have an alliance between the traditional and new petty bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other, and not only because of the Memorandum

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

133

and the austerity politics. It is something which started long before with trying to force down the throat of society accumulation and promoting large business, killing the small guys. And this is our big bet: whether we are going to have the kind of policies which are going to strengthen this kind of alliance vis-a-vis the banks and the big guys. Another related point: intellectuals here are massively on the left. In contrast to what’s happened in Anglo-Saxon or northern European countries, the intellectuals here are integrated into the left. Forty per cent of those within the universities, and perhaps more among the actors, the directors, the musicians are on the left. And the discourse promoted by these people is now more sophisticated and more creative than ever before. Which also means that the expertise for running a new kind of state is there already within society, in fact, much more than it was in Russia or China or Cuba. But the main point I want to make is the following. Looking at the situation right now, we might even say that if we take the government, then the revolution will start! I mean this in the following sense. There are already solidarity networks being built across the country: people who have exchanged goods, doctors who take people free, teachers who teach free or exchange an hour of teaching for a sack of potatoes. This kind of thing is developing at the grassroots level. It’s as if people now want a government to further develop this. So if we reform the government and if we keep, let’s say, the left flank of our coalition absolutely fixed, firm, then things will develop from below in a socialist sense. Taking over this or that building which is used by nobody, developing these kinds of parallel social networks, linking all this to social welfare and things like that. So from the point of view of strategy, even having a government obliged to make concessions to the European Union would not prevent our participation in the social movement promoting these ideas and social developments further. LP: This brings us to yet another potential contradiction, this one in

relation to your own base. It pertains to public space versus private space. When I was here in 2008, a group of construction workers were picketing outside the Synaspismos office because you had opposed the building of a stadium. This was a reflection of working-class interest. Obviously, this exposed a contradiction with your own base in terms of the tack you took in the programme. How big a problem will this be should you have to form a government? How much are you prepared for that type of confrontation between the public and the private, not just in terms effacing off with the bourgeoisie but from your own base in working communities?

134

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

AB: I don’t know. There is no general answer for that. On the stadium problem, for example, after you left, there was a kind of understanding that what we are saying was the correct thing. LP: And that came out of intensive discussions with the construction workers? AB: Partly. It also came up with a clarification of our position, on the one hand, and a kind of retreat by those who were pushing these people in this direction. Because there were big interests pushing workers in that direction. I mean promoters of the big construction projects who tried to mobilize the sentiment behind a big soccer team in Athens that has a great following. LP: But why I asked if it came out of intensive discussions was to get some sense of the capacity of the party to change this sentiment. I want to push this, because if you don’t form a government, it will give you much more time to develop this capacity, to build a stronger base, to develop the movement. After all, forming a genuinely socialist government already presumes having the socialist organizational capacities to support it. AB: I understand what you are saying. And I understand completely the kind of opposition we’ll be having. And to tell you the truth, I agree also that we might be in a much better position if we don’t win. But the situation is such that you cannot avoid winning the battle once you enter it. This is the problem. And, I mean, from the point of view of what’s happening in the world, we are hoping that winning will affect us positively in different ways. We are not expecting that if we win the Spanish left will also be suddenly elected. We are not as crazy as that. But given the structure of the European Union, and the very big problems they are facing, we can have allies in this situation from the objective point of view, even from the US. So there’s a kind of global phenomenon taking place here. But to tell you the truth: if we are going to form a government, we are not perfectly ready. In a sense, we are unprepared. But we are ready to assume the responsibility of winning. And we are confident that, if we win, we will not fail. W^e will learn quickly. Michalis Spourdalakis: I think part of this problem is about giving space and resources to the grassroots. Citizens are often the last people to get involved, and the other problem of contradictions within the working class cannot be resolved unless we deal with this. Even its partial resolution will depend upon how much we are going to develop the whole idea of an economy of needs, which decisions are made, the way in which decisions are implemented - and whether we will gain support. This will come up every time we turn any building over to any organization on the principle

THE RISE OF SYRIZA

135

of public versus private, because it fills a social need, and when we try to put some rules behind what we are doing. The same goes for the conflict within the working class. We witnessed this in the years even before the Memorandum, and certainly after the Memorandum, where the right wing put forward the conflict between public workers and private sector workers. This strategy didn’t succeed because the government soon thereafter also attacked the working class in the private sector. But we will have to face the problem in a deeper sense, not in the sense that those who organize the working class in either the private or in the public sector are more corrupt than the others, or closer to the big parties, but in the sense that those in the leadership of the unions in both spheres do make careers out of the their ties to the parties and the state. And people in general are very much against these kinds of organizations. So you have to create the space to reorganize the unions, and members will respond to this because they are frustrated by the way in which the unions are run now. There are people with all kinds of ideas, who want to serve the public, who are absolutely frustrated by the old kind of political unionism, where the union gets the power from the actual state. If you can destroy this link at the top level, at the level of the state, then the union structure starts to waver. And what we are witnessing as we speak is that the big unions, the top leaders of the unions are approaching us, are running after us to say ‘we are with you’. And we have to be really careful about that. AB: That’s what I meant before in saying that we must keep absolutely to the left flank of the political front we represent. If we keep this absolutely firm then we can make all kind of alliances without losing our identity. And up to now - which is amazing in many ways - we’ve got such a large electoral success while keeping the left flank absolutely firm. And so there is inflow from the right, from opportunists, from everybody under the auspices of our radical left kind of discourse. This is the amazing thing. That’s why the other side is so afraid of us. But from the other point of view, in terms of the actual implementation of our ideas, let’s say, against state corruption, what we get is the sense that people will be trusting us and forgive, for a period, our mistakes because they have suffered enormously from the old political system at all levels. LP: Let me just say that whatever happens, it is clear that your success already

reflects a certain confidence which the left has lacked for so long. AB: In a message somebody sent me, I don’t remember exactly from where, there was this quotation of Mark Twain: ‘They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it’. You know, this is the reason I dare to say that if

136

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

we get in now, we’ll be more effective than if we stayed out for another six months and form the opposition. LP: The danger being that you will get socialized into being the ‘Official

Opposition’? AB: True. Syriza will then have a triple task: (a) Immerse itself in the social movements to promote the values of socialism, help organize all kinds of solidarity networks, develop its programme in open dialogue with society, and formulate the agenda of a government of the left at both the national and international levels, (b) Transform itself into the political expression and the organizational backbone of the diverse social movements, without trespassing on their autonomy, (c) Organize itself as an ‘official opposition’ prefiguring the new kind of state organization that it will implement if and when it comes to power. But beyond this, I think the vertiginous rise of Syriza in less than three months has opened a significant breach in European and world politics. This breach concerns capitalism itself, for the European states continue on the neoliberal path of austerity and destruction of public welfare with no regard for the explosive social conditions in many European countries and with no ‘Plan B’ in sight. This situation puts socialism on the political agenda after many decades. But socialism can be actually brought about only through the struggles and the active will of the vast majority, and this must consistently inform the work of the left as its tries to redefine socialism for the twenty-first century by, among other things, criticizing consistently all failed attempts to institute it. So for all of us this represents a lot of work.

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER: POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN TRANSITION HILARY WAINWRIGHT

I

n a context of uncertainty and flux, it helps to start from the specific. My starting point is the rise of Syriza, the radical left coalition rooted in the

movements resisting austerity that has become the main opposition party in the Greek parliament. Syriza’s ability to give a focused political voice to the anger and despair of millions has made a breakthrough from which we can learn. This is a matter not only of its soaring electoral support, which rose from 4 per cent of the national vote in 2009 to 27 per cent in June 2012 on the basis of a refusal of the policies imposed by the IMF, the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB), but also of the fact that this electoral mandate is reinforced by organized movements and networks of solidarity that Syriza has been part of building. This is not to imply that Syriza’s success is stable or that its momentum will necessarily be maintained. One of its 71 MPs, the ex-Pasok member and trade union leader, Dimtris Tsoukalas, warns that ‘votes can be like sand’.^ Threatening winds will blow persistently from a hostile media determined to exploit any sign of division; from national and European elites creating an atmosphere of fear towards the left and from an aggressive fascist party exploiting xenophobic tendencies in Greek society with some success, having won 7 per cent in the polls. Syriza does not provide a template to apply elsewhere; it is a new kind of political organization in the making. Reflection on its rise, however, which has taken place alongside the collapse of support for Pasok (from around 40 per cent of the vote in 2009 to no more than 13 per cent in 2012), throws the present quandary of the left, especially in Europe, into relief Such reflection also stimulates fresh thoughts on forms of political organization that could help us find ways out. The quandary is this. On the one hand, there is the inability of social democratic parties to stand up to, or even seriously to bargain over, austerity for the masses as a solution to the financial

138

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

crisis. To varying degrees these parties are demonstrating their inability to rise to the challenge of a visibly discredited neoliberal project. The decay in party democracy and culture, moreover, combined with an entrenchment of market-driven mentalities, has meant that in social democratic parties the forces of renewal are negligible or very weak. On the other hand, most political organizations of the radical left, with the notable exception of Syriza, are in weaker positions than they were before the financial crisis of 2008. In addition, the traditional forms of labour movement organization have been seriously weakened. There has been an impressive growth of resistance and alternatives of many kinds, many of them interconnected and many, like Occupy, besmirching the brand of an already dodgy-looking system. But through what strategic visions, forms of organization and means of political activism they can produce lasting forces of transformation is an open question under active and widespread discussion. In other words, while the right, in the form of neohberalism, was ready for the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the left in the North, when faced with capitahsm coming as near to coUapse as it can — given its abihty to call in state guarantees - has been unable to find appropriate ways of building a dynamic of change driven by its alternative values and directions for society. Syriza in its current form has been forged in the intense heat of the most ruthless turning of the screw of austerity. Syriza is going to face many problems, both within its own organization as it changes from a coalition of parties and groups to becoming a party with its own direct membership, as well as in the face of new pressures that will come from its opponents both inside and outside Greece. However, after interviewing a wide range of activists and reading interviews and reports by others, I have a grounded belief that the long and difficult process of developing a framework of rethinking political organization beyond both Leninism and parliamentarism is producing qualitatively new results. Many of the political resources that shaped Syriza’s response to the present extremities and led it to a position in which it is uniquely - but still conditionally — trusted by so many people in Greek society are the outcome of considerable learning from the trial and error of other radical parties across Europe and the experience of the European Social Forum. This essay seeks to contribute towards continuing this dialectic of transnational political learning on the left. By generalizing from the distinctive features of Syriza, and also bearing in mind lessons from other experiences where parties with similar ambitions have been unable to sustain their transformative dynamic, I will suggest approaches to problems of political organization, further consideration of which might help to overcome the quandary of the left.

TPJVNSFORMATIVE POWER

139

My discussion of these themes will focus on the problem of transforming the state. This is a major issue for Syriza as it campaigns and prepares for office in and against a notably corrupt and anti-democratic state. One of four sections of the programme drawn up in 2009 by members of Synaspismos, the largest party in the Syriza coalition, is entitled ‘Restructuring the state’. My framework for approaching this fundamental issue sees sources of democratic transfomiative power autonomous from the state as decisive to the possibilities of change. The economic dimension here is crucial. Political change is seriously hindered if it lacks a base in non-capitalist relations of production, including the production of services and culture, however partial and incomplete. At the same time, it must be said that a conflictual engagement in as well as against the state is a necessary condition for systemic change. Such an engagement has to be rooted in, and accountable to, forces for democratic change in society. Without a strategy of this kind to transform and, where necessary, break state power, transformative struggles will recurrently lapse into containable counter-cultures and their potential for the majority of people will be unrealized. To develop my argument, I draw particularly on the experience of the radical left of the Labour Party in governing London in 1982-86; and that of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) in opening up decisions about new municipal investment to a citywide process of popular participation in Porto Alegre from 1989 until 2004. Despite these cases being well known, their lessons for political organization have yet to be fuUy distilled. For my argument, what is significant is that their achievements — each of the city experiments involved a redistribution of resources and, for a period, power and capacity, from the rich and powerful to the poor and marginalized depended on opening up to and sharing resources with autonomous sources of democratic power in the cities concerned. In other words, they combined initiatives for change from within government structures with support for developing wider, more radical sources of power outside. But it was very significant that not only had such a strategic orientation failed to change the Labour Party in the UK, it also turned out that neither did the PT in Brazil adopt such a dual strategy once it was elected at the national level, which partly explains the limits of the Lula government in fulfilling many expectations it had aroused for radical social change. In the Greater London Council (GLC) and Porto Alegre experiments political parties used their electoral mandates to move beyond the constraints imposed by the existing system and instead to strengthen and spread challenges to that system. The spirit they embodied can also be seen in widespread campaigns by public service workers and users against privatization that

140

SOCIALIST RJEGISTER 2013

involve effective strategies to change the way that pubhc services are managed and public money administered, dragging political parties after them. All these experiences have underlined the importance of strugghng to create non-capitalist social relations in the present rather than defer them to ‘after winmng power’. Lessons from these local experiences, however, can help the rethinkang that is necessary of what pohtical organization needs to be like in a context of plural sources of transformative power. In drawing these lessons, we need also to bear in mind that there are further distinct problems in changing state and quasi-state institutions on national and international levels. To understand the wider significance of the way these local pohtical experiences combine a struggle as representatives within the local state with support for democratic movements and initiatives outsaide, we need to distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power. These are on the one hand power as transformative capacity and on the other hand power as domination — as involving an asymmetry between those with power and those over whom power is exercised. We could say that historically, mass social democratic parties have been built around a benevolent version of the second understanding. Their strategies have been based around winning the power to govern and using it patemahsticaUy to meet what they identify as the needs of the people. Both the experiences of the GLC in the early 1980s and the PT in municipal government in the 1990s were attempts to change the state from being a means of domination and exclusion to becoming a resource for transformation by campaigning for electoral office in order then to decentrahze and redistribute power. I would argue that in practice Syriza is attempting the same project at a national level. SYRIZA AND THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE The most distinctive feature of Syriza, in contrast with traditional parties of the left, is that it sees itself as more than simply a means of pohtical representation for movements, but as being involved practically in building the movements. Its political instincts make responsibihty for contributing to the spread and strengthening of movements for social justice a high priority. In the weeks following the election of 71 Syriza MPs in June 2012, its leaders stressed the importance of this as central to ‘changing people’s idea of what they can do, developing with them a sense of their capacity for power’, as Andreas Karitzis, one of its key political coordinators, put it. While the party believes state power is necessary, it is clear that, in Karitzis’s terms, what is also decisive is what you are doing in movements and society before seizing power. Eighty per cent of social change cannot come through

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

141

government.’^ This is not just talk. This view of strategies for social change influences how Syriza is allocating the considerable state resources it is receiving as a result of its high level of parliamentary representation. The party will get €8 million (almost triple its present budget) and each MP is allocated by the parliament five members of staff. The idea at the time of writing is that a high proportion of the new funds should go to solidarity networks in the neighbourhoods — for example, to employ people to extend initiatives such as social medical centres, to spread what approaches have succeeded, to link, online and face to face, people in the cities with producers of agricultural goods. Funds will also go to strengthening the capacity of the party in parliament, but a greater proportion will be directed towards Syriza’s work in building the extra-parliamentary organizations for social change. Of the five staff allocated to MPs, two will work for the MP directly. One will work for policy committees that bring together MPs and civic experts and two will be employed by the party to work in the movements and neighbourhoods. Behind these priorities is a learning process arising from the vulnerability shown by left parties in other European countries to letting parliamentary institutions, with all their resources and privileges, pull them away from the movements whose political voice they had intended to be. From its origins in 2004 at the height of the alter-globalization movements (which had a particularly strong impact in Greece), Syriza was at least as concerned with helping to build movements for change in society as with electoral success. There was also a learning process through the European Social Forum and then the Greek Social Forum. This contributed to not only Syriza’s clear strategic view of the limits of state power for social transformation, but also a self-conscious insistence on norms of pluralism, mutual respect and openness to the new ways in which people were expressing their discontent and alternatives. Providing a constant reminder of the political methodology they were trying to avoid was the KKE, one of the last orthodox Communist parties in Europe, self-confident in its selfimposed isolation and wary of contamination with ‘unorthodoxy’. Syriza activists, by contrast, were very much part of the open, plural, curious culture of mutual learning promoted by the European Social Forum, and it was explicitly one of their goals that their new political coalition be infused with it. The effects of this were clearly seen in how Syriza related to the youth revolt after the police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008, not pushing a line or seeking to take control. And they acted in the same way when the protests gathered in Syntagma Square and beyond through 2011.

142

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Syriza activists contributed their own principles - for example, not allowing any anti-immigrant slogans — and apphed these with others, anarchists for example, to find practical solutions through the general discussions. The youth wing of Synaspismos had a workshop near the beginning of the Syntagma protests to explain and discuss this non-instrumental, principled approach. Syriza is also shaped by the converging culture of the different generations and traditions that make up the coalition. The younger generation, now in their late twenties or early thirties, came to the left independently of any ‘actually existing’ alternative. The older leadership had been part of the resistance to the dictatorship in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of them became the left Eurocommunists of the 1980s. Both generations were active m the alter-globalization and social forum movement. This meant that the collective processes of knowledge and cultural production in the movements resisting neoliberal globalization, both inside Greece and internationally in the 1990s, were central to the personal pohtical development of Syriza activists rather than being a sphere in which they ‘intervened’ to promote an alternative that had already been worked out elsewhere. Syriza activists at all levels are emphatic about going beyond protest and of having alternatives that are convincing to people who are discontented with the corrupt Greek state and the ‘troika’ of the EC, the IMF and the ECB. This has led to an emphasis on support for initiatives that could make an immediate difference now rather than waiting for Syriza’s election to government. For instance, as the cuts destroy the pubhc health system, doctors and nurses in Syriza are involved with others in creating medical centres to meet urgent social needs and at the same time pushing for free treatment m pubhc hospitals and campaigning to defend health services. Syriza is also bringing together sympathetic frontline civil servants with teachers, experts and representatives of parents’ organizations to prepare changes in the organization of the Ministry of Education to make it more responsive to the people and to release the stifled capacities of state employees who genuinely want to serve the public. It is also mapping the social and cooperative economy in the country to identify how it can be supported politically now as well as to determine what kind of support it should have when the party moves into government to realize Syriza’s goal of an economy geared to social needs. The party’s responsiveness to the steady rise in self-organized forms of solidarity economy amidst the crisis, recognizing its potential in terms of constructing an alternative direction for society, is reminiscent of what Andre Gorz’s meant when, in outlining the strategic concept of non-reformist reforms in his Strategy for Labor, he stressed the

TPJ\.NSFORMATIVE POWER

143

importance of ‘enabling working people to see socialism not as something in the transcendental beyond but as the visible goal of praxis in the present’.^ When Alexis Tsipras declared that the party was ready for government, based on an unequivocal rejection of the economic policy memorandum, it concentrated the minds and organizational discipline of Syriza activists. The movement style and culture of the organization gave way to a singlermnded campaign in which loyalties to this or that group or tendency in the Syriza coalition weakened and a new closeness emerged. But complaints also emerged about a certain opacity of when and where decisions were made and how to influence them, and fears expressed that the large parliamentary group could reinforce this if it becomes too autonomous. And there is recognition of the danger of Tsipras becoming a celebrity symbol on which the future of the party can end up becoming dependent, weakening internal party democracy and diluting debate — shades of Lula in Brazil, shades too of Andreas Papendreou in 1981. Although the coalition is united on the importance of its claim on government, much thought is being given to how to share leadership, maintain accountability to party and movement activists, how to sustain a critical politicized culture of debate, challenge and strategic mihtancy; to avoid in other words becoming ‘another Pasok’. RETHINKING THE EILANCHISE: FROM ATOMISTIC TO SOCIAL P^PP^SENTATION Syriza’s experience gives a practical focus to recent discussions in the alterglobalization movement about whether, in liberal democracies, to engage in, as well as struggle against, the pohtical system — and, more specifically, whether

to

seek political

representation

for more

than

propaganda

purposes, and if so with what forms of organisation. Syriza’s self-conscious combination of organizing for government with spreading the capacity for change autonomously from the political system - through solidarity work in the community, agitating at the base of the unions, campaigning for social and political rights, as well as against racism and xenophobia and so on - raises anew the question of whether the vote is stiU a resource for social transformation or a perpetual source of disillusion and alienation. In other words, can representation in the existing institutions of parhamentary democracy, along with efforts to change these institutions, strengthen the wider struggle to bring somehow an end to capitalist power - the power of the financial markets, private banks and corporations, all intertwined with and guaranteed by state institutions? My answer is positive, albeit highly conditional. In the broadest terms, the condition is based, organizationally and culturally, on an understanding of

144

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

citizenship as social and situated. In today’s societies, ndden as they are with inequalities, this implies an engagement with electoral pohtics while at the same time strongly challenging what has become of the universal franchise: an abstract, formal political equahty in a society that is fundamentally unequal. Many propertyless men and women and their allies who struggled for the vote imagined that exposing, challenging and overcoming unequal and exploitative relationships would be at the heart of parliamentary pohtics. For the Chartists and many suffragettes, the vote was the opening of a new phase in this political struggle, not a plateau on which to remain. Pohtical representation meant for them a means of ‘making present’ in the political system struggles over social and economic inequahty.'* The abihty of the British establishment, often with the comphcity, tacit and overt, of Labour’s parliamentary and trade union leaderships, to contain this potential dynamic is only a well documented example of a phenomenon common in different forms to liberal democracies.^ The result is a narrow form of representation in which citizens are treated as individuals in an entirely abstract way rather than as part of embedded social, and at present unequal, relationships. It is a pohtical process which consequently tends to disguise rather than expose inequalities, and protects rather than challenges private economic power. This tendency has regularly come under challenge by later generations. They have taken up the radical democratic goals of the pioneers by seeking to break the protective membrane of parhamentary pohtics and open pohtics up to the direct impact of struggles that are shifting the balance of power in society. There is much to learn in this respect from two experiences, the radical Labour administration of the Greater London Council and the PT government of Porto Alegre. Both their political leaderships m practice built their strategy for implementing a radical electoral mandate on sharing power, resources and legitimacy with citizens organized autonomously around issues of social and economic equality. These municipal politicians started from the recognition that the inequalities they were elected to tackle — of economic power, race, gender and more — needed sources of power and knowledge beyond those of the state alone. In both cases, the mandate was for a politics that would learn from and not repeat the compromises, national as well as local, of the past. In the case of the GLC, the left leadership of the London Labour Party, influenced by a fierce controversy in the national party, was determined to avoid the failure of the 1974-79 Labour government to implement a radical electoral mandate. This strong political will, along with a direct involvement in community, feminist, trade union and anti-racist movements, led the would-be GLC councillors to reach out to many organizations that broadly

TPJVNSFORMATIVE POWER

145

shared their aims and involve them in drawing up a detailed manifesto. This became the mandate of the new administration after Labour won the GLC elections in 1981. It was a key reference point in conflicts with public officials both in County Hall and across the river in Thatcher-led Westminster and Whitehall — a source of moral legitimacy for the radicalism of the GLC’s policies. In the case of Porto Alegre, the ‘taken-for-granted’ way of running the municipality had involved local party elites making mutually beneficial deals which reproduced a structural corruption and secrecy that ensured that the council effectively served, or at least did not upset, the economic interests of the 15 or so families who dominated the local economy as landowners and industriahsts. The PT’s mission, as part of its commitment to redress the gross inequahties of the Brazilian polity and economy, was to put an end to this. Under the leadership of Olivio Dutra, it committed itself to working with neighbourhood associations and other grassroots democratic organisations to open up the council’s budgetary, financial and contracting procedures. In both cases, the strategies were effective in achieving many of their goals — so much so that in different ways the vested interests they challenged took action, equally effectively in their reactionary terms. These experiences and, in particular, the crucial relationships between autonomously organized citizens and the local state were the product of particular historical circumstances. Both the British Labour Party and the Brazilian Workers’ Party were the product of labour and social movements and progressive intellectuals but their divergent historical origins were based on differing understandings of democracy and hence of their strategies towards representative politics. While the PT was created to give a radically democratic lead to the struggle against dictatorship, the Labour Party was founded to protect and extend workers’ rights and social provision within a parliamentary democracy. The Labour Party began from an almost sacrosanct division between the industrial and the political, respectively the spheres of the unions and of the party. The rules governing the relationship have had a significant flexibility; otherwise this ‘contentious alliance’ would not have survived. By the 1950s this division of labour had produced a profoundly institutionalized abdication of politics by the trade unions to the Labour Party, which increasingly saw legitimate politics as taking place only within narrowly parliamentary confines. The unions could lobby and as part of the Labour Party pass resolutions proposing what governments should do. But for them to take action directly on pohtical issues, including broadly social ones, was out of bounds. The London Labour Party of 1981 was of a very different character.

146

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

It was the product of a powerful challenge to this moderating division of labour, which came perilously close (in the eyes of the British estabhshment) to breaking the barriers protecting the reactionary UK state against the rebellious spirit of what was at that time one of the best organized trade union movements in Europe. The Labour Party of the early 1970s was in opposition and radicalizing in reaction to the pohtical collapse and compromise of the 1964-70 Wilson government. The Labour Party at this time, especially outside the parliamentary leadership, opened its doors to the influence of social movements, including the base and some of the leadership of the trade unions. A radical manifesto was drawn up in a relatively open and participatory manner that was not only about extending pubhc ownership but also delegating power to trade union organisations in the workplace. In government, however, and under the pressures of the City, strengthened by US moves towards financial deregulation, and the IMF, the doors were closed by the parhamentary leadership. The result was an unprecedented struggle throughout the labour movement, which escalated into a conflict not over this or that policy, but over the very nature of representation. This struggle has been well documented.^ By the mid-1980s, the left had lost the struggle to change the Labour Party and with it the nature of working-class pohtical representation. In the meantime, the left had not only won and kept control of the party of the capital city in 1980, with the support of most of the trade unions, but with its victory at the elections for the GLC had gained control over a strategic authority with a budget greater than many nation-states. It had the opportunity, the wiU, the allies and some of the legislative powers - before the Thatcher government started to hack away at them - to implement radical policies. Once ensconced in County Hall, Labour councillors, driven on by the struggles and organizations in which many of them were involved, and indeed had become councillors to pursue, led the GLC in ways that would transform the relationship between councillors, local government ‘officers’, autonomous citizens’ organizations (including the unions) and the majority of London citizens.’ For a brief moment, this significant local Labour Party behaved m a way comparable to the Workers’ Party in Brazil 6,000 miles away. The distinctiveness of the PT, at least from its foundation in 1980 to the late 1990s (and its importance for our discussion of the conditions under which representative democracy might be a resource for social transformation), is a political practice based on the belief that the formal foundations of democracy - universal franchise, rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, political plurahsm and the rule of law - had to be reinforced

TRANSFOPJVIATIVE POWER

147

by effective institutions of popular, participatory democracy if the goals of democracy — political equality and popular control — were to be realized. This was the lesson the party drew from not only the experience of bringing down a dictatorship but also the extreme inequalities of Brazilian society, which made even more of a mockery of purely legal claims to political equality than in most capitalist countries. The practical character of these radically democratic forms was drawn partly from the participatory forms developed in the movements from which the PT was founded, particularly militant trade unions and the landless movement. These participatory forms were then developed through a self-conscious and collective process of trial and error in the formation of the participatory budget itself, in several major cities in addition to Porto Alegre. The culture and mentality of the party’s approach to popular participation was important too. This drew on the traditions of popular education which, most explicitly in the case of Paulo Freire, were effectively a form of political consciousness-raising based on the pnnciple of enabling people to realize their capacities. The result was a party that had committed itself to developing institutions of popular control through which it would try to share power and strengthen popular transformative capacities. There are many echoes of the PT in the character of Syriza, a reflection perhaps of their common history of struggle against a dictatorship. Returning then to the distinction between power in the sense of transformative capacity and power as domination, we can see how, in both cases, the radical political leaderships attempted to use state powers of domination — over finance and land in particular — as resources for the efficacy of popular transformative capacity. Thus, in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities that developed processes of participatory budgeting, after winning the mayoral elections and gaining centralized control over the budget, the party effectively delegated power over new investment and priorities to the co¬ ordinated decentralization of the participatory budget. At the same time, a group was set up to work with different neighbourhood organizations to facilitate the decentralized process. This was the organization of the annual cycle of neighbourhood and regional meetings at which proposals for new spending were made; evaluated according to the agreed framework of technical and substantive criteria; discussed through an elaborate, but transparent and rule governed process of horizontal decision-making and negotiation; and then finalized through a committee composed of delegates from the different regions of the city and various thematic assemblies as well as representatives of the Mayor. Progress on the implementation of previous decisions was also monitored through this open process, backed up by the

148

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Mayor’s budget office. In the case of the GLC, there was a similar combination of council action that used its centralized power and resources to delegate power to citizens’ organizations to strengthen the capacity of Londoners as workers or as citizens to determine the decisions shaping their lives. The GLC, for example, used its power to purchase land to prevent property developers from destroying an inner city community and then delegated the management of that land to the local community aUiance, which in the course of resisting the property developers had worked on its own plan for the area. It created a pubhc enterprise board, which helped to save companies from closure on the condition that the trade unions in those companies had certain powers over how the resources were used. It set up a central office within the council with the authority to monitor other departments’ implementation of the electoral mandate, including the commitment to popular participation. In other words, the centralized power to tax, to control the use of land and so on, was combined with a decentralization and delegation so the power over how state resources were allocated and managed was shared with popular groups. As with any serious experiment, the problems must be reflected on as well as the aims and the successes. These problems shed a harsh hght on the tensions between the forms of political organization developed historically within liberal representative poHtics to gam and sustain office within the state and the forms of political organization needed to build popular control over the state. To a significant extent, the political innovations towards the second goal were, in both cases, developed through the momentum of the process building on neighbourhood, workplace and social movement organizations that had already formed. The pressures of the immediate often meant that difficult issues raised in the actual practice of relations between parties and autonomous initiatives and movements were not always publicly recognized and discussed. In the case of the GLC, the emphasis on working with civic and trade union movements was strengthened by the limited nature of its own official powers for implementing Labour’s radical manifesto commitments. Much of the practical and political process of the relationship between the council and these independent organizations was dependent, however, on the GLC-appointed officers (most of whom had a movement background) and committed councillors, rather than Labour Party organizations on the ground. A continuing engagement with autonomous movements, beyond the institutional relation with the unions, had not become generally built into the political habits of local Labour Parties. This had begun to change in the

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

149

late 1970s and early 1980s, reaching a peak with the support that local Labour Parties and unions organized with others in communities and workplaces across the country, including London, for the 1984-85 miners’ strike. But this social movement struggle-oriented culture was not entrenched enough to withstand the defeats imposed by the Thatcher government, including the abolition of the GLC itself as the elected government of London. In Porto Alegre, where relations between the PT and social movements were very close, with much overlapping membership, a major problem was the extent to which leading activists in both were drawn into government positions, weakening both the party outside government and autonomous community

and

social

movement

organization.*

A

second

problem

concerned the participatory budget process itself Although all the evidence points to a significant increase in the active involvement and growth in self-confidence and organizing capacity, especially among the poor, women and blacks, a serious hmit emerged to the extent to which participatory budgeting developed popular transformative capacities beyond the point of making and prioritizing pragmatic demands. The source of this limit lay in the separation of the participatory budget process from strategic policymaking as, for example, on urban planning. As participation in budget decision-making grew numerically and participants gained in confidence and political awareness, activists, including in some of the poorest areas, pressed for information and involvement in planning policy. But this was never fuUy opened up. Close observer-participants suggest several explanations. One is that the PT within the municipality was not able to exert sufficient centralized control over the behaviour of the different departments, to implement this desire of the participants in the participatory budget. Planning officials were particularly protective of their departmental interests. Sergio Baierle indicates that it also reflected the development of a ‘governmental cadre’ amongst the PT who became distant from, and paternalistic towards, the community activists.^ A third problem with the participatory budget process was an absence of publicly debated and agreed guidelines for agreements between City Hall and community organizations involved in the provision of services such as childcare and recycling. The absence of an insistence on certain standards of equality, democracy and public efficiency - quite a well-developed feature of the CLC’s processes of grant giving — meant that the PT-led process of decentralization of resources to community organizations was vulnerable to the encroachment of the neoliberal path of community management, whose destination was usually some form of privatization.'® The problems encountered in London and Porto Alegre were not

150

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

necessarily insurmountable. Both processes had developed a certain capacity to innovate through trial and error. But in both cases the rise of marketdriven politics closed the space for further development of these experiences of democracy-driven rather than market-led reform. In the case of the GLC, its abolition took place during the period when the neohberal right was at its most triumphant. Moreover, some sections of the left, including those whose visions of socialism had been tied to the fortunes of the Soviet Union (or, like Tony Blair, had no vision of sociahsm whatsoever) became entirely defensive, turning into naive new converts to the capitahst market as the source of efficiency and ‘modernization’. As a result, they only weakly defended, and sometimes attacked, the innovations of the GLC. Certainly, they worked to delete its memory rather than to learn from it. In the case of Porto Alegre, the defeat of the PT in 2004 was a result of many factors, including a certain loss of direction in the local PT and disappointment with the early years of the Lula government as it succumbed to the pressures of the IMF. It is significant that the full development of both experiments was curtailed by the impact on parties of labour of the global momentum of neohberalism, for their importance is that they illustrated in practice a direct answer to market-driven politics. This politics did so in the way it began to develop a non-market alternative that responded to severe democratic fadings in public administration, while stiU recognizing the importance of the state in the redistribution of wealth and the provision of essential services and infrastructure. Whereas the conversion of social democracy to the neohberal paradigm involved unleashing the capitalist market as if it could be the source of new energy needed to reform routinized and unresponsive state bodies, the early PT and the radical left in London (and elsewhere) looked to fonns of democracy that released the creativity lying dormant among the mass of people as the source of new energy for the management of public resources for the public good. The attempted obliteration of this option, through the pervasive ideological imposition of the dichotomy ot an old statist left versus the dynamism and entrepreneurialism of the capitalist market, was m effect a continuation of cold war mentalities into the twenty-first century. Left alternatives are underdeveloped precisely because of the successes of this obliteration. But when we look for the sources from which a transformative politics can now grow, it is important to recall that the transformative alternative did not entirely disappear. This was seen in Brazil, if not in the PT itself, then through highly politicized movements and networks such as the Movemente Sans Terre. While even in the UK it survived in spirit in various campaigns.

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

151

from the one that defeated Thatcher’s poll tax to the more recent ones of, for example, UK Uncut against corporate tax evasion, combining creative fomis ot direct action with the research of committed academics, journalists and trade union whistle-blowers, followed up by supportive MPs. Here, 1 want to reflect especially on the many movements and initiatives that undertook struggles against privatization since the mid-1990s. Many of these were also struggles to transform the state. There are enough examples from across the world to suggest that these indicate a significant development among public sector unions and wider alliances, especially at a local level but with national and international support.” These experiences indicate a positive response to the breakdown of the division of labour characteristic of social democratic labour movements, as noted earlier, between trade unionism as concerned with industrial relations and the employment contract and parties taking responsibility for wider pohtical issues, including the welfare state. Here, in the refusal of trade unions to accept the commodification of public services and utilities, and at the same time voice the reassertion and renewal of the goal of maximizing public benefit rather than profit, unions are directly taking responsibility as citizens for what was the sphere of representative politics. In a sense, they are defending the earher use of the state to redistribute and to decommodify; but they are also opening up a dynamic of renewal and transformation of those non-market relationships. What is it that makes these struggles transformative, going beyond defending existing relationships and initiating a new dynamic that releases the creative capacities and powers of working people? The key development here is that trade union organizations grounded in specific workplaces, and cooperating with associations of users and communities, have begun to struggle around the use values produced by their members, rather than simply replicating the relations of commodity production and bargaining over the price and conditions of labour. Indeed, to win the struggle for public services they have turned their organization from being a means of representation and mobilization to also being a way of democratically socializing the knowledge that workers — and users — already have in fragmented form of the service they deliver or use, and gaining a fuU view of how the service could be developed and improved. They are in effect making overcoming of the alienated nature of labour a part of their struggle to defend but also realize the full potential of the public sphere of non-commodified provision.

152

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN TILANSITION The examples in this essay all illustrate a transition from sociahst change as centred around the state to an understanding of transformative power organized in society. Government — in these cases, local government — remained important, not as the prime driver of change but as exercising specific powers — of redistribution and sociahzation of land and finance, and the defence of public services. These are powers that can support the capacities of self-organized citizens to resist and transform, both in ways that they can be used against capital and in ways that can facilitate self¬ organization and support democratic and decentralized management of public resources, including as ‘commons’. What can we conclude about the implications of this transition for the nature ofpolitical organization? We have had a ghmpse through these examples of the GLC, Porto Alegre and transformative resistance to privatization, of the multiplicity of forms of political organization and initiative, in which the objective of pohtical representation and/or government office is only one part of the process of change. The concept of the ‘pohtical’ has, over the past four decades or so, gained the broader meaning of concern with transforming power relations throughout society. Many of the initiatives which are, in this sense, political more often than not focus on a particular site of social relations but do so with a wider vision and cluster of values in mind. An aspect of this broader interpretation of pohtics is the way that these activities are increasingly creating alternatives in the present which not only illustrate the future they are working for but also seek to open up a further dynamic of change. In this respect we made a comparison with the innovative strategic thinking of Andre Gorz in the mid-1960s; but in thinking now about political organization, a contrast will help to identify a further feature of the present transition. The organizational dimension of the struggle has changed considerably since Gorz’s time. For many reasons, involving both the political defeats of traditional organizations of labour, the socially devastating impact of neoliberal economics and also radical changes in technology and the organization of production, we face extreme forms of fragmentation and dispersion. In effect, the problem of creating prefigurative change in the present with a dynamic towards future change is as much about ourselves creating new forms of self-organization in the present as about reforms through the state. We can see the practice of this through campaigns around resistance and alternatives to privatization. We have described how these campaigns aim to achieve changes in the present which also illustrate an alternative future, defending or recovering public provision from takeover

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

153

by the market, but also making them genuinely public in their organization, not merely their ownership. These campaigns could not rely on the existing organizations of the labour movement. Considerable organizational innovation has been required involving links with communities in which the union is one actor amongst many, and the traditional labour parties have had only a minimum presence. Such campaigns have highlighted the need for the conversion of the union from a means of defensive bargaining to a means of gathering workers’ knowledge and taking militant action to transform services in response to users’ needs. This hybrid of old and new organizational forms, developed and combined for a common purpose, is a widespread pattern producing new organizational forms. Any

useful

mapping

of distinctive

features

of the

transition

in

organizational forms should include two further features of this multiplicity of political organization. The first concerns the importance of the means of communication. Organization is always in good part about communication, as well as about decision-making and discipline. The new communication technologies now enable a qualitatively greater variety of means of collaboration. They facihtate means of networked coordination based on common goals and shared values but recognizing a plurality of tactics and organizational forms and therefore not requiring a single centre. Such networked approaches to transformative politics preexisted the new technology but there has been an escalation of possibilities which have in turn expanded our organizational imaginations, as well as producing new problems. The second related feature concerns knowledge. The spread of dispersed yet often connected and collaborative forms of organization also creates favourable conditions for realizing the political potential of the plural understandings of knowledge developed in practice by movements in the 1970s, especially the women’s movement and radical trade union organizations and also, from different origins, in the traditions of popular education and grassroots political organizing in many parts of the South. The shift from a state-centred understanding of change to one focused on developing transformative power in society is associated with these radical changes in our understandings of knowledge. The movements of the 1970s asserted in their practice the creative, knowing capacity of socalled ‘ordinary’ people, against both the ‘scientific management’ of the Fordist factory and the centralized, exclusively professional knowledge of the Fabian social democratic state. Their understandings of the importance of experiential as well as theoretical knowledge, tacit as well as codified.

154

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

underpinned the first phase of thinking about participatory democracy in these earlier decades of rebellion and a so-called ‘excess of democracy’. This also alters the whole context of political programmes, leading to a far wider, more participatory process of the development of ideas than traditionally has taken place within political parties, emphasizing alternatives in practice as well as, indeed often as the basis for, reforms required from the state. In many ways, the functions associated with a pohtical party are now carried out by many autonomous actors sharing common values. To think through the implications of this complexity for pohtical organization it is important to distinguish different kinds or levels of pohtical activity. For example, the focused kind of unity required for an election campaign is not what is required for helping to build a network of social centres or alliances of community groups and trade unions, where spreading information and facilitating diversity according to local circumstances will be more appropriate. It makes sense for the question of organizational form to be related to the purpose of the activity. Moreover, there is no necessity for different activities and organizations that share common values be part of a single pohtical framework. There is a wide variety of ways in which common values can be communicated and shared. There remain, however, many unresolved issues. One is the problem with which we began: that of representation within the pohtical system, to redistribute public resources and redeploy state power. This is a purpose which again requires distinctive organizational fomis. To develop these, we need to return to our theoretical sketch of a critical approach to representation based on citizens not as atomistic individuals with a formal, abstract political equahty, but as citizens embedded in concrete, and at present, unequal social relationships, as workers, as dispossessed in numerous different ways, as women, as ethnic ininorities, disabled and so on. What strategies and organizational forms best ‘make present’ and gain political resources for the struggles to overcome these inequalities and sources of exploitation? We noted how actually existing parliamentary democracy effectively tends to occlude and reinforce inequalities of wealth and power unless directly challenged. This is a process intensified by conceding key decisions to opaque and unaccountable national and international bodies; and, as a consequence, a depoliticization of most of the central decisions affecting the future of society. This trend is often associated with neoliberal globalization, but it is only a continuation of a process endemic in liberal democracy; leaving key issues concerning the future of the poor in the hands of the capitalist market; as we saw in the past history of Porto Alegre, the future of the residents of the favellas in the hands of the elite of landowning families; of inner city

TBJ^NSFORMATIVE POWER

155

London communities in the hands of speculative property developers; and of public services in the hands of predatory corporations. The common feature of the counter strategies attempted in London and Porto Alegre was one based on municipal collaboration with those struggling directly against these inequalities: the organizations of the poor in the favellas through the participatory budget, the inner city of communities in London through direct involvement in formulating and implementing the council planning process and support for their proposals against the pressures of landowners and property developers, respectively. Organizationally, they entailed a form of political representation based on an electoral mandate and accountable for its implementation to those citizens with specific sources of power, knowledge and organization necessary — but without sufficient politic support — to carry through the change. I have argued that political representation in such contexts involves a clash between two entirely different understandings and forms of organization of political power. Organizational forms are needed, therefore, for the purpose of making present in the pohtical system struggles in society. These struggles reinforce the electoral mandate by actively claiming and elaborating the commitments made. Such forms of political representation are up against entrenched institutions which take as given and as beyond their responsibility the inequalities and problems against which these struggles and the electoral mandate are directed. The kind of organization whose purpose it is to carry through this social, unavoidably conflictual, form of representation has to be organized to serve the struggles and movements whose demands and needs it is pursuing through the political process. This is much more complex and harder than being ‘a voice’. If parties are understood as those organizations seeking political representation and government office, then we are talking here about a political party. But it is a party - or parties - of a very distinctive kind (of which we have experienced so very few). For a start it would, as should be clear from our previous evoking of the multiplicity of forms of political organizations for radical social change, be part of a constellation of organizations, outside of political institutions shanng more or less explicitly common values and goals. Secondly, these new kinds of parties would effectively be serving within the framework of a commitment set out by the electoral mandate, developed through the participation of this wider network or constellation. Forms of accountability and transparency for the work of representatives in implementing this commitment would be central to the organizational character of the party. Thirdly, the party organization would necessarily be double-sided with its

156

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

members, including those involved in the work of representation, involved m building these extra-parliamentary organizations of transformative power. As we saw with Syriza and others, they would be involved not especially as leaders but as fellow activists, contributing to and sharing their particular sources of power and knowledge. Such a new kind of party would require specific organizational forms to counter the pressures drawing representatives into the flytrap of parliamentary politics, with all its tendencies towards a separate pohtical class. W^e saw in both London and the GLC and Brazil and the PT, that the inability of the two parties to continue to build up the presence of social movements, and open up state resources for social struggles, lay in the weakness (m the case of the Labour Party) or weakening (in the case of the PT) of the parties’ organized links with society. There are lessons here that Syriza could well bear in mind. Political parties are shaped in part by movements that were decisive in their origins: for the PT, the movements for democracy and equahty against dictatorship and ohgarchic rule; and for the London Labour Party of the early 1980s, by the maturation of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Parties are also constrained by the system they are working in. With Syriza, perhaps, we have one of the first parties to be shaped predominantly, though not exclusively, by the movements that have developed to resist neoliberal capitalism in the face of a political class completely disconnected from the mass of people. One of the 29 women MPs that make up a third of Syriza’s parliamentary group, Theano Fotiou, described the overriding purpose that the structure of the new party must fulfil: ‘It must be a structure for the people to always be connected to the party, even if they are not members of the party, to be criticizing the party, bringing new experience to the partyThey created a coalition to which nearly two million people felt connected in spite of — maybe partly because of — a determined attempt to whip up fear. Syriza arrived at this through much learning both from fellow Greeks and from political experiences across Europe. It is clear that as we strengthen our continent-wide capacities to refuse austerity and organize behind the non-reformist reform of a democratic and equal Europe, we will learn a lot from them.

TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

157

NOTES My thanks to Roy Bhaskar, Vishwas Satgar, Jane Shallice and Steve Platt for helpful discussions and suggestions on earlier drafts, to Red Pepper and Transnational Institute companions for their constantly stimulating collaboration, and to Marco Berlinguer for many discussions in the process of writing a joint book that includes among many themes, those of this essay. 1 2 3

Personal interview, Athens, 9 July 2012. Personal interview, Athens, 9 July 2012. Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 7. Gorz explains non-reformist or ‘structural’ refomis as reforms conceived ‘not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human

6

needs and demands’. For this analysis of the radical potential of political representation as ‘making present’ see Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope, London: Verso, 1989. See, for example, Peter Gowan, ‘The Origins of the Administrative Elite’, Neiv Left Review, 167(March/Apnl), 1987, pp. 4-34. And on the role of Labour’s leadership: Ralph Mihband, Parliamentary Socialism, London: Merlin, 1961. Leo Panitch and Cohn Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left

7

to New Labour, London: Verso, 1997. Pubhc managers are known as ‘officers’, in line with the onginal mihtary model

4 5

8

9

10

11

of public service. In the early years of the PT government about 10 per cent of the local membership of the PT came to be employed by the Municipality. The city of Porto Alegre has 600 government appointed positions, a common pattern in Brazilian local government and something the PT presumably did not challenge because it strengthened their control over the state apparatus. But it does produce Its own problems. See Sergio Baierle, ‘The Porto Alegre Thermidor? Brazil’s “Participatory Budget” at the Crossroad , The Socialist Register 2003, London: Merlin Press, 2002. Baierle,‘The Porto Alegre Thermidor’. Also see Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, Updated Edition, London. SeaguU Books, 2009, pp. 140-50. See Evilina Dagnino, ‘Citizenship in Latin America: An Introduction , Latin American Perspectives, 30(2), 2003, pp. 211-25. She refers here to the ‘perverse confluence’ between, on the one hand, ‘the participatory project constructed around the extension of citizenship and the deepening of democracy and, on the other hand, the project of a minimal state, which requires the shrinking of its social responsibilities and the gradual abandonment of its role as guarantor of rights’. See D. Hall, E. Lobina and R. de La Motte, ‘Public Resistance to Privatization in Water and Electricity’, in D. Chavez, ed.. Beyond the Market: The Future of Public Services, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2005, pp. 187-95; M. Novelli, ‘Globahsations, social movement unionism and new internationalisms:

158

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 The role of strategic learning in the transformation of the municipal workers union ofEMCALI’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2(2), 2004, 161-90; S. Van Niekerk, ‘Privatization: A Working Alternative’, South Africa Labour Bulletin, 22(5), 1998, pp. 24-7; H. Wainwright, ‘Transformative Resistance: The Role of Labour and Trade Union Alternatives to Privatisation’, in David A. Macdonald and Greg Ruiters, eds.. Alternatives to Privatisation: Public Options for Essential Services, London: Routledge, 2012; H. Wainwright and M. Little, Public Service Reform... But Not As We Know It, Bnghton: Picnic Pubhshers, 2009.

12

We have seen it in campaigns in the UK against tax evasion. We have also seen it with Syriza in its campaign against the troika’s Memorandum, as they combine work to build the movement of the squares with organizing for government. The successful campaign against water privatization in Italy was again a hybrid of local campaigners for the commons organized through autonomous groups converging for a common campaign with trade unions, especially locally, municipal political representatives and so on. It is evident, too, in some of the most effective transnational networks such as ‘Our World is not for Sale’, which played a central part in the campaigns to expose and block the workings of the World Trade Organization. It is made up of a hybrid of trade unions, social movement, organizations of workers in the ‘informal economy’ and radical research and campaigning organizations from across the world. The global, continental and national convergences of movements and smaller organizations and initiatives through the World Social Forum processes spread and further cross-fertilized this hybrid pohtical networking.

13

For a useful and empirically grounded analysis of recent examples see: Marianne Maeckelbergh,

'Horizontal Democracy Now:

occupation'. Interface, 4(1), 2012, pp. 207-34. 14

Personal interview, Athens, 3 July 2012.

from alterglobalization to

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIRES

J

CHRISTOPH SPEHR ust seven years after its birth, Germany’s new party of the radical left, Die Linke (Left Party), has experienced a severe crisis. Having lost support

even in the face of the financial and eurozone crises, and without any clear strategy for the next electoral campaign, it was evident long before the party’s important convention in Gottingen in June 2012 that the enthusiastic dynamic that greeted the party’s foundational years from 2005 to 2009 had worn out. Its standing in national polls since the autumn of 2010 fell by half, from 12 to 6 per cent, while by 2012 the maverick Pirate Party emerged to suck up protest votes. In the eastern states of the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), Die Linke’s electoral ground proved more stable, even though it lost its representation in the state of Berlin’s governing coalition. On the western side, the electoral blows were harder, as Die Linke lost all its parliamentary seats in two states, including in the country s largest. North Rhme-Westphalia - where the rise of the new party had begun just seven years earlier. As the media played on unfortunate statements by its leaders in political debates and internal party quarrels, a complete electoral meltdown in the 2013 federal election seemed quite likely. In the run-up to the June convention, the polls hit a new low, with the party now showing only 5 per cent support — the election threshold for the German Bundestag. It was in light of all this that, just three weeks before the convention, Oskar Lafontaine - who two years earlier had resigned from the leadership along with co-chair, Gregor Gysi - offered to come out of retirement, only to withdraw the offer a week later. It was widely expected that the convention would result m turmoil, driving the rival tendencies and groups into a sharp clash, and possibly ripping the Left Party apart. Yet this did not happen. On the contrary, the party held an astonishingly constructive convention. For the first time in the party’s young history, the elections for the co-chairs and the board were completely open, with no pre-arranged or pre-bargained candidates

160

SOCIALIST PJEGISTER 2013

- and the results were broadly welcomed in the party. A loose but strong ‘third camp’, coming from all tendencies and counting for about a third of the delegates, expressing the membership’s frustration with the staging of internal rivalries and their determination to keep the party together, played a decisive role in the outcome. Although there was a numerical majority of delegates from Eastern Germany (the East counts only for a quarter of Germany’s inhabitants but the party has many more members there), the delegates elected a very regionally and politically balanced board. Moreover, candidates known for their more polarizing behaviour, or who narrowly advocated at the convention for their own tendencies in the party, did not get elected to higher positions. The outcome also ushered in an overdue generational change which, while already very much in the works, had not been expected to happen quite yet. It was clearly in response to the unsettling events before the convention that this was executed now. The new co-chairpersons reflect these developments. One of them is Katja Kipping (the party statutes since 2010 require that at least one of the two chairpersons has to be female), a 34-year-old mother of a six-monthold daughter. Already a member of the Bundestag, as head of its committee on labour and social issues she is well known for her commitment to the concept of basic income. Coming from Eastern Germany (and deputy chairwoman of the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) there), she represented the Left Party in the alliance that organized the anti-G8 protests in Heiligendamm in 2007, and was co-founder of the Institute for Solidary Modernity, a think tank that brings together leftists from the Greens, the SPD (the Social Democratic Party), the unions and social movements as well as Die Linke. The other co-chairperson is Bemd Riexinger who, although a venerable 56 year old trade unionist, is also known as a ‘movementist’. Unlike Oskar Lafontaine, Klaus Ernst and many others from the party’s trade-union faction, Riexinger has never been a member of the SPD. He took part in the German Social Forum, and was generally active in promoting the alliances with social movements and participation in social protests. As regional executive director of’Verdi, the public services trade union, in the western state of Baden-Wiirttemberg, he played a significant role in the organizing of the first demonstrations against the cuts to social services undertaken by the Schroder government (the so-called ‘Agenda 2010’). Also, Riexinger represented the party at major Occupy protests in Germany and in the planning for the Frankfurt ‘Blockupy’ protests against European austerity politics in the summer of 2012. In prevailing against more realpolitik-minded rival candidates at the Gottingen convention. Kipping said that she would not be able to talk as

DIE LINKE TODAY; FEARS AND DESIRES

161

loudly as her political predecessors ‘but maybe in a different voice’. This may hold true for Riexinger too, since in fact both new co-chairs signal an emancipation of the party from dependence on its elders, particularly Lafontaine and Gysi, who forged the Left Party together from two different source parties, the W^ASG (Labour and Social Justice — The Electoral Alternative) and the PDS, but also gave prominent voice to the conflicts, mutual fears and prejudices that went along with that process. To understand this very crucial point in the young party s history, and its current chances and options, one has to go back a little in time. DIFFEP^NT WAYS OF KNOWING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT W^e socialists, like people in general, do not always know very precisely what we want but usually are quite clear about what we do not want. We are more capable of articulating political fears, which are often rooted in our own experiences, than our political desires for a world yet to be created. Those from the former GDR who formed the PDS in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall knew that they did not want another SED (Socialist Unity Party). Those from the West, who broke away from the Social Democratic Party in 2005 and founded the WASG, knew that they didn’t want what the SPD had become during the governments of Gerhard Schrdder from 1998 to 2005. A lot of the conflicts and suspicions that troubled the Left Party from the beginning have been based on these different, and sometimes contradictory, political fears. The PDS was founded by a younger generation of former SED members who had seen first hand the authoritarian structures not only in the state and society but m the party itself, as it clung to an almost rehgious system of self-congratulatory dogmas and formulas. They had seen what happened to a socialist party that lost its touch with reality and with people. Those who shaped the PDS rejected the claim that world capitalism was to blame when people fled the workers’ and peasants’ state, let alone if garbage collection didn’t work. They had personally experienced a large field of very concrete, local grievances and dysfunctions, and recognized these as the reservoir for growing opposition and, finally, revolution. Realpolitik to them meant accepting that the truth about a society does not lie in the party s or state s declarations, but in the way people are treated in everyday life, in its schools, its public services, its workplaces. The WASG had different roots. It was created by those in the West who had watched with growing dismay the decay of the SPD under the redgreen coalition government that had finished off 15 years of conservative rule in

1998.

In its seven years of power, the Schrdder government

162

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

committed almost every sin one could imagine from a supposed left-wing government: leading Germany into the war against Yugoslavia (its first foreign military engagement since 1945); cracking down on social security, cutting unemployment and welfare payments under the notorious ‘Hartz Laws’; partially privatizing the pension system (further deregulating financial markets); lowering taxes on the high incomes and business. All of this paved the way for a huge low-wage sector. This was what the Schroder SPD called realpohtik. For the WASG founders, words like ‘compromise’, ‘modernization’, even ‘reform’ and ‘reason’ became synonyms for the SPD giving up every ideal and submitting to every capitahst demand that came along. The two new parties’ different experiences were reflected in their central strategic concepts. While for the WASG, this was ‘Haltehnien’: the ‘stop lines’ or ‘red lines’ that a socialist party would never cross when coming to power. For the PDS it was ‘Ankommen’, Hterally ‘arrival’ but better translated as ‘involvement’ - the idea of a sociahst party that got involved with actually-existing society and broke with the old ideological shibboleths as well as vanguardism in all its dimensions. The actual orientation of the various forces involved in each party was more complicated than such symbols could express, of course. Since 1993, the PDS had expanded into the former Western Germany, absorbing some of its left-wing tendencies. It also included the Eastern-based tendency of the ‘Communist Platform’ that considered the party’s fundamental critique of actually existing sociahsm in the GDR as overstated. The WASG also contained an array of groups and tendencies, resulting in sharp conflicts between the trade unionists and the radical leftists, especially the Trotskyists. However, the different basic experiences — and fears — defined both the practical orientations and the collective unconscious of the two source parties. It is notable, for instance, that while both source parties disliked the term progress — a concept so central to both socialist and communist theory and strategy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — they did so for very different reasons. In the PDS experience it was associated with a dangerous political teleology - the conviction that the victory of socialism was inevitable and that the failures and crimes of ‘actually existing socialism’ could be justified in the name of progress toward a new future. In the WASG experience, the invocation of progress was the door-opener for so-called ‘reforms’ that served only the interests of capital; ‘progress’, like ‘refonn, had become just a code word lor neoliberalism. There were also different political desires, mostly stemming from asymmetrical disillusions (for the western comrades with the limits of parliamentary democracy in a capitahst state, for

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIP^S

163

the eastern comrades the problems with a statist command economy). The Eastern members tended toward a stronger vision of individual freedom, self-administration and participation; the Western ones looked to the state to counter the power of private property and wealth, and to secure greater equality and social security. When the two parties came together in 2005 it was soon clear that these differences did not preclude common political demands, and in this sense, they largely shared the same space on the left of the political landscape. But to overcome the different political fears and desires, based on the sharply different experiences and organizational heritages, there was still a long way to go. HOW THE WEST WAS WON Drawing on his famous political instinct, Gerhard Schroder in 2005 staged a vote of confidence in the Bundestag so as to be able to hold a snap federal election. While the SPD had just lost its electoral heartland in the state elections of North Rhme-Westphalia, neither the PDS nor WASG, running against each other as well as the SPD, did well enough to enter the state parliament. Shroder was gambling that the PDS and WASG would now destroy each other m their competition for discontented SPD voters at the federal level. This proved a very bad bet - above all because Oskar Lafontaine decided to bet against him. Lafontaine immediately declared that he would run as the top candidate if the PDS and WASG managed to unite for the elections. This was an offer too exciting to be refused. Lafontaine was an exceptional German politician. Minister-President of Saarland state from 1985 to 1998, he was also the SPD s candidate for Chancellor in the 1990 elections. As the party s Chairperson from 1995 to 1998, he successfully deployed a strategy of obliging the SPD to take a course of non-cooperation with the CDU to isolate and bring down the Kohl government. Given his standing in the party, Schroder had appointed Lafontaine as Minister of Finance m the 1998 government. And It was from this position that Lafontaine suddenly resigned a year later in the face of Schrdder’s capital-friendly orientation and his ready embrace of neoliberal economic policies. Having the most prominent critic of the Schrbder government - which he had once helped bnng to power - as the top candidate of a united left added a certain ‘High Noon’ flavour to the contest that the mass media found hard to resist. Further, it solved the so-called ‘pilot problem’ in terms of being able to cut deeply into the support of the SPD. If you want to sack the pilot of a plane for following a wrong course, the question will

164

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

quickly be raised: ‘This critique is all very well, but is there anybody else on board who can fly a plane?’ Otherwise, the uproar over the critique will quickly fade away. Lafontaine obviously could fly and he was also strong and experienced enough to negotiate with the PDS elite. In Gregor Gysi, the likewise unique protagonist of the PDS, he found a partner with whom he shared mutual trust and who also realized the historical opportunity. Indeed, Gysi often gave Lafontaine the greater share of the stage so as to win greater support from western voters. Lafontaine’s strategy for ‘winning the West’ worked exceptionally well. There was already a deep and widespread disappointment with the Schroder government among the trade unions, the workers and the new ‘precariat’ produced by the Hartz laws. Lafontaine’s strategy was to exploit maximally the weakness of the SPD, using the new coalition of the left as an instrument to punish the SPD for what Schroder had done. He focused the campaign on the very concrete, most hated actions of the Schroder government, demanding the abandonment of the Hartz laws and withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan. As positive elements, he added the demand for a minimum wage and for a wealth tax. As the PDS and WASG thus managed to come together in an electoral coalition with a clear strategic focus, the 8.4 per cent of the vote it won had the effect of throwing Schroder and his SPD-Green coalition government out of office. After the election, the PDS and WASG merged to create the new Left Party, Die Linke. The strong electoral showing foretold a ‘critical mass’ behind it that had to be taken seriously. This induced a rapid growth in members for the new party in the W^est, which allowed for a certain regional balance of power in the new party. And while Lafontaine saw the party as an instrument of protest for putting pressure on the SPD, he was careful to underline that the Left Party was not just a naysayer: the promise of achieving social justice had to be the ‘brand essence’ of the new party. At the same time, he offered to support a social-democratic chancellor who would meet the Left Party s basic electoral demands. He stressed the party’s attachment to traditional social-democratic values, presenting Die Linke as a kind of‘real SPD’ opposed to the ‘traitor SPD’ created by Schrdder. Although this was a completely refonnist programme, Lafontaine used to blame the PDS for being too reformist. In truth, Lafontaine’s conflicts with the former PDS leadership had other sources as well. He opposed their politics of cooperation with the SPD in local coalitions because it interfered with his strategy to demonize the SPD and to force it out of power. He also staged conflicts with the PDS leadership, as a concession to anti-communist sentiment among workers in West Germany, and as a signal to the trade

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIRES

165

unions that, through Lafontaine, they could get direct access to the party’s power centres as they had in the SPD before Schroder. This strategy — a combination of old SPD mimicry, populist kitchen table wisdom and the tricky offer to ‘vote against the SPD for its own good’ — was extremely successful in the initial years of the Left Party. The party reached a peak of support at the 2009 Bundestag elections when it gained 11.9 per cent of the national vote (8.3 in the West and 26.4 in the East). However, this also marked a turning point, as the success of the initial strategy started to fade. The crucial factor here was that the political landscape had changed now that the SPD was relegated to the opposition: the outcome of the 2009 election meant that it could no longer cling to office as it had done after 2005 as the junior partner in Merkel’s grand coalition government. This may have dismayed the SPD’s careerist parliamentarians, but it also undercut Die Linke’s support because it meant that Merkel and her government now became the only enemy in the eyes of the trade unions, the workers, the poor and the social movements. By 2010 it was clear that the Left Party urgently needed consolidation and reorientation, particularly in the West, but also in its Eastern base. The party had been going on pure adrenalin for four years from the excitement of its creation and the need to campaign year after year. But now the party was exhausted and needed to prepare for a period of ‘stationary warfare’ instead of‘mobile warfare’. The Left Party had entered a period of internal crisis. HOW THE EAST SURVIVED Easterners are unnervingly modest. When a Western comrade uses a lighter to open a bottle of beer, he calls it a strategy . If he does the same thing again half an hour later, he calls it steering a steady course . When a regional section of the party in the East invests eight years to bring down a conservative mayor and finally succeeds, replacing him with a left candidate, they wouldn’t caU it a strategy - they just call it ‘hard political work’. In truth, there is a lot of elaborate strategy involved. The PDS internal debates after 1990 revealed some of this strategy, but only hazily. The PDS comrades found it difficult to explain to their Western comrades from the WASG what they had done over these years to consolidate a base of support and how they had gone about it. The almost colonial takeover of the former GDR by West Germany served as a constant source for a successful appeal to morality, integnty and self-respect against the dominant German parties and the broader political system they represented. In 1989, CDU chancellor Helmut Kohl and SPD chairman Willy Brandt had sung the national anthem at the Berlin Wall m

166

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the light of the cameras. After 1990, they more or less forgot about the East, seeing de-industrialization, unemployment, poverty and lack of prospects as a kind of just punishment for the heirs to the experiment in a really existing socialist state. What was quite unbearable for many of the GDR’s former citizens was that those in the West were completely uninterested in anything that might have been good in the GDR, and the new unified state incorporated none of its achievements — except the green arrow allowing a right turn at a red light when there is no traffic. The core strategy of the PDS was ‘to care’ for the people while others did not. The PDS made community organizing and communal politics central, fighting for every httle local decision that might be in the people’s interest. This also offered some degree of self-respect for Easterners, who clung to the notion that the idea of a post-capitalist society had not been aU wrong. Like Lafontaine in the West, Gysi in the East had been foremost in articulating the fact that the experience of really existing socialism, although having brought oppression and authoritarianism, had nevertheless brought about some positive changes in social relationships. Class divisions had not vanished in the GDR, but they had been transformed deeply. GDR workers dishked the term ‘class’ because the authoritarian government used the term mostly to celebrate itself and to insult people’s intelhgence by empty political speeches. Nevertheless, it really did matter that the opponents of the working class were not private factory owners and corporate capitahsts, but state bureaucrats and pohtical ehtes. The working class was well educated, socially mobile, it had seen a lot of affirmative action and it had overcome bourgeois discrimination. One of the striking differences in GDR society was that couples easily crossed differences in social status. There was no shame in being a worker and no privilege to being a teacher. Although free unions and oppositional organizations were banned, there were structures of social control that also limited the range of top-down command at the workplace and in the local neighbourhood, the ‘niche’ places in society where things got done through multiple quiet practices of solidarity and trust. This was exactly how the PDS behaved: caring, intelligent, respectful and building things from below. It had almost no competitors in this effort after 1990, and it collected many activists that the established Western parties simply did not want. Gysi and the PDS, moreover, invested a lot of energy and debate into distinguishing a socialist vision from the dictatorship of actually existing socialism, especially by rearticulating socialism as a ‘neighbourhood-state’, with extensive community control. The PDS’s criticism of the GDR and state sociahsm was, in fact, much sharper than it

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIRES

167

was among the Western left. The PDS invested a lot of effort on internal debates to try to clarify how their daily groundwork would contribute to ending capitalism and establishing a better, freer socialism. The key concepts were ‘transformation’ (a term invoked to overcome the fruitless reform-orrevolution-debate), ‘participation’, ‘solidarity’ and the previously mentioned ‘Ankommen’, as a merging of socialist politics with every aspect and niche of the existing society. Crucial to the party strategy was to combine participation in government with so-called transformative projects

(‘Einstiegsprojekte’).

The party

was keen to enter government coalitions because it was so necessary for recognition and legitimacy after the disintegration of the GDR. The first SPD-PDS governing coalition in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 1998 was a breakthrough in this respect. It not only suggested that the PDS might finally become accepted as a ‘normal’ political party, it was also seen as an act of conciliation from the new dominant forces, showing you could hold a different opinion about the GDR experience, but still get access to the highest positions in the state. In the state of Berlin, the PDS sacrificed crucial political positions to enter another such coalition in 2001. In Brandenburg, the PDS developed a long-term strategy to reach another SPD-PDS governing coalition, strengthening points of accord between the two parties while overcoming points of discord, and relying on widespread sentiments in the East that it was worth trying to make it work. The ‘Einstiegsprojekte’ were long-term political projects in specific fields designed to demonstrate a socialist-type approach to organizing inside a capitalist society. The most famous - and most heavily debated - of these projects involved attempting to develop a sector of publicly funded employment. Another involved ‘participatory budgets in urban districts. While the term ‘Einstiegsprojekte’ got more than a little inflated in the party, with almost every political demand being called a transfomiative project’, the initial strategy of building competence and capacity in selected political fields proved successful on many levels. It showed the party could accomplish something for people, and this allowed it not only to articulate but to realize a conception of socialism that would be identified in daily life with the politics of the PDS. By 2009, however, the Eastern strategy had worn out. After accepting Die Linke into a governing coalition in Brandenburg that year, the SPD began to reject the idea of cooperation with the Left Party even at the local or state level because it would hinder the SPD’s nationwide strategy to make the Left Party ‘superfluous’. Meanwhile, the effects of the financial crisis on the national budget as well as on communities and states made it difficult to

168

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

find ‘Einstiegsprojekte’ that amounted to more than reinforcing the trend to precarious work. Above all, the Left Party in the East had continually lost members due to the aging of its membership structure. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what had seemed positive about being raised in the ‘niche-society’ of the GDR had faded among a younger generation that only knew a unified German republic, with access to all the channels of global communication and culture. THE SHOWDOWN BEFOP^ THE GOTTINGEN CONVENTION This would have been a good starting point to open up a strategic debate and to look, at last, for a merging between the Eastern and Western strategies of the party. But what instead started to emerge at the beginning of 2010 was the revival and even intensification of old fears and inner conflicts. Oskar Lafontaine had already announced in October 2009 that he would no longer be available for the chairmanship of the parliamentary group as he had to undergo cancer treatment. Although he made a full recovery, he made it clear that he would retreat completely from the Bundestag and would not run for a third term as chairman of the party at the convention of May 2010. At the same time, he accused Dietmar Bartsch, the general-secretary of the party who was seen as a natural candidate for the chairmanship after Lafontaine by many of the party’s Eastern regional sections, of having manoeuvred against him and leaking confidential information to the press. It was the start of a bitter fight over who should lead the party after Lafontaine, with the latter’s behaviour implying a Western threat to break up the party if Bartsch should succeed him. It did not come to a break-up, largely due to Gregor Gysi. After weeks of accelerating levels of threats - displayed in open letters between the Western and Eastern sections - Gysi signalled in a public speech that he did not back Bartsch, who declared soon after that he would not run again for the position of general-secretary or for any other position in the new board. To further ensure any open clash at the upcoming convention was avoided, Gysi invited the party’s regional chairpersons to what became notorious as the ‘long night’, forcing them to agree on a board that no one liked but that had at least some balance - and was sanctioned by Lafontaine. The ‘long night’ lasted until 4:30 in the morning. At 9:00 a.m., Gysi appeared before the press and announced the ‘mutual understanding’. At this point, two things became apparent. The obvious one was that the long night only temporarily covered over the old tensions arising from trying to merge the two dominant regional sections. The East felt betrayed because the new chairman Klaus Ernst seemed less capable than their

DIE LINKE TODAY; FEARS AND DESIRES

169

preferred candidates; and the new chairwoman, Gesine Lotzsch, although coming from the East, was not seen as representing their interests. The West, in turn, became enraged by what were seen as guerrilla tactics practiced by those in the East to delegitimize the new board in the public media. Other inner party conflicts — between trade unionists and Trotskyists in the West, between ‘governmentists’ and ‘movementists’ in the East — seemed to get sucked up in the all-consuming and long-lasting East-West tension. Over the following two years, the ‘big guns’ from West and East waged war, mobilizing ‘their’ regions against the ‘other side’, feeding prejudice and appealing to respective fears. The East, it was said, would want to ‘soften’ the party into a new kind of neoliberal SPD, while the West, the other side claimed, would have the party regress into an authoritarian, quasi-SED talking shop. Yet, it also soon became apparent that all sides were sick and tired of this hopeless confrontation and its debilitating effect on inner-party democracy. A common feeling arose inside the party that things could not go on like this. A growing group of middle rank-and-file party activists tried to work for mutual disarmament, organizing East-West meetings, and advancing the sober insight that Lafontaine would be urgently needed to lead the party m the 2013 elections. But the party had first to free itself from destructive confrontations and lay common ground for what would happen after 2013 when Lafontaine would certainly have to depart the political scene for good. The adoption of a new party platform in autumn 2011, after a long period of gestation, served both purposes. The platform was the result of hard work, intense East-West dialogue and some fair compromises. This was especially seen in the way the ‘Haltelinien’ strategy was embraced on all sides, while softened in a way that did not destroy the possibility of entering governing coalitions with SPD m the East. Yet by the time of the 2011 convention it still appeared that East-W^est suspicions and mass phobias had reached a peak, with Lafontaine presenting himself as the only one who could be trusted to defend the platform against ‘watering down’. Members of the wider voting constituency for the party were not interested, however, in platforms and cared neither for ‘Haltelinien’ nor ‘constructive politics’. They were disgusted by the party s internal conflicts and the bad behaviour in airing them in public. The Left Party and its leadership were losing the capacity to connect to their voters. Polls fell, raising new arguments and accusations, in a vicious circle. At the end of 2011, after Dietmar Bartsch announced that he would run for chairman in the convention in June 2012, Lafontaine signalled that he might be willing to lead the party again in the 2013 elections but not with Bartsch as chair.

170

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Three of the Eastern regional sections called for a ballot of all the party’s members to elect new chairpersons. As the East has far more members than the West, the latter saw this as a trick that served only Bartsch, and they therefore blocked it while promising that a compromise for the new board would be discussed in a timely manner. But nothing happened. The middle¬ ranking officials tried to meet and continue the process of conciliation but they could do little so long as Eafontaine did not declare his position. After Die Linke’s painfully poor showing in the important North RhineWestphalia election in May 2012 — which was by no means unexpected — Eafontaine came up with his ‘offer’. He would serve as top candidate in the 2013 elections, but only if it was agreed upon that Bartsch would withdraw his candidacy so that Eafontaine would become chairman too, and that a board would be formed that ‘would undoubtedly support him’. This was too much. There followed a week of inner-party campaigns for and against this ‘offer’, but it was the resistance to it that was much stronger. Not all Eastern regional sections wanted Bartsch, but all of them rejected giving in to Eafontaine’s conditions. Most of the Western regional sections wanted Eafontaine, but many active members were not willing to support him in what was felt to be a rather authoritarian humiliation of the East. Gysi again came to the fore, declaring this time that he saw no reason to urge Bartsch to withdraw. The Left Party could ‘not be led like a social-democratic party’ where ‘the chairman assigns the key positions’. This settled it. Eafontaine withdrew his ‘offer’, and just a few weeks before the 2012 convention, the party was compelled to stumble into the postLafontaine era. In a seemingly revolutionary move, Katja Kipping, joined by Kathanna Schwabedissen, chairwoman of the Left Party m North Rhme-Westphalia, announced their candidacies for joint leadership, and this was the signal for the rise of a new third camp’ beyond the increasingly fruitless supremacy struggles between East and West hard cores. In the end Schwabedissen, to satisfy the trade unionist faction, withdrew in favour of Bemd Riexinger who won in a close competition against Bartsch. While the radical proposal for a two-woman leadership was not on the cards, Sahra W^agenknecht, the party s 43-year-old rising star in the Bundestag, received an overwhelming vote in running for deputy chairwoman, laying the basis for the common impression that she might well be one of the best options for a top candidate in the 2013 elections. Ulrich Maurer, one of Lafontaine’s long-time companions in the party, called for ‘the old he-goats’ to ‘make room’ for a younger generation.

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIRES

171

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CRISIS? All this may sound like one of those soap operas that internal leadership dynamics so often seem to produce, even in socialist parties. But behind it aU there was something really profound. One of the bitter and ironic aspects of the Left Party’s near downfall is that it may have had nothing to do with the party’s own actions at all. Rather, the increasing quarrels may well have been — and continue to be — the helpless reflection inside the Left Party of the peculiar and conservative reaction by the German public to the protracted global financial crisis, and specifically its asymmetric impact across Europe. Until 2010, the onset of the crisis of the eurozone, there had been a strong inclination among the German public to put an end to neoliberalism, at least to its hard-core version represented by the Merkel government. The SPD had been continuously closing the gap with the CDU, the right-wing Liberal Party had once again been overrun by the Greens, and the Left Party had stayed at a 10 per cent level of popular support. But from late 2010 onward, these tendencies changed. It was at this time that Bild magazine put out its notorious headline: ‘Do sell your islands, you broke Greeks!’ In Germany, which has managed to ride out the crisis relatively unscathed and even profit from the weakness of its neighbours, the Greek crisis was perceived as something that will happen if a country loses its discipline and starts to raise public spending and stops demanding sacrifice among its own citizens. In German public opinion, the Greek crisis muffled the desire for political change in Germany because it stirred up deeper fears. The Left Party was simply not prepared for the hard work and strategic adjustment this new political context in Germany showed was needed. While the party had begun to perceive that the East and West strategies that it had been deploying might both be wearing out, it held on even tighter to these strategies under the pressure of the changing political situation and the decline in the party’s electoral fortunes. From the East came an inclination to dodge the public debate about the crisis and avoid taking demonstrative political action around it, in favour of concentrating on reviving a political strategy based on local issues and communal politics as well as taking up ‘new questions’ like ecology and democratic participation. Since in the West the reason for the party’s declining support was largely attributed to the failure of the Left Party to sustain strongly enough its ‘brand essence’ distinct from the SPD, the inclination was to launch a much sharper ‘blame the SPD’ campaign concentrating now on its craven political submission in pursuing another Grand Coalition strategy. Yet it was not clear that either strategy would have helped revive Die Linke’s support in the new political setting. In any case, the party could not avoid taking a strong stand in the debate

172

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

over the crisis unfolding across the eurozone. Even if at times Die Linke’s interventions seemed to be falhng on deaf ears and meant only further isolation, these also left the public with a greater impression that the party was quite competent in economics, and had seen earlier than the other parties what needed to be done. With the victory of Francois HoUande and the Socialist Party in France, and the stunning results of Syriza in Greece, the critics of Merkel’s economic course are gaining ground in the European Union’s political space, with clear effects inside Germany as well. The sentiment that the EU’s pohcy in the crisis so far has only helped the banks and the wealthy is getting more widespread attention and even reaches the mainstream talk shows and media. Although the leadership of the SPD and Greens continue to hold on to neoHberal policy prescriptions, with some handwringing, these positions are increasingly disputed among the pubhc, and there is growing unrest among their memberships, especially over their parties’ support for the European Fiscal Compact. It may be that the pohtical situation is beginning to turn more favourably again for the Left Party. If it does, one has to admit that this wiU not mainly be the result of the party’s strategic decisions or what it considers to be such decisions. It will be the result of a change of circumstances. The party’s internal differences, stressed so much in the fight about its leadership, prove largely irrelevant outside of the party. In public and on talk shows, Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine do not talk about the end of capitahsm, but about possible solutions to the crisis. In public and in the media, Dietmar Bartsch and Stefan Liebich do not talk about how easy it would be to form coalitions with the SPD and Greens at a nationwide level but rather about the failures of these parties to steer any meaningful course. In the West, the party has had its first new experience with a governing coalition in the city of Saarbriicken, supplemented by a politics of parliamentary ‘toleration’ in the state of Hesse, and with selective support for an SPD-Green minority government as in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the East, the party feels more pressure to address a younger generation, with the rise of the Pirate Party being much sharper there than in the West. It is time to learn that the period of fantasizing about ‘existential decisions’, because the party could write this or that in its platform, should be over. AP^ THEB^ LESSONS FROM DIE LINKE? Is there anything to learn from the experience of the German Left Party? First, bringing a new political actor into existence needs a window of opportunity. There must be a chance to reach within a short time a critical mass of cadre and public support. Second, the new political instrument has to include a

DIE LINKE TODAY: FEARS AND DESIRES

173

broad spectrum of different left experiences and approaches. The political times are changing and we do not know which aspects of left politics will be needed two years from now. There is no sense in narrowing down options, and the time for single-focus vanguard parties has passed. Third, while the party needs to serve a function beyond just the electoral one, it cannot just function as a home for leftists: it needs to find a necessary function beyond this that people much more broadly can see the party as especially useful for, one that connects with the specific national traditions and contexts of its political system. Fourth, the party needs to be a space for mass dialogue and debate. The very complicated antagonisms and misunderstandings between different pohtical traditions and experiences have their origin in the differentiation and experiences of the working classes today. Listening to each other will pay off, and exploiting prejudices for internal power politics will not. Fifth, the party must be able to explain at any time why its electoral successes do really serve the greater goal of political change, against reservations that by taking votes away from parties of the centre-left they help conservative or reactionary governments get elected. And relatedly, we must face the question of whether criticism of the parties of the centreleft demobilizes more voters than we mobilize for the left. Such questions about the over-all positive contribution the party is making to the relations of power between left and right in general are ones that every attempt to establish a strong socialist party will have to face in any country. As Brecht once put it, it is not enough to drive your own car; you need to have all the other cars around you in mind if you want to avoid accidents. The German Left Party contains a very broad range of different experiences. This ought to be considered an advantage, as it gives rise to a certain richness of debate and knowledge. The Left Party will have to renew the Lafontaine strategy of defining things that can be done now in the people’s interest, as part of the strategic cnteria for gaining systemic reforms from parliaments and governments and building social movements. The party will also have to renew the PDS strategy of Einstiegsprojekte , and thereby provide useful examples of everyday struggles and reforms that get things done now in a socialist way. A socialist party must not be boring. Its main duty is to be visionary, to overcome fear in favour of desire, which can only be reached by imagination and solidarity. A new society cannot be guided by old fears. Nor can a left party.

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM? NEW EUROPEAN LEFT PARTIES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE CHARLES POST

T

oday, the socialist left in Europe confronts a situation markedly different from most of the twentieth century. The social democratic

parties, while maintaining significant electoral support among workers in most of Europe, are no longer parties of even pro-working-class reform. Most have adapted ‘social liberal’ politics, combining residual rhetoric about social justice with the implementation of a neohberal economic and social programme of privatization, austerity and attacks on organized labour. The communist parties, with few exceptions, have either disappeared or are of marginal electoral and political weight. They were unable to survive either the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or over four decades as the junior partners in electoral alliances with a rightward moving social democracy. The European sociahst left that has survived is attempting to create new fomrs of organization. While some of these parties have labeled themselves ‘anti-capitalist’ and others ‘antineohberal’, almost all of these parties describe themselves as both ‘post-social democratic and post-Leninist’.' Striving to create fomis of working-class and popular political representation for a new era, many in these parties claim to be transcending the historic divide in the post-1917 sociahst movement. This essay seeks to lay the historical foundation for a better understanding of the extent to which these parties have actually moved beyond the main currents of twentieth century sociahsm. We start with a reexamination of the theory and history of pre-First World War social democracy, and examine what Leninism represented in relation to it. We then trace the rise and decline of the Leninist organizations, the communist parties from 1923 through the 1990s. Next, we assess the unsuccessful attempts to ‘hot-house’ new Leninist organizations by relatively small groups of students and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, we analyze how the two most significant new

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

175

anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal political formations in Europe — the Italian Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) and the German Left Party, Die Linke — came to face the same strategic issues that confronted socialists before 1914, and reproduced not only the political debates but also the same practical contradictions that Leninism had sought to resolve politically and organizationally. Our analysis leads us to the conclusion that Leninism cannot be reduced to the post-1923 caricature of‘democratic centralism’. Instead, the enduring legacy of Leninism remains the goal of constructing an independent organization of anti-capitalist organizers and activists who attempt to project apolitical alternative to the forces of official reformism not only m elections, but in mass, extra-parliamentary social struggles. THE WORLD OF MASS SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTIES, 1890-1914 In Britain, France, Italy and Germany, relatively small socialist parties - often with parliamentary representation - and unions composed mostly of skilled workers had survived both the ‘long depression’ of the 1870s and 1880s and the intense repression of the left and workers’ organizations in the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871.^ The long period of capitalist growth from 1890 to 1914 set the stage for the growth of truly mass workers’ parties and unions in most of Europe. The emergence of metal working industries (steel, machine making, automobiles, shipbuilding, etc.) and the development of electrical and chemical power increased the size and weight of the industrial working class. While profits remained relatively high, capitalists unleashed an intense campaign to destroy the power of skilled industrial workers, speed up production and depress wages. Workers across the industrial world responded to capital’s offensive m three major waves of industnal struggle.^ The first wave of mass industrial struggles came in the 1890s, as dockers, miners, and railway workers established beachheads for industrial unionism in their workplaces. Tens of thousands of new adherents joined socialist political organizations across Europe - the largest being the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A decade of relative class peace in Europe ended abruptly m 1905-07. Massive metal worker and miners’ strikes in France led to the establishment of General Confederation of Labour (CGT), under syndicalist leadership, and to the unification of the various socialist electoral groups into the French Section of the Workers’ International m 1906. Strikes in Germany produced a new wave of growth for the SPD and unions. The last wave of prewar industrial struggles came between 1912 and 1914. Attempts of employers to generalize ‘scientific management’ (Taylorism) in the machine making, steel, auto, and shipbuilding industry sparked massive

176

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

struggles against speed-up and deskilling. Led by skilled industnal workers, these strikes coincided with struggles over war preparations across Europe. While the established leaders of the unions and socialist parties were, at best, lukewarm in their embrace of worker militancy, renewed industrial struggles resulted in the growth of union membership and electoral support for the sociahst parties. The discontinuity of these - Eke all working-class struggles under capitalism — produced two socially and politically distinct groups that came together in an uneasy alliance in prewar social democracy.'^ On the one hand, the mass struggles before 1914 generated hundreds of thousands of radical and revolutionary workplace leaders. These mostly well-paid skilled metal workers led countless battles over economic issues, as well as pohtical struggles for democratic and social rights — often against the wishes of the social democratic leaders of their unions and parties. This ‘mihtant minority’, the actual workers’ vanguard, was the mass audience for the revolutionary, left wing of social democracy — Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and, before 1914, Kautsky. On the other hand, the stabihzation ofparhamentary institutions, the spread of suffrage among working-class men and growing trade union legahzation allowed the consolidation of a layer of full-time party, parliamentary and union officials. With the support of the less active segments of the working class (the mass of social democratic voters and party and union members), these officials sought a ‘place at the table’ of capitahst society. Committed to normalizing class relations through parliamentary reforms and institutionalized collective bargaining, these officials were the social base of reformist politics in the prewar socialist movement. As understood here, reformism was (and is) not the struggle for reform, but the substitution of electoral campaigns and routinized bargaining/grievance procedure for mass social disruption through strikes, demonstrations and the like.^ The reformist bureaucrats dominated the official practice of the parties and unions in most of Europe before the First World War. Ffowever, each wave of mass strikes brought the conflicts between these officials and the more radical and militant ranks of their organizations into the open, precipitating the classic debates on socialist strategy in the prewar era. The struggles of the 1890s, and the subsequent consolidation of industrial unions and of socialist parties across Europe in a period of capitalist prosperity, produced the

‘revisionism’

debate

of 1899-1900.

Eduard Bernstein

challenged

predictions of capitalist stagnation and decline, giving a theoretical gloss to the union and party officials’ day-to-day practice and bolstering those social democrats who supported the French socialist Millerand’s entering

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

177

a capitalist dominated government as minister of commerce and labour.® Arrayed against Bernstein and his allies were the most prominent theorists of German social democracy, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Kautsky, prophetically, argued that ‘Millerandism’ would lead socialists to take responsibility for pro-capitalist policies — policies that involved attacks on workers’ wages, hours, working conditions and political rights.^ Luxemburg argued that the inherent instability of capitalist accumulation made mass struggles necessary to win and defend all temporary gains for workers under capitalism.® The tumultuous struggles of 1905-07, in particular the first Russian Revolution, sparked the ‘mass strike’ debates. Since the 1880s, socialist parties in Europe had pursued what Engels called the ‘tried and tested tactic’ of building mass parties that contested parliamentary elections and organized trade unions, cooperatives and various working-class cultural institutions.^ For Luxemburg and other left-wing social democrats the 1905 revolution in Russia, despite its defeat, pointed the way forward.’® Workers’ struggles that began over immediate workplace issues could be generalized across workplaces and industries into massive political strikes that could not only win immediate political reforms, but, in certain circumstances, pose the question of political power. Advocates of the mass strike in Germany argued that party and union mditants should seize the opportunity presented by the debates on the reform of voting laws in Prussia to organize not only a one day demonstration strike, but to agitate in workplaces for continued and generalized strike action for universal suffrage. The leadership of the SPD and socialist-led German unions, with the support of an increasingly conservative Kautsky, rejected the call for the mass strike.” Believing that such tumultuous struggles could threaten their ‘place at the table in parliament and collective bargaining, the party and union officials argued that the ‘twin pillars of social democracy’ - the party and unions - were independent ‘equal partners’ in the workers’ movement, with the party restricting itself to election campaigns and socialist education, while the union officials directed the day-to-day workplace struggle. The prewar strike wave shaped the debates on the immanent mterimpenalist war that wracked the socialist movement between 1912 and 1914.’^ A growing layer of worker militants, radicalized by the experience of recent struggles, supported those in the left wing of social democracy that pressed for preparing the movement for revolutionary opposition to the coming war. Luxemburg, Lenin and others argued that war between capitalist states was the inevitable result of dynamics of early-twentieth-century capitalism, and believed the war would provide opportunities for massive, revolutionary

178

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

working-class struggle. The ‘centre’ and right of the socialist movement rejected militant,

extra-parliamentary opposition to

war preparations.

Kautsky and the ‘Marxist centre’ argued that capitahst development would actually lessen inter-capitahst political and mihtary rivalry, as impenahst competition gave way to ‘ultra-imperiahsm’. The increasingly pragmatic union and party officials convinced themselves that support for their national capitalist classes in wartime would strengthen social democracy. The Russian social democratic movement took a different path from the rest of Europe. The Russian socialists — both Bolsheviks and Menshevik — were the products of the same waves of mass workers’ struggles that shaped the sociahst movement in Western Europe.In the mid-1890s, mass strikes in the Russian metalworking, textiles, mining, and railroads created a layer of radical workers, whose ‘merger’ with Marxist students and intellectuals allowed the launching of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party in 1903. As the Russo-Japanese War exacerbated social tensions, mass strikes in the major Russian cities led to the 1905 revolution, where the first workers’ councils (soviets) pointed to the possibihty of a worker-led democratic revolution

against

Tsarist

autocracy,

producing

sharpened

strategic

differences between the differing wings of Russian social democracy. Tsarist Russia also experienced massive, illegal strikes among metal, oil and textiles workers in the two years before the First World War. While both wings of Russian social democracy grew in these years, the Bolsheviks emerged as the main underground organization among worker leaders in the larger industrial plants. The debates in the Russian socialist movement before the First World War mirrored those in the rest of social democracy. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were mainstream, left-wing, European, prewar social democrats. As Lars Lih has demonstrated, Lenin was a devoted Kautskyian before 1914.''^ Wliat Is To Be Done?, generally presented as a blueprint for a ‘party of the new type’, was a call for creating a classical socialist party under ‘Russian conditions’. Lenin embraced Kautsky’s vision in the Erfurt Program of a ‘merger of sociahsm with the workers movement’. Lenin believed that he was engaged in building a party like the SPD under Tsarist absolutism, a party of‘conscious workers’ that democratically determined its perspectives and activities, and expected its members to implement these decisions in a disciplined and centralized manner. Nor was Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ strategy for Russia — a workersled revolution to create the conditions for democracy and capitalism that would spark socialist revolutions in the West — fundamentally different from that advocated by Kautsky, Luxemburg and Trotsky.

On the issues of the

relationship of parliamentary activity and mass struggle, and the coming war.

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

179

Lenin was firmly in the mainstream of the left of European socialism. In fact, he broke with Kautsky politically much later than Luxemburg, when Kautsky reneged on his prewar commitments to revolutionary opposition to the First World War. While Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not develop a distinct theory of socialist organization before the Russian Revolution, the social foundations of their organizational practice was fundamentally different from that of western socialist parties.’^ The difference was not, as the ‘textbook’ interpretation of Lenin claims, on matters of the relationship of intellectuals and workers or internal party democracy. Lenin understood ‘democratic centralism’ as the authority of democratically elected party congresses alone to make decisions binding on aU party committees and members.Instead the differences flow from the social and political conditions the Bolsheviks faced. Put simply, it was impossible to build a ‘party like the SPD under Russian conditions’. Tsarist absolutism short-circuited the stabilization of parliamentary institutions and trade union legality, thus limiting the development of the layer of fuU-time party and union officials that was the social foundation of reformism in the West.^^ As a result, the Bolsheviks built a party of revolutionary worker leaders, independent of and capable of politically contesting the forces of capitalist liberalism and working-class reformism. As Donny Gluckstein argued, ‘the Bolshevik party has been built upon a tradition of workplace activity that made it unique’ in pre-war socialism - a party of the militant minority of revolutionary minded worker leaders.In other words, the Bolsheviks, in practice, rejected the ‘twin pillars of social democracy’ - the independence of the union officialdom from the political party. Those Russian social democrats that were more sympathetic to reformism, in particular many Mensheviks, enjoyed the support of skilled workers in small-scale industries (printing, etc.). However, they were unable to establish their dominance in the movement because of the absence of parliamentary institutions and legal trade unions in Russia. The First World War ended the unstable social democratic alliance between reformist union and party officials and militant rank-and-file workers. While the party-union officials, with the support of the passive majority of workers, rallied to the ‘defence’ of their national capitalist states, radical and revolutionary workers attempted to continue the class struggle during wartime and prepare for revolutionary upsurges in the near future. While the antiwar wing of the socialist movement was initially small and isolated, wartime struggles over inflation, deskilling, speed-up and food shortages strengthened them and deepened the crisis of the European socialist parties. In Russia alone, where the ‘militant minority’ was organized independently

180

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

and the forces of reform were socially weak, did the war lead to a successful revolution. The victory of the Bolshevik-led revolution of 1917 produced an attempt to create new, revolutionary parties - communist parties - that organized the revolutionary minority of the working class independently of the forces of official reform. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES, 1919-91 The communist parties (CPs) launched by the Communist International (Comintern or Cl) in 1919 sought to overcome the contradictions that paralyzed prewar social democracy. At the centre of their project were parties free of the forces of ‘opportunism’ — independent organizations of revolutionary worker activists and leaders. Such parties rejected the ‘twin pillars’ of social democracy, where the party would focus on elections and the unions on workplace struggles. The communist parties sought to organize political interventions not merely in the realm of elections and socialist education, but primarily in extra-electoral struggles — strikes, demonstrations and other forms of social disruption. Such parties would, through joint action around immediate working- class and popular struggles, contest with the forces of official reformism for the leadership of the working class. Initially, the communist parties attracted a small portion of the ‘mihtant minority’ that had been the social base of the left wing of prewar European sociahsm. The infant CPs organized, for the most part, youth — the unemployed, veterans, ex-students and young workers with little experience of workplace and political struggles. These young rebels gravitated toward the politics of‘left communism’ - abstention from elections, boycotting the existing trade unions and refusing common action with social democratic workers. The majority of the antiwar, radical wing of the prewar socialist movement remained loyal to the left wing of social democracy - the left wing of the French and Italian parties and the Independent Social Democrats in Germany. It was only in 1920-21 that the European communists became mass parties as a result of a series of splits of radicalized industrial workers with the left of social democracy. These mass parties rejected the politics of left conununism and embraced the strategy of common action with social democratic workers and their leaders against capital and the state (‘united front’). Nevertheless, the Comintern actually undermined the development of the non-Russian parties. In 1921-22 the Cl leadership, in particular the Russians around Zinoviev, feared a reversal of the Russian Revolution in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and the concessions to private capital involved

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

181

in the New Economic Policy. Hoping to ‘hot-house’ revolutions in the West, the Cl began to dictate tactics to the European parties. The disastrous Marzaktion in Germany in 1921, where the German communists launched a ‘revolutionary offensive’, resulted in the defection of many worker leaders and the purge of those western communist leaders (Paul Levi in particular) who objected to the Comintern’s adventurism.^^ The defeat of the German Revolution of 1923, at least in part the result of the German communists’ tactical dependence on the Comintern leadership, ended the hopes for a short-term victory of workers’ revolution outside of Russia. The defeat of revolution in the West facilitated, on the one hand, the consolidation of bureaucratic and authoritarian rule in the USSR; and, on the other, the growing subordination of the communist parties to the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy. The organizational transformation of the communist parties facilitated this political subordination. ‘Leninism’ as a distinct organizational theory and practice was invented during the ‘Bolshevization’ campaign of 1924-25. The rational core of the Leninist organizational practice before 1923 was the rejection of a division of labour between the party and unions and the construction of an organization of revolutionary worker activists independently of the labour and parliamentary officialdom capable of contesting the latter’s leadership of the workers’ movement. The communist parties sought to unite the ‘militant minority’ so it would be capable of taking political initiatives in the labour and social movements autonomously of the forces of official reformism. After 1923, the Comintern leadership imposed what the twentieth-century left has come to know as ‘Leninist norms of organization’ - cells at a local level operating under the direction of an unaccountable democratic centralist leadership, bans on internal tendencies and factions, defining ‘cadre’ in terms of political and organizational loyalty to the party leadership, an extremely narrow political and organizational ‘homogeneity’, and the like. In the wake of these organizational changes, rank-and-file worker communists lost whatever control they may have exercised over the policies, action and leadership of their organizations.^^ The disastrous consequences of the zigs and zags of Comintern policy, following the shifting goals of Soviet foreign pohcy, are generally well known.2^ The ‘Third Period’ strategy, that revived the ‘left communist’ hostility to common action with social democratic workers and their leaders, led to the capitulation, without any resistance, of the German labour movement to Hitler. The adaptation of the Popular front strategy after 1935, with its emphasis on electoral-political alliances with social democrats and ‘democratic’ capitalists facilitated the defeats of mass, potentially

182

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

revolutionary workers’ struggles in France and Spain. Moreover, the shift to the Popular Front strategy at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern had a lasting political and social impact on the communist parties in Europe. After 1935, the communist parties, even while retaining the Comintern’s organizational norms, adapted the political strategy of social democracy alliances with capitalist and middle class hberals in defense of the institutions of the democratic capitahst state, and seeking reforms through parhamentary activity and routine collective bargaining rather than mass, militant struggles. The ‘gradual process of social democratization’ of the western parties not only transformed their politics but their social composition as well. Beginning in the late 1930s, the communist parties became highly centrahzed organizations led by a section of the trade union and parliamentary officialdom. Put simply, the communist parties after 1935 progressively abandoned the independent organization of the ‘militant minority’ in their struggle against capital and the forces of official reformism. Instead, the post-Popular Front communist parties reproduced pre-1914 social democracy’s alliance of radical workplace leaders and increasingly conservative union and party officials. Flowever, the communist parties lacked the democratic internal hfe that allowed leftwing social democrats to challenge the reformist officialdom before the First World War, while rank-and-file communists’ belief that the Soviet Union was the ‘sociahst fatherland’ cemented their loyalty to their party leaders. After the Second World War, the communists became the leadership of the main union federations in both Italy and France. Thousands of worker militants joined these parties convinced that they were leading the struggle against capital and for socialism, which they equated with the regimes m the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Flowever, party membership in these decades also became the path to a full-time career in the union officialdom. Daniel Singer describes the process in postwar France:

Communist authority [in the CGT] is not seriously challenged because, whatever the theory, in practice decisions come down from the apex of the pyramid, in the union as in the party. The leaders must naturally take into account the mood of the rank and file, though the hierarchical structure provides distorted channels for its expression. Advancement on the union ladder is more dependent on approval from above than on support from below — hardly a system to encourage critical minds. The absence of genuine and open debate has made it easier to impose a hne from the top. In the end the cumbersome CGT machine added its own dead weight to that of the party’s bureaucratic establishment.^'^

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

183

In those countries where they remained relatively small, as in Britain, the conmiunist parties also became organizations o£both radical workplace leaders and full and part-time workplace officials. British communist militants in the 1950s and 1960s vacillated between leading militant industrial struggles and the pursuit of alliances with ‘left-wing’ union leaders in the Labour Party.The electoral success of the communist parties, especially in France and Italy, where they enjoyed substantial parliamentary representation and administered local and regional governments, consohdated a layer of full¬ time party-governmental officials. Ernest Mandel argued that ‘the virtually permanent installation of the apparatuses of the Communist parties within the machinery of the bourgeois democratic state ... or in the unions’ facilitated the integration of the communist parties, both leadership and active membership, into the existing capitalist order.^^ Put simply, the European communist parties, while retaining loyalty to the USSR on issues of foreign policy and maintaining the old Comintern organization norms, had reproduced both the political practice and social composition of pre-1914 social democracy. On the one hand, communist workers through the 1960s lived a ‘double reality’ - leading often nftlitant day-to-day workplace struggles, while remaining loyal to the shifting pohtical orientations of the Soviet and national party leader whom they believed embodied the struggle for socialism. On the other, communist union officials rejected social democracy’s corporatist income policies and the ideology of ‘labour management’ cooperation that justified them, while sacrificing workplace and pohtical struggles in pursuit of ‘anti-monopoly coalition’ with ‘progressive capitalists’. As long as the capitalist world economy was experiencing high profits and unprecedented growth, the communists were able to ‘deliver the goods’ in the form of higher wages and expanded social welfare, maintaining the loyalty of most workplace activists. As the slowing of global economic growth impelled capitalists across the industrial world to attack working conditions in the mid-1960s, the long-term effects of the social democratization of the communist parties on the militant minority of the working class became evident. In France and Italy, where their comrades led national unions committed to routine bargaining and grievance handling, communist shop stewards and local officers increasingly opposed unofficial job actions and wildcat strikes against speed-up and attempts to further deskill industrial workers. In Britain, the communists’ pursuit of a long-term alliance with left union officials led them to attempt to restrain rank-and-file militancy against the wage and labour policies of the Labour Party, in the hope of integrating ‘income

184

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

policies’ into some form of state economic planning.^’ Even before the mass upheavals of 1968-74, the communist parties were becoming an obstacle to mihtant workers’ struggles against capital. The result was a profound disorganization of the ‘militant minority’ of worker leaders who had been the social base for revolutionary and radical pohtics in the European working classes before the 1930s. Put another way, the communists’ role in derailing mass workers’ struggles during the upsurge of 1968-75 into routine bargaining and electoral poHtics was rooted in their nearly forty year long political and social transformation.^® The creeping social democratization of the western European communist parties, sped up by their pursuit of electoral aUiance with mainstream social democracy (France) or liberal capitalists (Italy), culminated in the advent of Eurocommunism in the mid to late 1970s. While marking a temporary break with the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy, Eurocommunism deepened the formal reformist politics of the western communist parties. The deepening global capitalist economic crisis and capital’s embrace of monetarist and neoliberal economic policies after 1979 effectively ended the possibihty of winning reforms through parhamentary activity and routine collective bargaining. As Mandel argued in 1978, the global capitahst crisis ‘drastically narrows the room for ... the ... bourgeoisie ... to grant reforms. Today, what is on the agenda everywhere is not reform but austerity. ... Any reformist orientation is a poHcy designed to administer the crisis and not to make “profound transformations’”.^^ Faced with growing resistance from capital and calls for cooperation in restoring profitabihty, European social democracy abandoned the struggle for reform. After nearly two decades of pursuing electoral coalitions with the rightward moving social democracy, including administering neoliberal austerity as part of governments with these parties in France and Italy, the conmiunist parties were struggling to maintain their distinctive political identity m the early 1990s. The collapse of the ‘socialist bloc’ in 1989-91 sealed the fate of the communist parties in the West. The Italian conmiunists formally abandoned any reference to socialism, communism or working-class politics as they transformed themselves into a liberal capitalist party, the Democratic Left (PS), which transmuted into the Democratic Party (PD) in 2007 after merging with the remnants of Christian Democracy.^’ The French, Spanish and Portuguese parties experienced a sharp dechne in electoral support and membership; while others, like the British party, simply disappeared.

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

185

THE POST-SECOND WORLD WAR REVOLUTIONARY LEFT The attempts to build revolutionary political organizations to the left of the communist and social democratic parties, despite promising beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, were in crisis by the 1980s and 1990s. A new left was born across Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the one hand, the Soviet invasion of Hungary dashed the hopes for internal reform of the ‘socialist fatherland’ inspired by Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s repression. On the other, the failure of both social democrats and communists to build effective movements against renewed imperialist aggression — in particular the AngloFrench-Israeh invasion of Suez and the bloody French colonial war in Algeria — radicahzed large layers of students and working-class youth across Europe. By the late 1960s, most of the European new left gravitated toward the small organizations that attempted to maintain a socialist alternative to the left of social democracy and orthodox communism. Various currents of Maoism and Trotskyism gained support from students and some young workers across Europe. The renewal of militant workplace struggles across Europe between 1968 and 1975, with near revolutionary upsurges in France in May-June 1968 and Portugal in 1974-75, convinced youthful revolutionaries that it would be possible to transform their relatively small organizations into mass revolutionary parties in a matter of years. Many on the new revolutionary left believed that the traditional workers’ organizations’ attempts to push the new wave of struggles into routine collective bargaining and parliamentary politics, especially in a period of global crisis that limited the willingness of capital to grant reforms, would create a massive layer of workers who would be searching for an alternative to reformism. Put another way, most youthful radicals believed that they were in the midst of a new recomposition of the workers’ movement equivalent to that between social democracy and communism in the wake of the First W^orld W^ar and Russian Revolution. Armed with an organizational blueprint for new revolutionary parties derived from the post-1923 communist parties, the new revolutionaries believed that the revival of mass revolutionary organizations in Europe was once again on the agenda. In the midst of mass strikes that shook governments across Europe and forced capital and the state to make concessions to labour in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hopes of young revolutionaries seemed to be realistic. Organizations to the left of social democracy and the communist parties grew rapidly. In northern Europe - Germany and Scandinavia - thousands of students and young workers flocked to organizations that identified with Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In southern Europe and

186

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Britain, organizations from the Trotskyist tradition won thousands of new adherents among students and worker activists. In Italy, massive workers struggles and an increasingly conservative Communist Party fuelled the growth of a specifically Italian far left - groups that fused elements of Maoism with native ‘left communist’ traditions. Few of these attempts at hot-housing new revolutionary parties in capitalist Europe survived the decline of mass working-class struggles after the global recession of 1974-75 and the resurgence of the traditional workers’ organizations. Maoism as a small mass pohtical current disappeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s across Europe. The Itahan far left also went into sharp decline, with elements engaging in individual terror against state personnel and prominent capitalists, while others regrouped in Democratzia Proletaria in 1978. Most of the organizations that identified with Trotskyism also experienced sharp decHnes in membership and influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Only

two

small

but

substantive

organizations

of the

European

revolutionary left were able to survive the downturn with some base among militant workers. The British International Sociahsts (IS) had attracted several hundred militant shop stewards in the metalworking industries (automobile, machine making), many of them former members of the Communist Party, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These shop stewards were the backbone of rank-and-file networks in several British unions that were capable of leading unofficial strikes and challenging the official, pro-Labour Party leaderships of their unions. As the IS relaunched itself as the Sociahst Workers Party (SWP) in 1977, the leadership of the new party decided that many of these worker leaders were ‘conservative’ compared to a new generation of young workers. By the late 1970s, many, if not most, of these radical and revolutionary shop floor leaders were either purged from or left the SWP. Despite these losses, the SWP was able to recruit many younger workers through its leadership of the ‘Anti-Nazi League’, which successfully confronted British neo-fascist groups in mass demonstrations.^^ In the 1990s, the SWP played a central role in organizing the ‘anti-capitalist’ global justice movement in Britain and in the movements against the wars in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. In continental Europe, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) also survived the general coUapse of the revolutionary left of the 1960s and 1970s. Descended from the Revolutionary Communist Youth, a left-wing split from the French communist youth organization and the most important revolutionary organization among students in May-June 1968, the LCR was able to win several hundred young workers among bank employees, teachers, nurses, train and bus drivers, postal and teleconmiunication workers.

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

187

and (to a lesser extent) auto and steel workers.While suffering a decline in membership and influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the LCR was able to maintain a significant cadre among both white and blue-collar public sector workers. LCR militants were central to building ‘class struggle’ currents in the social democrat dominated Democratic Confederation of Labour and in launching the independent Solidarity, Unity, Democracy unions in the 1980s. With the revival of mass workers’ struggles in the 1990s, the LCR played an essential role in the extended public sector workers’ strikes of 1995 and in the launching of the ‘alter globalization’ (global justice) movement. By the 2002 its charismatic spokesperson, the postal worker Olivier Besancenot outpolled the French Communist Party in the first round of the presidential elections. Despite the survival of these two small but still significant revolutionary organizations, the ‘party building’ projects of the 1960s and 1970s had failed to achieve their stated goal — the creation of new, mass revolutionary workers’ organizations capable, like the early communist parties, of challenging the reformist organizations for political leadership of workers in Europe. There were many reasons for the failure to build mass revolutionary organizations. Clearly, the coUapse of worker militancy in the wake of the 1974 world recession, the restabilization of capitalist politics, the resurgence of reformist politics and organizations, the stultifying effects of adapting post-1923 ‘Leninist organizational norms’ which promoted splits over tactical issues, and their own unrealistic expectations all contributed to the dechne of the new revolutionary left.^^ However, the early communists had survived similar challenges in the 1920s. The ultimate limit for the party building projects in the 1970s was the reduced size and relative political and organizational weakness of the militant minorities of workers in capitalist Europe. Decades of routine collective bargaining and parliamentary-electoral politics combined with a highly centralized and bureaucratic internal life had transformed the bulk of the rank and file of the communist parties into supporters of the forces of official reformism - the labour and party-parliamentary officialdom. Put another way, the massive layer of radical and revolutionary worker leaders who became the ranks of the communist parties after 1920 had been disorganized and/or transformed politically and socially from the 1930s onwards. The weakness of this independent layer of worker leaders doomed all of the attempts to recompose the workers’ movements in Europe and launch new revolutionary organizations in the 1970s.

188

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

THE NEW LEFT PARTIES IN EUROPE The parallel crises of social democracy and mainstream communism on the one hand, and of the revolutionary left on the other, created space for the emergence of new left political parties and alliances in Europe. While the crisis of the traditional workers’ organizations led to anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal splits from social democracy and communism, the crisis of the party-building projects of the 1970s forced substantial portions of the revolutionary left to reassess their projects. Important elements of formerly Maoist organizations and significant currents within Trotskyism concluded that their attempts to quickly transform relatively small organizations of students and workers into mass revolutionary parties had reached a dead end, and new political forms and alliances were a necessary step in the recomposition of the socialist left.^® The development of these new left parties has been extremely uneven. The two most prominent and initially promising developments occurred in Italy and Germany. In Italy, a substantial minority of Communist officials and activists rejected the transformation of the PCI into the DS and launched the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) in

The new party

brought together diverse social elements from old school elected officials and union leaders to militant shop stewards and global justice activists. Initially, the PRC appeared to be reproducing the PCI’s relationship to independent mobilizations — supporting the union officialdom’s attempts to channel them into electoral activity and routine bargaining. However, the 1994 struggles against the first Berlusconi government’s pension reform shifted the PRC’s relationship to mass struggle, with the party aligning itself with rank-and-file militants who organized union officials’ attempts to derail the movement. By the early 2000s, the PRC assumed leadership of the global justice and antiwar movements in Italy, promoted unofficial, wildcat strikes among auto and public transport workers, and attempted to radicalize the union mobilizations in defense of constitutional provisions against unfair dismissal.'*' The PRC, according to its leadership, was an attempt to refound the communist project of the abolition of capitalism.'*^ However, a significant layer of the party leadership and theorists remained anti-neoliberals, rather than anti-capitalists. More importantly, the PRC’s ostensibly ‘anti-capitalist’ programme did not immunize the PRC from the attraction of entering government coalitions with social liberals. The quest for office led to a marked shift in the PRC s relationship to mass struggles and opposition to imperiaUst wars. As they sought an electoral alliance and government coalition with the social liberals of the DS and Margherita, the PRC abandoned opposition

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

189

to the union officials’ acquiescence to concessions and austerity.While the PRC had led antiwar mobilizations against the NATO bombing of Serbia and the US-UK wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the PRC followed its social liberal allies in the Unione government in slowing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the dispatching of military forces to Afghanistan and Lebanon.'*'^ In 2007, after the fusion of the DS and Margherita to form the new Democratic Party (PD), the PRC joined the ‘Ohve Tree’ coalition in the hope of stopping the re-election of the right-wing Berlusconi government in the 2008 general election. The Vrodi/Unione s pursuit of ‘a moderate liberal course akin to that of European Social Democracy and Bill Clinton’s Democrats’, led to an electoral disaster.'*® With no clear, anti-capitalist left opposition to the Prodi government’s pohcies of war and austerity, the right filled the pohtical vacuum and Berlusconi was swept back into office. The PRC paid a heavy price, losing all of its parliamentary representation in the rout of the electoral left.'*® As Luke March pointed out, the incoherent ‘double game of government participation combined with mobilizations against government measures they dislike ... jeopardized party unity and [led to] serious losses in the following elections’.'*^ In Germany, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) was constructed in the 1990s out of the remnants of the old ruling party of the German Democratic Republic by an alliance between those whose careers in the party and state were cut short by German unification with intellectuals and activists oriented to western Marxism. The early 2000s saw the formation of the Electoral Alternative for Social Justice (WASG) — ‘a collection of trade-union-onented left-wing intellectuals, academics, publicists and leftwing representatives of IG Metall with decades of SPD membership , who were disgusted by the SPD’s embrace of the neo-liberal ‘Agenda 2010’, and sought to return to German social democracy’s tradition of Keynesian reformism. Together the WASG and PDS launched Die Linke - the Left Party in 2007.'*® In the initial ‘programmatic guidelines’ adopted by the unified party at its founding. Die Uinke remained within a clearly anti-neohberal framework. Activists associated with the

Anti-Capitalist Left

current in the party

have argued for a clearer politics of social transformation and resistance. While some of these mihtants believe that the 2010 programme marked a distinct shift in a more anti-capitahst direction, they acknowledge that Die Linke remains committed to a reform of unbridled ... financial market capitahsm’. Put simply. Die Linke remains anti-neoliberal and seeks a return to traditional social democratic economic regulation and extensive social

190

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

welfare pro visions. The issue of entering coalition governments, at the local, state or federal level, with the SPD or the equally social liberal Greens, posed challenges to Die Linke even before the party was founded. Many on the left wing of WASG opposed fusion with the PDS because of its participation in a coalition government in Berhn, which had administered social service austerity.^^ Die Linke remains divided between what Nachtwey calls ‘office seekers’ and ‘policy seekers’.The ‘office seekers’, mostly former members of the PDS, are primarily interested in obtaining office and support entering coalition governments with the SPD and Greens to push the social hberals to the left and defend and extend economic regulation and social welfare. The ‘policy seekers’, the anti-capitalist left and some of the former WASG leaders and activists, are primarily interested in building a pohtical alternative to neoliberahsm, whether administered by conservative or social hberal governments. Die Linke’s electoral success, especially at the state level, has made the question of entering coalitions with the neoliberal left a recurring issue. In 2008, Die Linke made substantial gains in the traditionally SPD strongholds of Hesse and Lower Saxony, leading the SPD and Greens to invite the party to join coalition governments. Die Linke refused to enter the coalitions, maintaining their independence when the social liberals initiated new cuts in social services and public employment. In 2009, Die Linke joined an SPD government in Brandenburg and became complicit in the lay-off of nearly 20 per cent of the state’s 55,000 public sector workers.^** In North RhineWestphalia, Die Linke made substantial gams in the 2010 election, leading the SPD and Greens to invite them to jointly govern the state. However, the anti-capitalist left that leads Die Linke in North Rhine-Westphalia refused and initially played an important role in building extra-parliamentary mobihzations against the SPD-Greens austerity measures.However, their focus on parliamentary activity may have contributed to loss of support to the SPD and the Internet privacy ‘Pirate Party’ in May 2012.^^ In any case the tensions are now so severe inside the party that there is increased talk, even from some elements in the leadership, of a split.^^ Die Linke, like the PRC before it, has grappled with the issues of the relationship of parliamentary and routine trade union activity to social movements and workers struggles. Both rank-and-file activists and union officials, in particular from the metal workers (IG-Metall) and public sector (Verdi) unions, are members of Die Linke. However, the party defines politics primarily as elections, leaving matters of workplace organization and mobilization to the official leaders of the unions.^® The party’s electoral-

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

191

parliamentary orientation to politics is manifested in its organizational structure, with almost all branches organized on the basis of electoral districts. The emergence of the ‘Working Group on Workplaces and Trade Unions’ in 2008, an organization of Die Linke members in the unions and works councils, opened the possibility of party members collectively discussing and acting m the unions and workplaces.^® However, there is no clear evidence that Die Linke militants, as such, rather than individuals, participate in the trade union left formations agitating for nationalization of key industries, a shortened work week and mobilizations against austerity.^' Despite their claims to be ‘post-social democratic’ and ‘post-Leninist’, both Germany’s Die Linke and the Italian PRC reproduced the social and political contradictions of classical, pre-First World War socialism, which pre-1935 Leninism attempted to resolve through the organization of the ‘militant minority’ of the working class independently of the forces of official reformism. These parties brought together party and union officials and radicalized worker and social movement activists, and are grappling with the same strategic and political debates that plagued classical social democracy - the contradictions of entering capitalist governments, the relationship of electoral and routine trade union activity and mass, extra-parliamentary struggles, and the issues of war and peace. On the one hand, they seemed to have the potential of becoming new forms of working-class political representation, combining an electoral alternative to social liberalism with the organization of a militant minority’ in the workplaces and social movements. On the other, these new formations contained the seeds of a new social liberalism — party-union officials committed to parliamentary manoeuvring and routine bargaining in a political context of an employers’ offensive and austerity drive. Despite the purported programmatic differences — the PRC s anti-capitalism and Die Linke'% ‘anti-neoliberahsm’ - both parties proved unable to consistently resist the lure of participation in government coalitions with the social liberals with the resulting embrace of austerity at home and imperialist wars abroad. Neither party has transcended the pre-1914 social democratic twin pillars organizational norm where the party focused on electoral politics, while the union officialdom directed the day-to-day class struggle in the workplace and beyond. In the other large states of Europe, the building of new left parties remains stalled. In Britain, the efforts to build alternatives to Labour - the Socialist Alliance and RESPECT - failed to attract a substantial following among Labour Party members or voters and fell victim to sectarian squabbling. In France, the New Capitalist Party, launched primarily by the LCR, has yet to make a significant breakthrough in terms of either membership or

192

SOCIALIST FIEGISTER 2013

electoral support and is facing a severe crisis in the aftermath of the April 2012 presidential elections in which the Left Front Alliance of Communists and left social democrats became the dominant force to the left of social liberalism. Ultimately, two factors will shape the future of these new pohtical formations. The first, and most crucial, is the outcome of extra-parhamentary struggles over austerity and privatization, which will shape the political consciousness and confidence of party militants and broad sectors of the working-class and popular movements. The second is the relative strength within these parties of the ‘militant minority’ of workplace and movement activists and the conscious anti-capitalist left, on one side, and, the forces of official reformism on the other. If the experience of the ItaHan PRC is indicative, battles over formal programme (‘anti-capitalist’ v. ‘antineoliberaf) and official leadership positions (including nomination for elected office) within these parties will not be decisive. Instead, the key will be the revival of the rational core of Leninism — the transcendence of the division of labour between party and unions and movements through the organization of radical and revolutionary activists who attempt to contest the forces of official reformism over the conduct of mass struggle. Put another way, whether the ‘militant minority’ can transform these parties into organizations contesting the direction of all struggles, electoral and extra-electoral, or whether the union-party officialdom can maintain the division between politics’ (elections) and ‘economics’ (union struggles) will determine the future of these parties. NOTES I would like to thank the editors of The Socialist Register, (Greg Albo, Vivek Chibber and Leo Panitch) and Samuel Farber, Andrew Sematinger and David Camfield for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Special thanks to Kit Warner for comments on an earlier version of this essay and our ongoing conversations on the history of socialist organization. 1

Bertil Videt, ‘Introduction’, in D. Ben-Said et al., eds.. New Parties of the Left: Experiences from Europe, London; Resistance Books/Amsterdam: International Institute for Research & Education, 2011, p. 20.

2

In the US, the continuous geographic migration of both capital and labour across the North American continent short-circuited the emergence of significant socialist minorities. Anti-socialist business unionists dominated the surviving unions - mostly in the locally based constmction trades and intra¬ urban transport - tying the unions to one or another capitalist party in the US. See Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012, chapters 1 and 2 for an analysis of the geographic expansion of capitahst

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

193

social property relations in the US; and Kim Moody, ‘The Party That Never Was; Review of Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labour Party in the United StatesT, International Socialism Journal, 119(June), 2008, for a discussion of the impact of geographic mobility of labour on workers’ organizations in the US, available at http;//www.isj.org.uk. 3

Our discussion of the relationship of mass workers’ struggles and the rise of mass sociahst politics in western Europe, and the emerging tensions between social democratic party and union officials and rank-and-file worker activists, is drawn from: Dick Geary, European Labour Protest, 1848-1939, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981, chapters 1-3; D. Geary, ed.. Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, New York: Berg, 1989; Harvey Mitchell, ‘Labour and the Origins of Social Democracy in Britain, France, and Germany, 1890-1914’, in H. Mitchell and P. Steams, Workers & Protest: The European Labour Movement, the Working Classes and the Origins of Social Democracy, 1890-1914, Itasca, IT: F.E. Peacock PubHshers, Inc., 1971; Keith Mann, Forging Political Identity: Silk and Metal Workers in Lyon, France 1900-1939, New York: Berghann Books, 2010, chapters 1-5; Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Dusseldorf, 1890-1920, New York; Cambridge University Press, 1981; Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy: The Development of the Great Schism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, chapters I-X.

4

Ernest Mandel, ‘The Leninist Theory of Organization’, International Socialist Review, 31(9), 1970, chapters 2-4, available at http://www.ernestmandel.org.

5

See Robert Brenner, ‘The Paradox of Social Democracy: The Amencan Case’, in M. Davis, F. Pfeil, M. Spnnker, eds.. The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, London: Verso, 1985; Robert Brenner, ‘The Problem of Reformism’, Against the Current, 43(March-April), 1993.

6

Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, New York: Schocken Books, 1961; Mann, Forging Political Identities, pp. 64-65.

7

The Social Revolution, Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1902, Part I.

8

‘Social Reform or Revolution’, in Dick Howard, ed.. Selected Political Writings

9

For a discussion of the ‘tried and tested tactic and Luxemburg s challenge,

of Rosa Luxemburg, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 5gg

Ernest Mandel,

Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy , m

S. Bloom, ed.. Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century: Collected Essays, Atlantic Highlands, NJ; Humanities Press, 1994, available at 10

http: / / WWW.emestmandel.org. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971. Brill will be producing a collection of English translations of the major contributions to this debate as part of the Historical Materialism book

11

series in 2013. Schorske, German Social Democracy, chapter VII contains the best summary of

12

these debates currently available in English. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968; Luxemburg, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Selected Political Writings. See V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism; and Karl Kautsky, UltraImperiahsm’, both available at http://www.marxists.org. See also George

194

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, for an overview of these debates.

13

Our discussion of the development of the Russian social democracy before World War I is drawn from Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008; Victoria E. BonneU, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900^9^4, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983; and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the fuly Days, 1917, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, chapters 1-3.

14

Lih, Lenin Rediscovered; Dnin, London: Reaktion Press, 2011.

15

See the documents collected in Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, eds.. Witness to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2011. 16

Mandel’s ‘Leninist Theory of Organization’ is the best attempt to theorize the social foundations of the Bolsheviks before 1921 and of the early communist parties.

Unfortunately,

Mandel argues

that Lenin broke with

Kautsky

theoretically and politically before 1914. Paul LeBlanc m his Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990, makes a similar claim. Lih’s Lenin demonstrates Lenin’s loyalty to Kautsky’s pre1914 politics, even after Kautsky ‘reneged’ on his pohtical and theoretical commitments. 17

Lih, Dnin Rediscovered, pp. 499-508.

18

Donny Gluckstein, ‘The Missing Party’, International Socialism fournal, 2(22), 1984, makes a similar argument.

19

Gluckstein, ‘The Missing Party’, p. 23.

20

Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, chapters 5-23; David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 19171922, Ithaca, NY: CorneU University Press, 1975; John Riddel, ed.. Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, Leiden: BriU, 2011.

21

Broue, The German Revolution, chapters 24-27, 45; David Fembach, ed.. In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, Leiden: Brill, 2011, Part Two.

22

Valentino Gerratana,

‘Stalin,

Lenin and “Leninism”’,

New Left Revieiv,

I/103(May-June), 1977; Paul Kellogg, ‘Leninism - It’s Not What You Think’, Socialist Studies: The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies, 5(2), 2009. See Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London: Merlin Press, 1975, for an analysis of the profound differences between the organizational norms of the Bolsheviks and the post-1923 communist parties. 23

Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominfomi, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, chapter 4.

24

Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968, New York: Hill and Wang, 1970, p. 94.

25

Leo Panitch, Social Democracy & Industrial Militancy: Hie Labour Party, the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945-1974, New York; Cambndge Univeoity Press,

195

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

1976, pp. 254-255. I would also like to thank Panitch for clarifying these issues in personal correspondence of 18 May 2012. 26

Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism

27

Chris Harman, The First Last Time: 1968 and After, London; Bookmarks, 1988,

in One Country’, London; New Left Books, 1978, p. 21. pp. 18-21; Panitch, Social Democracy & Industrial Militancy, pp. 145-148, 156159. 28

Hamian, The Fire Last Time, chapters 5, 10, 11, 12.

29

Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, p. 35.

30

See the essays collected in The Socialist Register 1985/86: Social Democracy and After, Pontypool; Merlin Press, 1986; and Daniel Singer, Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterand, New York; Oxford University Press, 1988.

31

David Bell, ‘Introduction’, in D.S. Bell, ed., Western European Communists and the Collapse of Communism, Providence, RI; Berg Publishers, 1993; S. Gundle, ‘The Italian Communist Party; Gorbachev and the End of “Really Existing Socialism’”, in Bell ed.. Western European Communists, pp. 15-30; Franco Turigliatto and Salvatore Cannavd, ‘A New Period for the Italian Left - The End of the Rifondazione Era’, International Viewpoint, 388(April), 2007, available at www.europe-solidaire.org; Mimmo Porcaro, The Radical Left in Italy Between National Defeat and European Hope’, in C. Hildebrandt and B. Daiber, eds.. The Left in Europe: Political Parties and Party Alliances between Norway and Turkey, Brussels; Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2009, pp. 158-

32

160. Hans Petter Sjoli, ‘Maoism in Norway’, Scandinavian fournal of History, 33(4), 2008, pp. 478-490; Jan Willem Stutje, ‘Trotskyism Emerges from Obscunty; New Chapters in Its Historiography’, International Review of Social History, 49(2), 2004, pp. 279-292.

33 34

Harman, The Eire Next Time, Parts Three and Four. Harman, The Fire Next Time, chapter 16; Tom Behan, ‘The Return of Italian Communism?’, International Socialism Journal, 2(84), 1999.

35

J. Higgins, More Years for the Locust: The Origins of the SWP, London; IS Group, 1997, available at http;//www.marxists.org; Martin Shaw, ‘The Making of a Party? The International Socialists, 1965-1976 , The Socialist Register 1978, London; Merlin Press, 1978.

36

Singer, Prelude to Revolution, Part 11.

37 38

Harman, The Fire Next Time, chapter 16. M. Smith, ‘The Radical Left m Europe’, (Apnl), 2007, summanzes the rethinking of these militants, available at http;//www.socialistunity.com.

39

New Parties of the Left and The Left in Europe are the best surveys of the variety

40

of new left parties. Behan, ‘Return of Italian Communism’;

41

Refoundation’, in New Parties of the Left. F. Bertinotti (interview with T. Behan), ‘Refounding Further , International Socialism Journal,

102(Spnng),

2004;

S.

Behan,

Cannavo,

‘The

‘Italy;

Return

A Failed

of

Italian

Communism’; F. Ruggiero, ‘Bufondazione’s U-Turn , International Socialism Journal, 105(Winter), 2005, available at http;//www.isj.org.uk.

196 42

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 Bertinotti, ‘Refounding Further’; Behan, ‘The Return of Itahan Communism’; Ruggiero, ‘Rifondazione’s U-Tum’; M. Trudell, ‘Rifondazione Votes for War’, International Socialism Journal, 113(Winter), 2007, available at www.isj. org.uk; Turigliatto and Cannavo, ‘New Period for the Itahan Left’.

43

Ruggiero,

‘Rifondazione’s U-Tum’; S.

Cannavo,

‘Italy After the April

Elections: Victory of the Right, Suicide of the Left’, International Viewpoint, 402(July), 2008, available at http://www.europe-sohdaire.org. 44

TmdeU, ‘Rifondazione Votes for War’.

45

Porcaro, ‘The Radical Left in Italy’, p. 159.

46

Turigliatto and Cannavo, ‘New Period for the Itahan Left’; Cannavo, ‘Italy After the April Elections’; C. Arruza, ‘An ‘Invertebrate Left’ Approaches the European Elections’, International Viewpoint, 412(May), 2009, available at http: //WWW. europe-solidaires. org.

47

L. March, ‘Contemporary Far Left Parties in Europe: From Marxism to the

48

C. Hildebrandt, ‘Die Linke in Germany’, in The Left In Europe, p. 134; K.

Mainstream?’, International Policy Analysis, 2008, pp. 139-140. Engert, ‘The Rise of Die Linke in Germany’, in New Parties of the Left, Manuel Kellner, ‘Germany: Take Off Without a Left Wing?’, International Viewpoint, 379(June), 2006, available at http://www.europe-sohdaire.org; and 1. Solty, ‘The Flistorical Significance of the New German Left Party’, 2007, available at http://www.rosalux.de. 49

Flildebrandt, ‘Die Linke,' p. 134. See also Engert, ‘The Rise of Die Linke', pp. 101-107.

50

Michael Heinrich, ‘Capitahsm and the State in the Debate m Die Linke , Neues Duetschland, 9 August 2010, available at http://www.europe-solidaire. otg, Oliver Nachtwey,

Die Linke and the Crisis of Class Representation’,

International Socialism Journal, 124(Autumn), 2009, available at http://www.isj. org.uk. 51

Kellner, ‘Germany’.

52

Nachtwey, Die Linke’; V. Grossman, ‘Germany: Greens Rise as the Left Party

53

Struggles ... with Itself, 2010, available at http://www.europe-sohdaire.org. Hildebrant, ‘Die Linke’, p. 140.

54

S. Bornost, Opposition and Opportunity in Germany’, International Socialism Journal, 125(Winter), 2010, available at http://www.isj.org.uk; J. Schaefer, ‘Germany: Change for the Parties, But Not Yet for the Class Struggle’, International Viewpoint, 419(December), 2009; A. Klein, ‘Gemiany: Electiom Mark

Significant

Break’,

International

Viewpoint,

419(December),

2009,

available at http://www.europe-solidaire.org. 55

M. Kellner, ‘Gennany: Die Linke Success m North Rhine-Westphalia’, International Viexvpoint, 427(August), 2010, available at http://www.europesolidaire.org.

56

F. Mueller, ’Gemian Voters Rattle Merkel’, Socialist Worker, 22 May 2012, available at http://socialistworker.org; S. Bomost, ‘Germany: The Odd Man Out Inside A Surging European Left’, Socialist Worker, 26 May 2012, available at http://www.socialistworker.co.uk.

57

V. Grossman, ‘Germany’s Left Party Survives a Cliflhanger’, MRZine, 6 May

WHAT IS LEFT OF LENINISM?

197

2012, available at http://nirzine.monthlyreview.org. 58

Kellner, ‘Die Linke’-, Engert, ‘The Rise of Die Linke’.

59

T. Gleiss, ‘Germany: Die Linke, One Year On’, International Viewpoint, 402(July), 2008.

60

Nachtwey, ‘Die Linke’.

61

Schaefer, ‘Germany’; Klein, ‘Germany’.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM? LUCIO MAGRrS THE TAILOR OF ULM STEPHEN HELLMAN

W

hen Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm originally appeared in Itahan, in 2010, Eric Hobsbawm called it ‘extremely shrewd and despondent’.’

Despondent, indeed: a month after the English edition was pubhshed in 2011, Magri traveled to Switzerland where, at age 79, he committed medically-assisted suicide. To be sure, the subject matter of the book - the dechne of Italian communism and the Itahan left - did not drive Magri to suicide. As his closest friends revealed, he had contemplated this act since the death of his wife a few years earher. But even a reader much less insightful than Hobsbawm can hardly miss the author’s bleak, elegiac tone. The title comes from a Brecht poem that tells of a sixteenth century tailor who claimed to have built a flying machine. Challenged by the bishop to prove It, he launched himself from the top of the cathedral of Ulm, and plunged to his death. But, Brecht pointed out, human beings did eventually learn how to fly. The poem was invoked by Pietro Ingrao, historic leader of the PCI s left wing, in one of the tumultuous meetings debating the Communist Party’s future,

including whether to

drop

‘Commumst’

from its title. To cite Hobsbawm once more, ‘Nothing illustrates Italian communism’s demoralisation more vividly than that Ingrao ... should, as it foundered, have called up the shade of the tailor of Ulm’. The book’s original subtitle, ‘A Possible History of the PCI’, was changed, in the English edition, to ‘Conmiunism in the Twentieth Century’. Despite the fact that Magri himself requested the broader Enghsh subtitle, the onginal is more accurate. Clearly, no one writing about European communism in the twentieth century could ignore what was going on in the Soviet Union, and in what used to be called the international communist movement. And, It should be said, that while Magri has interesting and quite sensible things to say about the Soviet experience, there is little that is not found in more

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

199

authoritative sources. The focus of The Tailor of Ulm is, quite properly, the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It is worth recalling, two decades after its dissolution, that the PCI emerged from the resistance and collapse of Fascism as an extraordinarily strong social and political phenomenon. It quickly came to dominate the Italian left, both organizationally and electorally, and exerted an exceptional influence on Italian society and culture, thanks to its relative openness and flexibility. From the 1950s until its dissolution in 1991, it was also the largest communist party in the western world. And on the PCI, Magri has a good deal to say, from the perspective of someone who was an acute observer, a theorist and an active intellectual, militant and occasional party leader. It is an interesting, insightful and sometimes fascinating book, but its strongest contribution, not surprisingly, concerns events in which the author was directly involved. Space limitations prevent doing full justice to this book, so I will contextualize and discuss just a few of the most important topics in the hope that this makes the work as a whole more accessible to those with limited knowledge of the events he discusses. I will then conclude with a discussion of the broader theoretical and strategic issues raised at the very end of 77ie Tailor of Ulm, which is only appropriate, since nothing Lucio Magn wrote was meant to be read outside a consideration of real movements and the problems they had to confront. FROM THE PCI TO IT MANIFESTO Lucio Magri was one of the most interesting figures on the Italian left. The son of a military officer, he spent part of his childhood in Libya, where his father was stationed, and came of age in Bergamo (the city m the strongly Catholic north of Italy which was also the home of Pope John XXIII). He was active for some years on the left wing of the ruling Christian Democratic (DC) party. After militating in the DC’s left wing, he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1958. This was not a time when people were flocking to the Communists, who had been losing members ever since Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s excesses at the 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But Magri was clearly attracted to a party and international movement that appeared to be coming to terms with the worst excesses of its past, and remained, by a long shot, the dominant force on the Itahan left. Despite the setback following Khrushchev’s revelations, the PCI stiU counted nearly two million members. Moreover, its vote total had risen steadily, and would reach 25 per cent by the 1960s, and nearly 35 per cent in the mid-1970s. The PCI certainly did open up considerably in the post-Stalin years, but those of a genuinely radical bent rarely made much headway in the party.

200

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Magri initially rose quickly, and soon found himself at party headquarters in Rome. He was encouraged to acquire ‘on the ground’ experience, to prepare him for bigger things in the future, and in the (vain) hope that handson praxis in Bergamo — where he was sent to run the party organization — would moderate his views. Not long after he returned to Rome, due to the outcome of internal debates and manoeuvres, he and many members of the quite heterogeneous left wing of the party found themselves increasingly marginalized. The party was simply too cautiously bureaucratic, and too jittery following the death of its postwar leader, Palmiro TogHatti, in 1964, to engage in the sort of far-ranging debate that the left wing of the party felt was required. The mid-sixties were an inauspicious time for a party that claimed to have radical goals to be taking a cautious stance, for working-class

militancy

was on the rise, and, by the end of the decade both labour mobilizations and new social movements - most notably the student movement - were shaking many of the Itahan system’s foundations. They also shook the PCI, which was taken by surprise by a movement that arose totally outside its control (students), or that proved nearly impossible to control despite representing its core constituency (workers). It was in this period that some of the most critical and creative elements inside the party coalesced and, hoping to provoke more discussion within the party, produced a monthly called II manifesto, edited by Magri and Rossana Rossanda. The group almost immediately began to be called by the name of the journal - which after it was founded in 1969 became a daily in little more than a year. The Manifesto group came from one of the Italian left’s noblest traditions, which many (though not all) liked to claim as Gramsci’s true legacy. The type of radical reformism it stood for ran transversely through the left, cutting across the Socialist as well as the Conmiunist Parties, but also including Catholics who did not end up in any of the traditional parties of the left. The idea was to push through reforms that challenged capitalist control (of markets, including the labour market; of the workplace; of civil society in the broadest sense). And the emphasis was not only on the content of radical reforms, but on their form: mass mobilization and constant pressure from below as essential components of any hope of a programme of radical transformation, parliamentary activity was essential, but even a strong majority in a legislative chamber could not produce results, for the forces of capital — not to mention reaction — would hardly accept significant inroads into their positions of power. But mass mobilization was also a way to put pressure on one s own representatives, who might otherwise find themselves too inclined to compromise within the walls of parliament.^

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

201

The Manifesto’s critical analyses of the Italian and international scene created serious consternation within much of the PCI’s top leadership, especially because it was widely read outside the party as well as within it, even though this had not been the group’s original intention.'* The tipping point came quickly, with an article penned by Magri that denounced the situation in Czechoslovakia, where a reform effort led by the Czechoslovak Communist Party had been met by Soviet intervention in the summer of 1968. The PCI, to its credit, had criticized the invasion, but the party’s subsequent behaviour was quite cautious, reflecting the internal dissension and confusion that followed its criticism. Accusing the group of constituting an organized faction — prohibited by the rules of democratic centrahsm — the PCI demanded the cessation of il manifesto's publication, initially through pnvate, informal approaches. When the journal continued to be published, the three editorial board members who were on the Central Committee of the party were expelled.^ Along with several others, Magri also found himself out of the PCI, marking the beginning of a 35-year odyssey on the left that included a return to the PCI, only to exit once more, this time of his own volition. His experience, again recounted with considerable modesty, reveals a great deal about the frustration, and evident dead end, in which what remained of the left found itself by the end of the century. FROM IL MANIFESTO TO THE PCI TO LA RIVISTA DEL MANIEESTO Although not all members of the Manifesto group held the same views, and several gave up on the PCI earlier than others, it is broadly accurate to argue that they almost always worked from the assumption that if there were to be any hope of serious radical change in Italy, it would have to go through, or at the very least draw m, the PCI. There was a brief period in the wake of the most intense mobilization of the ‘hot autumn of 1969 when, in Magri’s own words, they briefly flirted with extremism.^ Then, in 1972, the Manifesto presented its own electoral list, hoping to act as a catalyst for a unified far left that, they hoped, would force the PCI’s hand. The problem was that other groups had the same idea, while still others were simply intent on presenting their own lists. The result was an electoral disaster for one and all. Despite the most intense period of social and political mobilization in the postwar period, the tidal wave of votes the far left expected turned out to be an extremely modest 3 per cent, just over a million votes. Even worse, the far left vote was so fragmented that no far left groups won a single seat, notwithstanding the quite permissive system of proportional representation in effect at the time. Two years later.

202

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Magri and some of his Manifesto comrades joined with other elements to form the Party of Proletarian Unity for Communism (PDUP), with Magri as secretary. To avoid the fragmentation of 1972, they joined with other far left formations in electoral alliances, again with very modest results — but this at least avoided a complete shut-out of the far left from parliament. As is so often the case, the historic fault lines of the various groups tended regularly to reassert themselves during times of political tension, producing splits, recombinations and relatively short-lived alliances. And these were times of extraordinary political tension and polarization in Italy. As the PCI vainly pursued its historic compromise strategy through most of the 1970s (see below), it opened considerable space to its left. As the mass mobilizations of the late sixties and early seventies waned, in an increasingly polarized atmosphere that included right-wing terrorist acts, significant elements on the left took up extremist positions, including strategies of armed underground struggle. (Left-wing terrorism recruited more adherents, and caused more casualties, in Italy than in the rest of western Europe and the US combined). The PCI, from the beginning, embarked on a ‘scorched earth around extremism’ policy, out of ideological commitment but also because of its strategy of rapprochement with the ruling Christian Democrats. Equally unsurprisingly, the various groups and parties to the left of the PCI reacted with everything from open approval to outright condemnation. The PDUP contained tendencies that reflected aU of the above positions, which produced some internal fireworks, although the vast majority, including Magri and the former Manifesto adherents, were resolute in their condemnation of terrorism. By the end of the seventies, the political climate had cooled considerably, and the PCI was not only in the opposition but had dropped its historic compromise strategy. After a couple of elections in which his party had joined the PCI in a common list, Magri brought most of the PDUP into the Communist fold, merging with it in 1984. The PCI was in deep trouble, much of it the result of its own blunders over the past decade, but it remained the essential reference point for anyone who hoped to begin to construct an alternative in a political landscape whose outlines were becoming increasingly alarming. PCI secretary Enrico Berlinguer s effort to move the party to a more class-based, militant stance, however belatedly, appeared to Magri as perhaps the last best hope in the PCI s possible history . This attitude no doubt accounts for the, on balance, lenient treatment Berlinguer receives from Magri, who - too generously in my view - focuses far more on the leader’s last few years than on his overall legacy. To complicate matters further, Berlinguer died in 1984, after the

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

203

PDUP’s merger was first mooted, but before it actually took place. Magri was welcomed into the leadership of the Italian Communist Party, but the reconciliation did not last very long. He had hoped to find himself in a party boldly, if belatedly, grappling with many challenges and embarking on a path of Gramscian renewal. What he found was a party floundenng even more than usual due to Berlinguer’s death, not particularly interested in a revitalization of its mass party characteristics, or in re-establishing the privileged position of the working class that he felt Berlinguer was attempting. He describes an interim leadership committed to maintaining a facade of unity more than anything else through the rest of the decade. And yet, when Achille Occhetto was elected party secretary, Magn and his comrades probably wished Occhetto had been cut out of the same continuista mold as his predecessor. Instead, just days after the fall of the Berhn WaU, Occhetto told a gathering of party militants that he intended to undertake a rethinking of the entire communist experience in which everything would be put into question, including the very name of the party. Fifteen months of turmoil followed, and when the PCI finally voted to dissolve itself, in 1991, Magri exited the PCI (along with a sizable minority) and, joining numerous external groups, helped form the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC). Within the PRC, he m effect reconstituted the old PDUP per il comunismo as an internal faction. Four years later, when RC threatened to bring down the centre-left government that had taken office after Silvio Berlusconi’s first cabinet was forced to resign, Magri’s group split off to fomi the Movement of Unitary Communists. When this group later joined the Left Democrats (yet another iteration of what remained of the old PCI), Magri finally withdrew from active political engagement. He returned to il manifesto in 1999, as editor of La Rivista del manifesto, which consciously intended to go back to the publication’s origins as a monthly review. The idea was to explore the new reality that confronted the left, and to try, if possible, to produce the foundations for programmatic renewal. The experiment lasted five years before intractable differences over both short-term tactics and strategy in the Italian political context, as well as fundamentally conflicting visions of the world and what a future left should resemble, finally led to its cessation m 2004.^ MAGRI’S ANALYSIS OF THE PCI Magri’s discussion of the PCI makes clear that he not only felt it had to be taken seriously because it was a large and formidable force, but because he appreciated its distinctiveness and originality. This explains the admiration that frequently comes through when he discusses Togliatti, who, more than

204

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

anyone else, determined the shape and behavior of the PCI in the postwar period. This hard-nosed former political coordinator of the International Brigades in Spain also was a key figure in the Communist International’s turn to a Popular Front strategy in the mid-1930s. What made the PCI distinctive was its curious hybrid form: it was structured like a classical mass socialist-style party, but it also maintained numerous vanguard characteristics typical of communist parties. Magri’s admiration for Toghatti is far from unequivocal, particularly regarding the extreme caution displayed in his reaction to Khrushchev’s revelations. For Magri, this caution had serious consequences for the PCI’s evolution, as well as for the international communist movement as a whole, within which Togliatti’s prestige was such that a more forceful intervention might have made a diSerence. Toghatti did take his distance from the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet dispute, which was heating up in the early 1960s, but the memorandum he wrote staking out his belief in a ‘polycentric’ movement became a sort of final testament, for he died (at 71) shortly after writing it. As already noted, Enrico Berlinguer also gets fairly sympathetic treatment, above all in the last years of his hfe - he, too, died in office (at only 62), almost exactly two decades after Toghatti. But it was the leader who came between these two, Luigi Longo, Toghatti’s successor, who gets Magri’s most unequivocally positive treatment of all - not for his intellectual strengths (Toghatti stands out here) or his strategic audaciousness (Toghatti again), but for his political courage. A leader of the International Brigades in Spain as well as commander of the Garibaldi Brigades m the Itahan Resistance, Longo was Togliatti’s long-time, trusted deputy. Longo was still a teenager when they first met, in Turin, as collaborators of Gramsci on the Ordine Nuovo. On the surface, he would seem an unlikely candidate to lead the Italian Communists in a more open direction, but this is precisely what he did when the student movement erupted in the late sixties. Far from viewing the students with suspicion and outright hostility — like the French Communists and his own party s conservative wing — Longo met with student leaders, recognized their positive potential, and said as much. Despite his biography, he was also, according to Magri (who was close enough to him personally to make this testimony persuasive), much more sensitive to the changes taking place in Italy than most of the party leadership. Physically weakened by the end of the 1960s, he was replaced at the head of the party by Enrico Berlinguer, and was an isolated dissenting voice in the top leadership when Berhnguer embarked on the historic compromise strategy. Berlinguer was destined to preside over the party’s greatest electoral success, but also its decline. Naturally, in an organization as massive and

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

205

complex as the PCI, no single individual can be assigned full responsibility for the course of events. Magri repeatedly makes clear, in discussing this strategy as well as other crucial episodes, that the entire leadership had a lot to answer for — on several key occasions, he can only register dismay at the way highly questionable decisions were collectively approved. But with all this said, Berlinguer surely is most responsible for leading the party in a direction that had truly catastrophic consequences, and above all for the way he and his collaborators implemented it. The compromesso storico’s analytical underpinnings were simply wrong: they assumed a fundamentally stable set of political structures - the mass parties that had emerged from the Second World War, which is to say the Christian Democrats and Communists, with a distinctly minor role assigned to the Italian Socialist Party. But Italian society, and these parties along with it, were being irrevocably transformed precisely at the time the strategy was formulated. From this followed an equally problematic political assumption: the only way to implement significant social transformation without destabilizing the system, with very real threats of a reactionary outcome (Unidad Popular’s destruction had just taken place in Chile) would be through the collaboration of these mass parties. The threat of a reactionary turn, if exaggerated for effect, was real enough. So too was the recognition that any such collaboration would indeed require considerable compromise on the part of everyone. But the idea that Christian Democracy would lend itself to dismantling the system of power it had built over 25 years of uninterrupted control was sheer fantasy, as quickly became apparent in the ruling party’s behaviour. And this discussion only concerns the theory that underlay the historic compromise. The truly fatal consequence for the PCI was that nothing resembhng the strategy was ever implemented — for reasons that ought to be clear. Instead, riding a tide of electoral success that brought it to an alltime high of over 34 per cent of the vote, which prevented the DC from forming a government with its usual allies, the PCI settled for trying to force acceptance of a formal governing role for itself But the DC dug in Its heels, to which the PCI responded by providing external support for a series of DC-dominated ‘National Unity’ governments. The Communists gained unprecedented legitimacy in being recognized as part of a governing majority, along with a number of important political concessions. But they remained on the outside looking m, a situation the DC ably exploited. After three years of being frustrated, having senously alienated large chunks of its base, the PCI withdrew its support from the government, forcing elections m 1979 in which its vote dropped by 4 per cent. The Communists were back in the opposition, but the damage was done. With hindsight.

206

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

we can see that this was the beginning of a downward spiral from which the Communists never really recovered. Their 30 per cent vote total was more than respectable, but it marked the first time in postwar history that their vote had declined. Equally ominously, by the late 1970s, membership stagnated and began to decline. Why spend time on these long-ago and rather depressing events? Because it was at this point that Berlinguer attempted to lead the party toward an opposition based on a left alternative to the DC’s system of power, as many opponents of the compromesso storico had urged from the very start. It was also at this point that the Socialist Party rejoined the DC in government, making clear it had absolutely no interest in constructing a left alternative with the PCI. On the contrary, the Socialists’ main goal was to isolate and undermine the PCI while grabbing as much power as possible for themselves. Over the next decade, in fact, the contest for spoils between the DC and PSI would signal the final chapter in the paralysis and eventual breakdown of the entire postwar party system. Finally, as previously noted, it was at this point that Magri came back to the PCI. We have seen how that reconciliation ended, and with it what Magri considers the last critical juncture in the PCI’s ‘possible history’. One can certainly argue that the unravelling of the PCI at the end of the 1980s would have taken a different - at the very least, a slower - course had Berlinguer not died unexpectedly in 1984. Magri implies as much, but at the same time, his account of the prevailing tendencies in the party he had rejoined portrays a leadership not just uninterested in, but often hostile to, the kind of classbased mass-mobilizational strategy in which he continued to believe. Well before broaching the topic of dissolving the PCI, Occhetto and many of those around him had been touting the advantages of a ‘light’ party structure, one that would leave leaders far more freedom of manoeuvre than is possible in a traditional mass organization. In a similar vein, while recognizing the hmits of old orthodoxies (even if the PCI had never been very ‘orthodox’), most party leaders seemed more interested in flirting with every intellectual fad that came down the pike rather than make a serious effort to construct an analysis that grappled with and tried to pose an alternative to, an increasingly difficult set of strategic conundrums. But Magri s experience in Rifondazione also shows how a radical temperament is hardly a guarantee of such an analysis emerging — never rmnd the weakness, fragmentation, and lack of political sophistication of the organization. And similar frustrations emerged in the more purely intellectual realm, in the Rivista del manifesto, where Magri closed out his engagement — with the notable exception, of course, of The Tailor of Ulm.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

207

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? MAORI’S ENVOI Tl^e Tailor of Ulm ends with an epilogue, which Magri calls an envoi, titled ‘A New Communist Identity’.® It is an interesting document, first prepared in 1987 as a contribution for the left-wing minority of the PCI, and was incorporated into the motion that opposed the party’s dissolution at the Twentieth Congress in 1991. As Magri puts it, the document went back into a drawer in 1991, and he pulled it out and appended it to his book nearly twenty years later, without changing anything, for he felt that ‘it does not seem to have aged so much’. This alone makes the envoi worth some comments, for it provides a look at Magri’s sense of what needed to be done — and what was worth fighting for — over the last two decades of his life. Much of the envoi provides a strikingly contemporary analysis of the ways in which the capitalist restructuring that had been underway since the seventies (if not earlier) had radically changed, for the worse, the terrain on which the left had to operate. Read more than twenty years after they were written, Magri’s words are familiar, but his efforts to weave together broad structural changes in global capitalism, changes in the productive mechanisms of capitalism (in advanced capitalist countries, but also in the Clobal South), along with changes on the shop floor and more besides, represent a tour de force weU worth reading, even with a necessarily critical eye that 20/20 hindsight provides. At the same time, it must be said that, if read too literally, the envoi will create serious problems for anyone trying to take away some lessons in 2012. To cite on obvious example: the failures of the Soviet experience were all too apparent in the late 1980s, and Magri is quite prescient about the likely outcome of Gorbachev’s reform efforts. But the fact remains that the USSR still existed, and debates on the left still had to pay serious attention to developments in the East. However important they might once have been, such discussions are anachronistic today. Even more problematic, at least in the context of the state and sensibilities of the left by the end of the twentieth century, is that Magri, in perfect coherence with his own lived experience, asserts in this document the absolute necessity of having a mass party at the centre of any possible transformation of modern capitalism. To be sure, such a party could not be the only, or perhaps even the most privileged, component of a broad revolutionary alliance. But he insisted that it will be necessary to have something that provides connective tissue between the political and social realm. And, while needing to go beyond Gramsci s totalizing formulations (written, after all, in the 1930s) it was still necessary to have a dramatically reformed and restructured radical party that could, in the best Gramscian

208

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

sense, ‘stimulate intellectual and moral reform’. A new type of party would be necessary, and its primary function would be as ‘stimulus and synthesis of a whole system of autonomous movements, through which a multiphcity of social subjects together weld a new historical bloc’.^ Stirring, Gramscian words, but much easier said than done, as he himself knew. Magri wrote in this fashion to combat growing tendencies within the PCI that felt the traditional party-form was increasingly irrelevant. But he also wrote out of profound conviction, dismayed at the serious dechne of the PCI as a mass party. Yet even in dechne, the party about which he worried still stood at 1.4 million members, with local organizations whose activities were becoming sporadically active electoral machines with an aging membership profile and other disturbing demographics. As troubhng as this might have appeared at the time, within a few years, the situation got a lot worse: nearly half the PCI’s membership simply vaporized, with the Democratic Party of the Left and Rifondazione combined able to count only about 800,000 members. Yet these are still numbers that the left in most countries can only envy. If a party of the dimensions and characteristics Magri had in mind is truly necessary for any process of transformation, the problems this poses are self-evident. I have put these issues ftont and centre because they really do represent serious problems - not so much for Lucio Magri’s pohtical theorizing as for the perennial re-posing of the tension between institutions and movements, mediation and synthesis and mobihzation and spontaneity. One of the things that drove Magri out of active political engagement was the tendency of Rifondazione (and not only Rfondazione) to succumb to a ‘movementism’ and opposition for its own sake that revealed as much about its own weaknesses and insecurities as any serious underlying analysis ot precisely what this or that particular movement might represent in the construction of an alternative to the status quo. Long before he had to confront this movementism in his own organization, he was emphasizing how market forces are simply too effective in their capacity for fragmentation, redirection, or integration to fear diffuse struggles and ... movements expressing social solidarity’.'*’ Viewing tendencies already beginning to gain traction on the far left in the late 1980s, he argued that Democracy is not alive without a collective sovereign, and that collective sovereign cannot exist in the form of an atomized multitude, a jumbled mix of impulses and cultures: fragmentation is not pluralism but disguised uniformity

Although no one could ever question Magri’s

radicalism, his frustration over Rifondazione’s willingness to bring down a centre-left government in order to assert its own leftist identity led him, as we have seen, to leave the PRC in order to avoid yanking the rug out

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

209

from under the government. Some years later, Rifondazione would become a formal coahtion partner (with its secretary, Fausto Bertinotti, becoming Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies). When they voted to continue to fund the Italian military contingent in Afghanistan, many on the left were appalled. Here, and elsewhere in the envoi, there are insights that anyone on the left needs to take seriously. The Gramscian dimension of Magri’s ideas is particularly evident in the ways he incorporates the media and education into both his analysis of the ways in which capitalist hegemony has been able to consolidate itself - and also into the ways any serious challenge, any effort to construct a counter-hegemony, has to take these phenomena seriously and challenge existing cultural arrangements. He felt that these areas got short shrift from the left — when ‘Third Way’ proponents were not simply mimicking dominant patterns. Yet he also acknowledges, here as elsewhere, that one cannot simply throw around temis like ‘radical challenge’ and ‘counter-hegemony’. He argues that any such enterprise will take an extremely long time, but it represented the only reahstic route for the left. Finally, if it is not already clear, ‘A New Communist Identity’ provides something of a contrapuntal ending to a book which — as noted at the outset — is elegiac, even despondent, in tone. Unlike the book, this document, like so much of Magri’s work, was composed in the heat of political battle. While its tone cannot help but be sober, given the content, it was also written well before Magri withdrew from direct political engagement, and provides a more fitting, because more combative, cloture to the contribution of this remarkable, and admirable, figure, who wrote in the 1969 Socialist Register. It is becoming more and more accepted that revolution is an urgent need in Western society. In the neo-capitalist world, the faith in the inevitable progress of humanity towards a bright future has survived much less successfully than it did in the world of nineteenth century capitalism. In differing ways, many people who are not Marxists have begun to be conscious that the present system is wrong. Moreover they are beginning to realize that even in its very development its contradictions become sharper and its inhumanity increasingly evident .... Therefore, we must try to consider, in concrete terms, how both the party and the trade unions can be positively changed. What is the structure and internal life which will equip a revolutionary force to meet the needs of the new phase of the struggle? This is a complex problem, and we do not know the perfect recipe. One thing is certain though; the time is now ripe to pose the problem ....’^

210

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

NOTES 1

Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century, translated by Patrick CamiUer, London and New York: Verso, 2011; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Poker Face’, London Review of Books, 8 April 2010, 23-4. The title refers to Palmiro Togliatti, the subject of the other book under review in the same

2

article. This emerges, along with many insights, in Perry Anderson’s excellent and moving hommage, ‘Lucio Magri, 1932-201T, New Left Review, 72(NovemberDecember), 2011, p. 119.

3

Perhaps the best elaboration of this position in Enghsh is Andre Gorz’s Strategy for Labor, which, it should be noted, appeared the year before 1968, and is replete with references to left-wing Italian trade unionists and many of their innovations. Gorz’s book puts more emphasis on economic and shop-floor reforms than to the mass-mobihzational dimension of the sort of radical reformism I have described here, but it certainly expresses the radical reformist sensibility. See Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, Boston; Beacon Press, 1967; as well as Andre Gorz, ‘Reform and Revolution’, The Socialist Register 1968, London: Merlin Press, 1968. For Magri’s own conception of the ‘strategy of reforms’ at the time, and his broader considerations on what such a radical reformism would require by way of fundamental changes in parties, unions and social movements, see his ‘The May Events and Revolution in the West’, The Socialist Register 1969, London: Merlin Press, 1969.

4

Magri, with characteristic modesty, devotes only a few pages to the episode (pp. 237-43), but they provide a fascinating account of the journal’s origins. Its initial success was an unintended consequence of the caution of major publishers close to the left, who refused to print il manifesto for fear of incurring the PCI’s wrath. So an obscure start-up publisher took the job, calculating that the only way he could make any money was by distributing the journal in newsstands, making it widely available.

5

They were ‘read off the rolls’ of the party, which is technically one step below that of outright expulsion. Most of those not on the Central Committee were simply refused renewal of their membership. This was posed at the time as a gesture that left the door open to the readmission of those affected, provided they gave up their ‘factional’ activity. Of course, it can also be viewed as PCI hair-splitting to distinguish these measures from Soviet-style bureaucratic repression.

6

Magri is silent as to exactly how, and over what issues, this flirtation took place. One factor was the level of extremely radical militancy that was already evident in 1969, exacerbated by early acts of rightwing terrorism. The Manifesto group also notoriously viewed the Chinese Cultural Revolution through rosecoloured glasses, initially taking at face value its portrayal of the struggle of the righteous ‘base’ against a sclerotic bureaucracy. That a strong anti-bureaucratic interpretation served the Manifesto group’s own goals obviously contributed to this position.

7

Magri’s explanation of the reasons for ending publication appeared in English

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ITALIAN COMMUNISM?

211

in ‘Parting Words,’ New Left Review, 31(January-February), 2005, 93-105. The Rivista exists on line, and the interesting discussion that took place in its last issue, of which Magri’s intervention is just one among many, can be found at http: / / WWW .larivistadelmanifesto .it. 8

Magri, The Tailor ofUlm, pp. 385-427.

9

Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, p. 416.

10

Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, p. 408.

11

Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, p. 415

12

Magri, ‘The May Events and Revolution in the West’, pp. 29, 51.

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION: THE SOUTH AFRICAN CASE JOHN S. SAUL ny sober strategy for realizing progressive, let alone socialist, goals from

1

.

Athe promising drama of the new struggles emerging in South Africa

must necessarily begin with an interrogation of South Africa’s disappointing path to the presentd Such an interrogation must, of course, be done with care. For one does not want to trivialize in any way that which, with the overthrow of apartheid, has been accomplished; the defeat of a bankrupt and evil system of institutionalized racism, a system entirely worthy of its consignment to the global scrapheap of history. Yet in what now looks hke a classic case study of how to demobiHze a potential revolution, the African National Congress (ANC), working with its new allies, both domestic and foreign, has succeeded in integrating South Africa firmly into the broader world of global capitalism. As South Africa entered its key transition years (from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s) it would have been hard to imagine that a bald swap of apartheid for the country’s recolonization within the newly ascendant Empire of Capital could ever be seen as being a very impressive accomplishment.Yet it is just such an outcome that has occurred in South Africa, one that has produced — alongside some minimal narrowing of the economic gap between black and white (as a result, primarily, of a small minority of blacks moving up the income ladder) - both a marked widening of the gap between rich and poor (the latter mainly black) and a failure to realize any substantial progress towards tangible ‘development’ and meaningful popular empowerment. It is precisely this recolonization of South Africa, occurring on the ANC’s watch, that fomrs the context within which the left in that country now seeks to regroup and to struggle. In this essay, then, we are left to pose some sobering questions about the country’s very transition away from apartheid: what kind of liberation has really occurred in South Africa anyway? How has what happened been

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

213

allowed to happen? And how has the ANC managed, thus far, to get away with it? BIKO AND BEYOND The key to understanding this denouement was, in fact, provided in a deftly illuminating commentary by none other than Steve Biko. Asked, in 1972, to reflect on the economy of the country, and identify ‘what trends or factors in it ... you feel are working towards the fulfillment of the long term ends of blacks’, he suggested that the regime’s deep commitment to a racial hierarchy had actually acted as ‘a great leveller’ of class formation amongst the black population and dictated ‘a sort of similarity in the community’ — such that the ‘constant jarring effect of the [apartheid] system’ produced a ‘common identification’ on the part of the people. Whereas, in the more hberal system envisaged by the Progressive Party of the time, ‘you would get stratification creeping in, with your masses remaining where they are or getting poorer, and the cream of your leadership, which is invariably derived from the so-called educated people, beginning to enter bourgeois ranks, admitted into town, able to vote, developing new attitudes and new friends ... a completely different tone’. Indeed, South Africa is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if the whites were intelligent. If the Nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle-class, would be very effective at an important stage. Primarily because a hell of a lot of blacks have got a bit of education - I’m talking comparatively speaking to the so-called rest of Africa - and a heU of a lot of them could compete favorably with whites in the fields of industry, commerce and professions. And South Africa could succeed to put across to the world a pretty convincing integrated picture with still 70 per cent of the population being underdogs. Indeed, it was precisely because the whites were so ‘terribly afraid of this’ that South Africa represented, to Biko, ‘the best economic system for revolution’. For ‘the evils of it are so pointed and so clear, and therefore make teaching of alternative methods, more meaningful methods, more indigenous methods even, much easier under the present sort of setup’.^ Needless to say, the Progressive Party of the 1970s was nowhere near power. And capitalists were, on the whole, still not nearly so reform-minded in the 1970s as Biko apparently felt the most enlightened of Progressive Party supporters then to be. In fact, the entire history of twentieth-century South Africa had been one much more defined by an alliance between

214

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

racists and capitalists to ensure both racial and class advantage than one defined by any deep contradiction between the two camps. Flash forward to the late 1980s, however. The reform (‘intelligent’) wing of the National Party (NP) - together with those of the capitahst class, both of Enghsh and Afrikaner origin, who increasingly claimed the allegiance of NP reformers - had become just what Biko imagined the Progressive Party already to be in his own time. For the NP was then proving to be (at least at the top) a party capable albeit with great caution and much obvious reluctance - of contemplating the shedding of apartheid for a system designed, more straightforwardly, both to empower a liberal capitalist regime and to move to facihtate black (even black majority) participation within it. For ‘inteUigent racists’ and capitalists alike could begin to see capital’s link to the politics of racial domination as having been a contingent one. Not, needless to say, that the resultant transition to a (tendentiaUy) colour-blind capitahsm would be simple or entirely straightforward; there were genuinely dangerous alternative possibilities that had to be overcome. Nonetheless, the ‘false decolonization’ evoked by Biko was to be, precisely, the ultimate outcome to which socialist strategy for South Africa in the twenty-first century would have to address itself. Biko, in evoking the ‘Prog possibility’, was of course following the analytical lead of Frantz Fanon. He had read and learned from Fanon’s analysis of ‘successful’ African nationalism across the northern and central portions of the continent as, in essence, fostering just such a ‘false decolonization’ — this to the advantage of domestic and international capital and of the newly ascendant African elites.'* Yet Biko’s understanding of South Africa’s quite specific possibilities was somewhat different. True, he was far from naive as regards the class dimensions of South Africa’s racial capitahsm; indeed, Biko had good and fruitful relations in Durban with Rick Turner and others who would spark the re-emergence of the working-class-based resistance that produced the urban strikes there (with increasingly important echoes across the country) in the early 1970s.^ Nonetheless, as Biko saw it, the racial structure of this system was what was central, and, for him, it was the emergence of a new confidence — and a more forthright ‘black consciousness’ - on the part of the mass of the country’s oppressed black (African, Coloured and Indian) population that could most readily open the revolutionary door to a new South Africa. This, as we know, was the politics of black self-assertion that Biko himself would follow in the few years of life granted him by the apartheid regime. Nor can there be any doubt as to broad resonance of such a ‘black consciousness’

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

215

emphasis — one evident in the events of Soweto (1976) and beyond — that helped fuel, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a mass movement for dramatic change in South Africa. THE POLITICS OF THE PROLETARIAT: THE TRADE UNIONS BECOME COSATU Yet it was working-class action that surfaced first on the ground to express active resistance within the country in the 1970s. This new assertion was too class-based (rather than racially-based) to be unqualifiedly approved of by those of ‘black consciousness’ sensibility. But it was also, in its orientation, much more specific and responsive to the immediate grievances of workers on the shop floor than was, for example, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) - the latter’s leadership now banned in any case and itself existing largely in exile as an international lobby group both within the global trade union network and as part of the ANC’s own established alliance of organizations. SACTU’s slant had been and continued to be (albeit now largely from exile rather than on the ground) the mobflization of workers for the broader purposes of‘national liberation struggle’. But the worker assertions that emerged in Durban in the dramatic and novel shop-floor struggles in the early 1970s had a rather different perspective. The organizations being formed out of such industrial contestations sought tactically, and so as to escape excessive negative scrutiny by the apartheid state, to avoid any overly compromising links to the ANC/SACP/SACTU exile group. Many within the ‘new trade union movement’ were also suspicious of such formations-in-exile, fearful, from the vantage point of their concern to safeguard worker interests and voice, of this exile triumvirate’s vanguardist preoccupations and also its possible embrace of a negative, all-too Soviet/ Stalinist modeled attitude towards true worker-centred empowerment from below.^ Indeed, as Webster and Adler argue, the legal proscription of the nationalist movements meant that in their formative years [the] embryonic unions were able to develop leadership, organize their constituency, and define their strategies and tactics relatively independently from the ideological orientations and models of the ANC, SACP and especially their labour arm, SACTU. The space created by virtue of banning and exile meant that the new unions could develop innovative approaches to organizing that differed from the popuhst strategies and tactics of the nationalist-linked unions of the 1950s.^ In fact, the new labour activists of the seventies remained respectful of

216

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the SACTU tradition and of Congress history but without feehng unduly beholden to them. Sparks struck by shop-floor confrontations at the Coronation Brick and Tile Works, at the Frame Group factories and at other sites in Durban quickly had dramatic resonance throughout the country as new trade union centrals surfaced (TUACC, FOSATU) and the wave of strike activity spread.^ Indeed, a nationwide context was soon created within which, even as ‘labour movements throughout much of the world experienced declines in membership and influence during the 1980s and 1990s, the South African labour movement [grew] rapidly’.® Moreover, these unions were impressive manifestations of what Webster has termed ‘social movement unionism’, for they were both fuUy conscious of the imperatives of the shop-floor struggles they launched while also being aware of the broader anti-apartheid resonance of their undertakings. Indeed, Joe Foster, the head of FOSATU, would make exactly this point in a widely-cited speech in the early 1980s; It is ... essential that workers must strive to build their own powerful and effective organization even whilst they are part of the wider popular struggle. This organization is necessary to protect and further workers’ interests and to ensure that the popular movement is not hijacked by elements who will in the end have no option but to turn against their worker supporters. ...[Indeed], in relation to the particular requirements of worker organization, mass parties and popular political organizations have definite limitations which have to be clearly understood by us.'® This was the emphasis that Bob Fine also underscored in introducing the republication of Foster’s speech in the Review of African Political Economy at the time. There he drew a clear distinction between ‘popular front’ pofltics (where ‘the working class is merely wheeled in and out like the crowd in a Shakespearean drama’) and a much more assertive and effective workingclass political presence, suggesting (already in 1982) that, in contrast, ‘there are good reasons to believe that [the popular front] was the basic conception behind the Congress Alliance; namely that SACTU subordinated the specific interests and organization of workers first to mass protest campaigns and then to the armed struggle’." The initiatives of such new trade union centrals as TUAAC and FOSATU, their seeds first sewn in Durban, increasingly moved centre stage, having, as we shall see, profound impact both upon the capitalist class and the apartheid state.Indeed, the Wiehann Report of the later 1970s which was to sanction the registration of African unions - albeit in the first instance the

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

217

better to co-opt and control them — opened, in practice, space for worker experimentation and ever more confident self-assertion. So much so that FOSATU itself continued to spread, ultimately allying with union initiatives of a quite different hue (these latter, like SACTU in its time, being more ‘populist’ — as the shorthand of the time had it — than ‘workerist’) but also with the crucially important National Union of Mineworkers, to form, in December 1985, COSATU (the Confederation of South African Trade Unions). And COSATU was to remain a visible and active force of real prominence throughout the 1980s. Indeed, when the crucial umbrella organization of active community organizations, the United Democratic Front (UDF, see below) was temporarily banned by the government in 1988, it was COSATU that sprang forward to take up the political slack, anchoring the freshly minted ‘Mass Democratic Movement’ that, for a period, took the UDF’s place in coordinating the vast internal popular movement that fought back against the negation of resistance intended by the state’s especially brutal response to the near revolution of the mid-1980s. Of course, it is also significant that the ANC, as it moved towards power at the turn of the nineties, did not — could not — adopt the same tactics towards COSATU that it was to use in facilitating the 1991 dissolution of the UDF. In the event, SACTU, the presumptive liberation movement trade union voice, was merely allowed, in 1990, to slip off the stage, its relative marginalization in exile from workers’ struggles on the ground now tacitly acknowledged. Nonetheless, COSATU had itself long sensed the need for a broader political project - one spearheading a counter hegemony to the historic hegemony of racial capitalism - that it could not readily imagine mounting alone. In this regard it grasped, as well, the seeming logic of its accepting the broader remit that the ANC was, during the transition period, increasingly claiming for itself The decisive break with ‘political abstentionism’ had come in November 1984 when FOSATU (very soon to also be a key actor in the formation of COSATU) entered into joint action with student and civic organizations to participate in the first successful worker stay-away since 1976. Then, only a few years later, ‘in one of their very first acts [after COSATU’s own founding in late 1985], its new office bearers ... traveled to Lusaka and endorsed the ANC’s leadership of the liberation struggle’.'^ True, there is little doubt that many within the COSATU camp failed to appreciate the fact that, even as the ANC and COSATU first met, the ANC was already in the process of refusing to countenance any counterhegemonic perspectives whatsoever towards capitahsm. For if COSATU was just too strong to be, hke the UDF, merely removed from the scene.

218

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

ultimately it was, in the 1990s, only to be permitted membership within a new ANC-SACP-COSATU alhance as a distinctly junior partner. Many of its own cadres would soon defect to jobs in party and state of course, while some momentary prospect (a false prospect, as it soon proved to be) of COSATU’s playing an on-going transformative role could be thought to he in the negotiations undertaken, with both business and state representatives, through the structures of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC).'" But there was also attrition of COSATU’s own rank and file as the new ANC government’s macroeconomic policies after 1994 saw both a decline in the number of stable jobs in industry and the emergence of an economy that would become ever more rehant on a part-time casual and insecure labour force.Moreover, there was to be a growing number of workers m very precarious jobs (seasonal, temporary, casual or fixed-term contract work) - up to as many as 30 per cent of the active labour force.

This latter

group of workers also largely remains without trade union representation, with COSATU itself having as yet shown httle vocation for organizing the unorganized. Indeed, it was tempting to see COSATU as becoming, in the post-apartheid period, increasingly representative of a ‘labour aristocracy’ of the organized and better-paid workers. True, even if there is ‘more evidence for the concept’s appropriateness now’, the ‘labour aristocracy’ label remains, as Webster warns, ‘misleading because neohberal globahsation is eroding the core ofthe labour market, making this “elite” very precarious’.

Nonetheless,

differences in interests and practices between the ‘settled’ proletariat and the more precariously employed — defined in terms of differential remuneration and job security and differing degrees of effective self-organization — can be of great relevance.'* It remains true, however, that COSATU has also retained an important role as an active and critical voice for both working-class and popular interests both within the Tripartite Alliance and more generally — and its present leader Zwelizinama Vavi continues as a spokesman of protest against what has happened on the ANC/SACP watch to any transformative hopes in South Africa.At the same time, it is also the case that any potential that COSATU might hitherto have had to further develop itself, its goals and its possible vocation as a force for ongoing radical transformation through the mounting of some much more assertive counter-hegemonic alternative to capitalism, has, at least temporarily and with the rise to power of the ANC, been lost. As has any promise that the ANC might itself have seemed to offer as an organization capable of focusing working-class energies towards the realization of any such transformation.

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

219

THE POLITICS OF THE PRECARIAT: THE CIVICS AND THE UDF And what of the precariat? Elsewhere I have argued as to the importance of this latter concept with reference to many settings of the Global South where an unfinished capitalist revolution continues to pile up populations in the global cities whose formal employment (if any) and whose life itself is generally and at best ‘precarious’.^® In such contexts, as I have further noted, ‘the politics of the urban dwellers per se as distinct from that of the urban proletariat (there is some obvious overlap between categories of course) has a dynamic and thrust of its own’. This is not just a matter of ‘street-level politics’, although it is certainly that.^^ For what we see in such social circumstances, and alongside more specifically working-class action, is a ‘people’ who are available for sociopolitical upsurge (in both township and rural settings) — though their actions may tend to be directed most forcefully against the state (especially at its local level) and the prevailing polity (as well as the latter’s minions and programmes), than, directly, against the employers (and capitalism) per se. In fact, it was just such a precariat, in its South African manifestation, that did set itself, in remarkable ways throughout the 1970s and 1980s, against the racial capitalist order, its rise to special prominence in the antiapartheid resistance being first embodied by students, the sons and daughters of proletariat and precariat alike. Here, initially, the influence of ‘black consciousness’ (BC) was front and centre - even if BC was always more a mood, ‘an idea whose time had come’, than an organization. For the BC mood was to have particular resonance in sowing the seeds of what would become, so dramatically, ‘Soweto’ - this latter term becoming crucial, both as fact and as symbol, to the dawning ‘South African revolution’. For Soweto, in 1976, witnessed the outbreak of a student revolt destined to spread out from its point of origin and, over the next decade, to galvanize a broader resistance of historic magnitude throughout South Africa. As Bundy suggests, ‘between the Durban strikes of 1973 and the Mass Democratic Movement’s defiance campaign of 1989, a long wave of popular protest surged across the South African political landscape. It eroded famiHar landmarks and opened new channels, it lapped on the beachheads of white power, and its high tide left a residue of aspirations and expectations’ of great significance.^^ Not even the state’s brutal repression could succeed in smothering the flames now so visible in so many centres throughout the country. Here in fact was a present-day expression, now dramatically magnified, of a long history of urban resistance to the closing fist of apartheid, a fightback cast both within the ANC tradition and outside it. Thus, in 1979-80, there was, as Bundy

220

SOCIALIST MGISTER 2013

further records, ‘the shaping of a new tactical repertoire of grievance-based protests’ and boycotts.^^ Moreover, this new kind of upsurge from below was to continue to tngger actions - actions to a very significant degree locally conceived and driven — that would erupt, throughout the 1980s, from an ever greater range of players and in an ever wider set of communities. True, although such varied initiatives were hnked by their sharing of apartheid as the common denominator of mass oppression, these actions were not, by and large, centrally planned or coordinated. Nonetheless, the intensity of this new drive towards confrontation would mark a sea change in South Africa, etching the reality of a mass rejection of apartheid indelibly onto the perceptions of dominant classes. South Africa and global, but also of a global public more generally. Of course, the state did make some move (as it had with Wiehann with respect to the proletariat) to respond to this new reahty and to forestall trouble. Thus its Riekert Commission led to legislation that acceded to the stabilization, even legalization, of a black urban population’s ‘rightful’ presence in the cities - albeit in the terms of the famihar urban-rural spht of the black population that had long underpinned racial capitalism. This was not nearly enough. But it did signal that the premises of the most hlywhite of apartheid nostrums - under which blacks were conceived merely as ‘temporary sojourners’ in the city - were themselves subject to change. And more moves of a similar nature were soon afoot: the ‘granting’ of‘Local Representative Councils’ (albeit virtually toothless ones) to urban Africans, for example, and the attempt to oversee the incorporation of the country’s Indian and Coloured communities as junior partners within a complex system of‘own parliaments’ for such groups. Almost immediately, however, any such ‘new constitutional dispensation’ proved to be merely a further provocation, adding fuel to the mounting mood of resistance manifested by all segments of the ‘black’ population (Africans, Indians and “Coloureds”). Indeed, it was this issue — the effective rejection, marked by massive non¬ participation within it, of the new governmental setup - that saw the birth of the UDF in August 1983. The UDF, while not the motor of the myriad of local resistances that defined a proto-revolutionary moment in South Africa in the 1980s, and certainly not the sole voice to claim institutional preeminence (there were, after all, CUSA and other initiatives also in the lists), did become, to a significant degree, the presumptive dirigeant of South Africa’s vast ‘precariat’ in the townships — even though, as Popo Molefe, one time GeneralSecretary of the UDF, put it, the UDF was forever ‘trailing behind the masses’.Indeed, the UDF, with as many as 600 local affiliates at various

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

221

points during the 1980s, became so central to resistance — perhaps the major agent in bringing South Africa, during the period 1984-86, as close to mass revolution as the country had ever been — that the state moved to smash it, banning it in 1988 and unleashing the full fury of police and military brutality on many of it leaders and functionaries. True, the tension between the apparent petty-bourgeois ambitions of many of those who stepped forward to lead the UDF (and would become, in turn, recruits to the ANC phalanx that would step into public office with the organization’s victory) on the one hand and its more genuinely precanan ‘foot soldiers’ who might have been persuaded by a different kind of leadership to keep the struggle for a more genuine liberation alive on the other has often been commented upon. Yet the fact remains, as Seekings records, that a new high point was indeed reached with dramatic confrontations in 1984 in the Vaal Triangle and the East Rand provoked by discontent over civic issues, especially increases in rents effected by unpopular township councilors, combined with student discontent around educational grievances and the state’s constitutional reforms } And after that, such resistance surged on; briefly stalled after 1986 by particularly savage state repression, including a temporary banning of the UDF, it was, at the very end of the 1980s, resurgent again, its drive focused by the Mass Democratic Movement, COSATU and a now unbanned and freshly defiant UDF.26

Yet the question remains: where did all this potential disappear to? Of course, to sustain any such revolutionary impulse as the UDF and the mass politics it embodied would have required imagination, a shift towards confronting a new enemy, poverty, in innovative and imaginative ways. But releasing active, assertive and sustained popular energies from below, and from an increasingly empowered citizenry, was the last thing a vanguardist, increasingly conservative, ANC actually was interested in — particularly as it became easier for the ANC to envisage itself soon coming to power. As many UDF leaders had begun to envisage a new order (and the new jobs that might go with it) the ANC itself moved to encourage the UDF, its task now, ostensibly, over, to formally dissolve itself.^^ As for the precariat, any future political role for it was to be relegated merely to the relative political passivity of voters’ box participation, to the demobilized world of the newly created South African National Civic Organization and its wards amongst the ‘civics’, and, in the absence of any more positively empowering vision, to such perverted popular purposes as would be evidenced in the xenophobic riots of 2008.^® For the fact is that the demise of the UDF marked a crucial moment

222

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

in South Africa’s recent history, albeit a moment too seldom given the careful scrutiny it warrants. Van Kessel notes, for example, the very tangible ‘demobilizing effect’ of such a decision, with the ANC doing little or nothing, in the longer run, to sustain people’s waning spirit of active militancy. She also quotes Alan Boesak as making a sharp distinction ‘between the UDF years and the early 1990s’: He noted a widespread nostalgia for the UDF years. “That was a period of mass involvement, a period when people took a clear stand. That had a moral appeal. Now it is difficult to get used to compromises_ Many people in the Western Cape now say that ‘the morality in politics has gone’. The 1980s, that was ‘clean pohtics’, morally upright, no compromises, with a clear goal”.^^

Similarly, Mona Younis reminds us that ‘as news of accommodation and concessions [during the 1990-94 period] to the previous rulers made their way to the streets, union and community leaders and activists called for the reactivation of mass action’. For, as Younis continues, many had viewed the ANC’s much talked-of ‘national democratic’ stage as primarily to be thought of as a ‘transitional one toward the attainment of socialism’. Small wonder that when the conference was convened to consider the possible dissolution of the UDF, it actually saw a clear and strong voicing of the view that, as an effective organ of ‘people’s power’, the UDF should be retained. ‘Proponents of this view’, she writes, ‘envisaged the UDF’s role as one of watching over the government, remaining prepared to activate mass action if the need should arrive. Many leaders and activists emphasized that the preservation of the UDF was imperative to ensure that participatory, rather than merely representative, democracy prevailed in South Africa’. Of course, as we have seen, a majority at that conference ultimately sanctioned the disbanding of the UDF. Nonetheless, the loss of purpose this represented was a very damaging one.^' Or so, finally. Rusty Bernstein, the veteran and highly respected ANC and SACP member and militant, has testified most forcefully. Writing m the last year of his life (2000) Bernstein eloquently reflected on just why the liberation project to which he had devoted his life had become so unglued during the transition:

Mass popular resistance revived again inside the country led by the UDF, [but] it led the ANC to see the UDF as an undesirable factor in the struggle

ON TAMING A P^VOLUTION

223

for power and to undermine it as a rival focus for mass mobilization. It has undermined the ANC’s adherence to the path [of| mass resistance as the way to liberation, and substituted instead a reliance on manipulation of administrative power. ...It has impoverished the soil in which ideas leaning towards socialist solutions once flourished and allowed the weed of ‘free market’ ideology to take hold.^^ From such a perspective, in short, it seems that the dissolution of the UDF was rather less ‘logical’, ‘unavoidable’ and ‘unremarkable’ than Seekings (as cited in footnote 27, above) has claimed. For the ANC had actually to work quite hard to see the UDF into its grave, quite literally killing it off not for what it had done but for what, under another kind of national leadership than the ANC was prepared to offer, the UDF initiative might have become. This is not to deny the ‘continued radical instincts of [various] high-quality unions, community-based organisations, women’s and youth groups, NonGovernmental Organisations, think-tanks, networks of CBOs and NGOs, progressive churches, political groups and independent leftists .

Indeed,

all of these assertions - still manifest because of COSATU’s survival and despite the UDF’s demise - were crucial to what Bond terms to have been a ‘1994-96 surge of shopfloor, student and community wildcat protests’. True, the wave of such outbursts of popular discontent, mounted in the very teeth of the deal between the ANC and capital, would temporarily subside. Nonetheless, as Bond continues, they provided a meaningful bridge to the awakened popular revolt that has since come to mark the new century - not least, in this respect, the ‘IMF Riots [that] continued to break out in dozens of impoverished black townships subject to high increases in service charges and power/water cutoffs’. Here, as we will emphasize m our conclusion to this essay, the promise of ongoing radical action by proletariat and precariat alike - a promise that Bernstein saw to lie, in part, at the base of the UDF would continue to live.^'^ THE ANC: THE POLITICS OF ‘THE POSSIBLE’? Just who then was the slayer of revolutionary promise? We have implied an answer above, but here must underscore it. Thus John Daniel, in a sobering article entitled ‘Lusaka Wins’, emphasizes not just the act of killing the UDF but also that of killing the latter’s fundamental spirit. For the UDF, however much he may define it as being, m essence, ‘the ANC m disguise’, IS

nonetheless seen to have been ‘a very different creature from its external

progenitor’: ‘in orchestrating a national insurrection’ it was ‘not a centralized entity at all’ but instead ‘one that practiced a robust and raucous fonn of

224

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

participatory democracy in which a premium was placed on grassroots consensus and accountability. It was in most respects the antithesis of the essentially conformist ANC in exile’.Indeed, it was precisely this openness that the external wing of the ANC feared most, the possibihty that the UDF would begin ‘to carry its practices into the emerging domestic structures of the ANC’ — and even set in train a process of further radicahzation. In sum, ‘hidden largely from the view of the so-called “magic” of the Mandela era with its policies of rainbowism and reconciliation [and recolonization], a subterranean struggle for the heart and soul of the ANC ensued through the early and mid-1990s’, a struggle capped by a victory for ‘Lusaka’ with all its attendant negative implications. In fact, Daniel goes further, rooting the ‘victory’ in the much longer history of the ANC, insisting that the ANC was never a mass-based party (‘it embraced notions of democracy, [but] was not popularly democratic in practice.... In reahty, it was a small, eHte-led, top-down hierarchical party with neither a significant working class nor a rural base’). Indeed, it was this 'modus operandf that the ANC took into exile ‘where, in an initially hostile Western environment, in conditions of semi-clandestinity and heavily rehant on its Soviet and East German allies, it transmogrified into a tightly-knit, highly centralized vanguard party’ - its political practice that of particularly strict democratic centralism, ‘with pohcy largely devised behind closed doors and then passed down to the lower ranks ... [and] deviation was met with expulsion and relegation’.^® It therefore followed, ineluctably, that when the very top leadership of such an organization took, unequivocally, the capitalist road and used its newly-won power to consolidate such a choice it was ‘game over’ for any who harboured, within the movement, some more radically democratic and/or socialist goals than those now enunciated by the vanguard. As McKinley writes, ‘many cadres in the movement [were] angered by the apparent abandonment of long held principles and policies’. And yet, as he continues,

the sheer pace with which the ANC leadership was traveling down the road of accommodation and negotiation instilled in its constituency the feeling there was no real alternative to a negotiated settlement which would entail compromise. This was further catalysed by the delegitimisation of socialist polices (associated with the collapsed economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe) and the accompanying confusion and demoralization experienced by movement socialists.

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

225

Of course, it is precisely this that explains Bernstein’s dismay when the opening offered by the UDF, with the radical possibilities that it revealed, were merely squandered by the ANC’s top brass. In addition to the overbearing influence on the ANC of the authoritarian ethos characteristic of the Soviet model, there was the quite similar ethos within both the front-line states bordering the region and the other liberation movements within the region itself with whom the ANC interacted.^* For the war for southern African liberation was not a context that nurtured democracy in practice - even if its essential long-term goals were often presented in terms

of democratic

demands.

Organizing for military

confrontation against an absolutely unscrupulous and proactive enemy tended everywhere to privilege hierarchy, secrecy and even abuse of power on the part of those who would seek to lead any such resistance. Habits so formed would prove to be extremely difficult to shake. Granted, such vanguardist militarism as marked the ANC did not lead readily to great success in terms of effective combat. In fact, from the Wankie campaign (an ill-starred military incursion into then Rhodesia, undertaken alongside Zimbabwean combatants, in 1967) forward, the ANC s practice of‘guerrilla struggle’ did little, in and of itself, to shake the confidence of the regime. On the other hand, the drama of such sorties as the SASOL attacks in the early 1980s had a marked impact on growing popular self-confidence - as did FRELIMO’s defeat of the Portuguese in Mozambique in the 1970s and the Cuban/Angolan success against the South African Defence Force (SADF) at Cuito Cuanavale in the 1980s. At the same time, the real drama of the time was being played out inside the country, on the shop floors and in the townships themselves, in ‘rising social rmlitancy and township unrest, as Elisabeth Drew emphasizes.*^ W^hy then were people so eager to accept the jailed and exiled leadership of the ANC as [their] counter elite?’. Drew asks, concluding that ‘the long¬ standing legitimacy of the ANC as opposition organization appears to have been part of the “social memory of the opposition’” with, in addition, ‘the personal prestige of Nelson Mandela’s leadership ... unmatched by any other opposition figure’. Similarly, Raymond Suttner, while arguing the case that there was, in fact, a more active ANC underground inside South Africa itself than many commentators have conceded, also concedes that It was not inevitable or preordained that the ANC would achieve hegemony within the liberation struggle and the new democratic South Africa. Indeed, there were times in the history of the organization when it was virtually dormant. .. .That it did survive [however] depended m the

226

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

first place on the way in which the ANC had, over decades, inserted itself into the cultural consciousness of people, becoming part of their sense of being, even if at times of great repression there was no public forum of outlet for this identity Here, perhaps, is one crucial reason why the ANC established its hegemony within the anti-apartheid struggle — and, in the process, ‘got away’, at least temporarily, with shrinking that struggle’s overall thrust to one of ‘mere’ nationalist assertion. For at this potent level of the popular imagination, the ANC/SACP/MK tandem came to serve even more as forceful myth than as reality — this also being true of the quasi-mythological status that had accrued to Mandela while he was in prison during the 1980s. The result: when a capitalist-friendly ANC was beckoned, as Fanon has once said, to ‘settle the problem’ around ‘the green baize table before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made’, the stage had also been set, within the resistance movement more generally, for the ANC’s eventual accession to formal power.'^^ It must therefore be underscored that the ANC’s compromise reached with capital was no accident.'^^ As early as 1984, future president Thabo Mbeki had written boldly and presciently that ‘the ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, it has never said it was, and it is not trying to be. It will not become one by decree or for the purpose of pleasing its

left

critics’.In the late eighties, he and his cronies would

seal a deal with capital on behalf of the ANC - adroitly outflanking Chris Hani and other potential critics within the movement as he did so.'^'^ Soon, too, even the sainted Mandela — despite his provocative statements about nationalizations and other aspects of economic strategy upon his release from prison in 1990 - would retreat from such heterodox thoughts. The ANC was well launched on its two-track process of negotiations - negotiations with both capital and the apartheid state — to determine the outcome of South Africa’s struggle for liberation. Small wonder Hein Marais could conclude that, among other things, it was clear that by 1994 ‘the left had lost the macroeconomic battle’.''^ As for the broader movement, it had been pulled emotionally past any lingering black consciousness or

workenst

sensibility and, ever more

firmly, onto the ANC’s symbolic terrain. What might have happened had a political organization like the ANC sought to build on and to draw out the revolutionary possibilities of the time is now a matter of merely disempowered speculation. The hard fact remains that the ANC leadership was, quite simply, prepared to reach a deal, defined largely on global and

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

227

local capital’s own terms, in order both to guarantee the consolidation of a colour-blind, formally democratic but capitalist-friendly, outcome and to ensure its own coming to power. AGENTS OF DEFORMED CHANGE I; CAPITAL AND THE POLITICS OF POSSESSION For much of the twentieth century the phrase ‘racial capitalism’ accurately epitomized the nature of a social and economic system in South Africa that was intractable, even seemingly invulnerable. In this system the twin pillars of dominant social power in South Africa - the racist overrule that culminated in apartheid and the class rule inherent in capitalism s centrality to the country’s economy — came to complement each other, with any possible contradictions between the two modes of ordering social hierarchy merely smoothed away with relative ease. True, some have insisted in seeing these two hierarchical modes — that of racial domination and that of class differentiation - as being in stark contradiction (as indeed they might appear to be in the realm of abstract model-building). This could then be presented as, on the one hand, racial prejudice trumping profit while, on the other hand, a colour-bHnd capitalism being forced to concede costly and ‘uneconomic’ ground to the captains of racial domination.But this is quite misleading. As Frederick Johnstone has clearly demonstrated, a crucial ‘exploitation colour-bar (favouring capital) was merely complemented by a ‘job colour bar (favouring, up to a point, white workers). For Johnstone demonstrated that any tension between the demands for entitlement based on the claims of race and class is best understood as representing relatively mild jockeyings for advantage within an overall structure of shared white-skin-cum-capitalist-class privilege. It was this reality, of course, that led Biko in the 1970s to his conclusion that it was racial privilege that tied the entire South African system together - with ‘black consciousness’ thus becoming the key ingredient m any meaningful radical endeavour in the country. Interestingly, however, it is also true that, even as Biko spoke, the grounds for such a stark premise were beginning to slip away. This was most evident, initially, within the camp of capital itself To begin with, some fractions of capital felt themselves to be more constrained by apartheid than others, notably, in this respect, certain sectors of manufacturing capital that could sense the super-exploitation of blacks as defining a constraint on the wider domestic markets they sought. Moreover, as a more complex capitalism also emerged, the various racial discriminations within the job market - even though the apartheid system was often rather more flexible about them in practice than m theory - could

228

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

also be felt as a constraint upon the capitalists’ effective deployment of any and all labour, regardless of its pigment. Indeed, the die was really cast when the unrest of the 1970s, already visible enough to unsettle both capital and the apartheid state, escalated, from 1984 on, into the broadscale eruption of black action. In such a context, the defection of capitalists from the apartheid project (albeit initially and most markedly its English-speaking members) escalated dramatically.'^^ For many now saw — as some had already seen in the 1970s — the dangers in continuing to link the exploitation (indeed super-exploitation) that they thrived upon any too tightly with the racial repression that marked the ‘racial capitalist’ system. Indeed, with mass African resistance continuing to escalate in the 1980s, the oft-quoted remark of big-business insider Zac de Beer takes on its appropriate resonance: ‘We all understand how years of apartheid have caused many blacks to reject the economic as well as pohtical system.... We dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bathwater of apartheid’.Of even more significance, perhaps, was the 1985 comment by Gavin ReUy, then Chairman of the powerful Anglo-American Corporation, who noted after the fateful meeting in Lusaka of leading capitahsts with the ANC leadership that ‘he had the impression that the ANC was not “too keen” to be seen as “marxist” and that he felt they had a good understanding “of the need for free enterprise’”.^® Time was to demonstrate fully just how perceptive was ReUy’s 1985 reading of the ANC’s own emerging nfrndset. As Dan O’Meara reminds us, American and British capitahsts were themselves beginning to rethink the odds in South Africa and to step back from apartheid. Recall, in this connection, the dramatic conclusions of Malcolm Fraser, the deeply conservative fomier Australian Prime Minister and a key member of the Conmionwealth’s official mission sent to South Africa in 1986 to evaluate the situation there. He was also author of the mission’s eloquent and tough-minded report, one that called for an extension of sanctions against South Africa in order to force it to come to its senses before the confrontation there escalated out of control. As Fraser further warned, in an escalating conflict ‘moderation would be swept aside.... The government that emerged from all of this would be extremely radical, probably Marxist, and would nationahze all western business interests’.^' Fraser’s warning would in turn inspire Brian Mulroney, Canada’s Prime Minister, to put sanctions on the Canadian political agenda but also to push for them both within the Commonwealth and in the G-7. Mulroney was not successful at first in the latter forum but then, slowly, Margaret Thatcher and, albeit with even greater reluctance, Ronald Reagan began to come over to such an understanding - all the more so as the global ‘threat’ of the

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

229

Soviet bloc itself appeared to wane. To be sure, capital’s new caution was also framed by the escalation of public pressure upon it from an emboldened anti-apartheid movement in the West — now responding dramatically to the unsettled economic horizon a turbulent South Africa had begun to present to the world.But note, too, that a continuing and concerted effort to win over the ANC to a post¬ apartheid order extremely friendly to capitalism was clearly afoot — and beginning to promise results. Not that, in the event, much persuading of the exile group seemed to be required — even though it meant jettisoning the more elaborate dreams of a socialist future that many in the ANC/SACP had once professed to harbour. AGENTS OF DEFOBJVIED CHANGE II: THE APARTHEID STATE AND THE POLITICS OF POSTPONED PROMISE While Afrikaner capitalists moved a bit more slowly towards such an understanding, something of a sea change had begun to occur even within the Afrikaner polity nonetheless. Thus, O Meara and others have demonstrated clearly the manner in which the fault lines of class distinction within Afrikanerdom had begun to eat away at the volk - and at the National Party itself

For the class character of ‘Afrikanerdom’, the chief electoral

base of the ruling National Party, was visibly shifting, however slowly and uncertainly, and the party itself had begun to fray. In fact, difficult as it may now be to remember, P.W. Botha - even granted that he was ever the buUy - came to prime-ministenal office, in the wake of Vorster and Muldergate, as a reformer, a uerligte over and against the serried ranks of vcvkvciifiptes. Of course, he would seek to reform in order to preserve — to preserve, in his case, the racial hierarchy, rather than the much more unequivocal offer of mere class hierarchy that the capitahsts would increasingly offer as the eighties dragged on. Indeed, his successor de Klerk would prove ultimately to be of Botha’s persuasion as well, although he would feel forced to go even further in a ‘reform’ direction than had his presidential predecessor — while still, almost to the very end, trying to safeguard some attributes of the racist order itself Thus, in the 1970s and as a new wave of popular agitation begin to surface that was fired by both proletariat and precariat in the cities and in the townships, Botha and others sensed that some pre-emptive initiatives, beyond the Bantustan strategy and brute force, were also advisable.^^ As a result and as part of a ‘Total Strategy’ that Botha and cotene now favoured and advocated, several novel attempts, noted above, at ‘formative action’ were undertaken - as framed, notably, by the Wiehann and Riekert reports.

230

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

The results, as the renewed (and quite dramatic) internal uprising of the mid-1980s would soon show, were to be quite different from any mere domesticating of resistance, however. For the fact is that Botha, the Nats, and the apartheid state more generally, were now trying to do several seemingly contradictory things at the same time. The problem followed from their very interpretation of‘Total Strategy’, of course — an interpretation that also rationahzed the formidable centrahzation of power and command into Botha’s own hands as Prime Minister (later President) — and, under his leadership, into the hands of the ‘securocrats’ of the police and (especially) the military.Professing themselves to be following the lead of such global gurus as Beauffe and Huntington, their ‘security state’ sought to ‘reform’ and to ‘liberalize’ just enough to take the steam out of the kettle of popular protest - but to make such (hmited) ‘reform’ stick with as much force as would prove to be ‘necessary’. In doing so — accepting of black trade unions and legahzing the permanency of the presence of some significant numbers of blacks in the urban areas — the Nats did, to be sure, move some distance away from the main premises of traditional ‘apartheid’ - far enough at any rate to accelerate the rightward drift of many amongst the lower ranks of Afrikanerdom who felt themselves to be threatened by change and who now came to strengthen the ranks of Andres Treuernicht’s Conservative Party and other such dark forces of genuine reaction as Eugene Terreblanche and his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) and Constand Viljoen and his Freedom Front. Nonetheless the ‘reform’ so envisaged could actually do very httle to quell the popular (black) rejection of the fundamentally racist predilections of Nat reformers. For the black population increasingly sought not some mildly improved terms within the overall apartheid framework of power but, instead, a full-scale change, democratic and transformative, of that very framework; it was on this basis that the push from below that fired popular uprising of 1984-86 was launched, in fact. Of course, this is also precisely where the other, darker side of Total Strategy came so grimly into play. For the policing function of the ‘security state’ was now deemed to be absolutely essential. And, finely honed as such a state apparatus has been through the preceding decades of imposing apartheid, it was fully prepared to be tough, brutal and merciless enough to attempt to force the African population to be (rather less than) half-free — and to keep quiet about the rest. This remorseless side of the story cannot be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that there was now locked into place a reign of terror by the state, the abuse of power that this embodied providing much of the focus for the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. True, such a

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

231

preoccupation would come, negatively, to deflect the TRC’s attention away from the more mundane structures of corporate and political power that had long sanctioned and bolstered apartheid. Nonetheless, there were more than enough chilling accounts of the impact of this underside of Bothaism presented to serve as a useful reminder of just what apartheid had actually meant in practice over all the years of its grim sway.^*’ Meanwhile, the neoliberal clock was ticking for the Nats as well. Indeed, the latter-day economic strategy of the National Party-in-power was itself, by the end of the 1980s, increasingly premised on the freshly established neoliberal script being written by global capitalism. This was why, despite Botha’s bluster, so many even within the apartheid government were particularly alert to negative signals from that quarter, and why the South African state now sought to create an ever more free market context within which capital could operate quite freely. Of course, this might appear to be somewhat counterintuitive in light of Botha’s own otherwise dirigiste, and still quite racist, approach to the overall society. But it was precisely onto this kind of economic terrain that capital, and an increasing number of centrist political actors, sought, with ultimate success, to draw in the ANC - itself, in any case, an increasingly willing ‘victim’ of this particular ploy. In the event de Klerk himself advanced this ‘strategy’ dramatically, although, like Botha, he did not yield up any such ‘reform’ entirely straightforwardly. For he too was still trying to have it both ways. Thus, after his release of Mandela and unbanning of the ANC, he continued, throughout most of the subsequent transition penod, to deploy the state’s cruel apparatus of enforcement, manifesting (to put it charitably) a toleration of the malign activities of various so-called ‘third force elements and of Buthelezi’s bloodthirsty cohort in an attempt to either defeat the ANC outright or, if not that, at least to skew the transition in the direction of more white-friendly outcomes. Not for de Klerk, until very late in the day, any mere reliance on shared trans-racial class interests to safeguard privilege beyond apartheid. Nonetheless, in the end and after a bumpy road (the grim events of Bisho and Boipatong massacres and the killing fields of KwaZulu and the Vaal townships demonstrating the abyss that threatened to swallow the country) de Klerk came to feel he had no choice. Between chaos and the acceptance of a new ruling—class coalition transcending race he saw, ultimately, no realistic, more overtly racist, choice. A DISFIGUFLED TRANSITION With capital, local and global, increasingly on side, and the proletariat and precariat more or less brought to heel (now both to be rendered politically as

232

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

presumptive ‘citizens’ rather than as active comrades in a continuing struggle for genuine liberation) the stage was set for transition - or was it? For there were a number of other bridges to be crossed during the four deeply troubled years that separated Mandela’s release in 1990 and the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP from the first genuinely free, all-in, election of 1994 — and there were a number of other players at the transition table to be dealt with cautiously, even somewhat nervously. To begin with, in the prevailing context of quasi-stalemate, there was the substantial residue of an apartheid pohty, state and army, still holding the reins of governmental power with none of these quite certain as to how much political power they could or should concede. In this crucial sphere alone the spectres of‘power-sharing’, ethnic vetoes and much worse could be seen to loom. There was also Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader, never quite a ‘stooge’ of the government but someone who was quite prepared to become its active partner in countering, in blood, the ANC. There was the white right, too, from Eugene Terreblanche and his AWB (though this force would eventually disquahfy itself with its ill-fated raid into Bophutatswana) through to General Viljoen. The latter’s own vaunted presence was, in fact, ultimately to dwindle away into an unsuccessful bid for a special volkstaat to be created for exclusive Afrikaner presence within the broader boundaries of South Africa, but not before his movement, the Freedom Front, posed a shadowy threat, hke that from Buthelezi, right up until a few days before the election. In the end, however, the ANC did win - although capital did too. How then accurately to interpret aU this? For starters, we are here carried back to our initial paragraphs on Biko and Fanon. After aU, Fanon was the most scorching critic of the false decolonization that Biko thought South Africa might, because of its distorted, racially-structured nature, be spared. But recall Fanon’s classic shorthand description of decolonization in the more northern parts of Africa where independence had arrived while he was still alive:

The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that ofintermediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism [recolonization].

Isn t this what we can see all too clearly to have happened in South Africa as well: a power-grab by a middle class risen from among the recently oppressed population who now, riding the back of ‘liberation’, had thrust

ON TAMING A MVOLUTION

233

themselves forward, both in the state and the private sector, to take the role of well rewarded junior partners of global capital? There are, of course, other perspectives. Some will merely offer the self-exculpatory argument that ‘globalization made me do it’ as sufficient explanation of the ANC’s capitulation to capitalism: the Soviet bloc quickly disappearing, a much too powerful capitalist system, global and domestic, left standing. This is the kind of‘fatalism’ offered up by many ANC apologists: mere resignation to ‘necessity’ as the rationale for the government’s opting quite unapologeticaUy for capitalism. True, such capitulation is often presented as being social-democratically tinged, but the essence of the position is clear: Africa and Africans have no choice; whatever the outcome of taking the present tack, ‘there is no alternative’. Small wonder that South African President Thabo Mbeki could himself, famously and quite specifically, state (and with some apparent glee), ‘just call me a Thatcherite’.^® No less an observer than Naomi Klein (in her Shock Doctrine) has argued, however, a different view, seeing the ANC instead as prisoners of capital - however short-sighted and naive they may have been with regard to the dangers of any such entanglements. Klein, in fact, calls up some strong witnesses to support her view: South African economist Vishnu Padayachee, for example, whom she paraphrases as arguing that ‘none of this happened because of some grand betrayal on the part of the ANC leaders but simply because they were outmanoeuvred on a series of issues that seemed less than crucial at the time - but turned out to hold South Africa’s lasting liberation m the balance’. Similarly, William Gumede’s view, as directly quoted, is that “if people felt [the political negotiations] weren’t going well there would be mass protests. But when the economic negotiators would report back, people thought it was technical”. This perception was encouraged by Mbeki, who portrayed the talks as “administrative” and as being of no popular concern. As a result he [Gumede] told me, with great exasperation, “We missed it! We missed the real story”. Yet Gumede, Klein further notes, ‘came to understand that it was at those “technical” meetings that the true future of his country was being decided - though few understood it at the time’. But, one is tempted to ask, had Padayachee and Gumede not read their Fanon? For Klein’s own position is, like theirs, fundamentally incorrect.It is impossible, in fact, to imagine that the ANC leadership, having sought assiduously from at least the mid-1980s to realize just such an outcome, such a false decolonization, could simply have ‘missed it’ - missed, that is, the main point of what was happening to

234

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

South Africa. Hence the decision, by the now powerful, merely to instead celebrate capitalism, its present and its ostensibly promising future. One might think this is a difficult position for any concerned African to take in hght of recent history. Yet in elevated circles in South Africa it has become simply commonsense. Mandela, for one and despite having an apparently alternative vision immediately on his release from prison, came to embrace a firmly capitalist South Africa in just such a ‘commonsensicaf manner.^ And Trevor Manuel, Tito Mboweni, Thabo Mbeki and others have too — with many other erstwhile ANC activists also moving briskly into the private sector.^* Moreover, as further evidence to support such an interpretation, Patrick Bond has itemized a whole set of highly questionable but crucial economic policy choices friendly to global capital made during the first half¬ decade of ANC power, from ‘agreeing to pay illegitimate apartheid era debt in part by taking on an unnecessary IMF loan of US$750 million (1993) with predictable strings attached’ to ‘adopting a bound-to-fail neohberal economic policy and insulating the Reserve Bank from democracy so as to raise interest rates to South Africa’s highest real levels ever’.^^ Indeed, by 1996, the ANC leadership had crafted for itself and the country the firmly neoliberal GEAR (‘Growth, Employment and Reconstruction’) strategy — declared by Trevor Manuel, to be ‘non-negotiable’ — to replace 1994’s mildly more left-leaning RDP (‘Reconstruction and Development Programme’). Interestingly, Pippa Green’s hagiographical biography of Manuel, one of the chief architects of the ANC’s economic strategy, is entitled, boldly and altogether instructively. Choice, Not FateN In its pages we find the case for recolonization being presented as, primarily, a smart developmental choice.'’^ Similarly, Alan Hirsch, from his vaunted position as ‘Chief Director of Economic Policy at the Presidency, South Afnca’, has averred that ‘the intellectual paradigm within which the ANC operates’ is one in which ‘elements of a northern European approach to social development [are] combined with elements of Asian approaches within conservative macroeconomic parameters’.^^ Some beneficiaries of this choice will have had quite self-interested and crass motives for making it, of course. Others (Hirsch perhaps) may have thought - this being the perennial illusion of social democrats everywhere - that you can ‘permit’ capital to do the heavy lifting of accumulation and the provisioning of material requirements while the good guys’, from on high, and through taxation and a variety of not too onerous controls’, bend such a capitalist system to meet a range of humane social preferences and less tangibly material ‘needs’. Lost in this latter project, however, is the way in which class imperatives

ON TAMING A ITEVOLUTION

235

and the uneven distribution of power almost inevitably rot out shared social purpose under capitalism — even as capitalism is also fostering a culture of consumerism and ‘possessive individualism’ unlikely to sustain any alternative, more high-minded, politics. Operating here is a kind of Gresham’s law that affects mildly progressive politics, under which ‘law’ one witnesses the gradual debasing of the coinage of progressive sociopolitical purpose and instead the fostering of a merely parasitic state and a self-seeking governing class. This is, at best, what I would myself judge to have become of South Africa’s presumed transition — and even this kind of pretence as to the retention of some higher aspiration and some higher purpose is fast fading in ruling circles. ★ ★ ★

Still, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Indeed, South Africa is currently very close to being the world’s leader in grass-roots social protest and demonstrated dissidence. True, as I have observed elsewhere, this unrest, this ‘rebellion of the poor’ (in Peter Alexander’s evocative phrase), remains more locally focused (as protest) than nationally focused - not yet being integrally linked to some presumptive counter-hegemonic project that might effectively challenge the ANC and its project while also aiming at a much more genuine liberation than the country has as yet come even close to realizing. Yet the voices of dissent are many and their potential real.^’ Indeed, there are even signs that, ‘fuelled by a dangerous mixture of high unemployment, slow growth, weak leadership and fierce feuding within the governing party’, some ‘influential factions’ in the ANC itself are ‘pushing to transform the courts, the media, the economy and ... the much praised constitution’.^® Can one not see in this diverse contestation, both within and without the ANC, the slow dawning of the ‘next liberation struggle’, a continuation of the very popular struggle that, as we have seen in this essay, the ANC leadership - in the name of neoliberalism and what one can only call ‘recolonization’ - had worked so hard to thwart in the transition years from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s? NOTES 1

2

For an examination of these more current struggles see my ‘Liberating Liberation: The Struggle Against Recolonization in South Africa’, in John S. Saul and Patnck Bond, South Africa: The Present as History, Oxford: James Currey, forthcoming, chapter 6. On the concepts both of ‘recolonization’ and of a new ‘Empire of Capital one not so readily defined as previously in terms of various nationally-defined imperial purposes - see my Decolonization of Empire: Contesting the Rhetoric

236

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 and Reality of Recolonization in Southern Africa and Beyond, Delhi, London and Johannesburg: Three Essays Collective, Merlin Press and Wits University

3

Press, 2008. Interview with Steve Biko, as carried out by Gail Gerhart on 24 October 1972, available at http://abahlali.org and from the Aluka e-coUection of antiapartheid-related materials at http://www.aluka.org.

4

See, on this and many other related points, Lindi Wilson, Steve Biko, Auckland

5

Eddie Webster, oral communication and in his contributions to the pubhc

Park, S.A.: Jacana, 2011. discussion following the presentation of his paper ‘A Seamless Web or a Democratic Rupture: The Re-Emergence of Trade Unions and the African National Congress (ANC) in Durban 1973 and Beyond’, at the conference ‘One Hundred Years of the ANC:

Debating Liberation Histories and

Democracy Today’, held in Johannesburg, 20-24 September 2011. 6

I heard this position most forcibly articulated in the late seventies at their then shared house in Durban from both then trade union activists Alec Erwin and (at that time banned) Johnny Copleyn who ultimately came to move in quite different directions from the opinions they expressed on that earher occasion.

7

Eddie Webster and Glenn Adler, ‘Exodus Without a Map: The Labour Movement in a Liberahzing South Africa’, in Bjorn Beckman and L. M. Sachikonye, eds., iMbour Regimes and Liberalization: The Restructuring of StateSociety Relations in Africa, Harare: University of Zimbabwe Pubhcations, 2001, p. 126.

8

See, among others. The Institute for Industrial Education, The Durban Strikes, 1973, Durban: The Institute of Industrial Education,

1974; and Steven

Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 19701984, Cape Town: Raven Press, 1987. 9

For more details on this see Webster and Adler, ‘Exodus Without a Map’, p. 124; and Sakhela Buhlungu, A Paradox of Victory: COSATU and the Democratic Transformation in South Africa, Durban: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press,

2010. 10

See Foster’s speech, published as ‘The Workers’ Struggle: Where Does FOSATU Stand?’, Review of African Political Economy, No. 24, 1982, pp. 99114.

11

Robert Fine, ‘The Workers’ Struggle in South Africa’, RexHew of African Political Economy, No. 24, 1982, pp. 95-99.

12

Not that FOSATU and TUACC (the Federation of South African Trade Unions and the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Council) sounded the only emergent trade union voices of black workers to be heard during this period, Webster and Adler recording a number of other important initiatives of the time, ‘Exodus Without a Map’, pp. 127-128.

13

Webster and Adler, ‘Exodus Without a Map’, p. 129.

14

For a detailed discussion of the NEDLAC process, and more generally of the challenges facing COSATU during this penod, see Carolyn Bassett, ‘Negotiating South Africa’s Economic Future:

COSATU and Strategic

Unionism’, a doctoral dissertation submitted to York University, 2000.

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION 15

237

Indeed, Franco Barchiesi’s (in his ‘“Schooling Bodies to Hard Work”: The South African State’s Policy Discourse and Its Moral Constructions of Welfare’, paper presented at the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa (NEWSA), Vermont, 2007) estimates that during the post-apartheid period ‘full time waged employment was a reality for only less than one third of the African economically active population’.

16

As indicated by Marlea Clarke in a personal communication and in her “‘All the Workers?”: Labour Market Reform and “Precarious Work” in Post¬ apartheid South Africa, 1994-2004’, a doctoral dissertation submitted to York

17

University, 2006. Eddie Webster, personal communication, although, as he correctly adds, ‘to have a job at all in these times may be seen as a privilege rather than a curse’.

18

And so do differences between the ‘proletariat’ and the urban ‘precariat’ even more broadly defined - a distinction I will elaborate upon at the outset of the following section.

19

Saul,‘Liberating Liberation’.

20

See my ‘What Working-Class?: Non-Transformative Global Capitalism and the African Case’, in Baris Karagaac and Yasin Kaya, eds.. Capital and Labour in Contemporary Capitalism (forthcoming).

21

On this subject see, crucially, Jonathan Barker, Street-Level Politics, Toronto:

22

Between the Lines, 1999. Colin Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance: Township Organizations and NonViolent Direct Action in Twentieth Century South Africa’, in Glenn Adler and Jonny Steinberg, eds., From Comrade to Citizen: The South African Civics Movement and the Transition to Democracy, London and New York: MacMillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2000, p. 26.

23 24

Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance’, p. 27. Popo Molefe, as quoted in Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Front in South Africa, 1983-1981, Claremont, S.A.: David Phillips, 2000, p.

121. 25

Jeremy Seekings, ‘The Development of Strategic Thought in South Africa s Civic Movements, 1977-1990’, in Adler and Steinberg, From Comrade to

26

Citizen, p. 70. This widespread campaign of naked suppression was a particularly important focus of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconcihation Commission.

27

Thus, Seekings, for one, can write in his book merely that, less dramatically, the UDF faded away before finally disbanding formally in August, 1991. There was a certain inevitability to the organisational shift from the UDF to the ANC. ...[it was] a logical, unavoidable, even unremarkable event’. Here, too, he quotes the then president of the South African Youth Congress, Peter Mokoba’s 1991 statement: ‘Now that the ANC can operate legally, the UDF

28

is redundant’. An option the weaknesses of which are crisply parsed by Seekings and by Like Zoem in her The Politics of Necessity: Community Organizing and Democracy in South Africa, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.

29

Ineke van Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: The United Democratic Front

238

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 and the Transformation of South Africa, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2000; see also Van Kessel’s ‘Trajectories after Liberation in South Africa; mission accomphshed or vision betrayed?’, in Zuid-Afrika & Leiden, University of Leiden, 2011, available at http://zuidafrikaleiden.nl.

30

Mona Younis, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 173.

31

Michelle Williams’s valuable The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India, New York and London: Palgrave MacMiUan, 2008, contrasts sharply the politics of Kerala’s communist party with that of the ANC/SACP, emphasizing the latters’ rehance on mere ‘mass mobihzing’ — designed primarily to, in effect, draw a crowd to popularly had its ascendancy. There could be very httle place for a proactive UDF-hke organization within such a scenario.

32

In a letter to the present author, which, however, I subsequendy pubhshed under the title ‘Rusty Bernstein: A Letter’, in Transformation (South Africa), No. 64, 2007.

33

Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, London: Pluto Press, 2000, p. 168. On the rise (notably during the period of constitutional negotiations) and fall of meaningful gender assertions, for example, see Shireen Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

34

See especially Ashwin Desai, We are the Poors: Community Struggles in PostApartheid South Africa, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002; see also Peter Alexander, ‘Rebellion of the Poor; South Africa’s Service Dehvery Protests — a Preliminary Analysis’, Review of African Political Economy, 37(123), 2010; and his updated survey entitled, ‘SA protest rates increasingly competitive with world leader China’, 23 March 2012, avadable at http://www.amandlapubhshers. co.za.

35

See John Daniel, ‘The Mbeki Presidency: Lusaka Wins’, South African Yearbook of International Affairs, 2001-02, Johannesburg; South African Institute of International Affairs, 2002, pp. 7-15, from which I quote liberally in the next several paragraphs.

36

Daniel, ‘The Mbeki Presidency’, pp. 9-10.

37

Dale McKinley,

The ANC and the Liberation Struggle: A Critical Political

Biography, London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 109. 38

See my ‘Socialism and Southern Africa’, m Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar, eds.. Introducing New Approaches to Marxism: Critique and Struggle, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, forthcoming.

39

Elisabeth Jean Drew, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; see also Younis, Liberation and Democratization.

40

Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa, Aukland Park, S.A.: Jacana, 2008, p. 148. Indeed, in the words of one other incisive analysis (Kurt Schock,

Unarmed Insurrections: People’s Power Movements in Nondemocracies,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 66), ‘more important

ON TAMING A REVOLUTION

239

to the anti-apartheid than the threat of anned insurrection’ was ‘the ANC’s reestablished public presence after the Soweto uprising and its provision of a culture of resistance and [of| popular anti-apartheid frames’. 41

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 48; as he then continues, ‘if the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be arranged around the baize table, listen to their own voice and begin committing outrages and setting fire to buildings, the ehtes and the bourgeois parties will be seen running to the colonialists to exclaim “this is very serious! We do not know how it will end; we must find a solution — some sort of compromise’’’.

42

Neville Alexander, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg; University of Natal Press, 2002.

43

Thabo Mbeki, ‘The Fatton Thesis; A Rejoinder’, Canadian Journal of African

44

This ‘Hani moment’ is graphically discussed in Janet Smith and Beauregard

Studies, 18(3), 1984, p. 609. Trump, Hani: A Life Too Short, Johannesburg and Cape Town; Jonathan BaU Publishers, 2009. Hani’s intervention at the NWC is referenced to Gevisser on 45

p. 210. Hein Marais, South Africa - Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition, London and Cape Town; Zed Press and University of Cape Town Press, 1998. A revised second edition of this valuable work appeared in 2001.

46

The classic example of this argument is that of Merle Lipton m her Capitalism

47

See, crucially, Fredrick Johnstone, ‘White Prosperity and White Supremacy

and Apartheid, Aldershot, U.K.; Gower Publishing, 1985, p. 372. in South Africa Today’, African Affairs, 69(April), 1970; and his Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa, 48

London; Routledge, 1976. On such realities see Dan O’Meara’s Lorty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948-1994, Randberg, S.A. and Athens, Ohio; Ravan Press and Ohio University Press, 1996.

49

As quoted in the Linancial Times, 10 June 1986.

50

As cited m McKinley, The ANC and the Liberation Struggle, p. 109.

51

Malcolm Fraser, ‘No More Talk. Time to Act’, Times (London), 30June 1986.

52

On this, see my A Partial Victory: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation in Global Perspective, New York; Monthly Review Press,

53

forthcoming. O’Meara’s Lorty Lost Years remains, as noted above, the locus classicus of analysis of the National Party’s trajectory - from egg to earth as it were.

54

See again, on the distinction between ‘proletariat’ and ‘precariat’, my ‘What

55

Working-Class?’ See Philip Frankel, Pretoria’s Praetorians: Civil Military Relations in South Africa,

56

See, among others, the six volume official report of the TRC, Cape Town;

Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1984. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998; as well as numerous nightmarish 57

book length accounts of the penod. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 122. As Fanon continues, ‘The national middle

240

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 class will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent and it will play the part without any complexes in a most dignified manner’.

58

Thabo Mbeki, as cited in Wilham Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005, p. 89, in speaking at the June 1996 launching of the GEAR programme.

59

Vishnu Padayachee and Wilham Gumede as quoted in Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007, chapter 10, ‘Democracy Bom in Chains: South Africa’s Constricted Freedom’, pp. 233-261.

60

Recall his apparent hailing, in 1994, of the free market as a ‘magic elixir’ in his speech to the joint session of the Houses of Congress in Washington.

61

Indeed, some of these latter were also to be involved in the breakaway COPE movement that, in the wake of Mbeki’s overthrow and in a (hostile but largely mistaken) anticipation of Zuma’s radicahzation of the ANC project, launched itself in 2008 — and contested the 2009 election, not very successfully, as a possible national liberation-hnked alternative to the right of ANC.

62

Patrick Bond, ‘South African Sphnters: From “EHte Transition” to “Small-a Alliances’”, Review of African Political Economy, No. 127(March), 2001, p. 115. On this subject there is also Patrick Bond’s Elite Transition; for another very full picture of the increasingly narrowing hmits placed by ANC on its economic policymaking see Marais, South Africa.

63

On the RDP see my exchange with Bill Frend, ‘The RDP: Two Reviews’, Southern Africa Report, July, 1994.

64

Pippa Green, Choice, Not Fate: The Fife and Times of Trevor Manuel, Rosebank, S.A.: Penguin Books, 2008. The book itself is a starthng example of hagiography (both as regards Manuel and also the ANC at its most conservative) but the lead title is also an arresting shorthand advertisement for the way in which the ANC would apparently like to present itself to right-thinking readers.

65

We might be forgiven for thinking it to be not quite so ‘smart’ from the point

66

Alan Hirsch, Season of Hope: Economic Reform Under Mbeki and Mandela,

67

See my ‘Liberating Liberation’; and also Alexander, ‘Rebellion of the Poor’; as well as his ‘SA protest rates’.

of view of the vast mass of the South African population, of course. Pietermantzburg: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2005, p. 4.

68

Geoffrey York, ‘ANC’s radical voices growing louder: Proposed agenda includes black economic ownership, fann expropriation, nationalization and tighter controls on the courts’. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 8 June 2012.

STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA ATILIO A. BORON

O

ne of the most impressive ideological and political retrogressions in

contemporary

class

struggle

in

Latin

America

has

been

the

abandonment of the notions of‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ by the political parties and social movements of the left. The underlying argument for such a major retreat asserts that this pair of concepts refers to a phase in the development of popular struggles already gone forever. Given that the forms of political struggles have changed, those old concepts have no role to play. In its more radical form this argument was developed in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, and is directly linked to one of the major theses: the vanishing importance of nation-states, and national struggles, in the vaporous scenario of the empire.' It seems unnecessary to recall the enormous impact that Empire exerted on a broad array of social movements and political forces throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, especially m the first editions of Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum. The postmodern airdu temps favoured the dissemination of these novel ideas, apparently better suited to deal with the complexities of contemporary capitalism where traditional forms of class struggle seemed relics of a bygone past. If in ‘classical times’ it was possible to establish a connection between class, class conflicts, labour unions, political parties and the state, where organizations like unions and parties developed certain strategies and tactics to fight the bourgeois state, in the rarefied atmosphere of twenty-first century capitalism with its amorphous multitudes, vanishing national states and the omnipresence of a de-centred, immaterial empire, strategy and tactics became as obsolete as bows and arrows after the invention of firearms. If the argument developed by Hardt and Negri winds up jettisoning ‘strategy’ as an incurable anachronism in the post-class era of the multitude, John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power, while endorsing

242

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

a very similar position, makes clear something that in Hardt and Negri remained m the shadows: the absolute refusal to pursue state power because, according to Holloway, all revolutions that took state power in their hands ended in a complete failure. In his own words.

There is no doubt that the fall of the Soviet Union and the failure of national liberation movements throughout the world have brought disillusionment to millions of people. The notion of revolution was so strongly identified with gaining control of the state that the failure of those attempts to change the world through gaining control of the state has led very many people to the conclusion that revolution is impossible.^

For Hardt and Negri the state is dying and waiting to be respectfully buried, and to think in terms of a ‘strategy’ to take state power is therefore nonsensical. For Holloway, the seizure of state power would signal the degeneration of any revolution, its inexorable frustration. It would take us well beyond the limits of this essay to explore the deep roots of this theoretical and pohtical standpoint. It certainly has to do with a pecuhar phobia against anything related to organization, recently developed among radical cadres and intellectuals, organization being conceived of as equal to Stalinism, ‘third internationalism’, ‘Leninism’ and so on. This leads to a contempt for parties and unions in general, and the revalorization of the virtues of‘spontaneism’, horizontalism, ‘base-ism’. Even though the idea is not fully articulated the underlying argument seems to be that the ‘failed’ revolutions of the twentieth century had as a key causal factor the betrayal of the leaders and organizations, which corrupted the virginal purity of the masses’ emancipatory projects.^ Following, perhaps unknowingly, the axiom ‘he who says organization says ohgarchy’ as formulated by Robert Michels, who drew the conclusion that working-class organization inevitably ended with elites deploying power usurped from the masses, the analyses by Hardt and Negri, and HoUoway, find the path to authentic socialism in the renunciation of organization, strategy and state power. Of course, this peculiar vision of these authors contrasts with some more traditional conceptions prevailing in other quarters of the radical left. It would be a mistake to think that this furious rejection of strategy and tactics is the only position to be found in the Latin American left, but it is certainly more widespread, if not the most important. The declining prestige of traditional leftist parties, both communist and social democrats alike, drives this kind of argument, further aggravated by the implosion of the Soviet Union and the adoption of capitalist developmental strategies by China, Vietnam and, to a

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

243

lesser extent, by the Cuban Revolution. On the other hand, the discredit of the party is strongly associated to the despotic features of the North Korean regime, certainly not a heart-warming example. But besides the negative impacts of the factors associated with the failure, defeat or collapse of twentieth-century socialist experiments, other positive influences were also at work. Paradoxically enough, the rejection of anything related to strategy and tactics took place and gained impetus in the ascending phase of popular struggles against neoliberalism. The rising tide of anti-neoliberal alter-globalization movements, sparked with the Zapatista rebellion on 1 January 1994 and amplified after the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in November 1999 and the ensuing succession of Porto Alegre World Social Forums played a major role in fostering political thinking in which classical Marxist principles of political action were strongly rejected. Under this perspective social movements were exalted while pohtical parties were duly demoted; classes and class organizations were regarded as remnants of archaic times, the ‘truth’ of social life lying in the multifarious panoply of all sorts of identities hitherto concealed by the abstract universality of class; ‘civil society’ became the catchword of a promising new era, while the state was considered as an unhealthy archaism. The new ‘common sense’ prevailing among large sections of the left could not fail to jettison what from Marx and Engels to Fidel and Guevara, passing through Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao and Gramsci, was the key problem of all revolutions: the seizure of state power. In this particular regard the impact of Zapatism was - especially but not only — in Latin America truly spectacular. This is related less to the strength of the movement, which turned out to be less than expected, and rather more to the outstanding ability of Subcomandante Marcos, the mouthpiece of the EZLN, to communicate the new gospel with an efficacy very rarely seen in the history of left-wing politics. The impact of Zapatist ideas on the Latin American academy was enormous, while Holloway — himself newly established in Puebla, Mexico - wrote a series of articles and several books in which he outlined the political theory of Zapatism. Crucial to his argument is the attack against what Holloway names the ‘state illusion’ of the traditional left, a doctrinal leftover of a state-centred conception of revolution according to which the latter is conceived of as ‘the conquest of state power and the transformation of society by the state’.Both reformists and revolutionaries share this creed, the great merit of the Zapatistas being to have broken the link between revolution and the seizure of state power. As a result, if the state is an ‘illusion’ and revolution can move forward without bothering to conquer state power, questions of strategy and tactics become no more useful to the real movement of societies than the theological discussions on

244

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the sex of the angels in medieval times. Or, as Marx put it m his writing on Spain, ‘as Don Quixote had protested with his lance against gunpowder, so the guerrillas protested against Napoleon, only with different success’.^ Yet, the eruption of a new and most severe general crisis of capitahsm seems to be causing the rapid obsolescence of these conceptions. Zapatism proved unable to fulfill the hopes it had nurtured since its beginnings. The few practical results obtained by major social movements hke the teachers’ strikes in Oaxaca, Mexico, or the vast mobihzations of Chilean and Colombian students in recent times, as well as the growing resistance against mega-mming in several countries of the region has brought to the foreground the need to rethink the usefulness of the pohtical methods used in those struggles. To defeat bourgeois rule in capitahsm, we need more than just enthusiasm and militancy. CLASS STRUGGLES UNDER NEOLIBERALISM IN LATIN AMERICA Capitalist democracies face profound crises in the current conjuncture. Latin America, far from being an exception, is one of the most glaring examples of the democratic maladie. The disillusionment with the performance of so-called democratic regimes (though not with the democratic ideal) and the sharp dechne in the esteem of political parties has led many observers and activists to conclude that one of the main tasks of the vigorous social movements in the region should be the recreation of democracy, of a new democracy.^ The democratic frustration, the delegitimation of politics and the public sphere, the demonization of the state and the discrediting of parties and elections granted the social movements a growing role in the ongoing political processes. In accordance with neoliberal ideology, the market and the private sphere, the virtues of individualist strategies of personal promotion and well-being were permanently extolled, while all sorts of collective strategies or actions were regarded as ineffective and anachronistic remnants of the past. An unintended outcome of this new social ethos tirelessly proposed by the right and its ideologues against institutional pohtics was to open the space to the ‘protagonism of the street’, that is, the vital political life that exists beyond the rigid and disciplinary institutions of bourgeois politics in all societies. This became more and more important in most Latin American countries, leading to the ousting of unpopular presidents in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Brazil, the blocking of reactionary economic plans like gas and water privatization in Bolivia and, most notably, defeating ALGA, the Free Trade Agreement of the Amencas so cherished by United States and its allies in the region.

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

245

As a matter of fact ‘the street’ is a metaphor that usually designates the plebs, the rabble, in a negative sense. But when it enters the stage as a protagonist in political life this can be a vigorous test of republican health, as Machiavelli argued in his studies on the politics of the Roman republic, a corrective of the conservative bias of institutional politics.^ It proves today the inability of democratic capitalism to channel the demands of the citizenry and to solve political crises in accordance with legal and constitutional procedures. The divorce between ‘/e pays real' and ‘/e pays legal' is an old one in Latin America, going all the way to the struggles for national independence. It had been observed by Simon Bolivar’s extraordinary tutor, Simon Rodriguez, when he warned the former against copying from Europe or America the political institutions of the new Latin American republics. ‘Either we invent or we err’, said Rodriguez.^ Despite his advice, the new republics in the South meticulously imitated the political institutions of the North, and they erred. Therefore, it is not by chance that on a periodic basis the masses take over the streets to redress what was wrong, or to undo what the government did wrong. Popular revolts ousted several Latin American governments in the last ten or fifteen years: in Ecuador in 1997, 2000 and 2005, opening the road to the sweeping victory of Rafael Correa in 2006. The same happened in Bolivia, where the protracted insurrections of large masses of peasants, Indians and the urban poor brought down right-wing governments in 2003 and 2005, making possible the formidable electoral victory of Evo Morales in late 2005. By the same token the ‘constitutional’ dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in Peru was defeated by an impressive popular mobilization that shocked the country in 2000. In Argentina, the supposedly ‘centre-left’ president Fernando de la Rua betrayed his promises of abandoning neoliberal policies and had to precipitously leave office two years early amidst a bloody uprising against his pohcies. More recently, the mobilization of Chilean students against President Michele Bachelet and her successor, Sebastian Pinera, put the government against the wall as the institutional political opposition was never able to do, and similar events are going on in Colombia in the first half of 2012. This enumeration is far from complete but it is enough to signal the enormous gravitational pull of ‘the street’ in the fragile, unrepresentative and largely illegitimate capitalist democracies of the area.® Now, these series of popular uprisings were the logical consequences of the long period - not yet completely overcome - of neoliberal hegemony, with all its enhanced social tensions, ruptures, exclusions and ever growing levels of economic exploitation and social degradation which, altogether, created the objective conditions for the political mobilization oflarge sections

246

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

of Latin Amenca’s populace. Were these plebeian revolts just exceptional episodes expressing popular anger and rage? Or were they the expression of deep-seated demands to move beyond the narrow hmits of liberal democracy and the invention of a new democratic model? A sober look at the history of re-democratization would reveal that there was nothing accidental in this impetuous political mobilization and in the tumultuous finale of many democratically elected governments of the region. It is because of this that eighteen presidents — almost all of them obedient clients of Washington — had to step down ahead of time, unable to cope with the overwhelming popular unrest.^® Not only that: referenda that were called to approve the privatization of governmental firms or public services almost invariably disappointed the expectations of neoliberal rulers. That was the case in Uruguay (water supply and ports); water supply again in Bolivia and Peru and gold mining in Esquel, Argentina, to mention just a few. Large mobilizations in most Latin American countries were instrumental in the defeat of the White House sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas, or to demand the nationalization of oil and gas in Bolivia and very recently to ask the government to call a popular referendum on the construction of a highway through the Amazon jungle; or to oppose to the pohcies of privatization of oil in Ecuador, telephones in Costa Rica and the health services in several others; or to demand the restitution of the savings of the bank customers, as in Argentina in 2001-02 (end the ‘corralito’l) and to end the American sponsored and financed coca eradication programmes in Bolivia and Peru. Yet, the great social movements that took the streets and overthrew unpopular governments fulfilled only one part of the job, because the ousted governments were replaced by others quite similar. There are two major exceptions to this rule: Bolivia and Ecuador, in which the movements were able to channel the impulse of the street mobihzations into a political organization and adopt a strategy leading to astounding electoral victories that were instrumental to solidify the new correlation offerees. Yet, if social movements failed in many other cases to build a new political alternative and to stabilize a new correlation of forces, the popular governments brought about by the electoral route gathered no better results. Lula in Brazil, the Kirchners in Argentina, Lagos and Bachelet in Chile and Vazquez and Mujica in Uruguay are other shining examples of the impotence of the subordinated classes to impose a clear and resolute post-neoliberal agenda on governments chosen by great popular majorities. Despite the extraordinary levels of popular acceptance of Lula and Vazquez, their successors had to go to a second ballot to prevail in the presidential elections. And the no

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

247

less popular Bachelet saw her candidate badly defeated by the right-winger Sebastian Pinera at the head of a conservative alliance. Therefore, if the insurrectional mobilization of the masses overthrew governments just to then demobilize themselves and withdraw to political immobility

once

again,

when

governments

were

changed

through

constitutional means the political outcome was surprisingly similar: masses went to the polls and then went home, demobihzed by the same parties that had asked their support in the elections. Yet, there is stiU a very important difference: mass mobilizations and street fighting left profound, even painful, lessons for the popular classes. They learned that when they take to the streets their political efficacy can be enormous. They learned that they can get rid of reactionary governments, an awareness of great importance. And the political right also learned something: the impunity with which they could mock the popular mandate is a matter of the past. The lessons left by electoral politics are not as constructive: only the bitter taste of unfulfilled promises, a sense of generalized frustration and the reinforcement of political ahenation. Politicians lie, and nothing can be expected from them. This unprecedented capacity of the popular classes to oust governments brought them suddenly into the political scene as a new and unexpected actor. Before then the only significant subjects of democratic transitions in conventional pohtical science literature were the pohtical parties. No more, as proved in the most interesting cases of Latin American politics: Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In Venezuela by defeating a coup d’etat and unleashing the radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution; in the other two countries by proving that strategic and tactical flexibility can crown the success in the street barricades with sweeping electoral victories that opened the door to a new political era in Bolivia and Ecuador, alongside Venezuela. STFkATEGIC AND TACTICAL DILEMMAS The loss of prestige of political parties and the growing importance of social movements should have brought to the fore a discussion on the best suited strategy and tactics of class struggle by those new political actors. Yet, the discussion is still missing despite the fact that by and large most movements have made a clear decision in favour of a general strategy without a senous discussion of the matter. Take the case of the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, Brazil. This was a very important initiative reflecting the new international political climate prevailing especially m the West (the Americas and Western Europe, not so much Africa or Asia) after the Battle of Seattle. An unspoken strategic assumption of this already exhausted period was the sharp separation

248

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

between political and social realities. In addition, politics and by extension the poHtical was regarded as ill, immoral, deceitful and clientelistic: the state was a corrupt and an unresponsive and unaccountable machine, party competition just the race of unscrupulous leaders to acquire power and wealth for themselves, and elections a sham. If party politics personified all evds, the social movements consider themselves as the sole representation of all possible virtues. As a result, in the first editions of the WSF held in Porto Alegre, political parties and political leaders were exphcitly excluded from participation. Lula had attended the initial meetings but once he became president of Brazil, in January 2003, he was politely asked not to come to the WSF anymore. Only in 2004 was Lula admitted to this singular, eccentric club, and in 2005 Hugo Chavez was finally accepted as a guest (and, I would say, reluctantly, because a sizable minority of the International Council of the WSF insisted on closing its doors to any pohtician, no matter how significant or friendly to the forum). Despite their unwillingness to discuss issues of strategy and tactics the leaders of the WSF had made their choice. But the choice was wrong. At the most abstract level, this was because the separation between pohtical and social organizations rested on faulty assumptions. The demands ot a labour union, a peasant federation, a feminist, youth or indigenous organization is never only ‘social’; their struggles are never fought in the pristine scenarios of ‘civil society’. From Marx on we know that all social conflicts, not to mention class conflicts, are political, no matter how conscious the involved actors are. The subordinated classes may not always be aware of the pohtical nature of their social ambitions, but the dominant classes certainly are. It is true that the social movements have shown great creativity compared to the rather arthritic practices of the political parties. The social movements, not the parties, were the main forces that ousted unpopular governments in the region, circumventing the biased institutional and constitutional structures that favour elites, and are embedded with prejudices that undermine the ‘protagonism of the street’ and similar forms of democratic participation. For the dominant political culture of contemporary capitahsm politics is an elite affair, the outcome of gentlemen’s agreements and quarrels fought within the bourgeois institutional framework. People mobilized in the street are not welcomed and should not interfere in the agreements and deals made by the elite. Social movements were able to upset this undemocratic arrangement, and this is an important achievement. But their healthy activation of the masses, while instrumental in getting rid of reactionary governments, proved unable to come to state power and launch a radical post-neoliberal programme. When this was possible it was because movements were able to

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

249

create a party of their own: that was the case in Bolivia, with Evo Morales’s MAS, and in Ecuador with Rafael Correa’s Alianza Pais. When this transition did not occur, as in Argentina after the 2001 popular upheaval, the foundations of neoliberalism survived the uproar of the masses. To some extent it could be said that social movements were able to break out of the straitjacket of electoral politics, something that could also be labelled the ‘electoral cretinism’ of political parties, especially on the left. Bourgeois parties never bet all their assets in a single political scenario, much less the electoral one. They play politics on aU possible terrains and with a wide variety of political weapons, with a formidable strategic and tactical flexibility. Elections? Yes, by all means, but also work in the non¬ elective agencies and state institutions (the judiciary, the armed forces and the police, the state bureaucracy, local governments) as well in ‘civil society’ (the educational system, mass-media, professional organizations, unions and even in some cases popular organizations) — deploying everything from co¬ optation and lobbying to bribes and scare campaigns, not to mention capital flight, investment strikes, hoarding, lock-outs and, in the international arena, ad-hoc coalitions with powerful international actors like the United States. All this amounts to an integral strategy of permanently building and consolidating more favourable power relations that not even remotely is circumscribed by the electoral arena. Needless to say, such an integral power strategy requires an immense accumulation of aU sorts of resources - material, organizational and symbolic - that only exceptionally could be matched by popular social and political forces. However, if the leftist parties want to change the world and not only denounce its evils, much more than an adequate electoral strategy is in order. ORGANIZATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS Therefore, notwithstanding the noteworthy changes in the nature and features of social and political actors - changes that made the popular camp more heterogeneous, atomized and disorganized, even while they made the bourgeois classes more homogeneous and better organized - the adoption of an adequate strategy and tactics continues to be a critical issue for the left. The diverging paths of working and capitalist classes can be immediately grasped by the simple comparison between Davos’s World Economic Forum and Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum. While the world’s rich and powerful gather in the Swiss mountain resort to discuss common strategies and tactics to be applied in the global scenario, caUing the principal political leaders to be lectured by experts about what they expect from them, in Porto Alegre the explicit goal was rather to provide ample room to the expression of all sorts

250

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

of identities and differences — nationalities, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, languages, professions, religions, ideologies, organizational forms — but without even dreaming of developing a minimum articulation of efforts to fight highly organized common enemies. Thus, in the 2003 version of the WSF the proposal to issue a statement condemning the imminent imperiahst aggression on Iraq was defeated while the people at Davos had already endorsed such a criminal move. The argument which finally prevailed at Porto Alegre was that ‘we don t want to become a new Third International’, which reveals the hrmted perspectives of the WSF’s leaders, mostly officials of respectable NGOs but with scant connection to the political reahties of their time. Little wonder the practical demise of the WSF in the ensuing years. Thus, while Davos constantly improved its organizational capabilities to enhance its influence worldwide, the WSF handcuffed itself by deflberately choosing not to create even a rudimentary organizational structure that could improve the effectiveness of the multiple struggles waged all around the globe. In classical Marxism organizational matters were regarded as eminently pohtical matters. The choice in favour of ‘no organization’ is a strategic political choice based on confidence in the extraordinary creative powers of the spontaneous upsurge of the masses, a romantic illusion never endorsed by the historical record. As stated above, masses can out of anger or despair take over the streets and, in some cases, overthrow a reactionary government. But without an organization, adequate strategic and tactical decisions defining friends and foes and selecting the specific fields in which to concentrate the revolutionary drive (i.e. agrarian reform, tax reform, bank nationahzation, educational reform, etc.) and in which sequential order cannot embed themselves in revolutionary consciousness. A key component of an adequate strategic choice is the consciousness of the revolutionary sectors of the population. Engels captured this point quite well when in his 1895 ‘Introduction’ to Marx’s Class Struggles in France he wrote that ‘The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of the masses lacking consciousness is past’." The big question is how to do it? How to overcome centuries of capitalist socialization, and — as Che Guevara insisted — to create a new social subject, endowed with a critical, revolutionary conscience? The limits of spontaneity are quite clear, but equally clear seems to be the enormous task to be carried out to produce the ripening of revolutionary consciousness. In this regard it is important to avoid a recurrent confusion between Leninism and Blanquism widely used as an indictment against Lenin by the postmodernist left as well as traditional social democrats of all sorts. Blanqui

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

251

was the exact personification of what Engels criticized in his ‘Introduction’: a revolutionary strategy that hinged around the decision of a conscious and resolute minority that dragged behind it the crowds who were lured by the heroic example of the leaders. Revolution comes first, mass support comes later. Lenin’s theory is exactly the contrary: the party, and the leadership, must first gain the confidence of the crowds and only then launch the revolutionary attack. Gramsci’s elaboration of this theme, which lies behind all his ideas on hegemony, is another expression of the same underlying idea. The problem is how to ensure the ripening of the type of mass radical consciousness which is

able

to

transcend the limits

of spontaneous

mobilization, so as to accomplish the transit from the ‘class in itself to the ‘class for itself, thereby endowing the subordinated classes with a clear awareness of their fundamental interests and promoting the construction of a national organizational structure capable of fostering and channelling their radical impulses. Experience has proved time and again the tmth contained in Lenin’s classic dictum: ‘without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’. In absence of such theory — and we should not forget that a theory is among other things a navigation map — it will be extremely difficult for the emancipatory social forces to find the route to arrive at the haven of the good post-capitalist society. HEROISM AND MILITANCY ARE NOT ENOUGH Heroic resistance, demonstrations and furious struggles can provide transient victories to the popular forces but are not enough to dismantle the rule of capital. In order to accomplish this goal the workers have to realize first that the capitalist system is a historical creation that, as any other of this sort, will be superseded by another one that will replace it. The old bourgeois propaganda which claims that capitalism is the natural embodiment of the egotistic and acquisitive impulses of the human species - the natural emanation of our deepest psychological drives - is designed to show that it is absolutely nonsensical to try to change the system. But once the masses realize that ‘another world is possible’ then a second problem arises because it will become necessary for them to learn which are the weakest points of the system, what to do to overthrow it, how to prepare the political instrument to conquer political power and, if successful, how to transform the state and set up an entirely new social order. Now, one of the most significant features of the present capitahst crisis is the teUing divergence between the evolution of the ‘objective conditions’ for an anti-capitalist revolution in advanced capitalist countries - especially in Europe, where large sections of the underlying population, as Lenin said.

252

SOCIALIST FIEGISTER 2013

don’t want to keep living as before while the upper classes seem more and more unable to continue living as before - and the pervasive backwardness in the evolution of the ‘subjective conditions’, namely consciousness and mass organization. This regrettable delay reflects the scope of the ideological victory of neoliberalism in the realm of ideas and values which, for instance, up to very recently succeeded in preventing the overwhelming majority of the population from even glimpsing the real nature of the system, not to mention to be able to call the system by its name. In this regard Terry Eagleton is right to say that ‘you can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitahsm. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.’^^ The ideological victory of capitalism created a new Gramscian ‘common sense’ according to which the state is the source of all sorts of evils, corruption is endemic in the state apparatuses, governmental enterprises are inefficient and wasteful, pohticians are corrupt and any strategy of collective betterment is dead wrong. Therefore, a strong anti-political sentiment made its inroads in the consciousness of the masses, discouraging any radical initiative against the dictatorship of capital. On the contrary, what was regarded as necessary was the dismantling of aU those elements of the state — hke social services, public health and education, etc. — not directly involved in the protection of capital and the promotion of free market policies. Capitalists’ dominance of the mass media and most of the ‘ideological apparatuses’ of the state reinforced up to unprecedented levels the neoliberal ethos. To the former should be added the confusion prevailing among the left, oscillating between a nostalgic vindication of the past and a ‘defeatism’ disguised as if it were a healthy reahsm. Events in Europe and the United States, from the indignados to Occupy, seem to indicate that the gap between objective and subjective conditions has begun to narrow, and a growing awareness of the incorrigible nature of capitalist exploitation seems to be making progress in the minds of millions. This is important but, once again, the ripening of a socialist consciousness should be accompanied by an effective political strategy to be able to change the course of history. The refusal to discuss strategic and tactical choices could frustrate the promising developments pointed out above. A bad strategic choice is preferable to no choice at all, placing all hope on the spontaneous creativity of the masses. Another frequent mistake was already commented upon by Marx in his Eighteenth Bnimaire: to behave with parliamentary manners in the street fights, while behaving rudely in the parliamentary arena.

STRATEGY & TACTICS IN POPULAR STRUGGLES IN LATIN AMERICA

253

To sum up: if parties narrow their political range of choices when only engaged in the electoral arena, then social movements suffer the same consequences when they refuse to develop an institutional strategy to come to power while at the same time refusing to address a mass insurrectionary strategy to conquer state power. This is the worst of all possible outcomes: neither an institutional road nor an insurrectionary road. The result: the perpetuation of bourgeois rule. NOTES 1 2

3

4

5 6

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 19. Daniel Bensaid has also criticized Holloway’s interpretation of the ‘failure’ of the twentieth century revolutions in a long article in which he asserts that ‘The verdict is to say the least hasty, wholesale (and crude), as if there existed only two symmetrical experiences, two competing and equally failed approaches [revolutions and reforms]; and as if the Stalinist regime (and its other avatars) resulted from the “revolutionary experience” rather than the Thermidorian counter-revolution. This strange historic logic would make it just as possible to proclaim that the French Revolution has failed, the American Revolution has failed, etc’. See his ‘On a recent book by John Holloway’, available at http://www.marxsite.com. Most authors in this tradition talk about the ‘failure’ of twentieth-century revolutions. It seems to me that they would better talk about the ‘defeat’ of those revolutions, bearing in mind the fact that all of them, including the ‘peaceful road to socialism’ of Salvador Allende m Chile, were fiercely fought against from their very beginnings and that this decisively contributed to their downfall. John Holloway, ‘El Zapatismo y las ciencias sociales en America Latina’, Observatorio Social de America Latina, 4(Junio), 2001, p. 174. In addition to the abovementioned book, m which Holloway summarized his theory, he had also written other articles on this subject. See especially ‘La revuelta de la dignidad , Chiapas, No. 5, 1997; and, in response to my criticisms, ‘La asimetria de la lucha de clases. Una respuesta a Atilio Boron’, Observatorio Social de America Latina, 4(Junio), 2001. An early discussion of Holloway’s theses can be found in my ‘The jungle and the polls. Questions about the Zapatist political theory’ in www.ezln.org/english/revistachiapas/No.12/ch.l2html Karl Marx, Revolutionary Spain, part 5, available at http://www.marxists.org. See Atilio A. Boron, ‘The Truth About Capitalist Democracies’, The Socialist Register 2006, London: Merlin Press, 2005. One of the most important and articulated proponents of the ‘reinvention of democracy’ by social movements is Boaventura de Sousa Santos. See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Democratizar a democracia. Os caminhos da democracia participativa, Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacpao Brasileira, 2002; as well as his Reinventar la democracia, reinventar el

254

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 Estado, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2005; and Renovar la teona critica y reinventar la emandpacion sodal, Buenos Aires: CLACSO/Instituto Gino Germani, 2006.

7 8

9

10

11 12

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, especially pp. 203-4 and 241-8. The complete sentence of Rodriguez is as follows: ‘El interes general esta clamando por una reforma, y la America esta Uamada por las circunstancias a emprenderla. La America no debe imitar servilmente, sino ser original... iD6nde iremos a buscar modelos? La America espahola es original; originales ban de ser sus instituciones y su gobiemo, y originales los medios de fundar uno y otro. O inventamos, o erraamos’. ‘Sociedades Americanas’ (1828), as quoted in Alfonso Rumazo Gonzalez, Ideario de Simon Rodriguez, Caracas: Centauro, 1980, p. 343. I have developed this argument at length in my Aristoteles en Macondo. Notas sobre el fetichismo democrdtico en America Latina, C6rdoba: Editorial Espartaco, 2009. See Anibal Perez Linan, ‘Instituciones, coaliciones caUejeras e inestabihdad politica: perspectivas tebncas sobre las crisis presidenciales’, America Latina Hoy, 49, 2008, p. 120. Friedrich Engels, ‘Introduction’, in Robert C. Tucker, ed.. The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1972, p. 420. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, p. xi.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA: THE GENDER AGENDA SUSAN SPRONK ver the past decade, there has been a notable rise in the visibility of women and women’s issues in Latin America. First, there has been a rise m the number of female heads of state. Michele Bachelet served as president of Chile (2006-10), followed by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina (2007-11), Laura Chinchilla of Costa Paca (2010-14) and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (2011-15). Indeed, nine of the 33 countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region have elected female presidents or prime ministers to serve full terms, an achievement unparalleled elsewhere in the Global South.^ Second, women’s issues — even a feminist agenda — have been embraced by governments of all stripes, particularly the more radical experiments in

‘twenty-first

century

socialism’

such

as Venezuela,

Ecuador

and

Bolivia. At the World Social Forum in 2009 Venezuelan President Flugo Chavez proclaimed that ‘True socialism is feminist . At the same meeting, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa named ‘gender justice’ as part of his vision for twenty-first century socialism. In all three countnes, efforts have been made to appoint more women to high-level political positions. When in 2010 Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the appointment of a new cabinet that consisted of ten women and ten men, he used the occasion to pay homage to his mother, sister and daughter. Yet, talking about feminism and having more women in political office does not translate automatically into women’s empowerment. After all, neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank promote the agenda of gender equality’. When conceived solely as the ability of women to make individual choices and compete equally with men in cultural, social and econormc spheres, gender equality does nothing to reverse extreme impovenshment and exploitation experienced by the majority of women. To what extent, then, has the project of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ advanced women’s

256

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

emancipation? This essay explores this question in the context of Bolivia, which is widely invoked as being one of the most radical experiments of twentyfirst century socialism. Unlike the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, the self-styled revolution in Bolivia is often praised for being ‘bottom-up’, inspired by militant social movements.^ Responding to popular demands, the Movement towards Sociahsm (Movimiento al Sociahsmo — MAS) has introduced gender-sensitive reforms that expand cash transfer programmes which especially target women, as well as quota legislation to increase women’s representation in the formal political sphere. These can help build capacity for collective struggle, but pushing the agenda forward requires reforms that address not only the unequal relations of race and gender but also class, which has been given a backseat in the context of what Jeff Webber has described as ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’ in BoHvia.^ Progressive agendas involving a redistribution of productive resources, such as agrarian reform and food sovereignty, offer the best way forward in the context of a country where the majority of precarious workers in both rural and urban areas are women. WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA The deep racial and class divisions in Andean society are most visibly marked on women, who often stiU wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. Before Morales was elected m 2005, 70 per cent of the population of just fewer than nine million hved under the poverty line. In a context where almost two-thirds of the population self-identify as ‘indigenous’ and only 81 per cent of women are literate (compared to 91 per cent of men), the majority of poor, disenfranchised citizens are indigenous women. In this context of intense racism and poverty, there is a history of radical peasant and indigenous women organizing as collectives of miners’ wives and subcommittees of peasant unions.^ W^hile some women who have participated in such organizations have come to identify themselves as feminists, in public spaces indigenous and peasant leaders are more likely to make reference to the Andean principle of chachawarmi, or the concept of complementarity between the sexes that rejects Western notions of women’s liberation and embraces instead maternalist notions of women’s roles as mothers and providers. Indigenous women’s groups have certainly framed their demands in the language of rights’, but the agenda of state-sanctioned rights exists in tension with communitarian traditions that seek to defend indigenous autonomy against the incursions of the racist postcolonial state.®

21 ST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA: THE GENDER AGENDA

257

As Bolivian sociologist Karin Monasterios has described it, the women’s movement is divided between, on the one hand, an independent movement grounded

in

anarchism

and

communitarian

traditions

that

emphasize

autonomy from the state and, on the other, a ‘gender technocracy’ led by women’s non-govemmental organizations.^ Unlike the latter, communitybased women’s organizations have organized out of economic necessity, having received minimal support from state and international development organizations since the initial period of structural adjustment in the early 1980s. As with the rest of Latin America, these women’s movements are separated by social class, which, given the racist history of Bolivia, corresponds with ethnicity. They have different goals, needs and orientations, and often find It difficult to unite around questions related to gender.® As Alexia Escobar puts it in a round table on the challenges facing the women’s movement in Bolivia:

Feminist groups vindicate the right to decide on our bodies while the sisters from indigenous and peasant organizations raise malnutrition as the main issue. We have had difficulties to move forward in partnerships because we definitely have different codes ... While some are in favour of the decriminalization of abortion, others argue that they have the right not to die during childbirth.^

In this sense, it is difficult to quahfy the self-styled revolution taking place in Bolivia as ‘feminist’ since the label is rejected by mass, popular movements in the barrios and rural areas where women are more likely to articulate their demands around the principles of poverty (class) and exclusion (race). Nonetheless, women, particularly poor women, are very active in the base organizations of social movements and have been seen as a key constituency of the MAS administration which has responded to their demands for health, welfare and political representation. WOMEN’S ACCESS TO HEALTH AND WELFARE At his inaugural speech m 2005, Morales announced that he would govern obeying the people’ and reverse two decades of harsh neoliberalism. Upon assuming office, Morales expanded cash transfer programmes introduced by interim President Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze (2005-06) to reach a large number of beneficiaries, particularly poor mothers. The inflows of royalties and taxes on resource exports has permitted a substantial increase in welfare spending, although not at levels comparable to Brazil, Argentina or Venezuela.Social policy subsidies from Venezuela have also helped

258

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

fund these programmes. These new programmes include a universal cash transfer scheme for school-age children linked to school attendance (the Juancito Pinto programme), introduced in 2006, that reaches over a million children. Morales also enacted two means-tested cash transfer programmes; a long-awaited pension programme Renta Dignidad introduced in 2008 that provides some coverage for those without (or with only very low) pensions, and a benefit that targets poor expecting mothers, Juana Azurduy, which was launched in May 2009. The Juana Azurduy programme is the social policy that most exphcitly targets women. Named after a revolutionary mestiza leader involved in the siege of La Paz in 1781, its main purpose is to reduce high maternal and infant mortality rates and malnutrition by providing monetary incentives to mothers to use safe, public health facilities in Bolivia before, during and after their pregnancies. It also aims to motivate women to fulfill the protocols of integral growth as well as the development controls of the child from birth to age two, and to create appropriate intervals between births. The bonus consists of monetary instalments provided to mothers who receive hospitalized medical care in state-run and approved facilities before, during and after childbirth, amounting to about US$265 over the course of 33 months. Seven dollars are given to expecting mothers for each prenatal medical visit, and about US$20 are provided for each bimonthly appointment up until the child reaches the age of two years. The incentive provides additional income for mothers and enables essential purchases during the early years of a child’s hfe, thereby improving their standard of living and tackling maternal and infant health issues in one of Latin America’s poorest countries. From the perspective of state administration, such programmes are an attractive option tor improving the material welfare of hard-to-reach populations, such as poor,

rural women.

They are relatively easy to

administer. One of the greatest challenges in administering the programme has been the requirement that women possess identity documents. It is also an added bonus that such a programme helps to boost electoral support: its primary intended beneficiaries

poor women in the urban and rural areas —

make up a substantial base of the MAS’s political support. Most importantly, the programme works. The infant mortality rate has been reduced since the introduction of the programme, from 51/1000 live births in 2009 to 42/1000 live births in 2011.^' In many respects, such progranmies represent an advance compared to social policies of the former developmentalist era when social benefits were tied to formal (public) sector employment. Indeed, the reorientation of state benefits towards workers in the informal

21ST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA: THE GENDER AGENDA

259

sector is a step closer towards universality, and has a particular impact on women who are over-represented in the most precarious parts of the labour market, working as agricultural labourers, domestic servants, sex workers and market vendors. To some extent, however, the uncritical celebration of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes by both left and right speaks to the lowering of popular expectations following two decades of harsh neoliberalism. The Juana Azurduy programme is akin to the Oportunidades programme m Mexico or the bolsafamilia m Brazil. As Maxime Molyneux has observed in the case of Mexico, CCT programmes are thoroughly neoliberal in so far as they target the poor and seek to ‘empower’ women by downloading responsibility for care onto the individual rather than the state.Although it is important to acknowledge that such programmes increase women’s autonomy vis-avis men (since payments are made directly to women rather than heads of households), they remain centred on highly ‘gendered conceptions of social needs, ones which were familial, patriarchal and paternalistic’ and reinforce the social divisions through which gender asymmetries are reproduced’.'^ In the long term, a more progressive policy would aim to transform gender relations by conceiving such benefits within a broader programme of parental rights based upon principles of shared responsibility. CCT programmes also assume that quality health-care services are available for purchase, which is a dubious assumption in the most impoverished areas. As Lisa Mills observes in the case of Mexico, racism towards indigenous women is one of the reasons why they do not use the health facilities: they are frequently treated badly by mestizo staff, they confront language barriers and often have customs and beliefs around birth that are not accommodated in the health facility, such as the desire to have family members present at the birth.''' And ultimately, cash transfer programmes come nowhere close to providing the kinds of high quality, decommodified public services enjoyed by citizens m revolutionary contexts such as Cuba.'^ EXPANSION IN FORMAL POLITICAL RIGHTS The new constitution ratified in 2009 contains many provisions that strengthen women’s rights. It prohibits discrimination based on sex, gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as familial and gendered violence. It guarantees equal pay for men and women with the same job. It also requires equal participation of women and men in Bolivia s Congress. Similar to the constitutions in Ecuador and Venezuela, it is written in gender inclusive language. However, reproductive rights are still not available to most women in Bohvia. Abortion is illegal except for victims of sexual assault.

260

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

incest or to prevent a life threatening pregnancy due to mental or physical iUness. More than a dozen chnics in the country perform the procedure, but the average fee of US$150 drives many to seek alternative, unsafe methods. It has been estimated that botched abortions result in at least one death a day; those who survive face problems with their pregnancies that are linked to Bolivia’s high rate of maternal mortality, which is second only to Haiti m the region.'^ Despite these problems, however, American joumahst Jean Friedman-Rudovsky observes that ‘there is little enthusiasm in the indigenous communities for legally sanctifying abortion with a raised fist and a NOW button’. The word ‘abortion’ does not exist in most of the indigenous languages where it is referred to as a ‘bad birth’ or a ‘missed period’. The gender pohcy that has attracted the most international attention was the ‘gender harmonious’ cabinet, appointed following the election of January 2010 when the MAS won 64 per cent of the popular vote. Out of the twenty ministers, ten were women, the majority of whom self-identify as indigenous. Within Bolivia, however, there are dissenting views by feminists who question whether the quota system is an appropriate tactic for advancing women’s rights in the context of gendered violence. Duma Mokrani Chavez, a founder of local feminist organization Tejedoras de Suehos and a member of the Comuna, a group of left intellectuals that provides critical support to the government, notes in an interview that leftist orgamzations in Bohvia are not necessarily more progressive than conservative ones regarding gender. An estimated seven of ten women in Bohvia suffer physical violence (from their spouses and employers) and rates of feminicide and sexual violence are equally alarming.'® As Mokrani notes, until such problems are addressed, the quota system can have a pernicious effect;

There are ... cases of physical violence when [town councilwomen] refused to resign to let men take their places. There are many cases in which female leaders have been looked down upon by the ... community members they represent, just for being women. Some ... meetings are held in bars. Union representatives meet in bars and if a woman comes in to discuss, it s frowned upon. To make sure that people don’t look down at them, or for their children or husband’s sake, the women leave their posts.... We have heard deputies of the MAS tell fellow lawmakers that women are not able to represent the people.

Feminist critics have also voiced concerns about the ‘gender mainstreaming’ approach of the Morales government. Morales has argued that since his

21ST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA: THE GENDER AGENDA

261

government is indigenous, it is not necessary to have a Ministry of indigenous issues. The same argument is being applied to women. Despite the fancy titles, the splitting of the former Under-Secretary of Gender housed by the Ministry of Human Development into the Depatricarchalization Unit of the Vice Ministry of Decolonization and the Vice Ministry for Gender, Generations and Family, was viewed by many feminists as an institutional downgrading. THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: P^DISTRIBUTION In terms of symbolic pohtics, Morales’s government has been ‘revolutionary’. The recognition of the exploitation of indigenous peoples and discrimination against women and the real incorporation of indigenous and women leaders into positions of political power are fundamental transformations in the context of a postcolonial patriarchal state. But such reforms have tended to respond to calls for ‘recognition’ rather than ‘redistribution’.^” These victories of gender parity and political representation are to be celebrated but cannot substitute for broader programmes that aim to redistribute productive assets to change the unequal relations of production to benefit the majority of women. Despite the rhetoric about protecting the rights of the Mother Earth (or in Bolivian parlance, the pachamama), the government’s economic agenda has focused on increasing resource rents by intensifying exploitation in the extractive industries and channelling these rents into a series of social programmes, such as those named above. As a result of this mild form of redistribution of the social wealth, class inequality may be reduced but the fundamental relations of production remain intact.^^ Unlike Venezuela, the Bolivian government has not promoted experiments to socialize the means of production and build capacity for self-management, such as workercontrolled factories or cooperatives. Indeed, as Jeff Webber has argued, one of most enduring aspects of neohberalism in Bohvia is proactive labour flexibility, or the prioritization of state efforts to build consensus among ■\Yorkers around submission to the imperatives of export-led capitalist development in a fiercely competitive world system.^^ Given the precarious nature of women’s work, this proactive labour flexibility has gendered dimensions. Between 1990 and 2010, the participation of women in the labour market has increased markedly: from a gross rate of female participation of about 50 to 64 per cent, and compares to a shght drop m the male rate from 83 per cent to 81 per cent over the same period.This is not, however, the result of the liberation of women. Rather, it is an indication of falling real incomes, structural adjustment policies and employers need for cheap labour. In turn,

262

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

nsing rates of female participation in the labour force has also contributed to stiffer competition for jobs, lower income and the incorporation of flexible forms of work. In sum, women have come to participate in a labour market that tends to produce low-productivity and low-income employment. According to the research institute CEDLA, most of the jobs that have been created in the past years have been unskilled jobs such as diverse personal services, construction and commerce. In a recent survey of the lowest paid workers, women workers made 4.2 bolivianos per hour (about US$ 0.60) as opposed to 5 bolivianos (about US$0.70) earned by men.^'* The measure of the precarious nature of women’s work is measured by out¬ migration. Women make up the majority (56 per cent) of more than the half million migrants who left the country between 2003 and 2007 in search of a livelihood in Spain or the United States.The tide of out-migration may have abated slightly since then, which is related to crisis and stagnation in the Global North rather than opulence in Bolivia. Women also make up the majority of the agricultural workforce in Bohvia and as such, have much at stake in the MAS’s electoral promise for radical agrarian reform. Indeed, Bolivia has amongst the most unequal distribution of land in the region. According to one estimate, before the MAS came to office two-thirds of the agricultural land was owned by 0.63 per cent of landholders, meanwhile 86 per cent of farms account for just 2.4 per cent of agricultural land; and, of course, there are many rural families without any land.^^ The problem is particularly acute in the lowlands of eastern Bolivia, which was relatively untouched by the agrarian reform that followed the national-popular revolution of 1952.^’ It

IS,

therefore,

no

surprise

that Bolivia’s

most

radical women’s

organizations are the subcommittees of peasant unions, such as the Bartolina Sisas (of the Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, CSUTCB) and the newly-formed National Confederation of Indigenous Women. These organizations have made agrarian reform a central part of their political agenda since the mid-1990s. Divisions exist amongst these women’s peasant organizations, however, since the Bartolina Sisas of western Bolivia advocate for individual titling of land (and therefore titles for individual women), while lowland groups in the East represented by the National Confederation of Indigenous Women advocate for collective titling. Under Morales, the percentage of titles granted to women has improved substantially. Compared to 1997-2005 data when only 17 per cent of titles were granted to women out of 24,746 titles, from 2006-10, 24 per cent of 132,725 titles were granted to women.However, up until the present, such titling programmes do not represent a true 'agrarian reform’

21 ST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA: THE GENDER AGENDA

263

since they have distributed marginal, public land isolated from markets.It remains an historical question whether a more ambitious agrarian reform that would aim to redistribute the most productive land currently owned by soy magnates in the lowlands is possible in the absence of armed struggle or the threat of it. CONCLUSION The Morales administration has taken important steps towards improving the lives of women in Bolivia. The recognition of the exploitation of indigenous peoples and discrimination against women and the real incorporation of indigenous and women leaders into positions of political power is a fundamental transformation. The conditional cash transfers have had a real impact on poor women’s lives, helping them take care of their families but also themselves, therefore raising their capacity for participation in broader political struggles. Such reforms in and of themselves do not overturn centuries of patriarchal domination or ethnic discrimination but help build capacity for collective struggle. As Carmen Deere observes, ‘in class-based societies those who own the means of production also hold political power’, and reforms in this respect have been far from revolutionary.^® In the context of generalized poverty where women are responsible for the majority of reproductive labour while being simultaneously pushed into wage-labour, a socialist-feminist agenda must centre on a fundamental transformation of the social relations of production. If there is one question upon which activists and left observers both outside and inside Bolivia can agree, pushing the agenda forward depends on the ability of social movements to reconstruct a radical project for redistribution. This win be necessary to force the government to make good on its promise to decolonize the state and end neoliberalism in a way that is consistent with an ecological programme for ‘mother earth’ that has been frequently pronounced upon in international gatherings. As such, agrarian reform and food sovereignty - the existing demands of Bolivia’s most radical women’s movements — should be seen as part of the agenda for gender justice. Such an agenda not only puts a redistributional politics at the core, but rethinks the politics of production in an ecologically sustainable way. NOTES I would like to thank Eva Mascolo Fortin, Angus McNelly, Lisa Mills, Karin Monasterios and Justin Paulson for comments, as well as Calais Caswell and Josie Howitt for research assistance. The usual disclaimers apply.

264 1.

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013 Mala Htun and Jennifer M. Piscopo, ‘Presence without Empowerment? Women in Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean’, Paper prepared for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, 2010, available at http://webarchive. ssrc.org.

2

For salutary assessments of the Bohvian ‘revolution’ see, for example, Fred Fuentes, ‘The Struggle for Bolivia’s Future’, Monthly Review, 59(3), 2007, pp. 95-109; Steve EUner, ‘The Distinguishing Features of Latin America’s New Left in Power: The Chavez, Morales, and Correa Governments’, Latin American Perspectives, 39(1), 2012, pp. 96-114.

3

Jeffery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics ofEvo Morales, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

4

UNESCO, ‘Bilingual Literacy and Reproductive Health’, 2012, available at http://www.unesco.org.

5

Amy Lind, ‘Feminist Post-Development Thought: “Women in Development” and the Gendered Paradoxes of Survival in Bohvia’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 31(3/4), 2003, pp. 227-246.

6

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘The Notion of “Rights” and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bohvia’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 18(2), 2010, pp. 29-54; Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, ‘Competing Pohtical Visions and Bohvia’s Unfinished Revolution’, Dialectical Anthropology, 35(3), 2011, pp. 275—277.

7

Karin Monasterios, ‘Bolivian Women’s Organizations in the MAS Era’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 40(March/April), 2007, available at https:// nacla.org.

8

Lind, ‘Feminist Post-Development Thought’; Anders Butman, ‘Chachawarmi: Silence and Rival Voices on Decolonisation and Gender Politics in Andean Bohvia’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 43, 2011, pp. 65-91; Stephanie Rousseau,

‘Genre et ethnicite racialisee en Bohvie

:

pour une etude

intersectioneUe des mouvements sociaux’, Sociologie et societes, 41(2), 2009, pp. 135-160. 9

Cited in Fernanda Wanderley, ‘La participacion politica de las mujeres y la

10

Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Peru spent 4.2, 3.0, 2.2, 0.8 and 0.4

agenda de equidad de genero en Bolivia’, Tinkazos, 28, 2010, pp. 9-31. per cent of GDP, respectively, on cash transfer programmes. See Nora Lustig, ‘Cash Transfers and Poverty in Latin America’, GREAT Insights 1(3), 2012, available at http://www.ecdpm.org. 11

Andean Information Network, ‘Bolivian Government Bonus for Mothers and Young Children Celebrates Second Anniversary’, 2011, available at http:// ain-bolivia.org.

12

Maxime Molyneux, ‘Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/oportunidades, Mexico’s Conditional Transfer Progranune’, Social Policy & Administration, 40(4), 2006, pp. 425-449.

13

Molyneux, ‘Mothers’, p. 438.

14

Lisa Mills, ‘Health Refonn Implementation and Reproductive Health in Mexico’, Paper presented at the Political Economy of Gendered Institutions, Carleton University, 31 October 2008.

21ST CENTURY SOCIALISM IN BOLIVIA; THE GENDER AGENDA 15

265

Luis Ortiz Hernandez, Iliana Camacho Cuapio, Catalina Eibenschutz Hartman and Silvia Tamez Gonzalez, ‘Progressive Alternatives in Primary Health Care in Latin America’, in David A. McDonald and Greg Ruiters, eds., Alternatives to Privatization: Public Options for Essential Services in the Global South, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 392-420.

16

David Goodman, The Struggle for Women’s Equality in Latin America, Dissident Voice,

2009,

available

at

http://dissidentvoice.org;

Virginie

Rozee,

‘L’application de la Convention sur Pelimination de toutes les formes de discrimination a I’egard des femmes en Bolivie’, Cahiers des Ameriques Latines, 53, 2006, pp.191-208. 17

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, ‘Abortion Under Siege in Latin America’, Time Magazine, 9 August 2007.

18

Pamela Calla, et ah, Racismo y regionalismo en el proceso constituyente. La Paz: Defensor del Pueblo y Universidad de la Cordillera, 2007, available at http:// www.ops.org.

19

Dunia Mokrani Chavez, ‘Ser de izquierda no te quita necesariamente lo machista’, Rebeli6n, 3 March 2010, available at http://www.rebelion.org. My translation.

20

Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr, ‘Introduction: The Latin American Left in Theory and Practice’, in Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr, eds.. The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire, Lanham, MD; Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming.

21

Webber notes that the Gini coefficient between 2005 and 2007 dechned from 60.2 to 56.3, indicating an improvement in income equality. See Prom Rebellion to Reform, p. 201.

22

Webber, Prom Rebellion to Reform, pp. 177-229.

23

Statistics are based on ILO data, available at http://wvvw.indexmundi.com.

24

CEDLA, ‘Los peores pagados’, 2012, available at http://www.cedla.org.

25

Franz Chavez, ‘Women’s Remittances Come at High Cost’, Inter Press Service, 29 May 2009, available at http://www.ipsnews.net.

26

Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval, ‘The Distribution of Bolivia’s Most Important Natural Resources and the Autonomy Conflicts’, Washington, DC: Centre for Economic Policy Alternatives, 2008, pp. 2-3.

27

Nicole Fabricant, ‘From Symbohc Reforms to Radical Politics through Crisis’, Dialectical Anthropology, 35, 2011, pp. 279-84.

28

Carmen Diana Deere, Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel and Claudia Ranaboldo, ‘Tierra de mujeres: Reflexiones sobre el acceso de las mujeres rurales a la tierra en America Latina’, La Paz, Bolivia: Coahcion Intemacional para el Acceso a

29

la Tierra, 2011, p. 58. Wes Enzmna, ‘All We Want Is the Earth: Agrarian Refonn in Bolivia’, The

30

Carmen Diana Deere and Franz Chavez, ‘Bolivian women a force behind

Socialist Register 2008, Monmouth: Merhn Press, 2007, pp. 217-36. power, but still powerless’. Inter Press Service, 10 December 2009, available at http://www.ipsnews.net.

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY JOHANNA BMNNER AND NANCY HOLMSTROM omen have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array

VV

of movements. Sparked by the current capitalist war on the working

class as well as the ongoing struggle around patriarchal relations, these movements provide an important arena for sociahst-feminist politics. Today, unlike the past, feminist ideas are part of many anti-capitalist movements, although bringing those ideas to the centre of anti-capitalist politics is still an uphill struggle. In this essay we discuss how socialist feminist activists are shaping demands and campaigns, how they organize on the ground, how they build the leadership of working-class, indigenous and rural women, how they work within mixed gender groups and movements. In order to do justice to the diversity of socialist-feminist strategies, we posed a set of questions to socialist-feminist scholars and activists engaged in different struggles. This essay is based on their insights. As a group, they are diverse in terms of age and political generation, social location and nationahty. Susan Dirr and Giselda Gutierrez are activists in the Occupy movement in Chicago and Houston, respectively,^ and Esther Vivas is an activist in Spain’s Indignado movement, as well as a journalist and sociologist.^ Martha Ojeda, a former maquiladora worker, has been Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras since 1996.^ Rosemary Hennessy, a theorist of Marxism and sexuality, also writes on gender and labour struggles in northern Mexico.”* Elem Varikas is a political theorist based in Paris and connected to researchers and activists in Greece.^ Valentine Moghadam is an expert on women in the Middle East and on Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) that provide crucial support and solidarity

in struggles

against capitalism and patriarchy worldwide.** With their collaboration, we have drawn a picture of socialist-feminist strategy that leaps from place to place and hardly presents a comprehensive view. Still, these instances of struggle reveal key aspects of contemporary socialist-feminist organizing.

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

267

DEFINING SOCIALIST FEMINISM TODAY We define socialist feminism broadly, to include all feminists (whether they would identify with the label or not) who see class as central but would not reduce relations of power and privilege organized around particular identities (e.g., gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity) to class oppression. Instead, socialist feminists regard these aspects of our lives as inseparable and systematically related; the task is to show how this is so, and to use the analysis to develop effective strategies for ending the oppression of all women. Socialist feminists start where most feminists begin: that the emancipation of women must come from women ourselves, but cannot be achieved by ourselves. From this starting point, socialist feminists are especially interested in building inclusive movements organized by and for working-class, indigenous and rural women. Through the process of self-organization, through the creativity of practice, deep divisions can be overcome as new understandings of the world, new ways of working together and new views of self emerge. Austerity, the growing precariousness of employment, the re-privatization of caring labour are reshaping women’s work, their families and their communities. For some communities and groups of women — for example, Mexican maquiladora workers - this transition began decades ago; for others, it is a more recent development. But everywhere, immigration is changing the face of caring work in and outside households. Women are the majority of migrants, occupying jobs such as cleaners, health aides, nannies and sex workers, raising to new heights the importance of supporting irmnigrants organized against scapegoating and emphasizing that migration is a consequence of the capitalist expansion that has taken place under the rubric of structural adjustment policies and free trade agreements. These have pushed women to migrate because they lost access to land or because of deteriorating working conditions and urban impoverishment, while the number of single mothers has grown and the conditions for families have worsened. In first world countries women’s work is even more precarious than men’s. The maquiladora model is being extended to more countries throughout the world and to many more industries. The crisis and the austerity imposed by capital as its ‘solution’ has led to the dismanthng of the welfare state particularly harming women who are more dependent on the state than men both for work (public service jobs) and for services crucial to their role as family caregivers and community members.^ The pohtics of austerity, exacerbated by the rise of conservative and rightwing populist and rehgious fundamentalist political movements, incorporates race and gender in complicated and interrelated ways. Beginning with the

268

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Arab Spring, newly invigorated mobilizations against austerity have put class politics squarely back on the political agenda. For socialist feminists the challenge is to avoid reverting back to the ‘class pohtics’ of an older left, so as not to lose the focus on race, gender, sexuality, nationahty oppression as an integral part of class oppression, while at the same time trying to bring a working-class, anti-imperiahst and anti-racist pohtics to feminist orgamzations that are fighting back against a reinvigorated war on women. While taking different forms in different contexts this twin strategic orientation is always at the heart of socialist-feminist pohtics. ORGANIZING WOMEN WOPJCERS I: THE EUROPEAN PFkECARIAT Women have been negatively affected by the global capitahst assault in different ways in different places and have been ‘actively fighting back before what has been officially recognized as “the crisis’” began, as Eleni Varikas explains. ‘Women and young people are particularly touched by unemployment and the appalling conditions of work. In Greece, three out of four young women are unemployed as compared to two out of four young men’. Indeed, throughout Europe over the last two decades, workers’ rights and work conditions have been substantially reduced, especially in the private sector. Varikas also points out that across Europe, pohcies on the family and on the ‘conciliation of professional and domestic hfe’ target women. Even when women work for wages, as mothers they are placed in a relationship to the state that is quite different from that of men. This gendered distinction between ‘protection’ and ‘rights’ has situated women as a ‘client’ of the state rather than as a rights-bearing citizen and poses difficulties for women in organizing to reclaim their rights. Racism creates additional problems, because the legitimate motherhood of women from ‘visible’ minorities is put into question, dividing women into those who deserve and those who do not deserve the protection of the state. Visible minorities, immigrants or first generation Europeans are also blatantly discriminated against in hiring and housing. Young university graduates from immigrant backgrounds are forced to hide their degrees and other skills when applying to work even in underpaid precarious jobs. As Varikas points out, European unions have not been willing or able to organize workers engaged in the ‘new fomis of “atypical” work (which of course have become very typical). This has been disastrous for the possibility of resistance to neoliberalism but also has contributed to dividing workers of the private and public sector. Civil servants are presented as privileged parasites.’ Part of the problem is the co-optation and corruption of the unions

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

269

by the governing parties, especially PASOK in Greece, where unionism became a major way to enter politics. Yet the incapacity to organize the precariat even extends to such formerly powerful and radical unions as the French CGT. Still, Varikas observes, ‘in several European countries, like France and Greece, a younger generation of women often - though not exclusively — working in precarious conditions in different sectors and levels of the public service, became actively involved within radical currents of the union movement. Some of them are feminists; many were attracted to and actually participated in the movements of “the outraged’”.® The campaign of solidarity with Constantina Kuneva in Greece is an illuminating example of the international gendered division of labour, the difficulties of feminized, precarious and immigrant labour, co-opted unions and politicians, but on the other hand, of good socialist-feminist analyses and organizing. Kuneva, a migrant trade unionist (an ex-historian from Bulgaria who came to Greece to get medical treatment for her son), founded the All Attica Union of Cleaners and Domestic Workers (PEKOP). What is remarkable about this union, Varikas stresses, is that it is the first union ofi cleaners and domestic workers (normally considered servants and hence not to be unionized). So their intention was to express an optimistic tone (that the most subaltern and despised women could turn this identity around and organize themselves successfully), but at the same time it shows the extreme difficulties and danger of such a wonderful success. Indeed, this is why the bosses struck so hard: thugs attacked this beautiful young woman with a rare sexist violence, destroying her face and making her drink sulfuric acid. The bosses were made very anxious by the revolt of these nobodies and were certain that nobody was going to react to defend them. The main Greek union confederation, GSEE, refused to take seriously the numerous threats against Kuneva and her son, and refused to publish the report on the conditions in the cleaning sector done by their own Research Centre until the researchers threatened to publish it online. Despite the indifference of the police and the media, the immediate mobilization of most feminist groups (on a Christmas Eve) created a wide national and international campaign which for the first time made clear the women’s quasi-slave working conditions m which they are forced to sign blank contracts by the agencies who employ them. Varikas reports that

270

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

as the campaign grew wider in force and scope, the openly gendered dimension,

underlined

by

both

cleaner

unionists

themselves

and

the initial feminist activists (i.e. the analogy between the specifically female task of “cleaning your dirt” and the impure, subaltern status of women, particularly poor women, in society), and the sexist mode of her “punishment” by the bosses’ thugs, gradually disappeared. When the progressive unions and the left, (at the best indifferent to feminism) joined the mobilization, they rightly stressed the exploitation of workers and the criminal action of the bosses in general and also the fact that they were immigrants, but they abandoned the paradigmatic gender dimension of the treatment of cleaners and of the attack on Kuneva. And hence they missed a crucial gender element of the international division of labour. On the other hand, Varikas says, ‘one of the most interesting movements of the left in the last years, in Greece, has been the “Network of the Rights of the Migrants”, which is one of the active sources of the victory of the Radical Left in Greece. Many women and feminists are involved in this movement.’^ Unfortunately not aU women or even all feminists understand the importance of fighting racism by making these kinds of aUiances with immigrants. Varikas argues, racism is one of the most crucial problems getting in the way of a strong and inclusive defense of feminist conquests. Gender is at the heart of racism and race discrimination — since control of women and their sexuality are seen as the prerequisite of the purity of race, nation, etc. It is remarkable that the most common symbol of Islamist terrorism is always a woman in black wearing a scarf, a hijab or even better a burka (and not for instance a bearded man with a bomb). Even feminists within the left are divided on these issues, some taking patronizing positions towards their foreign sisters who need to be saved.’®

This issue is indeed complex. As Val Moghadam points out, many feminists, including feminists from Muslim communities

and majority Mushm

countries, have legitimate concerns about Islamic fundamentalist political movements and support different strategies for responding to them. ORGANIZING WOMEN WORKERS II; THE MEXICAN MAQUILADOILAS Maquiladora workers in Mexico, like immigrant domestic workers in Greece, are developing new forms of organizing that circumvent the

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STILATEGY TODAY

271

traditional, and often sexist official unions of Mexico." The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), founded in 1989 during the NAFTA debates, is a multi-sectoral, international coalition that supports Mexican factory workers. Although CJM does not define itself as a socialist-feminist organization, their organizing strategies focus on the self-organization and emancipation of women in both workplace and community. This approach extends to CJM’s coalition-building work. According to CJM’s Executive Director, Martha Ojeda, Workers’ struggles cannot be isolated. No one can fight just on their own. CJM is having some success in developing local alliances as well as alliances with workers from other parts of the world. In fact CJM is a coahtion of 150 organizations from US, Canada, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Amsterdam. In many of the places we have had exchanges, for example, Morocco, Thailand and Sri Lanka, women workers are facing what we faced before NAFTA. Mexican maquiladora workers have years of experience fighting against free trade and multinational corporations. We share our knowledge of organizing with them and we learn from them.

In CJM’s organizing, Ojeda says, we emphasize the importance of collective leadership and the gender perspective. Workers learn how to do their own research on the companies, mapping the process of production, identifying the costs of inputs, companng that to the prices of the products sold, identifying health and safety conditions that violate international labour law. When they work together to collect this knowledge, workers build trust and cohesion. Definitely all those women who have been involved in any of our big struggles or who have been involved in international exchanges with women from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Argentina, Chile and Brazil find their lives changed.’ Leadership development, gender perspective and popular education are crucial to this process of change. CJM’s organizing strategy, like that of domestic workers in Greece, has been developed outside of the official unions. In Miexico, these are co¬ opted, corrupt and patriarchal. The independent union, the Authentic Front of Workers (FAT), is better; but, because the FAT’s organizing experience IS

mainly in Mexico City, they have been less effective on the border where

272

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

conditions are very different. Ojeda points out that The border was a free trade zone for many years before NAFTA, and the official unions have been protecting the companies there forever. Although they have had representatives in Juarez since NAFTA was passed, they have not been able to unionize maquiladora workers there. The FAT does operate with a horizontal collective structure and is a pioneer in including women in leadership, but in fact the organization’s male leaders exercise control through the decision-making process based in FAT’s centre in Mexico City. In 1994, Ojeda was leading a struggle by Sony workers with two thousand women in the streets demanding better working conditions and salaries. We demanded democratic union elections, but the CTM, the largest “official” union in the region at that time, (known as a “charro” or robber union) imposed itself Women workers were beaten, many were arrested and others put in the hospital. Antonio Villalba, from the FAT leadership, encouraged workers to affiliate with the FAT, which promised to demand collective bargaining from Sony. The workers asked Antonio if they would be the leadership of their union in Laredo, but he refused. The workers could have representation locally, but in accordance with the law, the leaders in Mexico City would negotiate with the company. They did not offer Sony workers a seat in the leadership of the union in Mexico City. So the workers did not affiliate with them. That was 1994, of course, and I welcome any changes the FAT may have instituted since then in their policies.'^ CONNECTING WORKPLACE AND COMMUNITY Socialist feminists have recognized theoretically what many women in resistance have expressed practically - that women’s role in social reproduction and their participation in wage work mutually shape each other. Martha Ojeda describes the reasons women working in the maquiladoras do not confine themselves to workplace organizing.

They see themselves as the same actors in the workplace and in the community. They make low wages; therefore they live in impoverished conditions, without decent housing or infrastructure like water, electricity, sewers and so on. Pollution in the workplace, such as toxic chemicals used in production without appropriate safety equipment and sometimes

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STILATEGY TODAY

273

without the knowledge of the workers, enters the community, and we find cases of birth defects, lead poisoning and other serious conditions. One of CJM’s areas of organizing on northern Mexico’s border is Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, a hub for maquiladoras. In 2004, workers and their families sought to settle on formerly ejido land where they could live without paying rent and grow some of their own food. After invading the land, residents were evicted by order of the mayor of Nuevo Laredo (who was a CTM union leader), but they returned again in 2005 to claim their land. Women took the lead in organizing against the eviction and in returning to establish their community. Originally the colonia residents organized for recognition and services from the city government, but after enduring several years of the government’s violence and neglect, and following several exchanges with activists from the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, they decided to channel their energies into sustaining themselves. They declared their settlement, Blanca Navidad, to be El Otro Caracol, a reference to their alliance with the Zapatistas. Women continue to play leadership roles there and residents are pursuing sustainable economic projects such as taking over a nearby water source and installing faucets on several streets, building a small clinic, solar ovens and a wind generator, and establishing community gardens of fruit trees, vegetables and medicinal herbs.''* Rosemary Hennessy describes the impact of women’s activism on gender relations as ‘gender adjustments’ - small changes that are enacted in specific, local gendered situations.'^ These adjustments are practices that transgress or revise gender norms in the particular everyday situations in which men and women live. The changes they enact or provoke are uneven. They are not won through campaigns focused on gender issues or for women’s rights. Rather they are accomplished as members of a community cooperate to meet basic needs and strive for lives with dignity. Martha Ojeda interprets these changes in the families and communities of Nuevo Laredo this way: CJM IS aware of the patriarchal burdens that limit women’s activism. When we hold meetings in the communities, we arrange for daycare for children and involve the women’s partners. We take a proactive role, offering workshops on the gender perspective that build consciousness of gender discrimination and women’s leadership. When women are

274

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

empowered from their own perspective, as individuals, they become more confident and secure. They also become stronger speakers, able to organize press conferences, and be the pubhc face of the movement. They also make changes in their own Hves, adjusting domestic labour obligations and inspiring and educating the next generation. CJM created a programme called Standing on Two Feet which aims to strengthen the ‘two feet’ of political education and sustainable community resources in local factory-to-community organizing efforts. The ‘Two Feet’ programme launched encuentros (encounters) that brought together campesino

and

indigenous

community

members

from

Chiapas

and

maquiladora workers from Nuevo Laredo.In addition to creating a space for thinking critically about gender relations, these meetings bridged historic divisions between the indigenous people from Mexico’s south and maquiladora workers in the north. They enabled communities to learn from each other’s long history of organizing. CJM’s Worker Empowerment Program provides an opportunity for women to develop analyses of gender relations in their homes, organizations and communities. According to Ojeda, The women organizers involved in the CJM Empowerment Program make connections among all forms of violence. They learn that the root of the problem is not just a patriarchal system but also a capitalist system that behind the scenes generates violence against women, including the latest violence perpetrated by organized crime, which is also a consequence of the neoliberal capitalist regime. Women of the colonia Blanca Navidad in Nuevo Laredo, women from the maquilas, indigenous women and campesinas from Chiapas who have been involved in the encuentros relate violence to the lack of land rights, lack of access to decent housing and jobs, to health care and education.*^ TAKING ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN Violence against women has also been taken up by rural women organizers in La Via Campesina, an international coalition of peasants, farmers, farm workers and indigenous agrarian communities from a wide diversity of locations and cultures. Women activists in Via have been organizing to reshape gender relations within their organizations and in their communities. At its founding, in 1992, Via reflected the patriarchal norms and pohtical outlook of its member organizations - for example, all of the regional coordinators elected at the first international conference were men. According to Esther

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

275

Vivas, the formation of a Women’s Commission in 1996 created the space for women within Via Campesina to organize to challenge patriarchal practices and policies.'^ Although special organizations for dealing with women’s issues can be instruments for co-optation and marginalization, this has not been the case in Via Campesina. Annette Demarais argues that this is partly because of the (relatively) democratic functioning of the Via.’^ It is perhaps also because the original weight of the organization was based in Latin America, where feminist ideas have had a longer presence and history.^® The Women’s Commission and the separate international conferences for women activists it organized have had a significant impact on the representation of women in Via and in its member organizations. In October 2008, La Via Campesina hosted the Third International Assembly of Women. The assembly approved the launch of a campaign targeting all forms of violence faced by women in society (interpersonal as well as structural).^^ Work that aims at achieving greater gender equality is not easy. Despite formal equality, women face obstacles when travelling or attending meetings and gatherings. As Annette Desmarais notes. There are many reasons why women do not participate at this level. Perhaps the most important is the persistence of ideologies and cultural practices that perpetuate unequal gender relations and unfairness. Being involved in reproductive, productive and community work makes it much less likely [for women] to have time for training sessions and learning as leaders. It is a struggle against the tide, and despite some concrete victories, we face a long fight in our organizations; and, more generally, sociaUy.^^ Women are also disadvantaged by masculimst styles of leadership that reward charisma, comfort with public speaking and competitive debate.^^ Via Campesina has established alliances with various organizations and social movements at the international, regional and national levels. One of the most significant has been with the World March of Women (WMW). According to Esther Vivas, at the Forum for Food Sovereignty in 2007 in Selingue, Mali, a meeting was convened by leading international social movements such as Via Campesina, the World March of Women, the World Forum of Fisher Peoples and others to advance strategies within a wide range of social movements (farmers, fishers, consumers) to promote food sovereignty. Women were a major catalyst as organizers and participants at this meeting which identified the capitalist and patriarchal system as primarily

276

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

responsible for the violations of women’s rights - and the destruction of the environment.^'^ One of the interesting aspects of the coalition between WMW and Via is the way that the issue of violence against women has provided a wedge for challenging patriarchal relations as these are experienced within organizations, communities and the state. Although women’s sexuahty or reproductive rights are alluded to, the thrust of the connection between patriarchy and capitahsm in their pohtics focuses on domestic and sexual violence. Within the context of so-called ‘failed states’, as in parts of Mexico, where violence (state-sanctioned and otherwise) is ever-present and increasingly so, and m the context of the violation of land rights and dispossession that has totally disrupted rural lives across the globe, it makes sense to connect violation and violence. Yet we might ask whether campaigns that target ending domestic and sexual violence are more compatible with ‘reformed’ patriarchal gender relations and hence a more appeahng starting point for women activists. Certainly, we have seen, in the US at least, a partial transformation of conservative politics where the right wing and ‘law and order feminism’ have made common cause around issues such as mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence as well as the racist ‘rescue’ pohtics of the international networks

for

abolishing sex

trafficking.^^

Contrasting benevolent

to

malevolent patriarchs, this politics reflects the success of three decades of feminist organizing against domestic and sexual violence, but also its co¬ optation by conservatives who formerly treated opposition to domestic and sexual violence as threats to men’s power equal to abortion and lesbian rights. Meanwhile, the right wing continues to fuel its movement and fill its coffers through anti-abortion and anti-gay rights pohtics. Compared to campaigns against violence, the opposition to campaigns for sexual and reproductive rights is much more fierce everywhere and finds a ground of support in religious fundamentalist political organizations. Val Moghadam points out that in many transnational feminist organizations, although organizers would like to take on women’s sexual and reproductive rights, they have had to put these on the back burner, while finding that violence against women is an issue that does get traction. For example, within the WMW abortion and gay rights have been dropped in order to unite women from different cultural backgrounds around a common agenda targeting patriarchy, violence against women and neoliberal capitalism. In Morocco, feminist groups recently formed a coalition with human rights groups and associations of lawyers and physicians for the reform of the penal code including the decriminalization of abortion. Although they

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

Til

understand abortion rights to be a crucial working-class women’s issue, because criminalization falls heaviest on poor women, women’s rights organizations have taken a back seat in the campaign, allowing physicians and health advocates to make the public case on behalf of women’s health and dignity. On the other hand, women’s groups were vocal and visible in the protests that followed the suicide of Amina Filah, a low-income young woman in a small town who had to marry her rapist and endure more abuse afterwards. Because such assaults tend to befall poorer women, the Amina Filali campaign is an example of cross-class solidarity and characteristic of women’s rights activism in the Maghreb. Clearly, one of the challenges for socialist-feminist strategy is to link claims for women’s sexual self-determination (an issue raised by both abortion and LGBT rights) to the class-based politics around economic and social rights which are galvanizing women’s organizing. This is a challenge in terms of making cross-class alliances among women — creating women’s movements that reflect and represent the voices, everyday struggles, aims and worldviews of working-class women — and in terms of bringing these issues of sexual self-determination into mixed gender organizations and movements. Rosemary Hennessy argues that in the US, as identity politics has become increasingly disconnected from class pohtics and mainstream gay rights organizing and organizations have centred on a ‘homonormative’ strategy in order to win acceptance, the possibilities for a class-based sexual liberation pohtics have narrowed dramatically. Homonormative politics defines legitimate gay and lesbian identities over against those whose gender transgressions fail to enact middle-class respectability. In Mexico, something similar is going on. Management uses homophobia to undermine organizers and as a pretext for firing lesbians and gay men. Organizing in the maquiladoras at times has foundered on homophobia. Workshops on gender and empowerment could incorporate more discussions of sexual politics because sexual shaming can undermine organizing efforts and is a powerful tool in management’s hands. Commenting on the difficulties of bringing the politics of sexual selfdetermination and sexual rights into grassroots movements or TFNs, Nikhil Aziz, Executive Director of Grassroots International (which partners with Via Campesina), points out that activists from the WMW and Association for Women in Development, are either queer friendly or themselves queer. ‘In all of our movements there has to be constant education, awareness building and dialogue on issues such as this. Via Campesina was once quite far from where it is today on violence against women, and, hopefully, in terms of gender justice and equity, down the road it won’t be still where

278

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

it is today — but in an even better place.’ Val Moghadam also makes the point that strategic compromises made at the formal level do not prevent activists from continuing to organize through more informal networks, organizational contacts, etc. Susan Dirr, an Occupy Chicago activist, argues that these on the ground and informal contacts are crucial sites for socialist-feminist organizing. Although Chicago has a tradition of black feminist organizing for reproductive justice, abortion and LGBT rights are contested ground in many communities of colour. Susan agrees that education within movements is crucial, but she sees solidarity as the best strategy for changing the way that community activists feel and think about sexual self-detemunation. ‘As LGBT people in the Occupy movement get involved supporting community struggles, there is a lot of learning on both sides. If the person that has your back is queer, that act ofsohdarity powerfully overcomes differences.’ TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST NETWORKS According to Val Moghadam, in recent years. Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) have contributed profound analyses of neoliberal capitalism, forms of economic decision¬ making and capitalist hyper-masculinities that generated the present crisis, and they call for new thinking and new policies predicated on a revived welfare state and recognition of the value of the care economy. TFNs have played an important role in changing consciousness and building organization around women’s/feminist issues. Active participants in World Social Forums, they have been responsible for the increasing acceptance of women’s issues/demands within the WSF. The majority of the most prominent formal networks are composed of middle-class, professional women.The World March of Women is more a mixed cross-class grouping which includes urban and rural women’s groups. The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras could be said to be a genuinely transnational network with deep alliances among feminist, urban and rural Mexican grassroots organizations. Moghadam comments that

the absence of working-class women from [the most pronfrnent] TFNs may be regarded as a deficit and a reflection of existing class divides. On the other hand, the presence of highly educated women within TFNs

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

279

who can critique economic poHcies, governance structures, security arrangements and family laws, and can put forward sound alternatives, is an advantage. That the majority of TFN activists are middle class does not mean the absence of working-class women’s issues from the TFN’s agendas.

Many of the founders of women’s rights groups in the Maghreb and the TFNs come from the left, including socialist and communist organizations, Moghadam explains, and have a long record of working in coalitions to demand social and economic rights. This is especially the case with the North Africa-wide Collectif 95 Maghreb Egahte. Though upper middle class m origin, Moghadam points out that ‘their demands for laws to prosecute sexual harassment are the result of concern about the plight of women working in factories or low-wage jobs’. As a result of rising unemployment, widening income gaps and the spiraling cost of living, feminist groups in Algeria and Tunisia have joined with the main trade union in each country and with progressive groups to practice what Moghadam calls a politics of ‘social feminism’, and advance the demand for what is essentially ‘a democratic, women-friendly welfare state’.^^ Another example: in the US, Sister Song Collective, an organization that brings together 80 national, regional and local women of colour projects working for reproductive justice, has been an important force in challenging, and to a certain extent changing, mainstream pro-choice organizations. Sister Song insists that the right to reproductive choice includes the right to have children and to raise them in safety, health and dignity — a right that is denied to many working-class women and especially working-class women of colour. Socialist feminists, influenced by women of colour organizing for daycare and against sterilization abuse, as well as access to contraception and abortion, helped to develop the unifying term ‘reproductive rights’ in the 1970s and the national Reproductive Rights National Network (R2N2).^° SOCIALIST-FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS; FROM THE ARAB SPRING TO THE INDIGNADO AND OCCUPY MOVEMENTS The self-organization that took place in the Arab Spring, followed by the Indignado and Occupy movements in Europe and North America, has been one of the most encouraging developments in the face of the current crisis. As Rosemary Hennessy comments, ‘the 99 per cent discourse represents a major intervention in mainstream US politics that brings class into focus in a way that has not been seen for decades’. However, she asks,

280

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

when women’s issues surface in this movement, how are they being connected to class, analytically and pohtically? In the sixties and seventies, sociahst feminists sought to theorize the relationship of women s place in the world to capitahsm and to class. But these ideas became marginahzed in academic feminism and in feminist activism. On the other hand, theorizing by women of colour introduced the idea of an intersection between race, class gender, nationality and abihty into feminist political thought that has gained real traction, at least m parts of academia and in some of the more radical community-based organizing projects.^^ The theoretical challenge is to connect this notion of ‘intersectionahty’ to a Marxist feminist framework; the strategic challenge is to actually implement a political discourse and organizing practice that is not only intersectional but also moves toward a critique of capitahsm and the necessity of an alternative.^^ But, perhaps, first things first: to bring an intersectional point of view into this explosive movement that has newly activated thousands of people. As both Giselda Gutierrez and Susan Dirr point out from their experience of working in Occupy Houston and Occupy Chicago, there is a willingness to listen and an interest in learning that has created opportunities for sociahst feminists to influence other activists. Esther Vivas finds the same to be true in the Indignado encampments. At first, issues such as feminism, environmentahsm, the rights of inmiigrants, etc. remained in the background as issues, as well as in the analysis of the economic and social crisis and the solutions to it. Feminism clashed with the prejudices and misunderstanding of a significant part of those in the squares. Activists came together to provide a gender perspective in the discourse and practice of the Indignado movement: “the revolution will be feminist or will not be”. These eflbrts varied in their success. It is unclear whether or not the gains will last, if feminists reduce their presence, work and involvement, in response to the frustrations and difficulty they face. Of course. Vivas stresses, ‘the challenge of mainstreaming feminist discourse and practice within the movement of the Indignados merely reflects the difficulty of inserting it in all social movements. The M15 [the movement of 15 May 2011] is no exception.’ Socialist feminists in the Occupy movement agree with Vivas that it is important to defend the value, not just the right, of self-organization and separate organization for oppressed groups within the broader working-class

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

281

movement. Efforts on the part ofwomen or people of colour to create separate organizing spaces or committees within Occupy have often met resistance, especially from the majority of newly activated people who almost always at first find this threatening. In addition to an emotional reaction, there is also often a misplaced understanding that ‘identity’ politics are counterposed to ‘class’ politics. SociaHst feminists argue that self-organization actually provides the basis for overcoming divisions within the working class. In Chicago, Occupy El Barrio and Occupy The Hood each have organized around issues facing the Latino and the African-American communities. Occupy The Hood initiated an action around police brutality and requested solidarity from the other segments of Occupy. And Occupy El Barrio has been a space where the immigrant community can be involved in Occupy. Susan Dirr argues that having these separate spaces has been very helpful in preventing the fight against racism and for immigrant rights from being swallowed by the larger Occupy message around getting corporate money out of politics and against public sector cutbacks. Education within Occupy Chicago was also important. For instance, in the early days of the movement, some of the activists arrested in an attempt to secure an encampment returned to the General Assembly outraged that the pohce had ‘treated us like criminals’. In response, workshops on racism in the prison-industrial complex were organized and changed the thinking of many Occupy Chicago activists. As in many cities in the US, Occupy Chicago has been drawn into local, community-based struggles against austerity. Many of these are led by women, often women of colour, and provide openings for intersectional politics. For example, parents, mostly Latina women, organized a sit-in to protest city plans to shut down their school.^'* As Susan Dirr explains, they partnered with Occupy and when Occupy activists came to the school, it was really important for people there to negotiate the relationship between the parents and Occupy. And especially to convey to Occupy people the importance of respecting the leadership of the parents. So we talked about how women of colour have had their power taken away already by the city, by the political and economic system, and how our role as allies is to encourage their empowerment, their self-organization and not to take their power away by taking over the event. This ‘on the ground and in the moment’ dialogue can be a tightrope walk sometimes, Susan says. ‘It can get tense when Occupy people want to change the message to be about “take over public space” or “fuck the

282

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

police” instead of ''save our school

. Another place for sociahst feminist

orgamzing is in worker-community coalitions around pubhc service cuts. The workers who will lose their jobs are disproportionality people of colour, again many women, who are reaching out to the community for support as, for example, in Chicago where women are leaders and activists in a coahtion to defend mental health clinics. Across the Occupy encampments, the success of attempts to integrate anti-racist and feminist struggles, to organize separate spaces for women and to mobilize diverse groups and build broader hnks of sohdarity, varied greatly according to the urban political context. One key factor was whether or not the city had a history of anti-racist and feminist organizing, a strong 'progressive’ political culture and existing grassroots organizing around anti¬ racism and feminist issues. In this regard Occupy Chicago, New York and Houston are revealing. In Houston, responding to sexual harassment within the camp and women being assigned to traditional 'women’s work’ (cooking, cleaning and other support roles), activists called for a 'safe space’ meeting for anyone who identifies as a woman, a call which sparked a firestorm. In New York, a challenge by activists of colour to the opening statement of Occupy Wall Street met resistance, but was ultimately successful.^^ In Chicago, a Gender Equity Committee has asked for and received Occupy support for actions. Giselda Gutierrez, a sociahst feminist active in Occupy Houston, comments that 'in cities hke Chicago and New York, there has been a recent history of radical organizing, conmiunity organizing, radical queer organizing. So there are more people who have experience in coahtion politics - of working with groups organized around oppression - black community organizations. Latino organizations, queer youth, etc.’. Val Moghadam makes a similar point about political context at the national level with regard to the presence of feminism in the Arab Spring. Comparing Tunisia and Egypt, she says. When it became clear that Tunisia’s democratic opening would invite Islamic groups to the political domain, women’s rights groups and young women staged rallies and demonstrations to demand that the country’s liberal family law remain intact, and that women’s rights advocates be included in the new transitional decision-making bodies. And they were. On the other hand, this did not occur in Egypt, the other country of the Arab Spring, which has a far more conservative culture and a far less organized and coordinated women’s movement.

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

283

Even so, Tunisian feminists and progressives are concerned about the rise of salafists, who have been insisting that women veil in public places, that alcohol be banned and that the family law be abrogated. Local feminists are also concerned that the ‘mainstream’ Islamic party, an-Nahda, may not be able to stand up to the newly-assertive salafists. A coalition of progressive parties, including one led by a woman, Maya Jribi, was formed in early May 2012 to counter this trend as well as to form a bulwark against the return of neoliberal economic policies. It remains to be seen if this coalition, the main trade union (UGTT) and the feminist groups will be able to coalesce around an agenda for a welfare state predicated on women’s rights and labour rights as well as social and economic development — and mobilize Tunisians around that agenda. CONCLUSION As we have tned to convey, socialist-feminist theory and practice offers an alternative to ‘business as usual’ on the left and in the major organizations of working-class defence — unions, social movement organizations and political parties. Socialist-feminist commitment to self-organization supports organizational structures that are non-hierarchical and democratic and therefore more inclusive. Attention to intersectionality as a guide to both programme and political discourse — the demands that movements make and the language we use to support those demands — opens a ground on which deep social divisions might be overcome rather than reproduced. Understanding the ways that workplaces, households and communities are interrelated leads to more effective modes of organizing and more possibilities for coalition politics, making connections between what are often seen as very different and separate issues and struggles. Socialist-feminist visions of leadership and of leadership development promote activists’ capacities for engagement in democratic decision-making and collectivity. The recognition that affect, emotions, sexuality are always present, shaping social relations, encourages activists’ self-reflection, empathy and respect for different ways of being in the world. Neoliberalism and the politics of austerity depend for their legitimacy on deeply embedded patriarchal and white supremacist ideas about the market and the state. In practice and in theory, socialist feminists are challenging the dualisms around which these ideas rotate. The key division here is between ‘independence’ (masculine) and ‘dependence’ (feminine) and, mapping onto this, the division between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ - those who have earned and those who have not earned the benefits of political, economic and social citizenship, including such rights as the right to a secure income

284

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

and a secure old age. W^orking-class women, working class people of colour, indigenous people, immigrants, the formerly colonized, the not normatively gendered - all these and many ‘others’ fall into the undeserving category. As global capitalism puts labouring people in competition against each other, old divisions are reproduced and new ones are created, multiplying the ‘others’. But also - from Cairo to Athens, NYC to Nuevo Laredo - we see people fighting back against exploitation, dictatorship, racism, religious fundamentahsm - whether Christian, Jewish or Mushm - and violence, both personal and structural. The strategic question posed for the movements is whether they will, again, organize in forms and for goals that marginahze these others or instead find a new path forward. The strategic question posed for the left is whether socialist-feminist perspectives will finally be brought into the centre of its politics. NOTES We are especially grateful to our collaborators on this essay, Susan Dirr, Giselda Gutierrez, Rosemary Hennessy, Valentine Moghadam, Martha Ojeda, Eleni Varikas and Esther Vivas. We are also grateful to Nikhil Aziz and Catherine Sameh for their conversations with us and to Christina Schiavoni for her help with translation. 1

2

3 4

5

6

Dirr is an activist in Occupy Chicago with a background in coalition work and queer politics; and Giselda Gutierrez has been active with immigrant nghts and community organizing in Atlanta and Houston. Vivas is an activist, a journalist and a sociologist is a member of the Centre for the Study of Social Movements at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Her most recent book is Planeta Indignado (Sequitur, 2012) coauthored with Josep Maria Antentas. Ojeda worked for 20 years in the maquiladoras, during which time she studied law and became an organizer. Hennessy is the Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, as well as Professor of English at Rice University. Her books include Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, New York: Routledge, 2000; and Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics ofi Organizing on the Mexican Frontera and Elsewhere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming. Varikas is professor of political theory and gender studies at the University ot Paris 8, and associate director of the research unit ‘Genre Travail Mobilite’ (Gender, Work, Mobility’) at the Center National de Recherche Scientifique. Her most recent book is Les rebuts du monde. Figures du paria (Social outcasts: Figures of the Pariah), Paris: Editions Stock, 2007. Moghadam is Director of the International Affairs Program and Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. Her most recent books are Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement,

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

285

Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2012; and Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East, Boulder, CO; Lynne Rienner Publishers, forthcoming. 7

Nancy Holmstrom, Capitalism: For & Against: A Feminist Debate (with Ann

8

Esther Vivas argues that the deep social and economic crisis and cuts to social

Cudd), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. and labour rights which hit young women the hardest, together with the attack of the reactionary right in the Spanish government against sexual and reproductive freedoms, has created favourable conditions for the emergence of a new ‘indignado feminism’ among young women activists. 9

Domestic workers are also organizing in the US. Leah Obias, ‘Organizing Domestic Workers; The National Domestic Workers Alliance’, Scholar and Feminist Online, Barnard Center for Research on Women, 8(1), 2009, available at http://www.bamard.edu.

10

Leila Abu Ltighod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist, 104(3), 2002, pp. 783-790; ‘The burka ban is hberticide’; Interview with Catherine Saniary’,

Viewpoint, 13 August 2010, available at http://www.

viewpointonline.net. 11

According to Rosemary Hennessy, maquiladora workers were initially almost 100 per cent women but that changed when men were recmited during the 1980s and 1990s; today they are stiU a slim majority and in some industries they are much more than 50 per cent.

12

Rosemary Hennessy and Martha Ojeda, NAFTA from Below: Maquiladora Workers, Campesinos, and Indigenous Communities Speak Out on the Impact of Free Trade in Mexico, San Antonio: Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 2007.

13

For an overview of working-women’s organizing in and outside of unions in Mexico, see Rachel K. Bnckner, ‘Why Bother with the State? Transnational Activism, Local Activism, and Lessons for a Women Workers’ Movement in Mexico’, Working Paper 298, September 2010, published by the Gender, Development, and Globalization Program, Center for Gender in Global Context, Michigan State University.

14

This is reminiscent of women’s stmggle to build and rebuild the Crossroads community in South Africa. See Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy, New

15

York: Routledge, 1996. Rosemary Hennessy, ‘Gender Adjustments in Forgotten Places: The NorthSouth Encuentros in Mexico’, Works and Days, special issue on Invisible Battlegrounds: Feminist Resistance in the Global Age of War and Imperialism,

16

29(1-2), 2010. Hennessy, ‘Gender Adjustments in Forgotten Places’. See also chapter 7, in

17

Hennessy, Fires on the Border. For a similar view of these connections from a North American perspective, see Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, The Color of Violence, Boston: South End Press, 2006; and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Boston: South End Press, 2005.

18

Esther Vivas, ‘Without Women There is No Food Sovereignty’, International

286

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 Viewpoint, available at http://www.intemationalviewpoint.org.

19

Annette Aurelie Desmarais, La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of

20

According to Hennessy, the emergence of socialist-leaning state formations and

Peasants, London: Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 186-187. the organizing taking place at the local level in towns and villages in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay are providing pohtical openings for a pohtics that is de facto socialist feminist. Hennessy, ‘Gender Adjustments in Forgotten 21

Places’. Esther Vivas, ‘Without Women, No Food Security’, Against the Current, 157(March/April), 2012.

22

Demarais, La Via Campesina, p. 282.

23

Susan Dirr points out that in Occupy Chicago women who did emerge as leaders were comfortable with this leadership style, but that women activists were far more likely to take leadership at the level of working committees, where these skills were much less important.

24

Vivas, ‘Without Women There is No Food Sovereignty’.

25

On ‘law and order feminism’ see Jan Haaken, ‘Stories of Survival: Class, Race, and Domestic Violence’, in The Socialist Feminist Project, ed., Nancy Holmstrom, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.

26

For a clear statement of this point see Amber HoUibaugh, ‘Sexuahty, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism’, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming her Way Home, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

27

See Hennessy, chapters 4 and 5, Fires on the Border. See also her The Value of a Second Skin’, in Diane Richardson, Janice McLaughhn and Mark Casey, eds.. Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2006; as weU as her ‘Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need’, Rethinking Marxism, 18(3), 2006.

28

Some of the more prominent groups include Women in Development, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, the Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace and the Women’s international League for Peace and Freedom.

29

Fora perceptive analysis and case study of the relationship between transnational feminist networks and local organizing that engages working-class women, see Catherine Sanieh, ‘Signatures, Rights, Networks: Iranian Feminism in the Transnational Sphere’, Doctoral Dissertation, Rutgers, 2012.

30

Sister Song Collective, ‘What is Reproductive Justice?’, available at http:// www.sistersong.net; see also Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross and Elena Gutierrez, eds.. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, Boston: South End Press, 2004; and Marlene Gerber Fried, ed.. From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom, Boston: South End Press, 1990.

31

For examples of intersectional analysis and activism, see Joseph N. DeFihppis, Lisa Duggan, Kenyon Farrow and Richard Kim, eds., Scholar & Feminist Online: A New Queer Agenda, 10(1-2), 2011-12. For a sampling of the early debates about capitalism and patriarchy see Lydia Sargent, ed.. Women and Revolution, Boston: South End Press, 1981; Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist-Feminism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979; and

SOCIALIST-FEMINIST STRATEGY TODAY

287

Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, New York: Roudedge, 1997. 32

For one approach see Johanna Brenner, ‘Intersectionality from a Marxist Perspective’, in Women and the Politics of Class, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

33

Johanna Brenner and Nancy

Holmstrom,

‘Women’s

Self-Organization:

34

Howard Ryan, ‘Chicago Occupation Challenges Corporate School Agenda’,

Theory and Strategy’, Monthly Review, 34(11), 1983. Labor Notes, 22 February 2012, available at http://www.labornotes.org. 35

Manissa McCleave Maharawal, ‘So Real it Hurts: Building a New Republic’, Occupy

Wall

Street Journal,

occupiedmedia.us.

23

October

2011,

available

at

http://

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA: A RESPONSE TO NANCY FRASER JOAN SANGSTER AND MEG LUXTON nderstanding the past and present possibilities of hnking feminist and anti-capitahst politics is critical to understanding the conditions under which subordination comes to be challenged. In the wake of the totahzing effects of the recent crisis of capitalism, some intellectuals have shifted their gaze to the economy and are re-evaluating the rise and dechne of left political movements, including feminism.^ Nancy Fraser’s ‘Feminism, Capitahsm and the Cunning of History’ is perhaps one of the more clear, succinctly stated and possibly influential discussions of this connection, in part because of its appearance in New Left Review. Fraser’s ambitious excursion through the making and unmaking of feminist critique over the last forty years urges us to reclaim the best ideas of second-wave feminism, striving for ‘transformation in the direction of justice’.^ Her argument that feminism was ‘co-opted’ is gaining much broader currency; scholars are now repeating her argument that capitalism and feminism became ‘compatible bedfellows’ applying her ideas to other social movements.^ However, before we rush to a consensus, we need to look critically at her version of the feminist past, and her vision of a feminist future. Like Fraser, we see the imperative of rethinking feminist debates that have ignored labour issues and de-emphasized the structural and material, instead giving more attention to the intersections of class politics and feminist strategies for change. However, her reinterpretation of feminist history, in which a homogenized second-wave feminism inevitably becomes a compliant bedfellow, or worse, an apologist for global capitalism, largely through women’s claims for equality m the field of labour, needs to be challenged. If we are to understand the partial incorporation of some feminist ideas - liberal, cultural, postmodern - into capitalism, and the role they play in its legitimation, then we need to theorize those specific connections.

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

289

Rather than presenting a narrative with feminism, once radical, now neoliberal, as the culprit, we need to distinguish which aspects of feminism have a structural and ideological affinity with neoliberalism, and why. We need to place these connections in the context of the defeat and collapse of most socialist or communist economies and their turn to the capitalist market, and of changing regimes of Fordist and post-Fordist accumulation, acknowledging the ideological pressures created, that led to naturalizing the market, depoliticizing capitalism and seemingly closing off political choices as unions were ruthlessly attacked, and survival took more and more effort for the working class. We need to avoid an American-centric understanding of feminism,

and to move beyond taken-for-granted assertions about

intersectionality to develop an analysis of class relations that thoroughly integrates gender and race and other systems of discrimination and oppression. In contrast to Fraser’s claim that second-wave feminism came to share a ‘subterranean elective affinity’ with neoliberalism, we argue that liberal feminism’s

compatibihty

with

neoliberalism

is

an

explicit,

structural

compatibihty, and that it has been able to achieve almost hegemonic status as ‘second-wave feminism’ only to the degree that socialist feminism has been ignored or defeated.'* Rather than a detemiinist view in which capitalism inevitably captured and reshaped the feminist movement in its own image, or an idealist view in which feminist politics created a new post-Fordist world, a feminist historical materialism (which recognizes the importance of the contextual and material, as well as the role of culture and ideology, while never ignoring human agency in history) can help us understand how certain feminisms were incorporated into the ruling apparatus of capitalism, and why others were marginalized or suppressed. FEMINISM CO-OPTED? Despite some qualifiers, Fraser’s investigation assumes a very generalized second-wave feminism, ‘as an epochal social phenomenon , which can be analyzed without emphasizing ‘this or that activist current’ or ‘strand of feminist theonzing’, or specific geographic locations and sociological strata of women. For Fraser, the second wave had relative success m transforming culture ... in sharp contrast with its relative failure to transform institutions’, and in a decidedly declension narrative, feminism’s ‘integrated’ and ‘holistic critique of capitalism’ was abandoned as there was an increasingly ‘disturbing convergence of some of its ideals’ with neoliberalism.^ In this feminism co¬ opted scenario, Fraser is particularly concerned with the relationship between feminism and paid work: feminists

rejection of the family wage became

the ‘romance’ of female economic advancement posited by liberalism, and

290

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

feminists’ critique of welfare state paternalism was ‘only a short step away’ from Thatcher’s critique of the ‘nanny state’.^ As feminism turned away from redistribution to recognition, it unintentionally legitimized the ideology of the market, deepened state retrenchment and valorized the cheap labour central to neoliberalism. This trajectory was almost inevitable: ‘it was only a matter of time’ before feminism was ‘resignified’ and ‘unwittingly’ came to provide ‘a key ingredient of the new spirit of neohberalism’.^ What working-class women got instead of emancipation from the family wage they were critiquing was imprisonment in the low-wage, multi-earner family of Walmart times. As this transpired, feminism shifted from an ‘unambiguously emancipatory’ movement to one that has become the handmaiden of neohberahsm.® At the heart of this fall from grace lay the cunning of history: the ‘utopian desires’ of the second wave ‘found a second life as feeling currents that legitimated the transition to a new form of capitahsm: postFordist, transnational, hberal’.^ Fraser usefully prompts us to think about how the pubhc face of secondwave feminism in the United States was reduced to its hberal manifestation, and she is not alone in proposing that the sociahst current of second-wave feminism faded away. Hester Eisenstein similarly suggests that secondwave feminism was seduced by global capitalism as the two found an ideological kinship, and for both authors, feminists’ equation of paid labour with ‘emancipation’ became an Achilles heel of second-wave feminism.^® Feminist advocacy of workplace rights, access to men’s jobs, independence and economic equahty found an ‘affinity’ with ‘corporate and government strategies to maximize profitability’. Although feminism eroded the ‘traditions of patriarchy’ on a global scale, it entered into a ‘dangerous liaison’ with corporate capitalism and became a key ingredient of its legitimation." To be sure, labour issues were a key incubator of fenfrnism as workingclass and rmddle-class women were pushed into a gendered and racialized workforce by economic need, and pulled in by capital’s search for a flexible, profitable, corpus of labour. As working women increasingly rejected the ideal of a family wage for men, they also questioned the racialized and gendered division of labour, women’s responsibility for domestic labour, the socialization and care of children and whether there was a ‘nature’ to female and male bodies — among other feminist issues.*^ However, work for pay was also profoundly differentiated by class and race. Precarious labour, as Ursula Huws points out, has long defined much of the world’s workforce — and certainly women’s work — making postwar Fordism more of a ‘special exception’ than a rule." The breadwinner ideal did not apply to the unskilled and to immigrant newcomers in North America whose familial

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

291

reproduction depended on multiple earners, and it was also a far cry from the economic situation of African-American fanfrlies and internally colonized Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US. Thus, to focus too concertedly on a critique of the family wage narrows our focus to one aspect of feminism, and sidelines the experiences of poor and racialized women, many of whom were already long integrated into paid work regimes, without any hope/or a family wage. Liberal feminism was buoyed by its own success, as it challenged and altered the gender order in areas such as the formal law, employment opportunity, reproductive choice, education and sexuality. These achievements reinforced liberal concepts of equahty, as well as the incorporation of some women into the ruling class (a very few), and more into the intelligentsia, academe and professions (an influential minority).While some of these feminist successes had positive implications for all women, liberal feminism did not anticipate the impact of neoliberalism and the differences between the gender order liberalism and neoliberalism facilitate. While liberalism idealized a nuclear family in which the man as income earner supported an economically dependent wife and children, neoliberalism relies on individuals apparently freed of domestic responsibilities, and available to work competitively in the labour force. One of the major points of tension in societies dominated by neoliberalism is the ways in which its economy and social policies force most people to juggle, on their own, the incompatible demands of caregiving and income generating work. The declining birth rate is one response. The deepening impoverishment of single mothers is another. Liberal feminism was incapable of fundamentally challenging a key outcome of neoliberal economies and policies, namely the widening class differences between women.'® Fraser’s argument that feminist demands for women’s equality in the labour force complimented, or at least failed to challenge capitalism, ignores the ‘more transformative’ and crucially related demands of socialist feminism, that any involvement in paid employment be linked both to socialised collective responsibility for children and to critiques of the hegemony of heterosexual nuclear family forms and sex/ gender divisions of labour.'^ The shift from sociahst-fermnist calls for high quality, not-for-profit twenty-four hour child care (and thus collective responsibihty for children), to liberal feminist demands for child care as a service for employed parents is but one example of this amnesia."' Provocative

overviews

like

Fraser’s

necessitate

some

generalization;

nonetheless, her interpretation of the convergence of feminist ideas with global capitalism orders up history into problematic, overly schematic boxes. The variants of capitalism, path dependencies leading to different processes

292

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

of neoliberalization, and the changing political, economic and social forces shaping employment relations and the prospects for worker organization, are inevitably condensed and simplified. This leads to a number of problems, summarized only briefly here. First, there is httle or no discussion of historical or contemporary forms of feminist resistance to capitalism in the South, including the hnks forged by women between anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles.'® Fraser’s depiction of the postwar moment assumes that ‘claims for justice’ were ‘channeled.. .into the domestic political arenas of territorial states’, yet anti-imperialist critiques emanating from the Global South were not so clearly ‘state bound’ since many argued that global and imperial economies had profoundly shaped their own underdevelopment.'^ Second, Fraser situates the rise of second-wave feminism in the postwar era characterized as ‘androcentric, economistic, technocratic, Westphahan’ (or state-organized)

capitalism,

while

the

‘compromised’

feminism

of

today is located within neoliberal capitalism. However, the market forces she identifies with more recent neohberaflsm were not entirely absent in the postwar period, although they were organized and held in check differently, and second-wave feminism did not simply prosper ‘in tandem with’ neoliberalism.^® It was in fact thriving before the profitabihty crisis of the seventies. Moreover, the contemporary conjuncture of capitalism might also be termed state-organized — despite the ‘small state’ posturing of neohberahsm.^' The massive prison industrial complex in Canada and the US is but one illustration that state capacity has not receded as much as it has been redirected to new - in this case, carceral - ends.^^ Fraser’s characterization of the postwar state as suffused with a ‘technocratic, managerial ethos’ might be just as relevant today.^^ Witness the technocratic leadership in Greece and Italy during the 2012 crisis, and the proliferation of consultants and commissions designed to give the impression that state decisions are made by professional experts rather than neoliberal political ideology. Third, the way in which feminism is inevitably overtaken by bhnd forces of the economy in her account downplays political contestations over neoliberalism. The rise of neoliberalism was not only occasioned by capitalist crisis concerning profit but was also a response to the relative successes of the global socialist movement, and the spread of social democratic equality demands at the same time. The late twentieth century saw the global defeat of socialism and the left, led by the people and institutions which advanced neoliberalism. Greg Albo’s observation that the greatest success of neoliberalism was not ‘privatization’ as much as the ‘defeat, isolation, individualization, and disorganization of the Left’, so much so that unions and civil society organizations have ‘internalized’ its assumptions, is apropos

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

293

here.^'^ If some feminists conceded to the precepts of neoliberalism, so too did labour and social democratic organizations. Fourth, the idea that some forms of feminism have an affinity with liberal democratic capitalism, in terms of a political philosophy of individualism and equal opportunity, and women’s ambition to move up the class ladder, manifested itself long before neoliberalism.

From the nineteenth century

onwards, this connection was critiqued by communist and socialist feminists who

challenged notions of acquisitive individualism,

competition and

acceptable social hierarchy that lay at the heart of liberal feminism. This was also true during the second wave Fraser explores, as the political and theoretical manifestations of Marxist and sociahst feminism challenged liberal feminist precepts - although some important feminist coalitions across political difference also existed. Even during neoliberalism’s ascent, Marxist and socialist feminists urged us to analyze changing historical bases for women’s different class interests; warned that liberal feminism could become cut off from working-class struggles; proposed we theorize women’s labour in terms of objectification and alienation; countered ‘ludic’ feminisms that inscribed the class interests of the upper middle class; and offered us sophisticated analyses of sexuality, commodification and capitahsm.

The

problem was that too few were listening, precisely because these critiques came from Marxist feminists or the organized left. In one such critique, Johanna Brenner noted the important changes in the gender order that emerged from the second wave, but warned that this was also, at heart, a Tourgeois feminist revolution , and that feminist demands for equality were being ‘culturally incorporated and institutionalized as the right to compete and contract’.Brenner’s analysis, more strongly indebted to Marxist-feminist understandings of class location and socialist politics, is nonetheless distinct from Fraser’s more recent claim that second-wave feminism became the unwitting handmaiden of global capitalism, for Brenner takes into account the complex relations between class, race and gender in which different class interests among women are an inevitable constant, even though women may be drawn together in overlapping feminist causes. A certain co-optation of western feminism was also evidenced in the international arena, Fraser suggests, as feminism became transnational in its institutional organizing, but less focused on questions of structural poverty and more attuned to a safer language of human rights. While this less radical reorientation may have occurred in mainstream feminist organizations, not all feminists ignored the troubling historical and contemporary alliances tying liberal feminism and imperialism together, nor did they abandon an international political economy cntique focusing on global capitahsm, poverty

294

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

and underdevelopment.^’ If an internationalist socialist-feminist critique was pushed off centre stage by a less threatening liberal feminist project, we need to ask how and why this happened.Again, Fraser’s bundhng of all feminisms into one package removes an opportunity to distinguish feminist politics of accommodation to neohberalism from those of radical resistance. HISTORICIZING FEMINISM Feminism not only needs to be de-homogenized in Fraser’s account; it also needs to be historicized. Analyses that assume feminist politics proceeded in chronological waves - three or four - result in the second wave being cut off from a longer trajectory of political thinking.^^ As Sheila Rowbotham points out, in the absence of mechanisms for the transfer of memory from one generation of activists to another, feminist history can be forgotten, creating an amnesia that inhibits current pohtical strategizing.^° ‘Second wave’ feminism, Fraser maintains, ‘pioneered’ an ‘intersectionist’ analysis integrating class, gender and race ‘that is widely accepted today’ - thus assuming a political consensus about intersectionalism being the theory of global choice.^’ One can support Fraser’s argument that there was a rupture in the 1960s and 1970s with previous feminist thinking, as issues previously closeted came out into the open and new connections were made between the psyche, the family, sexual onentation, domestic labour and work, without endorsing a mechanistic three or four wave theory of feminism in which chronology trumps pohtics. Nor should we equate intersectional analysis with class analysis, for the former can ehde the epistemological differences between the kinds of inequality and oppression women face; indeed, some intersectionality writing has led us back to a pluralist multiplicity of power relations. It IS useful to think, not of waves and troughs, but of streams of feminism, each taking up different pohtical ideas that are configured and reconfigured both by the social conjuncture and women’s changing political inspirations. There is a long history of attempts to combine, integrate, or run parallel analyses of class exploitation, gender and race oppression, stretching back to the late nineteenth century, taking in syndicalist, anarchist, conmiunist and socialist women. While these women sometimes collaborated with liberal feminists, their political projects, embedded in different class interests and culture, also diverged. Early twentieth-century communists and socialists may have focused primarily on class, but they recognized women’s oppression and racism, and they addressed issues such as housework, sexuality, the family and work.^^ While the mid-twentieth-century communist party is seen as sufrenng from economism (subsuming gender under class) or Stalinism

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

295

(subsuming all politics to the authoritarian cause of state socialism in one country), it did encourage new thinking about the ‘triple oppression’ of Black women.Nor was the communist left the only left, as is too often assumed in American histories. A range of socialist-feminist organizing and thinking spanned the twentieth century, from the women who promoted a new ‘utopian socialism’ in Canada during the Depression under the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, to Trotskyists who addressed the ‘woman question’ through debates about capitalism, consumerism and women’s make-up in the 1950s.^® The limitation of earlier efforts by US women in the communist left to fully develop a Marxist-feminist politics of liberation, suggests Barbara Foley, was not just economism or Stalinism, but rather the ‘reformist’ programme of Depression-era communism which failed to speak to the need to abolish the wage relation entirely, thus breaking decisively with the capitalist paradigm of social relations.The same challenge of theorizing and sustaining an alternative politics outside of ‘reformism’ existed for socialist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and was made all the more difficult by the decline of the organized left. Realizing this reinforces the strategic importance today of creating a truly alternative left feminism which is not simply absorbed into social democratic or liberal feminism. While global in one sense, the marginalization of socialist feminism after the 1970s and 1980s also took on different national and regional forms. Fraser begins by speaking of the ‘twin crises of finance capital and US hegemony’; but for those outside of (and on the receiving end of) the American empire, US ‘hegemony’ may not seem in crisis, but rather still hegemonic, certainly in geo-military terms.^^ When describing the counter culture, the New Left, or second-wave feminism, Fraser’s emphasis is on US history. Not only does this obscure the global, but it also obscures the experiences of feminists in other western countries. The presence of communist, social democratic or labour parties; a strong welfare state tradition (in this case the US is more the outlier than the norm); different configurations of race and ethnicity; the existence of nationalism and colonized nations within nations, as in Canada, all alter feminist politics enough that experiences cannot be pressed into a world or even western story. 5J7hile socialist-fermnist politics in 1970s Canada and Quebec might be considered state-centred, indeed even nationalist in their focus on decolonizing our links to the US (and in Quebec on decolonizing links to Canada), they also incorporated anti¬ imperialist views that contributed to a distinctive Quebec nationalism, fused with First Nations anti-colonial struggles and a social democratic feminism, that has managed to maintain some attention to emancipatory ends.

296

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Second-wave feminism was also more ideologically fractured than Fraser remembers. Not all second-wave feminists had an integrative, transformative agenda; some issues pursued engendered an anti-capitalist politics, some did not. Despite her stated intent of generalizing beyond ‘this or that activist current’, Fraser does at one point distinguish different currents of feminism, including socialist feminists, black feminists, liberal feminists and anti-imperialist feminists. Yet, her genealogy also suggests the confluence of feminist streams: she descnbes second-wave feminism emerging from the anti-imperialist New Left, specifically ‘the global anti-Vietnam War ferment’, and notes that the ‘sexism of the left’ then posed problems for socialist feminists, but not for radical and liberal feminists, who ‘could simply turn separatist and exit the Left’.^* The notion that all currents of secondwave feminism emerged from the New Left is problematic, even for the United States, and the implied sundering of ties between feminists and the New Left circa 1969 may reflect a decidedly American historiography. The distinctions between feminist political streams that Fraser rightly notes thus undermine an argument based on a generalized second-wave feminism. Inadvertently, Fraser may be silencing the very socialist-feminist politics she wants to advance. Understanding the history of women’s labour as a dialectical process infused with human agency is also necessary for sociahst-feminist strategizing. Fraser’s point that the post-Fordist economy shifted the landscape for employed women, often worsening the conditions of their productive and reproductive labour, is incontrovertible, but it is quite a different claim to say that feminists’ focus on paid labour facilitated its embrace of the goals of global capitalism. There is both a sense of historical detemfrnism to this argument, implying that feminism inevitably fell into the pathway of this juggernaut, and a sense of cultural idealism, suggesting that feminist ideas became the defining justification for economic changes that would likely have emerged anyway, given the profitability crisis. Moreover, there is an implied sense of fault for women who chose to strive for workplace equality without giving due attention to where this was taking them politically. Rather than focusing on the issue of work, we need to interrogate the different feminist political approaches to work, assessing their efficacy and consequences in the process of class struggle. W^omen workers cannot be blamed for promoting economic independence and ending up with the multi¬ earner, low-wage family; they reacted to changing economic conditions with the strategies they saw available and possible to sustain themselves and their families.

W^hen women have poured into labour markets around the

globe’ they did not do so spurred on by dreams of equality or, as Fraser puts

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

297

it, ‘a new romance of female advancement’; rather, they did so because they were involved in basic ‘survival projects’/” THEORETICAL CONTENTIONS Not only were there competing feminist politics within the second wave, but as different feminisms debated, disagreed and clashed during and after the 1970s, there was a clear triumph in intellectual/theoretical circles by the late 1980s of postmodern, poststructuralist ideas over historical materialism, though this varied across countries and cultures; some argue there was a particularly strong embrace of postmodernism in the US/' One could nuance this argument by pointing to regular invocations of class in ‘post’ writing, or to claims that there emerged a postmodern Marxism, or to evidence of a productive dialogue and exchange of ideas between Marxism and poststructuralism. We could also commend Fraser’s own positive interventions which did not lose sight of the material. But it is stiU inconvertible that, along with the rejection of Marxism, came a downgrading of class analysis. Postmodern feminists’ emphasis on the multiple, inherently unstable construction of identities, and increased attention to text, representation and discursive analysis came with a price tag: a de-emphasis on structural, meta-analyses of economic inequality. In

much

Anglo-American

feminist

theorizing,

there

was

more

weight assigned to the flexible, ethereal, changing nature of class, to its deconstruction, to its supposed disappearance in new consumer capitalism, or its fragmentation by other identities. In social analysis more generally, ambiguity, indeterminacy, scepticism, self-reflexivity (with an emphasis on the self), decentring, the eclectic, the local and the particular figured prominently. A profound questioning of the very concept of experience which had underpinned much socialist labour history and sociology also transpired; as a result, the lived realities of exploitation and oppression so keenly felt by the subordinated became more of an academic question mark than a caU to action. Unfortunately, a mechanical and ahistorical view of Marxism emerged, limiting a creative feminist engagement with historical materialism. Some self-designated third-wave feminists, shaped profoundly by postmodernism, and embracing a new individualism not incompatible with neoliberalism, absorbed these dismissals of Marxism. To them, Marxistfeminism was passe, too heavy, structural, collective, class-based and just not much fun - just as they imagined the supposedly humourless and judgmental second-wave

feminists who

invented it."*^ Theory did affect practice,

poststructurahst ideas dissipated and reverberated through our understanding of the politically possible, shaping social movements and feminist politics. Indeed, in Ellen Wood’s estimation, these theoretical shifts reflected the

298

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

diminished engagement of a new generation of left intellectuals with the working class. Despite the immense importance of this theoretical turn of events, nowhere in Fraser’s article do the words poststructurahsm or postmodernism appear. This is deeply problematic. Fraser does seem to use a code word, ‘cultural’, in place of any mention of the ‘posts’. ‘Feminism’ became a ‘one¬ sided culturalism’, Fraser writes. Feminists ‘overextended the critique of culture while downplaying the critique of political economyHowever, the word ‘culture’ obscures the specificity of theoretical debates and their political outcomes. Moreover, on the Marxist left, culture had long been part of debate, including about some of the themes of particular interest to postmodernists — consumption, popular culture, commodification — and there ‘had long been a recognition in radical circles that pohtical change had to be “cultural” to be effective’.How, then, was this new theory about culture different? The answer is that it was informed by poststructuralist theory, cast within the framework of postmodernity, though we stress that not all theory moved in this direction. Some feminists continued to engage with historical materialism, Marxism, Marxist-feminism - and we should not homogenize them, as there were differences — many raising concerns about the ‘cultural’. They wrote about work, experience, sexuality, theory and culture, at a time when they were ‘being told left and right that class is no longer a viable fundamental category for social and cultural analysis’."*^ Feminists were crafting a new feminist Marxist-humanism and also transforming Marxist political economy, developing precisely the kind of feminist, anti-racist class analysis that seems to be called for now.'*’ The gatekeepers of academic theoretical production in Anglo-American circles, however, were far less interested in these debates than in ones infomied by poststructuralism {New Left Review included)."*^ The dominant strains of feminist writing challenged the efficacy of metanarratives, with Marxism one of the primary culpnts. In an article co¬ written with Linda Nicholson, Fraser argued that a feminist postmodern theory, in contrast to more ‘essentialist quasi-metanarratives’, would offer a pragmatic and faUibilist’ approach, ‘tailoring its methods and categories to the specific task at hand, using multiple categories when appropriate ... this would look more like a tapestry’. Ironically, Fraser and Nicolson also called for theory which would be ‘explicitly historical’ and which ‘situates its categories in historical frameworks’, a description that seems to us to approximate a feminist historical materialism.'*^ Yet it was postmodernism, they claimed, that would help lead feminist theory away from its narrow

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

299

and mistaken focus on ‘western, white middle-class women’, surely a characterization that simplified and ignored past versions of socialist and anti-racist feminism.^® Fraser herself moved in a poststructuralist direction, as discourse came to play a more fomiative,

causative role in her writing,

though her

theoretical approach was still distinct from feminists like Judith Butler; in the ‘redistribution’ debate, for example, Fraser addressed the need to simultaneously alter political economy as well as culture. Fraser’s insistence that recognition and redistribution were not distinct, but ‘interimbricated’ was a valuable intervention in feminist debates.^' Yet, the whole concept of ‘redistribution’, as Rosemary Hennessy points out, could be equated with improving the welfare state rather than understanding the need to change the ‘unequal relations of production’.Fraser’s valiant efforts to mediate between ‘contentions’ in feminist theory led to calls for a ‘reconciliation’ between the ‘best elements’ of critical and poststructuralist theory, producing a ‘pragmatic view that there are a plurality of different angles from which socio-cultural phenomena can be understood [and] which is best will depend on one’s purposes’.Some theoretical contentions, however, cannot be mediated; to do so only leads to hberal pluralism. The political implications of these theoretical shifts for feminist strategizing cannot be underestimated. Marxist feminists point out that postmodern feminism reflected and subtly legitimated aspects of neoliberalism. There was overlap, they suggested, in a common critique of inherent or ‘essential’ values, standards and universal truths, a mutual celebration of relativism, fluidity, border crossing and the promotion of a ‘post class’ politics that only served to reify the existing social order.^'* Critics of ‘post socialist’ politics similarly posited that postmodernism played a role in the ideological retrenchment associated with conservative politics, not by openly endorsing them, but by retreating into aesthetic theory focused on the imaginary, by acquiescing to some of their precepts and by accepting realist doubts about the possibility of any wholesale social transformation, a scepticism validated theoretically by the postmodern abandonment of ‘old hat notions truth, critique, justice’ and other ostensibly passe ideas. The influence of ‘post’ thinking in encouraging the further embourgeoisment of liberal feminist politics and the marginalization of socialist feminisms must therefore be acknowledged; this cultural turn disclaimed materialist feminisms, challenged class as a structural category - and also as lived experience - at precisely the point that neoliberalism was attacking the small gains of both Fordism and feminism for working-class women. In the period when Fraser sees second-wave feminist stances on work coalescing

300

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

with global capitalism, labour studies were not at the centre of feminist debates. ‘Class’, publishers told one sociologist, no longer ‘sells’.^^ In the regular academic invocation of the trilogy of race, class, gender, class was often named but remained a theoretical ghost, an absent presence, and to leave out class from one’s analysis was a minor political error, to ignore other oppressions a major one. NO FEMINISM WITHOUT SOCIALISM: NO SOCIALISM WITHOUT FEMINISM In order to understand the incorporation of some hberal and postmodern feminist ideas into the ruling ethos of capitalism, and the concurrent legitimation of global capitahsm through those discourses, we have to address not only these shifts in theory, but the related dechne, dismemberment and discrediting of the left since the fate of a feminist class analysis was tied to the fate of left politics. In the process, human agency should not be shuffled aside, with the tsunami of neoliberahsm seemingly washing over aU opposition. After all, political choices were made — or avoided — even by those still calling themselves sociahst feminists (and it seems many were). The decline of the global left is often positioned symbohcaUy after the fall of Soviet communism, (though most of the left had long since abandoned Stalinism),

but

refuting the

Party need

not

mean

refuting historical

materiahsm, so there was far more to the left’s decline. In describing this history, Fraser accents the New Left/feminist desire for a ‘countercultural democratizing movement’ which was ‘anti-hierarchical and participatory’.^^ Feminists had to make a ‘decision’ about whether to exit a sexist (maledefined) left, and, indeed, many American histories likewise stress the sundering of feminist and New Left ties by the late 1960s. Socialist feminism may have briefly flourished, it is suggested, but was then out of favour by the 1980s, save in some rarified academic circles. Even if this describes the nature and genealogy of the left in the US, the political story in other countries was more complex. In other national contexts, socialist-feminist politics remained a presence and an alternative to liberal feminism, making inroads into the labour movement, though in Canada there was inevitably pressure from within the union bureaucracy for these women to abandon the socialist side of socialist fenfrnism.^* Reproductive campaigns in Canada, to take another example, did not move in a linear trajectory from anti-capitalist critique to an ‘incorporated’ feminism; rather, reproductive rights organizing remained committed ‘to the salience of social class, paying close attention to class structuring of abortion access and the importance of class for political organizing’.

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

301

Indeed, there is no need to pose our choices as either Marxism or pragmatic politics. Historically, left feminists have embraced multiple levels of political engagement. In welfare state struggles, they can engage in campaigns for immediate, if flawed programmes that ameliorate women’s suffering, while still offering a materialist analysis of the fundamental economic constraints of capitalism on welfare state and feminist actions. Recent campaigns around the living wage, especially those encompassing all workers ‘without borders’, similarly offer the possibility of combining demands for a decent standard of living with a socialist-feminist critique of neoliberal capitalism — and also a recognition of the insufficiency of social democracy in addressing exploitation.“ In Canada and the US, even if many academic feminists continued to claim the label socialist feminist, it did become so elastic that it might mean just about any brand of reform and social democracy. It was precisely such resignation to pragmatic, reformist pohtics that morphed into ‘new politics’, new labour and other backtracking from principled left politics, often downplaying class analysis in favour of endlessly multiple, shifting, versions of social power. Within this landscape, we need to take into account the impact of the decline of the so-caUed ‘ultra left’.^^ After the late 1960s, the emergence of new parties of the Marxist-Leninist left, and their small but visible presence (much hke earlier communist parties though on a smaller scale to be sure), did have some positive effects on political-theoretical debates. While some former Trotskyists and Maoists may now distance themselves from their youthful pohtics, the presence of a Marxist-Leninist left encouraged an engagement with Marxism, focused attention on Marxist feminism, pressed some revolutionary women into feminist organizing and emphasized the importance of working-class pohtics, rather than associating the working class (which does still exist, even if they inhabit changed occupational space) with a lost cause.Like the old left of the 1950s, the new communist left of the 1970s internally combusted in the face of self critique (in the 1970s, especially feminist critiques), however these groups did for a time stimulate socialist organizing.^^ After their disappearance, there was less discussion about the problems of reformism, the danger of losing sight of transforming productive relations, the need for socialist organization and leadership - indeed the latter had been so discredited as to be seen as a danger. With the disappearance of such debates, it was easier for socialist feminists to ‘settle’, to accept the ‘provisional’, as they lowered their expectations, settling for liberal reforms aimed at equality with men, these being perceived as more realistic than the more radical demands of socialist feminism.

302

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

A promiscuous confusion of socialism or social democracy with liberalism occurred, hobbling the development of a vigorous anti-capitalist feminist politics. This is an especially thorny problem in the US, where the terms liberal and socialist were so successfully conflated by the right, that even those on the social democratic left feel they have to defend the term hberal. The feminist acquiescence to piecemeal pragmatism is exemplified by Judith Stacey, who recently announced, in contradistinction to Hester Eisenstein’s call for a reinvigorated sociahst feminism, that she ‘no longer defined’ herself as ‘a sociahst feminist’. Stacey’s antipathy to ‘totaflzing theories and politics’ follows in the vein of poststructuralist writing; her statement that ‘the best we can hope and struggle for are radical reforms pursued through democratic means which inevitably will prove inadequate and ephemeral’ signifies the triumph of a pragmatic reformism.^'' Yet political pragmatism, presented as a superior strategy to totalizing metanarratives, may only lead to a resignation to capitalism. In Justice Interruptus, Fraser astutely critiques the term post-socialist, yet also betrays

a certain pessimistic acquiescence to it when she notes that there is no longer any ‘credible progressive vision’ only ‘provisional alternatives’. Her recommendation that we ‘create a different post-sociahsm’, encompassing a ‘bivalent’ politics of redistribution and recognition, does not look past social democracy.^^ Indeed, it raises the question: why ‘post’ at all? Why not just a new socialist or materiaHst feminism? Perhaps, as Terry Eagleton’s Tlie Illusions of Postmodernism argues, socialist feminists like Fraser were caught

between a socialist past and a postmodern present. As the left faced, not just a setback, but defeat, as struggle appeared not just difficult, but impossible, a ‘hbertarian pessimism’ overtook social theory, which increasingly focused on the partial, the pragmatic, the uncertain and the indeterminacy of politics, all of this dampening socialist action and the vibrancy of a socialist-feminist critique. In New Left Review, Fraser calls for a new ‘participatory democracy’ that might tame markets and ‘steer society in the interest of justice’.This terminology of participatory democracy may have particular resonance in the US, where it is imagined as a popular entree to the introduction of social democratic ideas, again suggesting that theories built on American political culture cannot be projected onto other western countries, whose experiments with social democracy have proven chastening to say the least. The leading states are not, as she suggests, ‘all Keynesians’ (even if they selectively intervene in capitals’ interest); nor is it at all clear that we are at ‘the beginning of neoliberalism s end as an economic regime’. Fraser’s statement of hope about Obama in New Left Review, penned shortly after his election

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

303

as President, articulates an optimism that, from outside the US, seemed at the time stunningly naive. The idea that the election of Obama could ‘signal the decisive repudiation, even in the belly of the beast, of neoliberalism as a political project’, did not reflect even his election rhetoric.^* Now, three years into his term of office, it can be seen as a complete misreading of his politics. Fraser may be correct in identifying some political hope; there are important mobilizations ofworkers in defence of rights that are being legislated away, initiatives that critique the international bodies of neoliberalism and promising organizing that is anti-capitalist, even if the alternatives posed remain ephemeral. In this context, concentrating our political sights on a reinvigorated liberalism or a vapid social democracy seems aU too limiting a strategy. CONCLUSION Nancy Fraser’s reflection on the fate of second-wave feminism is an important call for us to reassess feminist politics over the last forty years, and to reconstitute a more class-aware feminism that connects the interimbrication of capitalist social relations and the oppressions of identity. However, her argument that feminism was incorporated or co-opted ends up conflating second-wave feminism with one specific current - liberal feminism - at the expense of the socialist feminism she clearly supports. In doing so, she embeds her argument in the sociopolitical struggles of the US, and sidelines the experiences of working-class women, whose search for better jobs, economic security and survival should not be faulted for the cultural legitimation of capitalism. Fraser’s political prognosis is marred by her unfortunate entrapment in a social democratic (or Keynesian) perspective that concentrates on ‘conflicts around accumulation rather than confronting the very nature of accumulation’. If neoliberalism is the dominant form of contemporary capitalism, it cannot be reversed with better policy decisions, some redistribution of resources, or more participatory politics. As a process of accumulation, a reconstitution of the hegemony of capital, a recomposition of production and social reproduction, neoliberalism now has a ‘specific material basis’.^’ It is also intimately connected to the state in capitalist society, no matter what the state’s political stripe. If we are to rethink current political strategies, we need to recognize the signiflcant political and theoretical differences that have historically shaped feminism, avoiding assumptions of a western, let alone global consensus within feminism. Eliding distinctions between feminist ideologies, and

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

304

remaining captive to notions of radical democracy will leave us trapped in precisely the reformist cul-de-sac which symbolizes the impoverishment, or defeat, of an anti-capitalist socialist feminism. If a truly sociahst feminism is to be revived, we need to avoid overly determinist narratives of both the neohberal economy and feminist cultural incorporation, exploring the political choices made by sociahsts and feminists; human agency has a role to play in this story. If we are to name what went ‘wrong’, then there must be a reckoning, not only of the left’s difficulty in addressing non-class oppressions (so often noted), but also of some feminists’ flight from materiahsm. Rather than taking as our project the creation of a feminist historical materiahsm that was subtle in its interrogation of abstract categories, flexible in its openness to connect sexuality, historical in its emphasis on specificity, context and the construction of gender and race, and dialectical in its emphasis on contradiction and critique, some feminists too easily dismissed historical materialism as mere economism, or a faulty universahsm. The political result was, at best, a bland social democracy, at worse, surrender to liberalism. Neoliberalism’s permeation of everyday life does not mean it will be unassailable in the face of opposition from below, but we need a clear understanding of what we are up against if class and social mobihzations are to be built. As Sheila Rowbotham reminds us, earlier sociahst feminists in the 1960s and 1970s rejected pohtical approaches associated with the liberal project of modernizing capitalism and with state sociahsm, both of which sought simply to bring women into the public sphere on equal terms with men without regard for domestic life, and they were also critical of welfare reformism. They aimed instead to transform social relationships of class, gender and race at home and at work, and perhaps most important, they shared a utopian faith in the possibility of changing individuals and society.™ These goals are worth remembering. Fraser says ‘this is a moment m which feminists should think big’.’’ We agree, but insist that mere ‘transformation m the direction of justice’ is not thinking big enough. NOTES Several colleagues offered comments on earlier drafts of this paper that helped us strengthen and clanfy the arguments. We thank Susan Braedley, Bryan Palmer and Wally Seccombe for their insights and support. 1

Serge Halimi, Where did the left go?’, Le Monde dipolmatique, No. 1111, November 2011, p. 1.

2

Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, New Left Review, 56 (March/April), 2009, pp. 116-7.

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

305

Shanna Gong, ‘What Can the Environmental Movement Learn from Feminism’, e-Scholarship, University of California, 1 April 2010, available at http;//escholarship.org. While Fraser does not use the term co-opted, this is the headliner for the article in New Left Review. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 108. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, pp. 97-116. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, pp. Ill, 110. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, pp. 109-10. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 113. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 99. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Used Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradignr Publishers, 2009, p. 39. While there are some similarities in their arguments, Eisenstein’s analysis, clearly committed to socialist-feminism, is more complex, and more global. For the earlier argument that feminism was an ‘unwitting midwife to post¬ industrial society’, see Judith Stacey, ‘Sexism by a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley’, Socialist Review, 96, 1987, pp. 8-9, 7-28. H. Eisenstein, ‘A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization’, Science and Society, 69(3), 2005, pp. 501, 495, 487. Feminism was grounded in working-class resistance as well as middleclass discontent, and was not simply a white middle-class movement as it is often portrayed. Becky Thompson, ‘Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second-wave feminism’. Feminist Studies, 28(2), 2002, pp. 33760; Meg Luxton, ‘Feminism as a Class Act: Working Class Feixiinism and the Women’s Movement in Canada’, Labour/Le Travail, 48, 2001, pp. 63-88. Ursula Huws, ‘Passing the buck: corporate restructuring and the casuahzation of employment’. Work Organization, Labour & Globalization, 5(1), 2011, p. 4, nonetheless argues the casuahzation of work under neoliberalism took on significantly different forms from Fordism. It would be wrong to characterize all hberal feminists as neoliberals. Some clearly oppose its excesses, such as the evisceration of the welfare state. However, a liberal ethos of individualism, meritocracy and opportunity provides some symmetry between liberalism and neoliberalism. Linda McDowell, ‘Reconfigurations of Gender and Class Relations: Class Differences, Class Condescension and the Changing Place of Class Relations’, Antipode, 38(4), 2006, pp. 825-50, 831. Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family, London: Verso,

1982. Meg Luxton and Heather Jon Maroney, ‘Begetting Babies, Raising Children: The Politics of Parenting’, in Jos. Roberts and Jesse Vorst, eds.. Socialism in Grisis? Canadian Perspectives Socialist Studies/Etudes Socialistes, volume 7, Winnipeg/Halifax: Society for Socialist Studies 1992, pp. 161-198. Ozlem Aslan and Zeynep Gambetti, ‘Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited’, Academia.edti, available at http:// boun.academia.edu; Shireen Hassim, ‘Global Constraints on Gender Equality

306

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 in Care Work’, Politics and Society, 38(3), 2008, pp. 388-402.

19

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 102. See Maxine Molyneux, Women’s Movements in

20

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 108.

21

Andrew Gamble, ‘Neo-Liberalism’, Capital and Class, 75, 2011, p. 132.

22

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Grisis, and Opposition in

International Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Globalizing Galifornia, Berkeley; University of Cahfomia Press, 2007. 23

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 102.

24

Greg Albo, ‘Neoliberalism and the Discontented’, Socialist Register 2008, Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2007, p. 360. See also David Fdarvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

25

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism,

26

Johanna Brenner, ‘Feminism’s Revolutionary Promise: Finding Hope in Hard

New York: Routledge, 2000. Times’, The Socialist Review, 25, 1989, pp. 247, 249. The term bourgeois feminist has come under fire by Marilyn Boxer as too ‘reductionist’, simphfying relations between middle-class and working-class women. However, the term was not simply invented by misogynist sociahst men and foisted on their sociahst sisters; for the latter, it articulated strongly experienced and pohtical class differences. Marilyn J. Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Sociahst Construction and International Career of the Concept of Bourgeois Feminism’, American Historical Review, 112(1), 2007, pp. 131-158. 27

See for example Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, chapter 6; ZHah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West, London; Zed Books,

2004;

Asoka Bandarage,

‘Women in Development:

Liberahsm,

Marxism and Marxist-Feminism’, Development and Change, 15(4), 1984, pp. 495-515; Martha Gimenez, ‘Connecting Marxism and feminism in the era of globalization’. Socialism and Democracy, 18(1), 2004, pp. 85-105. 28

Not aU feminist writing in international pohtical economy indicated this shift. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: decolonizing theory, practising solidarity, Durham: Duke University, 2003; Geraldine Terry, Women’s Rights, London: Pluto Press, 2007.

29

Feminist historians, political scientists and sociologists, especially those deahng with women’s organizing around labour, the left and racism, contest the idea of waves. Nancy Hewitt, ed.. No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories ofU.S. Feminism, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010; Joan Sangster, ‘Radical Ruptures: Feminism, Labor, and the Left in the Long Sixties in Canada’, American Review of Canadian Studies, 40(1), 2010, p. 1.

30

Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Women’s Movement’, in Monica Threlfall, ed.. Mapping the Women’s Movement, London: Verso, 1996, p. 13.

31

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 103.

32

Leslie McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs, 30(3), 2005, pp. 1771-1800; Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3), 2006, pp. 193-209; special issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(1), 2006; and Avtar Brah and Ann

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

307

Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality’, Jowma/ of International Women’s Studies, 5(3), 2004, pp. 75-86. 33

For example August Bebel, Women and Socialism, Translated by Meta L. Stem (Hebe), New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910; Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, London: Alison and Busby, 1977; Philip Sheldon Foner, ed., Clara Zetkin: Selected Writing, New York: International Publishers, 1984.

34

Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 4; Clara Fraser, The Emancipation of Women: Female Leadership in the Southern Civil Rights Struggle, Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2003.

35

Peter Campbell, Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People, Montreal: McGiUQueen’s University Press, 2010, p. 278; Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920s-1950s, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989; Myra Tanner Weiss, The Bustelo Incident: Marxism and Feminism, New York: Onward Press, 1987.

36

Barbara Foley, ‘Women and the Left in the 1930s’, American Literary History,

37

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 98.

38

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, pp. 97-106.

39

Eisenstein, ‘A Dangerous Liaison’.

40

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 110; Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class,

41

‘Much postmodernism has sprung from the United States, or at least has taken

2(1), 1990, pp. 156, 163.

New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 85. rapid root there, and reflects some of that country’s most intractable political problems’. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p. 122. 42

Susan Archer Mann and Douglas J. Huffman, ‘The Decentering of Secondwave feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave’, Science & Society, 69(1), 2005,

43

pp. 56-61. Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘A Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, Or: Who’s Old Fashioned Now?’, The Socialist Register 1995, London: Merlin Press, 1995, pp. 22-49.

44 45

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 108. Terry Eagleton, After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 46.

46

Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure, p. 12.

47

Examples include Kate Soper, Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender, and Hedonism, London: Verso, 1990; Heather Jon Maroney and Meg Luxton, eds.,

Feminism and Political Economy:

Women’s

Work,

Women’s Struggles,

Toronto: Methuen, 1987; special issue of Studies in Political Economy, 51, 1996; Carohne Andrew, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Wallace Clement and Leah F. Vosko, Studies in Political Economy: Developments in Feminism, Toronto: 48

Women’s Press, 2003. The Fraser-Butler debate in New Left Review is one example. Note also that one of Eisenstein’s essays forwarding her ideas about the dangerous liaison between feminism and corporate capitalism was followed by a number of

308

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013 replies, none of which really approached the topic from a Marxist perspective. Even the Gibson-Graham response was essentially ahgned with post-Marxism. See Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34(1/2), 2006, pp. 40-89.

49

Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Linda Nicholson, ed.. Feminism/Postmodernism, New York; Routledge, 1990, pp. 35, 34.

50

Linda J. Nicholson, ‘Introduction’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 4-5. See Lise Vogel, Woman Questions: Essays for a Materialist Feminism, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 102; and Miriam Glucksmann, ‘Airbrushing the History of Feminism, “Race” and Ethnicity’, Feminism & Psychology, 18(3), 2008, pp. 405-9.

51

Nancy Fraser, Jwshre Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition, New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 34, n 8.

52

Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure, pp. 221-2.

53

Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York:

54

Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late

Routledge, 1995, pp. 60, 166. Capitalism, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 18. 55

Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pp. 1-29.

56

Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: Sage, 1997, p. 7.

57

Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 105.

58

Rosemary Warskett,

‘Feminism’s

Challenge

to

Unions

in

the

North:

Possibilities and Contradictions’, The Socialist Register 2001, London: Merhn Press, 2001. 59

Loma Weir, ‘Left Popular Politics in Canadian Feminist Abortion Organizing, 1982-199T, Feminist Studies, 20(2), 1994, pp. 249-74.

60

Maqorie Griffin Cohen, ‘From the Welfare State to Vampire Capitahsm’, in Patricia M. Evans and Gerda Wekerle, eds.. Women and the Canadian Welfare State: Challenges and Change, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, pp. 28-67; Dennis Howlett, ‘The Call for a Living Wage’, Canadian Dimension, 2 May 2005.

61

The word ultra has come to sigmfy a negative political assessment, equated with the perceived deficiencies of communist parties. Yet we should ask what ultra is compared to; if its comparator is a compromised and compromising social democracy, then we could remove the ultra and just call it the left.

62

June Corman, and Meg Luxton, Getting By in Flard Times: Gendered Labour at

63

Sue Ferguson, Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition’, Critical Sociology, 25, 1999, pp. 1-15.

64

Judith Stacey, ‘Not Acquiescence, But Multilingual Resistance’,

Home and on the fob, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 58-60.

Women’s

Studies Quarterly, 34(1-2), 2006, p. 64. This shift in ideology need not be caricatured simplisticaUy as feminists accusing others of being ‘turncoats’ and ‘appeasers’. 65

Fraser, fustice Interruptus, pp. 1, 4-5.

FEMINISM, CO-OPTATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF AMNESIA

309

66 67 68

Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, pp. 4-5. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 116. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 113.

69

Alfredo Saad-Filho, ‘Marxian and Keynesian Critiques of Neoliberalism’, The Socialist Register 2008, pp. 341-2. Rowbotham, ‘Mapping’, p. 113. Fraser, ‘Feminism’, p. 117.

70 71

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT ELI ZARETSKY

I

n 1867 E. L. Godkin, the Irish-bom co-founder of the journal The Nation, commented on the wave of strikes that followed the American Civil War.

In America, Godkin wrote, the ‘intense class feeling’ so apparent in Great Britain did not exist. In Europe ‘the workingman on a strike is not simply a laborer who wants more wages: he is a member of a distinct order in society, engaged in a sort of legal war with the other orders’. In America, by contrast, the labourer doesn’t consider himself‘the member of an “order”’. He has an ‘independence of feehng, a confidence in the future’, the vote, and ‘the prairies’, in other words, free land.^ Nearly a hundred years later Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and other cold-war intellectuals confirmed Godkin’s hne of thought, which is often termed American exceptionalism. The United States, they argued, enjoyed a consensus concerning private property and what they called ‘individualism’ and therefore had no need for class consciousness. The consensus school’s conviction that America has already achieved such goals as democracy and equahty, goals toward which other nations were still striving, underwrote cold-war liberalism, as well as neo-conservatism. Still more recently Barack Obama reasserted the widespread view that America neither has nor needs a left. The left/ right distinction, Obama remarked, is a ‘psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago’. These claims, I argue in my recent book. Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument, are false and misleading.^ The United States has not only always needed, but has typically had, a powerful, independent radical left. While this left has been marginalized (as it is today), and scapegoated (especially during penods of emergency or ‘states of exception’) the indispensable role of the left has shown itself during periods of crisis, periods when the country’s identity was in question. In my book I argue that the country has gone through three such crises: the slavery crisis culminating in the Civil War, the crisis precipitated by the rise of large-scale corporate

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

311

capitalism, culminating in the 1930s, and the present crisis, the crisis of neoliberal globalization, which began in the nineteen sixties. Each crisis generated a left — first the abolitionists, then the socialists and finally the new left. Together, these lefts constitute a tradition, one that has been central to US history. The core of the American left has been a challenge to the liberal understanding of equahty — the formal equality of all citizens before the law. In place of that understanding, each of the country’s three lefts sought to install a deeper, more substantive idea of equality. For the abolitionists, the issue was pohtical equahty, specifically the belief that a republic needed to be founded on racial equality. For the socialists and communists, the issue was social equahty, specifically the insistence that a democracy could not exist unless all citizens enjoyed security in regard to basic necessities. For the new left, finally, the issue was equal participation or ‘participatory democracy’, not only in formal politics, but also in civil society, the pubhc sphere, the family and personal life. In each case, the left sought to expand and deepen the hegemonic understanding of equahty associated with liberalism. Far more than the struggle between left and right, the struggle between Hberalism and the left is at the core of US history. Without a left, liberahsm has become spineless and vapid; without liberalism, conversely, the left has often become sectarian and authoritarian. In this essay, I wiU argue this case in three steps. First, I want to clarify what we mean when we speak of a left. In my view, the left is both larger and different than socialism, but what exactly is it? I hope that a look at the specific character of the American left can at once broaden and make more precise the idea of a left in general. Second, I want to look at what we mean by crisis, since it is in periods of crisis that the left has proven so important in the United States. Finally, I want to describe the relevance of the left to America’s three great crises - the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the present crisis, whose character remains to be defined. I The idea of a left emerged along with the idea of revolution. Thus it was closely associated with a crisis or break in the social order and the attempt to create something new. The iconic representation of the idea of a left was born in the French Revolution. The concept emerged when the older estates dissolved and the National Assembly was created in France in 1789. Those who sat on the left (the Jacobins, the Montagnard) came to represent the egalitarian social revolution, while those who sat on the right (the Gironde) stood for the political revolution, which could coexist perfectly

312

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

well with social and economic mequahty. As Napoleon’s conquests spread revolutionary ideals throughout Europe, the left/nght distinction began to order seating arrangements within parliamentary democracies.^ Being ‘visual and spatial ... [the left/right dichotomy was] immediately understandable and easily translatable across cultures’. It may have been no accident, moreover, that the proponents of equahty sat on the left. In every society, apparently, the right symbolizes dominance, authority, and God; the left symbolizes rebellion, danger, discontent, and the plebeian status, as well as dissension and disorder.^ Often, the very words ‘right’ and ‘left’ suggest these connotations — for example, recht, droit and destra vs. links, gauche and sinistra. Because the distinction between left and right derives from the situation of the body in space, it has often been used to legitimate social power by seeming to ground it in nature. It may also be that the distinction is part of the elementary grammar by which we build up knowledge of the world, akin to up and down, forward and back, and inner and outer, in other words, to be ‘on the left’ may be a way of knowing, a mode of cognition, an orientation to the world. This suggestion gains force when we consider that there has been an historic shift in the nature of rebellion associated with the emergence of a self-conscious left. In earher societies rebelhon took the form of‘anger at the failure of authority to live up to its obligations, to keep its word and faith with the subjects’. Traditional rebeUion, such as peasant uprisings or bread riots, accepted ‘the existence of hierarchy and authority while attempting to make it conform to an idealized pattern’.^ The left, by contrast, questioned whether we needed particular forms of hierarchy or authority, such as kings, or capitalists, or ‘experts’ at all. Imphcit in the project of the left, then, was a critical theory of society. Unlike France, America did not have a parhamentary system with left, right and centre parties. In its place America developed a non-ideological two-party system. As a result, the term ‘left’ was not widely used in a political sense in the United States until after the Bolshevik Revolution. The first American book that I have been able to locate that uses the term ‘left’ in its title in a political sense is David Saposs’s Left-Wing Unionism, which appeared only in 1926. This did not mean, however, that America lacked a left before the Bolshevik Revolution. On the contrary, there existed powerful US counterparts to the radical democrats, utopian socialists and communist revolutionaries of nineteenth-century Europe. These included the radical wing of the abolitionists, what was later called the ‘lyrical left’ of John Reed and Randolph Bourne and an extremely militant working-class and tradeunion movement. Nonetheless, the importation of the term left from Europe

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

313

did make a difference; it permitted American leftists to reinterpret the history of US radicalism as on ongoing tradition, which hnked the socialists and communists of the Popular Front to earlier abolitionists, feminists, pacifists and so forth. The term’s generalization enabled post-Bolshevik movements to situate themselves in an ongoing tradition, so that the radicals of the 1960s called themselves a ‘new left’. In spite of this contribution, the place of communism within the history of the left was deeply ambiguous. The reason was the communist break with liberalism. Marx argued that the democratic revolutions were bourgeois revolutions and thus should be followed by sociahst revolutions. Whereas the idea of the left originally presupposed a centre and a right, Leninism sought to occupy the total political space. It used the terms left, centre and right to describe differences on the left, for example between Trotsky, Stalin and Bukharin. Thus, orthodox Marxists conflated the left with revolution, whereas many leftists, including the great majority of the American left, presupposed hberal and democratic institutions and were committed to preserving and deepening them. Nonetheless, Marx’s contribution to the history of the left is indispensable. When Marx described all of history as the history of class struggle, he gave us a conception of emancipation as a continuous struggle, which countered the notion, central to the liberal tradition, that we are already free, or that we live in ‘free societies’. Equally central, Marx is the only thinker who has provided a clear and lucid theory of capitalism, a social system organized through the division between capital and labour, and utterly distinct from a market or exchange society, as described, for example, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or in the work of such contemporary economists as Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz. Central to Marx’s refusal to accept capitalism as an historical end point was his insistence on seeing capitalism as intrinsically rmh-prone. The American left inherited the idea of a crisis from Marx, not just the kind of ‘economic crisis’ that characterized the Great Depression and that afflicts Europe and the United States today, but also broader crises reflecting Marx’s influence on modem historiography, such as ‘the crisis of the middle ages’, ‘the general crisis of the seventeenth century’, or ‘the crisis of the modem state’.

314

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

II Let me turn now to the second step in my argument, which concerns the role of crisis m the history of the American left. We can learn much about the character of crises by considering the Greek word krino, from which the word krisis derives. Krino means to pick out, to choose, to decide, to judge. A crisis is not simply an economic breakdown or a war, from which one needs to recover. More deeply, it is a turning point during which fundamental decisions are made as to a society’s future direction. Crises have narrative structures, as in the Greek tragedies, where the subject arrives at a decisive moment and must confront his or her fate. The heart of a crisis lies not in its objective character but rather in the subjective self-awareness of the one who is undergoing it, in our case the American people. It is during periods of crisis that the left becomes indispensable to the nation, so indispensable that the crisis cannot ever be truly resolved without the left’s active involvement. To understand why, we must distinguish ‘normal’ periods, emergencies and crises in US history. During normal or everyday periods the country does tend to get along with such ideas as individuahsm, plurahsm and private property, and with calls for ‘pragmatism’, ‘bipartisanship’, and passing beyond ‘obsolete’ left/right conflicts. During short-term emergencies, hke the Ahen and Sedition Acts of the 1790s, the red-scare of 1919, or the McCarthy period in the forties and fifties, the country reveals a surprisingly strong communal, religious and ethno-national core; it comes together as a whole people, but in a panicky way, joining to expel the ‘ahen element’. In crises, by contrast, Americans strive to form a new or revised agreement, an agreement on values, not a mere deal, compromise, or horse-swap. While the left is present during normal periods, and can be very important in resisting group pressures during states of exception, its special value lies in periods of crisis. To understand why, we must look more deeply into the nature of crises. In everyday politics pragmatism and automaticity can prevail, but crises require a deeper examination of core values. In that examination the liberal ideals of freedom and equality, which are the common sense of a democratic society like the US, come under a new pressure. In particular, the liberal view of equality as the formal equality of aU citizens before the law comes to seem inadequate to many. The liberal’s formal understanding of equality installs a deep ambivalence at liberalism’s core. On the one hand, as Marx noted, this idea often serves to disguise exploitation; on the other hand, as Marx failed to grasp, it can also serve as the departure point for struggles to build a deeper, more substantive

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

315

equality. Some political philosophers, such as Ronald Dworkin or Michael Walzer, believe that a consistent, vigorous liberalism can itself resolve this ambivalence. From a philosophical point of view, they may be right, but as a matter of historical comprehension, it was only when a radical, independent left put unremitting pressure on the liberal tradition that the country’s past crises were resolved. Crises, furthermore, have a two-fold character. On the one hand, they have a structural dimension. Each of America’s three great crises was associated with an epochal transformation in the deep structure of American capitalism; primitive accumulation in the era of slavery; capital accumulation in the case of the Great Depression; and finance-led globalization in the case of the new left. Such crises were not merely ‘economic’ crises, resolvable by allowing the value of goods and services to decline sufficiently. Rather, they involved tectonic shifts in the nation’s assumptions, values and direction. Thus, crises have an identity dimension as well. They are redefinitions or refoundings of the nation’s identity. To resolve them, the nation has to look inward and summon up its unconscious and inherited powers, not just rely on its everyday, commonsensical fund of assumptions. When the US does look inward, it gets in touch with the deep conception of equality — equality as the nation’s telos, as its very raison d’etre — to which the left adheres. Let me turn now to the three crises to elaborate this idea. Ill As I have said, the distinctive character of the American left is its close relation to liberalism, a relation at once tense and productive. We can see this if we think about American history as composed of two distinct but interwoven narratives. The first, which descends from the Revolution, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, highlights the continuous extension of existing rights to new subjects such as the freedmen, women and gays. The other narrative, which begins with the Civil War, stresses punctual moments in which the meaning of freedom is rethought and deepened in light of the country’s core commitment to equality. The first narrative is continuous, focused on the linear unfolding of what Americans call ‘the blessings of liberty’. The second is discontinuous, centred on the three great crises I have mentioned. The first views American society as inclusive and pluralistic, at odds with discrimination; the second sees it as fractal and conflicted, divided along lines that are more difficult to discern than, but also not excluding, those of race, gender and sexuality. The first narrative occults the role of the left. The second posits that each crisis generated a left crucial to its resolution and that together these lefts constitute a tradition.

316

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

Understanding American history as a series of three successive crises and not as a unilinear unfolding gives us a new view of American history. In this view, the actual founding of the United States was centred on its commitment to equality and justice, not simply on independence. Each crisis required a refounding of the country, a transformation of its identity. In each case, moreover, it was a left that supplied an indispensable component of the refounding, namely, a deep conception of equahty that spoke to the country’s identity. In each case, finally, it was the left’s conception of equality that gave a meaning to structural reforms that would have otherwise remained ambiguous. Consider first the abohtion of slavery. Beginning with the American Revolution, many Americans opposed slavery. But most were content with reforms intended to encourage its gradual, long-term dechne, such as returning the slaves to Africa, or hmiting the area in which slavery could be practiced. By contrast, the radical or ‘immediatist’ aboHtionists who emerged in the 1830s — many of whom were Free Negroes — linked the end of slavery to integrating schools and churches and accepting interracial marriages. They argued against those who denounced slave power but were unwilhng to accept Negro children into their schools or abolish the ‘Negro pew’ in their churches. ‘While the word “white” is on the statute-book’, argued the abohtionist editor Edmund Quincy, ‘Massachusetts is a slave state. The abohtionists were the first American left. They invented the repertoire of the subsequent left, including door-to-door leafleting, demonstrations, nonviolent direct action,

cultural and sexual experimentation,

and a

willingness to court martyrdom rather than give in to the majority. As with their Puritan forebears, one converted to abolitionism; abolitionism was a sect, not a church. But what distinguished the abolitionists from the Puritans, and justifies my designating them as a left, was their connection to mass democracy. The whole point of the two-party system, created in the 1830s and 1840s, was to keep so-called ideological or divisive issues, above all slavery, out of politics. By contrast, the abolitionists welcomed people of both sexes and races to their fairs, picnics, public meetings, and conventions. They created the first political arena - after the Quakers - where women spoke in public. The abolitionists — and their contemporary radicals — invented the distinctive tactic of the American radical tradition, which is agitation. As Wendell Phillips explained, ‘a democracy functions

morally

only if it has agitators who devote themselves to stirring public opinion. ... Only by being shocking, insistent, and intransigent can an agitator overcome public apathy and inertia, which always favor the status quo.’® The aim of agitation was to win the public’s heart to one’s convictions, not

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

317

to gain a particular reform. As Lydia Maria Child explained in 1842, ‘great political changes may be forced by the pressure of external circumstances, without a corresponding change in the moral sentiment of a nation; but in all such cases, the change is worse than useless; the evil reappears, and usually in a more exaggerated form’.^ Later American lefts followed the abolitionist precedent in that they sought to destroy the codes of compromise, propriety, and pluralism that govern protest in a liberal-democratic society. The Popular Front destroyed the identification with uphft, thrift, and social purity that had characterized earlier racial and ethnic protest movements.The 1960 sit-ins, which kicked off the new left, circumvented the ‘fraudulent communication and self-deception through which whites had historically denied black selfassertion. ... In an almost visceral way, [they] expressed the dissatisfaction and anger of the black community that a century of mediation and black leadership had suppressed.’" Why was it necessary to explode the proprieties and rules that governed democratic participation? The reason was that the great reform of the day, the abolition of slavery in the first case, was ambivalent in its meaning, capable of two different, even opposite valences. In the words of historian David Brion Davis, the ‘sense of self-worth created by dutiful work’ in the free labour system could become ‘a way of disguising exploitation’, on the one hand; or a spur to redeeming the ‘equality [of| people of subordinate status’, on the other.Without the abolitionists, slavery would eventually have been abolished. But the change would not have been linked to the project — however incompletely realized — of refounding the country on the basis of racial equality. The existence of a left gave the abolition of slavery its egalitarian meaning. It left a marker for future generations. Even if the marker was soon denied or ignored, it remained latent and available for future reactivation. Furthermore, the abolitionist insistence on racial equality was eventually taken into the mainstream, as in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Delivered in the rmdst of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that ‘all men are created equal’ was of ‘no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain ... it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use’, by which Lincoln meant emancipation. This concept of ‘future use’ runs through the history of the America left, as each successive incarnation took up the marker left by its predecessor, transformed it, and left it in turn for those who came after. The first American crisis had two dimensions: a structural dimension centred on the implications of slave expansion for control over the federal government, and an identity dimension centred on racial equality. Although

318

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

the structural dimension might have been addressed in any case, the identity dimension required a left, which gave abolition the meaning of racial equahty. The same constellation of a structural crisis linked to an identity crisis is true of the second American crisis, which centred on the rise of large-scale corporate capitalism. Not only technological and economic, the second crisis arose from the widespread perception among Americans that the rise of the large corporations or ‘trusts’ had created a new system of quasi-feudal estates. The dividing line was not so much worker vs. capitahst, or native-born vs. immigrant, as between those who could maintain a basic level of security m their lives and those who could not. The crisis of the 1930s required, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, ‘a reappraisal of values’, and a new direction for society. The goal was not merely ‘recovery’ but rather refounding, analogous to that of the Civil War. The heart of this second refounding was a new role for the state. The culmination of a long series of struggles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by labour movements. Populists and Progressives, the New Deal’s original idea was ‘planning’, the so-called ‘panacea of the age’. Nonetheless, the second American left emerged as a critique of business-dominated, technocratic planning. Thus the sociaHsts and communists insisted that only an organized working class, including but not restricted to industrial unions, could have the heft to bend market forces to meet popular needs. The great legacy of the second left was not the idea of public ownership but rather the transformation of American democracy via the mobilization of the lower classes. Without the left the American state would have been transformed in any case. But it might well have assumed a more nationalistic, intolerant, racist, anti-Semitic and, in a word, fascistic character, like its counterparts in Germany and Italy or become bureaucratic and dictatorial as in the Soviet Union. As it was, the New Deal was inflected with the values and meanings created by a broad-based series of social democratic and anti-capitalist movements, including those among industrial workers, African-Americans, ‘illegal’ inrmigrants and women. The New Deal in general, and Franklin Roosevelt in particular, are often credited with ‘saving’ liberal democracy, meaning that when other nations turned to fascist and communist solutions, the United States held fast to its founding ideals. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. Liberalism survived the Great Depression only by appropriating principles of social equality pioneered by the left. The point, once again, is that the New Deal reforms were ambivalent in their meaning. Just as slavery would have ended without the abolitionists, so the modern state would have been created without the socialists. Such a

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

319

state was necessary to unify the masses of immigrants, ethnic groups, regions, states, and localities that constitute our vastly heterogeneous and internally divided continent, heir to the decentralized, self-governing, British imperial system. Such a state was also needed to organize elites, rationalize new forms of knowledge and technology, and provide the planning and research, the centralized, flexible forms of credit, the management of capital, the investment in the underdeveloped parts of the country (the South and the West), all of which the New Deal did, or tried to do. But without the left none of these activities would have been associated with the ideal of social equality. By elaborating the ideal of social equality, both for current and future use, the socialists provided an egalitarian meaning to the otherwise conflicting and particularistic tangle of laws and agencies that was the New Deal. The role of the left can be seen in relation to Keynesian spending, the New Deal’s most lasting attempt at a systemic reform. On the one hand, government spending could be interpreted in terms of an apolitical ideology of ‘growth’ and concentrated on military expenditures, in which case it would be vulnerable to the politics of the budget deficit or ‘austerity’, as occurred in the 1970s and as is occurring again today. On the other hand, the problem that Keynes called inadequate demand could be interpreted as aiming to reduce and eliminate structural inequality, as it was with the Wagner Act, which put the force of the government behind unions, and with Social Security, which turned one of the poorest segments of the population, the elderly, into one of the most secure. To the extent that the New Deal aimed at reducing structural inequality and not at growth alone it was thanks to the second American left. Thus, just as the abolitionists helped put racial equality at the centre of American history, so the Popular Front leftists put social equality there. Finally, let us turn to the new left. Of the three case studies I have written about, the new left is the most difficult to comprehend. This is in part because it is still recent, and its historiography is just beginning, and in part because of its diversity, as it was composed of many movements, including the radical wings of the civil rights and Vietnam War movements; new and unexpected forms of social protest, such as ecology, second-wave feminism (‘women’s liberation’) and gay liberation; and took place in new sites of struggle such as schools, prisons and hospitals. Above all, I need to address the following question; in what sense can one claim that the new left was engaged with a long-term crisis, comparable to the crises of slavery and industrial capitalism, comprising both a structural and identity dimension? By the new left, I mean what was then called ‘the movement’, the

320

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

activists of the sixties who intervened in the three great mass movements of the time: civil rights, anti-war, and feminism. In calling itself‘new’, the new left sought to distinguish itself from the ‘old left’, i.e., the sociahsts and communists of the Popular Front. The difference lay in the different stages of capitalism from which the two lefts arose. From the ‘Old left’ point of view, the emancipation of ‘man’ from nature depended on building up collective institutions, such as trade unions, and on gaining influence and ultimately control over the state. By contrast, the new left arose not from the accumulation of labour, but from the release of (first-world) labour from direct engagement in material production, in other words from the scientific, technological and educational revolution that has produced the wealth of our time. The increasing productivity of labour was experienced in the sixties under such rubrics as ‘affluence’, automation and ‘the triple revolution’, in the seventies as ‘deindustrialization’, in the eighties and nineties as the international spread of finance and services, and today as an unemployment crisis based on global overcapacity and on fiscal austerity imposed by states in defence of banks. Beginning after the Second World War, capital organized itself globally as the United States first sought out foreign markets and then invested abroad. The disaggregation of market forces - their global dispersal and escape from state controls - was associated socially with massive immigration flows and the rise of the two-eamer family and intellectually with what Daniel Rodgers has called ‘the age of fracture’, meaning the return of neo-classical economics, the rational choice revolution in pohtical science and sociology, the reduction of psychoanalysis to neurobiology, and the postmodern attack on subjectivity. The new left emerged at the beginning of this process, the 1960s. In the words of Samuel Huntington:

The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. ... People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents. ... Discipline eased and differences in status became blurred. Authority based on hierarchy, expertise, and wealth ... ran counter to the democratic and egalitarian temper.'^

Within the context of this democratic surge Kristin Ross, writing of France, called the new left’s distinctive characteristic ‘dis-identification’, meaning freedom from the imposition of social roles. May ’68, Ross writes.

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

321

had little to do with the social group — students or ‘youth’ — who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinants, with displacements that took people out of their location in society, with a disjunction that is, between pohtical subjectivity and the social group ... a shattering of social identity that allowed politics to take place.''* These brief considerations give us a clue as to how to situate the new left within the overall history of the American left. There would have been a cultural revolution in the 1960s had there never been a left. One did not need a left to see that the sixties marked the first full-scale emergence of mass consumer culture, with its uninhibited vibrancy and sex-appeal, its reliance on youth and on racial and sexual sub-cultures, its unprecedented international exchanges in design, music, film, its rights revolution and its massive entry of women into the labour force. One did not need a left to see that cold-war liberalism had produced a ‘democratic faith lacking in deeper emotional resources’.'^ One did not need a left to see that this lack might encourage a religious awakening, shown not only in the importance of religion to the civil rights movement, but also in Zen, Indian music, meditation and the Christian search for existential authenticity. Without the new left one would likely still have had the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Hair, Pop Art, Jimi Hendrix, John F. Kennedy, Marshall McLuhan, Buckrmnster Fuller, Mary Quant, colour TV, jet travel, transistors, and ‘the pill’. One did need a left, however, to break through the iron vice of coldwar thinking, to expose the alliance between Democratic Party liberals and Mississippi segregationists, to grasp the corporate and military control of the universities, to face the shocking sycophancy of American intellectuals in the face of power, to acknowledge the almost incalculable extent to which the government lies to its people, especially concerning war, to grasp the continuity between racism, colonialism, and the war in Vietnam, to see that schools, prisons and doctor’s offices were sites of power, to develop critical subfields in every academic discipline, to see sexism as a deep structure of human history, not simply a form of discnmination, and to build ties of solidarity with the poorest people on the planet, and with homosexuals, women and racial minorities. Like its predecessors, then, the new left brought an egalitarian twist to a major structural transformation of capitalist society. The effects of the new left on American society and culture have been almost incalculable. An entirely new consciousness of both race and gender has transformed language, life-style and institutions. There is a persistent

322

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

scepticism toward American intervention abroad. Academic life has been transformed, not only by the entry of minorities and women, but also by the creation of whole new sub-fields and by the critique of canonical knowledge. A host of new pohtical issues including abortion, gay marriage and ecology occupy centre stage. A moral revolution in the treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill, patients, and immigrants occurred. The churches, especially but not only the Catholic Church, developed hberation theologies. The election of a black President in 2008, whatever his pohtics, testifies to the impact of the civil rights movement. We are only at the beginning of understanding the full implications of the attack on patriarchy and on ‘compulsory heterosexuahty’, and of the questions of‘identity’ that opened up in the early seventies. Yet the new left today is widely considered a failure, and this must be directly addressed. Two different senses of‘failure’ need to be distinguished. In one sense, the left will always ‘fail’, because it stands for utopian ideals that cannot and will not be realized in the immediate present. This ‘failure’ is actually a form of success, because it means that the left is guided by the long-term project of deepening equality. At the same time, it is appropnate to speak of ‘failure’ in another, less positive sense: the new left’s failure to build a continuing radical presence after the movement itself went into decline. For reasons that we have not yet fully understood, the identity dimension of the 1960s crisis of post-industrial, globalized America outran the systemic dimension. The explosive possibihties for freedom released were not complemented by an ongoing pubhc, rational attempt to understand the historical situation of the country and the problems that confront it. In this sense, we can look at the new left as Lincoln looked at the Declaration of Independence, as having been put there ‘for future use’. It remains our marker for thinking through the problems of the left today. The reasons for the marginalization of the left that began m the 1970s are complex, but it is worth noting that the loss did not occur overnight. The country hovered between left and Right for most of the 1970s and, contrary to appearances, never decisively shifted to the Right. There was never what political scientists call a ‘critical election’ establishing a mandate for Reagan or Bush comparable to the elections of Lincoln m 1860 or Roosevelt in 1932. Many episodes since then, including a factitious impeachment, a stolen election, two misguided wars, and a remarkable series of missed opportunities, including 1989, 2001 and 2008, testify to a deepening sense among Americans that their country is m long-term and hard to comprehend difficulties. Given the antinomianism released in America in the 1960s, one might argue that what America needs today is not another

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

323

left, but rather more authority, leadership, and responsible elites. Against this argument stands the weight of American history as I have presented it here. In America’s two previous crises, it was a reconceptualization of the goal of equality, and a recommitment to that goal that paved the way to a successful resolution. IV What light, finally, does this perspective cast on the present-day crisis of finance capital? Each crisis in American history gave rise to a solution, but contradictions inherent in that solution generated the next crisis. Chattel slavery became important along with the rise of trade in mass (i.e. non-luxury) commodities, such as sugar, textiles and tobacco, but this trade eventually produced a culture at odds with chattel slavery. Slavery was replaced by free labour and a market society, but between the 1890s and the 1930s, free labour and a market society generated trusts, monopolies and finally the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the US created a powerful interventionist state - the Keynesian welfare state - and introduced redistributive policies. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the Keynesian welfare state gave rise to stagflation, deindustrialization and the collapse of a global order premised on the convertibility of the dollar to gold. After 1968 the nation moved toward a new, finance and debt-driven form of consumer society. With the new predominance of global financial markets, the US did what Great Britain had done a century earlier. It relinquished its industrial primacy and encouraged its capitalists to invest abroad. In the words of Thomas McCormick, the US became ‘a rentier nation, living off the income of its rents - that is to say, its direct and indirect overseas investments’.'^ The Reagan Presidency of 1981-88, far from solving the economic problems of the seventies, initiated a huge expansion of debt, both public and private, fuehng a senes of increasingly dangerous bubbles, making redistnbutive policies impossible, and entailing increasing militarization. These policies were continued by Reagan s successors. The current depression, the worst econormc collapse since the thirties, was the result. Since 2007 the word ‘crisis’ has been increasingly deployed. Can we speak of the coming period as one that is approaching a crisis, in the sense that the Civil War and the 1930s were crises? The measure of this will be not so much whether conditions are becoming worse, but rather whether the unjust bases of those conditions are becoming manifest. In this regard, Obama’s surprising victory in the 2008 contest for the Democratic nomination reflected the strength of the anti-war movement of the Bush

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

324

era, itself an incipient American left. Obama himself called at that time for a change not in policies but in mindsets. Given the investment of the American left in a historic Presidency — the first African-American to win the office — Obama’s self-defeating policies of‘bipartisanship’, capitulation to the banks, and his assault on civil liberties, proved profoundly disheartening. On the other hand, widespread anger at the ‘1 per cent’, evident in the positive response of so many Americans to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, bore out one central claim of this essay: the irrepressible character of the American commitment to equahty, and spoke to a second: the impossibihty of a successful resolution of the problems of the current epoch without a robust, independent left. Let me end by restating four major points that have been central to this argument. First, the history of the American left has been discontinuous and episodic; the left has gained prominence only in moments of upsurge, occupying perhaps thirty or forty years of the nation’s 250 years of history. Second, the periods in which the left gained prominence were periods of crisis, by which I mean not so much wars or economic downturns, but rather periods in which the country’s core values needed to be interrogated and a new direction mounted. Third, in such periods the left does not provide a solution to the crisis. Many factors, such as leadership, the hberal tradition itself, and the global economic and pohtical configuration must converge before a crisis can be resolved. Nonetheless, the left’s contribution is indispensable. It hes in its passionate commitment to equality. That conmiitment helps provide an egalitarian meaning to the structural transformation that resolves the crisis. Fourth and finally, the key dynamic in American history is not left vs. Right, and certainly not a vacuous centre, but rather the argument between the left and mainstream liberalism. The left, at its best, is deeply engaged with the liberal tradition. NOTES

This essay was dehvered as the Ralph Miliband Lecture at the London School of Economics in May 2012, and a much shorter version appeared in the newspaper. In These Times, on 5 April 2012. 1

Godkm IS quoted in Eric Foner, ‘Why is there no Socialism in the United States?’, History Workshop Journal, 17(1), 1984, p. 58.

2 3

Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Steven Lukes, The Grand Dichotomy of the Twentieth Century’, in Terence BaU and Rachard Bellamy, eds.. The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century

4

Political Thought, London: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 606. J.A. Laponce, Left and Right: The Topography of Political Perception, Toronto:

RECONSIDERING THE AMERICAN LEFT

325

University of Toronto Press, 1981, p. 27. 5

Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, Glencoe, II.: Free Press, 1960.

6

Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, New York:

7

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, New York:

8

Wendell Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830,

Random House, 1978. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, p. 21. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984, p. 19. 9

Quoted in Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850, Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 1989, p. 23.

10

Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p.

20. 11

Gaines, Uplifting the Race, pp. 116-7, 138-9.

12

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New

13

Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The United States’, in Michael J. Crozier, Samuel P.

World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 248. Huntington andjoji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, New York: New York 14

University Press, 1975, pp. 74-5. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its After-Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

15

2002, pp. 2-3. Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, New York: Columbia University

16

Press, 2002, p. 3. Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 164.

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM ALEX CALLINICOS

I

t has become conventional to say that the biggest crisis of capitahsm since the 1930s differs from its predecessor in that it has not led to a

growth of the radical left.' And indeed it’s true we have yet to see anything remotely comparable to the Popular Fronts in France and Spain or the mass strikes and sit-downs that unionized basic industry in the United States during the mid-1930s. The puzzle is even deeper, since the pohcy response, despite the massive bailouts of the banks, has been to seek further to entrench neoliberalism, through, for example, the implementation of fiscal austerity and renewed bouts of privatization and other supply-side ‘reforms’ - in marked contrast with the fumbhng towards more statist policies that characterized the bourgeois response to the Great Depression of the 1930s.^ Of course, there are contrasting trends — most importantly the Arab revolutions, themselves in part the effect of neoliberal pohcies m the Middle East and North Africa, and the example they have offered, above all to the Occupy movement. But, though the radical left has been involved in these struggles, it is very far from being the dominant force in them — a very different picture from the expansion of both mainstream communism and left social democracy during the 1930s. It remains to be seen how far the success enjoyed by Jean-Luc Melenchon of the Front de Gauche m the first round of the French presidential elections in April 2012 and the spectacular advances ofSyriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in the Greek elections of May and June 2012 mark a real change m the fortunes of the radical left. On the intellectual scene, however, the picture has been somewhat different. There has been an explosion of discussion of the idea of communism. Now this is, when one thinks about it, quite remarkable. ‘Communism’ is a term so closely associated with the Stalinist regimes (where generally parties that called themselves Communist held power) that often Marxists seeking to distance themselves from them have preferred to use the term ‘socialism’ (suitably qualified, as revolutionary socialism, or real socialism, or whatever)

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

327

to characterize their own alternative. This option has not been so easy in countries where the social-democratic mainstream called itself‘socialist’ and the word ‘conmiunism’ had a greater legitimacy because of the role played by communist parties particularly in the struggle against fascism. But it’s nevertheless fair to say that communism has until recently been rarely a subject of much theoretical discussion, let alone something that has come up in agitation. This is a term associated with particularly uncompromising affirmations of the Marxist project. In the April Theses that Lenin wrote on his return to Petrograd in 1917, he proposed that the Bolsheviks (whose official name was the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party) should convene a congress, not only to adopt the ‘demand for a “commune state’” based on the seizure of power by the soviets, but also because: ‘Instead of “Social Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed and deserted to the bourgeoisie ... we must call ourselves the Communist Party ? So why the renewed intellectual currency of communism among critical theorists? The process began with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s book Empire, whose famous closing sentence evokes ‘the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist’."* Appearing in 2000, in the wake of the Seattle protests. Empire played an important role in reintroducing a certain kind of Marxist language into the new movement against neoliberalism and war. In as much as Hardt and Negri subsequently developed their conception of communism, it was, particularly in the third book in the series they have produced together. Commonwealth, in terms of the concept of the common - by which they mean not simply natural resources that are or should be held in common but other kinds of goods that are collectively created but expropriated by capital. For Hardt and Negri, communism is the process of re-appropriation of the common already under way in a capitalism increasing parasitic on different forms of social creativity. This is one version of a widely shared view by autonomist Marxists, and sometimes expressed by rewriting ‘communism’ as ‘common-ism . It rests on a deeply mistaken understanding of capitalism. It presents capital as a substance that flourishes through battening onto the good things of the world. As Hardt and Negri put it, ‘[cjapital thus captures and expropriates value through biopolitical exploitation that is produced, in some sense, externally to it’; accordingly rent - the appropnation of surplus value by actors external to the production process — supplants profit.^ Not only does this abandon Marx s central conception of capital as an internal relation binding together exploiter and exploited, but it gravely underestimates the dynamism of capitalism as it economically transforms large portions of the globe even during the present

328

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

era of crises. Thus contrast Marx’s comment: ‘Capital is productive of value only as a relation, in so far as it is a coercive force on wage-labour, compelling it to perform surplus-labour, or spurring on the productive power of labour to produce relative surplus-value’.^ But the most decisive intervention in reawakening discussion

of

communism came from a very different, and in some ways surprising quarter. In 2007 the philosopher Alain Badiou wrote what was then the latest in a series of short polemical essays responding to shifts in the current politico-ideological conjuncture called Circonstances. Devoted to making sense of Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as President of the French Repubhc, the book included a chapter devoted to ‘The Communist Hypothesis’.^ The attention that this text attracted provided the stimulus for a large, and widely publicized conference devoted to the ‘Idea of Communism’ orchestrated V

chiefly by Slavoj Zizek in London in 2009. Badiou’s original essay and the one he dehvered at the London conference have in turn been the subject of much discussion by Zizek and by many other left philosophers (myself included).® Why was this a surprising development? Badiou has after all emerged as the leading philosopher of the French left over the past decade or so. Bom in 1937, he first attracted attention in the 1960s as a pupil of and a collaborator with Louis Althusser (although Althusser’s great opponent Jean-Paul Sartre has always been a major reference point for Badiou). After 1968 Badiou established himself as one of the most important voices of French Maoism, but a long complex text entitled Theorie du sujet that appeared in 1982 represented his apparent abandonment of Marxism (though it embodied a much more extended process of reflection). Hence the unexpected quality of his reaffirmation of the idea of communism. Badiou’s reputation grew on the basis of an austere and challenging philosophical text, L’Etre et I’evenement (1988). Here, influenced both byjacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis and by the development of mathematical logic, Badiou developed an ontology that focuses on events as rare and improbable occurrences. They arise from situations whose relative but problematic coherence is reinforced by their duplication in a state (of which much more below) that sets limits to their possible variation. Events emerge from what the state prohibits; they may become the object of a fidelity through which a subject is constituted.^ In a striking application, Badiou interprets Saint Paul s reinvention of Christianity as a universal doctrine open to Jew and Gentile alike as a form of ffdelity to the event of Christ’s Resurrection: the bond established here between the exceptional and the universal is very characteristic.

There is a marked kinship between the ontologies of Badiou

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

329

and Sartre, whose mam philosophical work is, after all, called L’Etre et le neant — Being and Nothingness, as opposed to Being and Event. But for Sartre the negation through which freedom is possible defines every human subject. Badiou, by contrast, takes subjectivity to be just as exceptional as the events through which it is defined; he identifies himself with the anti-humanist decentring of the subject in which Althusser and Lacan played a central part. The increased attention that Badiou has attracted in the past decade, particularly in the English-speaking world, no doubt reflects aspects of his philosophical system — notably the importance he accords to truth, a refreshing contrast for those grown weary of postmodernist relativism, and the potential that his conception of subjectivity as fidelity to the event might offer as a way of thinking about specifically political agency." But some other quahties have been important. Badiou is a great rhetorician in the best sense of the world — the author of several novels and plays, he writes a lucid classical French prose, again very different from the willed ambiguity that Jacques Derrida’s influence made fashionable, and is a powerful orator. Long hostile to the neoliberal hegemony, his occasional essays have come to articulate the sentiments of those desiring to resist it. There have been moments when Badiou has come to take on the role of moral leadership that is a crucial element in the traditional French conception of the intellectual - perhaps most notably when he punctured the Islamophobia that corrupts even substantial sections of the French radical left in a memorable philippic denouncing a draft law that would forbid young Muslim women from wearing the headscarf at school." But it is one thing eloquently to combat what exists. It is quite another to point towards a different mode of existence. Daniel Bensaid, in his last major intervention, organized a special issue of the journal Contretemps, which he edited, and a conference around the theme: ‘Of what is communism the name?’ The answer, quite simply, is that it is the name of n systemic alternative to capitalism - not a reformed, humanized, better regulated version of capitalism, but a different kind of social order altogether. The significance of the debate about communism is (or, perhaps better, should be) that it puts discussion of this alternative on to the agenda. Given the very narrow parameters within which policy responses to the crisis have been canvassed, let alone implemented (mainly greater regulation of financial markets), this is an important and welcome development. But how well does Badiou’s formulation of the ‘Communist Hypothesis’ meet the demanding requirements implied by the idea of a systemic alternative to capitalism? In an initial presentation, he locates the idea of communism firmly within the Marxist tradition:

330

SOCIALIST MGISTER 2013

In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class — the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity — is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will ehminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.^^ But Badiou goes on to describe communism as ‘what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme’, ‘a pure Idea of equality’. For Kant a regulative Idea is an idea that is never completely fulfilled in reality but that incites constant efforts to organize experience according to its requirements. Badiou accordingly associates the idea of communism with ‘two great sequences in its development’ - first, the era from the Great French Revolution to the Paris Commune (1789-1871), and second, the era from the October Revolution to the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1917-76).*'' In my own response to ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, I suggested that, as is often the case with Badiou, his approach is at once too abstract and too concrete.*® It is too abstract in as much as, if one considers the content of equality as a political ideal, it seems consistent with a wider range of forms of social fomiations than those based on the collective appropriation of productive resources that is implied by the idea of conmiunism, at least as It is articulated by Marx, from the Communist Manifesto to Capital. An important contemporary example is provided by the largely Anglophone school of egalitarian liberalism inaugurated by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. These philosophers imagine that the quite radical conceptions of egalitarian justice they have formulated are at least in principle compatible with the persistence of capitalist economic relations. They are, m my view, mistaken about this, but they indicate the possibility of non-communist egalitarianism (something of which Marx was well aware, as his polemics against Proudhon and John Stuart Mill underline).*® Badiou s approach is simultaneously too concrete because he throws together without distinction aU the projects associated with what he sometimes

calls

historical

Communism :

‘the

revolution

prevailed,

either through insurrection or prolonged popular war, m Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and succeeded in estabhshing a new

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

331

order’.This tolerant vision avoids the question of, for example, in what sense the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can be seen as a figure of the ‘Communist Hypothesis’: what kind of revolution was it that arrived in Korea in 1945 in the baggage train of the Red Army? Badiou is himself far from uncritical of‘historical Communism’, as we shall see. But his undiscriminating approach is taken further when he announces the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not be — cannot be — the continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state — all the inventions of the 20th century — are not really useful to us any more. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical pohtics they have become unworkable. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it.'® So everything so generously included under ‘historical Communism’ is then disposed of in the dustbin of history. What would allow one to transcend this oscillation between excessively abstract and excessively concrete, in my view, is Marx’s critique of political economy. It was, after all, through this critique that communism as a transhistorical ideal (Badiou invokes the familiar names of Spartacus and Miinzer) could be transformed into a historically situated project that offered a resolution of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. From Marx’s perspective, capitalism is the terrain on which the question of communism is posed. It was the constitutive injustices and disorders of this economic system, and Marx’s diagnosis of these ills that defined communism in its modern form. As Marx and Engels put it in a famous passage in The German Ideology (as Bruno Bosteels points out, cited by almost aU participants in the debate started by Badiou), ‘[c]ommunism 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’. If we follow Marx, then, the answer that I gave above to Bensaid’s question needs to be amended: communism is at once the process of overthrowing capitalism and the terminus of this process. The criticism this implies of Badiou’s ‘Communist Hypothesis’ is quite widely shared. Thus Bensaid himself warns: ‘The temptation to subtract oneself from a critical historical inventory leads to reducing the communist idea to atemporal “invariants”, to turn it into a synonym for indeterminate ideas ofjustice or emancipation, and not the specific form of emancipation in the era of capitalist domination

332

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

Zizek too has for a number of years criticized Badiou for his refusal to engage in the critique of political economy and has himself more recently sought to renew this critique.^’ Unfortunately, the form that this renewal has taken has proved hopelessly confused, drawing eclectically on Hardt and Negri and on more sophisticated understandings of Marxist value theory. Badiou himself has responded disarmingly to such criticism. According to Badiou, Negri has accused him of being one of‘those who pretend to be communist without being Marxist’. He replies: I am also Marxist, innocently, completely, in a manner so natural that there is no need to repeat it. Would a contemporary mathematician try to prove that he is faithful to Euchd or to Euler? Real Marxism, which consists in the rational political struggle for an egahtarian social organization, began no doubt around 1848, with Marx and Engels, but it has travelled further since, with Lenin, with Mao, with some others. I have been nourished by these historical and theoretical lessons. I believe I know well the problems that have been resolved, whose instruction it is useless to repeat, the problems that await resolution, which demand reflection and experience, and the problems that were badly addressed, which require of us radical rectifications and difficult inventions. All living knowledge is made of problems, which have been or must be constructed and reconstructed, and not of repetitive descriptions. Marxism is no exception. It is not a branch of economics (theory of the relations of production), or a branch of sociology (objective description of “social reality”), or a philosophy (dialectical thought of contradictions). It is, let us repeat, the organized knowledge of the political means needed to undo existing society and deploy a figure of collective organization that is at once egahtarian and rational, whose name is “communism”.

Badiou goes on to reject theories of postmodern capitalism advanced most notably by Hardt and Negri, which portray ‘[a] capitalism that is on the verge of its metamorphosis into communism’:

My position is exactly the contrary: contemporary capitalism has all the traits of classical capitahsm. It conforms strictly to what one could expect of it, as long as its logic isn t countered by resolute and locally victorious classes. Take, m what concerns the becoming of Capital, all Marx’s predictive categories and we wiU see that it is now that their vahdity [evidence] its fully demonstrated.

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

333

What’s the problem? Badiou effectively says: I’m a thoroughly orthodox Marxist. The first thing to say about this is that it marks a shift. Badiou devotes an important chapter of L’Etre et I’evenement to a critique of the Marxist theory of the state. He does so by drawing on one of the main themes of his ontology, that every situation represents a merely provisional unification of elements in the chaotic void that is being (what he calls ‘inconsistent multiplicity’). This unification, or ‘counting-for-one’, requires reinforcement through its reduplication in the state of a situation. As Badiou has more recently explained, ‘I call a “State” or “state of the situation” the system of constraints that limit the possibility of possibilities’.^^ We can see here how he runs together his own ontological concept of the state of the situation with the politico-historical concept of the state. The resulting portmanteau concept makes Badiou’s argument hard to get hold of But he contends that Marx and his successors, in conceiving the political state as the result of class antagonisms, were mistaken both in failing to see this as one instance of a larger ontological truth and in according antagonism a constitutive role. This critique exemplifies what seems to amount to Badiou’s attempt to subsume what he deems to be valid in Marxism into a more abstract ontology whose focus is on events and the forms of subjectivity to which they give rise (it also signals his political preoccupation with the state, to which I return below).At this stage, at any rate, Badiou seemed to take up a respectful distance to Marxism, making it plausible to include him in the category of post-Marxism, alongside figures as diverse as Ernesto Laclau and Jurgen Habermas. But in Logiques des mondes, the second volume of L’Etre et I’evenement, published in 2006, Badiou apparently stepped back towards Marxism. He described himself as developing a ‘materialist dialectic’, in contrast to Negri’s ‘democratic materialism’, which he dismissed as ‘a poor man’s Spinozism’. In contrast to the essentially vitalist affirmation ascribed to Negri that ‘There are only bodies and languages’, this matenalist dialectic proclaims that there are also truths. Truths are for Badiou universal and eternal, but they are also plural and emerge in localized conditions, where events occur. A subject faithful to such an event incorporates the truth related to this event (Badiou gives the example of ‘the event-Spartacus’ whose correlative truth is that ‘Slavery is not natural’) This seems a funny kind of materialistic dialectic, particularly since Badiou devotes a chapter to Hegel in which, consistent with some of the deepest themes of his ontology, he seeks to demonstrate that no Whole exists. On the face of it this seems hard to square with the preoccupation with conceptualizing social formations as contradictory totalities that is common

334

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

to such otherwise different Marxist philosophers as Lukacs and Althusser, an approach powerfully continued in our own day by Fredric Jameson. One’s puzzlement is increased by a passage towards the end of this long book: Contrary to what happened in the Stalinist version of Marxism, the version that Althusser inherited while contesting it from within, it is essential to disjoin the materialist dialectic, philosophy of emancipation through truths, from historical matenahsm, philosophy of alienation through bodies-languages. To break with the cult of genealogies and narratives seeking to restore the past amphtude of the present. I already wrote more than twenty years ago, in Theorie du subject: History does not exist. There are disparate presents whose radiance is measured by the power they preserve to unfold a past that matches up to them.^®

How does this abrupt dismissal of history match up with Badiou’s most recent, ‘innocent’ avowal of Marxism? Note that in the passage cited above where he declares himself‘Marxist’, he brackets any specific content (theory of production relations or philosophy of contradiction, for example), describing Marxism as the ‘rational pohticzl struggle’ and ‘organized knowledge' required to achieve communism. He also compares it to mathematics, for him the queen of sciences. So his Marxism is about both science and pohtics. This chimes with an interesting passage where Badiou explains why he talks about the ‘Communist Hypothesis', invoking the analogy of ‘a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved’. He gives the example of Fermat’s last theorem, which resisted numerous attempts to prove it for centuries, until it finally succumbed in

1995: Many of those attempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself It was therefore vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis was not abandoned. As Mao puts it, the logic of imperialists and all reactionaries the world over is ‘make trouble, fail, make trouble again’, but the logic of the people is ‘fight, fail, fail again, fight again ... till their victory

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

335

This analogy offers what is in many ways an attractive reformulation of the idea of communism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (particularly since persistence was, in the case of Fermat’s last theorem, ultimately rewarded). But Badiou’s fine (and highly Hegelian) formulation that ‘failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis’ brings history back in. Indeed, shortly after announcing that ‘History does not exist’, Badiou recommends that ‘one reconstitutes a different past, a history of accomplishments, discoveries, processes, that is not at all a cultural monumentality, but a readable succession of fragments of eternity’, a conception of historical writing that, at the level of abstraction at which it is posed, bears some resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s attempt to develop a method of dialectical images in opposition to both historicism and evolutionism.And the most recent volume of Circonstances, devoted particularly to the Arab revolutions, is called The Rebirth of History. More concretely, Badiou, in championing the idea of communism, has started to engage with some histories that belong to its first two ‘sequences’ — specifically, those of the Paris Commune, May 1968 in France, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The last of these has particular resonances for Badiou, since his opponents often seek to rub his face in his past Maoism, a peculiarly ineffective exercise, since he is happy to flaunt it - for example, studding an excellent article in Le Monde on the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions with sub-headings taken from various sayings of Mao.But this is not to say that Badiou is content dogmatically to reaffirm Mao Ze-dong’s thought. Running through his discussions of the Commune, May ’68 and the Cultural Revolution is the disabling effect, even on the revolutionaries he most admires, such as Lenin and Mao, of an orientation on state power and of the adoption of the party form as the means of attaining it. Thus for Badiou the significance of the Commune lies above all in the break it represented with the ‘left’ - the professional politicians who from the 1840s onwards sought to use popular struggles as means to strengthen their

position

within

the

prevailing

‘capitalo-parliamentarian’

order;

‘For the Commune is what, for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements’. But the French left’s complicity with ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’ is merely one form of an entanglement with the state from which even the most resolute communists have found it impossible to escape. Thus in a detailed discussion of the Cultural Revolution, Badiou describes how Mao finally agreed to the restoration of order in 1968. Mao sought to mitigate the repression suffered by the Red Guards he himself had mobilized against his opponents in the Chinese Communist Party by, for example, sending organized workers (and

336

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

not the People’s Liberation Army) to take control of Peking University away from the Red Guards: We can clearly see that Mao, by bringing in the workers, wanted to prevent the situation from turning into one of “military control”. He wanted to protect those who had been his initial allies and had been the bearers of enthusiasm and political innovation. But Mao is also a man of the party-state. He wants its renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. In the end he knows fuU well that by subjugating the last outpost of young rebellious ‘leftists’, he eliminates the last margin left: to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural Revolution: the hne of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis — nobody does — as to the existence of the state, and because the large majority of people after two exalted but very trying years, want the state to exist and to make its existence known, if necessary with brute force. ‘Historical Communism’ is thus fatally compromised by its orientation on the state. But imphcated in the shipwreck is also the very form of the party so closely associated with the communist project:

The party-form has had its time, exhausted in a short century by its statist avatars. Appropriate to the military conquest of power, the Communist parties were proven incapable of doing on the grand scale what is definitively the sole task of a state in the course of withering away: resolving in creative ways the contradictions within the people, without adopting the model, when confronted with the least difficulty, the terrorist mode of resolving contradictions with the enemy

The implication seems it was the imbrication of party and state that was responsible for the Stalinist Terror — a claim made at such a high level of abstraction and at such a distance from the historical evidence that it is hard to know how to assess it. Of course, the question of state and party has been at the centre of many theoretical and strategic debates among and between Marxists, anarchists and social democrats over the past century and a half. But the angle from which Badiou approaches the state is a peculiar one. It is not altogether lacking in concreteness. He tends to focus on the state as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. For example:

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

337

The state can almost be defined as an institution disposing of means to impose on an entire population norms that prescribe what derives from this state, the duties that it imposes and the rights that it confers. Within the framework of this definition, the state fictions an identitary object (for example the ‘French’) to which individuals and groups are obhged to be as similar as possible in order to deserve the positive attention of the state. Whoever is declared to be markedly different to the identitary object is equally entitled to the state’s attention, but in a negative sense (suspicion, control, internment, expulsion Undoubtedly this way of conceptualizing the state captures an important aspect of its activities in the neoliberal era. (Badiou’s preoccupation with the state as the fabricator of an imaginary collective identity probably at least in part reflects the work of the Organisation politique, the post-Maoist groupuscule in which he is an activist, among immigrant workers in the Paris suburbs.) But one can think of other things advanced capitalist states do: for example, despite the restructuring of the past generation, the state remains a large-scale redistributor of income and provider of services, as well as the locus of macroeconomic management. All these functions are at stake in contemporary struggles over austerity. Properly taking them into account of course needn’t lead to social-democratic conclusions, but once one does it becomes harder to maintain the disdain that Badiou consistently displays for the everyday poHtics of bourgeois democracy. Like it or not, this is the terrain on which distributional struggles - in which the ideal of equality is also potentially at stake - are hkely, at least, to start. At a theoretical level, however, Badiou’s preoccupation with keeping the state at arm’s length does not lead him to agree with either anarchists, who seek to abolish the state immediately, or classical Marxists, who expect to see it wither away during the transition to communism. As we saw in his discussion of the Cultural Revolution, Badiou beheves that ‘nobody’ has ‘an alternative hypothesis ... as to the existence of the state’. But this isn’t simply a matter of not knowing how to do without the state. For the implication of the discussion of the state in L’Etre et Vhenement to which I referred above is that the imposition of a Active unity by the state that Badiou highlights is merely one instance of the ontological requirement that any situation reduplicates itself in a state that seeks to rescue the situation from ‘the peril of inconsistency’. Thus he reproaches Engels because ‘the machinery of counting-for-one [i.e. the imposition of unity] is reduced to a [class] excrescence, for lack of recognizing fully that excess that it deals is inescapable, because it is a theorem of Being’.^^

338

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

So the state is at once the death of emancipatory struggles and an ontological necessity. This makes the practice of politics - which Badiou insists is different from the state — tricky, as he himself acknowledges: ‘if the party-form is obsolete, what is there for an organized process that nourishes itself with a sort of rectitude and true fidelity to the struggle of the political generic — which has as its norm equality — against statist identity, which separates and suppresses?’ Badiou therefore doesn’t renounce organization, which he describes as ‘the crossing of an Idea and event’.He writes of the need for ‘a new discipHne, a practical discipline of thought. ...Today’s task, being undertaken notably by the Organisation Politique, is to support the creation of such a discipline subtracted from the state’.It is striking that he characterizes the process of an organization in subjective terms — disciphne, rectitude fidelity. This is entirely typical. During a discussion of ‘state revolutionaries’ — the Chinese Legists, the Jacobins, and the Maoists — whom Badiou admires despite their statism, he offers this characterization of ‘the truths of politics’: ‘All these truths articulate four determinations, wrU (against socio-economic necessity), equahty (against the estabhshed hierarchies, power or wealth), confidence (against anti-popular suspicion or the fear of the masses), authority or terror (against the “natural” free play of competition)’.^^ The priority Badiou gives to subjective qualities means that his avowed Marxism is skin-deep. Thus in the very text where he makes this avowal, he highlights

the importance of the distinction, in revolutionary Marxism, between the ‘classes’ and the ‘masses’. The first determine the field of the logical movement of History (the ‘class struggle’) and politics (of class) that have been clashing there. The second designate an originarily communist aspect of the people m motion, its generic aspect, by virtue of which an uprising is historic. One should not be deceived: it is ‘class’ that is an analytical and descriptive concept, a ‘cold’ concept, and ‘mass’ that is the concept by which one designates the active principles of risings, the real change. Marx always underlined this: class analysis is a bourgeois invention, initiated by the French historians. But it is the masses, much more indistinct, that are feared ...^^

This isn t simply dubious etymology (think of the whole problematic of mass society , which conceives the masses as atomized, uniform and passive). Badiou plays fast and loose here with a famous passage, highly relevant to discussion of communism, m a letter of Marx’s to Joseph Weydemeyer:

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

339

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois econonusts their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production-, 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless societ-y^'^ To say that the class struggle was discovered by the bourgeoisie doesn’t make it a bourgeois concept. As the passage shows, Marx integrates it into the very theory of history from which Badiou seeks to distance himself. It would be embarrassing to feel obliged to show that this theory and the role that it gives to class antagonism in constituting social formations are central to the theory and practice of politics in Marx himself, in Lenin, and also (albeit in a much more problematic way) in Mao."*’ The reason for Badiou’s attempt to deny this and for his real indifference (despite his protests) to the critique of political economy is less that he thinks Marx is wrong than that he is constructing a politics that lacks any concrete content. This is not to say that his analyses have no theoretical content at all, but this is provided by Badiou’s philosophical system. It is striking, for example, how recent discussions of the Paris Commune and the Arab revolutions involved detailed re-descnptions of them in terms that derive particularly from Logiques des mondes^^ It is not that these descriptions lack interest. Badiou is highly intelligent, he has studied the struggles in question closely, and his philosophical preoccupation with the exceptional and with subjectivity allow him to thematize important aspects of the situations he is addressing. The problem is partly that the highly abstract character of the philosophical vocabulary he uses means that much of the specificity of the situation disappears. It is exactly this specificity that ‘cold’ class analysis is intended to capture, starting with the particular distribution of material resources and structure of social relations that provide the context in which struggles develop.'*^ Thus, to take two cases discussed in Badiou’s most recent book, the English riots of August 2011 centred on poor, often unemployed urban youth in an advanced capitalist democracy; by contrast, the Egyptian revolution detonated a dictatorial Arab regime closely allied to the United States and Israel in a society that, though increasingly urbanized, still has a large petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. Of course there are features in common - the

340

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

leading part played by the disaffected young, coordinating often through social media and the like (though Badiou refreshingly ignores the fashionable chatter about the Twitter generation), and the continuing pressure exerted on every society by the global economic crisis, but analysing these has to be integrated with a grasp of what differentiates the Enghsh from the Egyptian cases, not as an academic exercise but to get a sense of the resources available to, and the obstacles facing, different struggles/"^ The absence of such concrete analysis is exacerbated by Badiou’s tendency to valorize a ‘rare and heroic’ subjectivity/^ Thus he celebrates the fact that a million people acting together in Tahrir Square came to be accepted as speaking for the Egyptian people: this necessarily ‘totally minoritarian movement’, defying not merely Mubarak’s dictatorship, but also the norms of representative democracy, expressed Rousseau’s General Will, which is nothing but ‘the emergence of a truth’But what Badiou regards as virtues are in fact the site of a political problem: the development of the Egyptian Revolution since February 2011 has involved precisely a gap growing up between the revolutionary minority, made up of predominantly young working class people, and the large majority who, though often sympathetic to the revolutionaries, have been willing to give the ruhng Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood a chance to renew the Egyptian state and society. The way in which the electoral process has been used to isolate the revolutionaries and to legitimize a bourgeois stabftization of Egypt speaks to Badiou’s hostiftty to representative democracy, but the tendency of the young vanguard to boycott elections simply plays into the hands of those seeking to marginalize them. This particular case illustrates the highly impoverished conception of politics with which Badiou operates. To a conception of the state as the enforced imposition of identity corresponds one of political organization as a pure vanguard shunning compromise. But the conception of the party in the classical Marxist tradition (as opposed to the Stalinist variants vrith which Badiou indiscriminatingly associates it) centres on a process of constant interaction between organized revolutionary militants and the larger masses of the oppressed and exploited. The development of this relationship depends on the party s involvement in struggles that mobilize workers around demands that they place on the state. Already in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx had identified a general movement of the working class that put demands on the state as a political movement; in Capital Volume I, he closely studied such a movement, for the limitation of the working day. The pertinence of these analyses remains undiminished, particularly in the light of, as noted above, the much greater redistributive role performed by

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

341

the contemporary capitalist state. It is struggles precisely in this area that have set Greece, and to a lesser extent Europe, alight in the past few years. To recogmze this is not to surrender to ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, but to face up to the elementary truth long understood by all the great Marxist practitioners of politics that the struggle against capitalism can only start from the working-class struggle within capitalism, not from some subjectively assumed Archimedean point outside it.'*’ Some years ago I accused Badiou of ‘ontologizing politics’ by casting into philosophical stone the highly subjectivist form of leftist politics that he sought to detach from his earlier Maoism.'*^ Despite the depth and seriousness of Badiou’s engagement with the ‘Communist Hypothesis’, it has done nothing to dislodge this judgement. This is not to dismiss the courage with which he has championed what to many must seem like the most lost of causes, and also, as I have already noted, the political value that can gained from renewed discussion of the idea of communism. But the criticism that Bensaid, myself, and others initially made, that failing historically to locate the communist project among the contradictions and struggles generated by capitalism as it exists today transforms it into a subjectivist abstraction, seems valid. Of course,

this is absolutely no reason for complacency.

Marx’s

contribution was historically to situate communism, but this involved two great weaknesses. First, he tended to assume that the overthrow of capitalism is inevitable: thus in the letter to Weydemeyer he says that ‘the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Secondly, he believed that conceiving communism as a historical movement freed him from the obligation to say much (apart from the interesting but fragmentary intuitions articulated in the Critique of the Gotha Programme) about the nature of the society emerging from this process. One of the great achievements of revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century, in the wntings of thinkers as different as Gramsci and Benjamin, was to rescue historical materialism from any doctrine of inevitability. But the collapse of Stalinism has deprived us of the refuge provided by Marx’s critique of utopian socialism from the necessity of elaborating a con vincing account of our alternative to capitalism. Let Bensaid have the last word, in what proved to be, alas, his final text, where he states very well the theoretical and practical challenge presented by the ‘Communist Hypothesis’: Communism is not a pure idea, or a doctrinaire model of society. It is not the name of a state regime, or that of new mode of production. It is that of a movement that, in permanence, surpasses/suppresses the established

342

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

order. But it is also the aim that, rising from this movement, orients it and allows it, unhke pohtics without principles, actions with consequences, day-to-day improvisations, to determine what draws closer to the aim and what makes a greater distance from it. In this respect, it is not a scientific knowledge of the aim and of the road, but a regulative strategic hypothesis. It names, indissociably, the irreducible dream of another world of justice, equality and solidarity; the permanent movement that tends to overthrow the existing order and the era of capitalism; and the strategic hypothesis that orients this movement towards a radical change in the relations of property and power, unlike those accommodations with a lesser evil that will be the shortest path to the worst.'^^ NOTES 1

For one statement of this view, see Susan Watkins, ‘Shifting Sands’, New Left Review, 610anuary-February), 2010; and, in response, Alex Callinicos, ‘The Radical Left and the Crisis’, International Socialism, 2(126), 2010. See also the more recent exchange (where Watkins emerges as a relative optimist): T.J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, and Susan Watkins, ‘Presentism? A Reply to T.J. Clark’, New Left Review, 74(March-April), 2012.

2

For some reflections on this puzzle, see Alex Callinicos, ‘Contradictions of Austerity’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 36(1), 2012.

3

V.I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’, in Collected Works, 24, Moscow; Progress, 1964, p. 24, n*. See also Lenin’s defence of the proposed name change in ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution’, Collected Works, 24, pp. 84-8.

4

Michael Flardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge MA: Harvard University

5

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth, Cambridge MA: Harvard

Press, 2000, p. 413. University Press, 2009, p. 141. 6

Karl Marx, Lite Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, XXX, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 399. I plan to develop both this critique and, more importantly, the positive account of capitalism on which it relies in a book on Marx’s Capital.

7

Alain Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, New Left Review, 49(January-

8

See especially Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, London: Verso,

February), 2008. 2009; ‘De quoi le communisme est il le nom ?’, special issue of Contretemps, No. 4, 2009; Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, eds.. The Idea of Communism, London: Verso, 2010; Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010; and Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, London: Verso, 2011. 9

I discuss L’Etre et I’evenement in The Resources of Critique, Cambridge: Polity, 2006, chapter 3. Peter HaUward has written an excellent critical study of

ALAIN BADIOU AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

343

Badiou s philosophy: Badiou: A Subject of Truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 10

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.

11

One must add that Badiou’s recent prominence is also a consequence of the American academy’s apparently structurally determined demand for Continental maitres-penseurs — something that Zizek has translated into the realm of celebrity. But this raises issues that I cannot pursue here.

12

A. Badiou, ‘Derriere la Loi foulardiere, la peur’, Le Monde, 22 February 2004. This conception of the intellectual is analysed by Pierre Bourdieu, himself an instance of the phenomenon, for example in The Rules of Art, Cambridge: Pohty, 1996.

13

Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, pp. 34-5.

14

Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, p. 36.

15

This and the following three paragraphs restate my discussion of Badiou in ‘Sur I’hypothese communiste’. Contretemps, No. 4, 2009.

16

I discuss egalitarian hberalism at length in Equality, Cambridge: Polity, 2000;

17

Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, p. 36.

18

Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, p. 37.

19

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, V,

and in The Resources of Critique, chapter 7.

Moscow: Progress, 1976, p. 49; Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, p. 19. 20

Daniel Bensaid, ‘Puissances de communisme’. Contretemps, No. 4, 2009, available at http://www.contretemps.eu.

21

For example, Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press,

22

Alex CaUinicos, ‘New Theorists of the Dialectic? Alain Badiou and Slavoj

23

Alain Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire (Circonstances, 6), Paris: Lignes, 2011, pp.

2006, pp. 317-28; and Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2010, chapter 3. Zizek’, Brumaria, No. 22, 2011. 18-19. 24

Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, pp. 21-2.

25

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 243.

26

A. Badiou, L’Etre et I’evenement, Paris: Seuil, 1988, Meditation 9; see my discussion in The Resources of Critique, pp. 98-9, 107-9.

27

Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil, 2006, pp. 44, 9, 12, 74. His

28

Badiou, Logiques des mondes, p. 531.

discussion of Hegel is on pp. 152-64. 29

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, pp. 6-7.

30

Badiou, Logiques des mondes, p. 532; on Benjamin, see, for example, Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1989.

31

Reprinted in Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, pp. 153-61.

32

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, pp. 197, 148; italics in second passage added.

33

Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, p. 101.

34

Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, p. 135.

35

Badiou, L’Etre et I’evenement, pp. 126, 127. Badiou goes on to refer briefly to Lenin’s and Mao’s unsuccessful struggles with the state, in terms very similar to

344

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 the passage on the Cultural Revolution cited above. This treatment of the state in L’Etre et I’evenement also includes an account of representation that provides the philosophical underpinnings

36

of Badiou’s

rejection of representative

democracy. Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, pp. 118-19, (the awkward syntax, unusual for Badiou, is in the original), 98. Badiou consistently, and problematically associates genericity and universahty with equality: see Calhnicos, The Resources of Critique, pp. 109-11.

37

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 228.

38

Badiou, Logiques des mondes, p. 36.

39

Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, p. 134. 1 have translated ‘emeute here as ‘uprising’ because, although Badiou starts in this book with a discussion of the EngHsh riots of the summer of 2011, he comes to focus on movements - the Arab revolutions and the 15 May movement in the Spanish state - that are much broader phenomena than riots.

40

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, XXXIX, Moscow: Progress, 1983, pp. 62-5.

41

For the record, Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 4 volumes.. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977-90. Conceiving class struggle as central to politics does not entail a reductionist treatment ofpohtics: see Alex Calhnicos, ‘Daniel Bensai'd and the Broken Time of Pohtics’, International Socialism, 2.135

(2012). 42

For example, Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, pp. 200-27; and Le Reveil de

43

Badiou’s difficulty in addressing these derives in part from his philosophical ban

44

For more analysis of, respectively, the Egyptian Revolution and the Enghsh

I’histoire, IX. on the concept of relations. See Calhnicos, The Resources of Critique, p. 107. riots, see Alex CaUinicos, ‘The Return of the Arab Revolution’, International Socialism, 2(130), 2011; and Jonny Jones, ‘August 2011: A Riot of Our Own’, International Socialism, 2(132), 2011. 45

Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 8.

46

Badiou, Le Reveil de I’histoire, pp. 90, 92.

47

On the classical Marxist conception of the party, see Tony Chff et al.. Party and

48

Calhnicos, The Resources of Critique, p. 108.

49

Bensai'd, ‘Puissances de communisme’.

Class, London: Bookmarks, 1997.

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM MICHAEL A. LEBOWITZ e are in the midst ofa class war. That’s not unusual. There is always class VV war in capitalism — although sometimes it is hidden and sometimes there is the interlude of an apparent Carthaginian Peace. But the class war has intensified now because of the crisis in capitalism — a crisis rooted in the over-accumulation of capital. And, in this crisis, capital has intensified the class war against the working class. Austerity, cutbacks, the need to sacrifice — these are the demands of capital as it calls upon workers to bear the burden of capital’s own failures. This is a war conducted by capitahst states against workers to compel them to give up their achievements from past struggles. And, in some places (but, unfortunately, not aU), we see that the working class is saying, ‘no’. In some cases, we see that workers are fighting to defend their past successes within capitalism and that they are fighting against the racism and xenophobia which are the default position when workers are under attack but are not in struggle against capital. Such struggles, as Marx knew, are ‘indispensable’ — they are the only means of preventing workers ‘from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less weU-fed instruments of production’.^ But, who will win this class war? In his recent book. The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou describes the past defeats of May 1968, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune as well as those of factory occupations and other such struggles as defeats ‘covered with glory’.^ Because they remain in our memory as inspirations, they must be contrasted, he insists, to the ‘defeat without glory’ that social democracy brings.^ This is certainly true. However, we need to acknowledge that the current struggles against capital’s attempt to make the working class rescue it from yet another of its crises may yet be added to the list of glorious defeats. Of course, it is necessary to try to stop the cutbacks and to communicate to capital how high its costs will be for attempting to shift the burden of its own failures to workers. And, of course, we must celebrate those struggles taking place wherever the working class has not

346

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

been anesthetised as a result of previous defeats without glory, leaving only what Marx once described as ‘a heart-broken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass’d But it is not enough to say ‘no’. There are those who think that an accumulation of loudly screamed no’s can be sufficient - let alone the ‘silent farts’ celebrated by John Holloway.^ These poets of negation demonstrate thereby that they don’t understand why and how capital reproduces itself Why is it that after so many defeats so many still cannot see what Marx grasped in the nineteenth century - that capital has the tendency to produce a working class which views the existence of capital as necessary? ‘The advance of capitalist production,’ he stressed, ‘develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural laws.’® Marx understood that capitalism tends to produce the workers it needs, workers who look upon capitahsm as common sense. Given the mystification of capital (arising from the sale of labour-power) which makes productivity, profits and progress appear as the result of the capitahst’s contribution, it followed that ‘the organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance’. And, Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed ‘sets the seal on the domination of the capitahst over the worker’ and that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s ‘dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them’.^ Obviously, for Marx, capital’s walls will never be brought down by loud screams or silent farts. Even with a certain resistance marked by struggles over wages, working conditions and the defence of past gains, as long as workers look upon the requirements of capital as ‘self-evident natural laws’, those struggles occur within the bounds of the capitahst relation. In the end, workers’ subordination to the logic of capital means that faced with capitahsm’s crises they sooner or later act to ensure the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital. Nowhere is this clearer than in the defeats without glory of social democracy. And, defeat when capitalism is in crisis means that capital can emerge from the crisis by restructuring itself- as it did internationally with the Bretton Woods package after the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s. As is often noted, there is a big difference between a crisis in capitalism and a crisis of capitalism. The latter requires conscious actors prepared to put an end to capitalism, prepared to challenge and defeat the logic of capital. But this requires a vision which can appear to workers as an alternative conmion sense, as their common sense.

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

347

Like the worst architect’, we must build our goal in our minds before we can construct it in reality; only this conscious focus can ensure the purposeful will required to complete the defeat of the logic of capital.® To struggle against a situation in which workers ‘by education, tradition and habit look upon capital’s needs ‘as self-evident natural laws’, we must s*^^uggle for an alternative common sense. But what is the vision of a new society whose requirements workers may look upon as ‘self-evident natural laws’? Clearly, it won’t be found in the results of twentieth century attempts to build socialism, which, to use Marx’s phrase, ended ‘in a miserable fit of the blues’.^ THE ‘KEY LINK’ FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOCIALISM 'We have to reinvent socialism'. With this statement, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, electrified activists in his closing speech at the January 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. ‘It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union,’ he stressed, ‘but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.’ If we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world, capitalism must be transcended, Chavez argued. ‘But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything’.^® There, at its core, is the vision of socialism for the twenty-first century. Rather than expansion of the means of production or direction by the state, human beings must be at the centre of the new socialist society. This marks a return to Marx’s vision — to the contrast he drew in Capital between a society subordinate to the logic of capital (where ‘the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization’) and the logic of a new society, that ‘inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’.’^This concept of the worker’s need for development is the culmination of Marx’s consistent stress upon the centrality of the development of human capacity - the ‘development of the rich individuality’, as the real wealth and explicit goal of the new society. Here was the ‘inverse situation’ which would allow for ‘the all¬ round development of the individual’, the ‘complete working out of the human content’, the ‘development of all human powers as such the end in itself, a society of associated producers in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.'^ But this is only one side of Marx’s perspective. A focus upon the full

348

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

development of human potential was characteristic of much sociahst thought in the nineteenth centuryWhat Marx added to this emphasis upon human development was his understanding of how that development of human capacities occurs. In his Theses on Feuerbach, he was quite clear that it is not by giving people gifts, not by changing circumstances for them. Rather, we change only through real practice, by changing circumstances ourselves. Marx’s concept of‘revolutionary practice’, that concept of‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’, is the red thread that runs throughout his work.^‘‘ Marx was most consistent on this point when talking about the struggles of workers against capital and how this revolutionary practice transforms ‘circumstances and men’, expanding their capabdities and making them fit to create a new world. But this process of changing ourselves is not at aU limited to the sphere of political and economic struggle. In the very act of producing, Marx indicated, ‘the producers change, too, in that they bring out new quahties in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language’.’^ And, certainly, the relations within which workers produce affect the nature of the workers produced. After aU, that was Marx’s point about how capitalist productive relations ‘distort the worker into a fragment of a man’ and degrade him and ‘alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’.'^ It is essential to recognise that every human activity has as its result 2. joint product — both the change in the object of labour and the change in the labourer herself.'* Unfortunately, that second product is often forgotten. Marx’s combination of human development and practice constitutes the key link. Taken seriously, it has definite imphcations for relations within the workplace — rather than capitalism’s joint product (the fragmented, crippled human being whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things), it implies a person who is able to develop all her potential through her activity. Taken seriously, that key link has definite implications for the nature of the state — rather than allowing us every few years to elect those who misrule us as our representatives to a state which stands over and above us, it implies what Marx called the ‘self-government of the producers’, the ‘reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces’.'^ Taken seriously, that key link has definite implications for the nature of the party — rather than a body that sees itself as superior to social movements and whose members are meant to learn the merits of discipline in following the decisions made by infallible central committees, it implies a party which learns from popular initiative and unleashes the creative energy of masses through their

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

349

own practice. Taken seriously, that key link has obvious implications for building socialism. Consider the characteristic of socialist production implicit in this key link.^° What are the circumstances that have as their joint product ‘the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn’?^’ Given the ‘dialectical inversion’ peculiar to capitalist production that cripples the body and mind of the worker and alienates her from ‘the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’, it is clear that to develop the capacities of people the producers must put an end to what Marx called, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour’. For the development of rich human beings, the worker must be able to call ‘his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain’. Expanding the capabilities of people requires both mental and manual activity. Not only does the combination of education with productive labour make it possible to increase the efficiency of production; this is also, as Marx pointed out in Capital, ‘the only method of producing fully developed human beings’.Here, then, is the way to ensure that ‘the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’.^'* The activity through which people develop their capacities, however, is not limited to the sphere of production as narrowly defined within capitalism. Every activity with the goal of providing inputs into the development of human beings needs be understood as an aspect of production. And the goals that guide production must be democratically estabhshed so that people can transform both their circumstances and themselves and thereby produce themselves as subjects in the new society.^^ The implication is obvious every aspect of production must be a site for the collective decision-making and variety of activity that develops human capacities and builds solidarity among the particular associated producers. When

workers

act in workplaces

and

communities

in

conscious

cooperation with others, they produce themselves as people conscious of their interdependence and of their own collective power. The joint product of their activity is the development of the capacities of the producers - precisely Marx’s point when he says that ‘when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’.^* Creating the conditions in workplaces and by which people can develop their capacities is an essential aspect of the concept of socialism for the twenty-first century. But it is only

350

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

one element. How can the worker’s own need for development be realised if capital owns our social heritage — the products of the social brain and the social hand? And, how can we develop our own potential if we look upon other producers as enemies or as our markets — i.e., if individual material self-interest is our motivation? Capitalism is an organic system, one which has the tendency to reproduce the conditions of its existence (including a working class which looks upon its requirements as ‘self-evident natural laws’). That is its strength. To counter that and to satisfy ‘the worker’s own need for development’, the sociahst alternative also must be an organic system, a particular combination of production, distribution and consumption, a system of reproduction. What Chavez named in January 2007 as ‘the elementary triangle of socialism’ (social property, social production and satisfaction of social needs) is a step forward toward a conception of such a system. Consider the logic of this socialist combination, this conception of socialism for the twenty-first century; 1. Social ownership of the means of production is critical within this structure because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of producers or state bureaucrats. But, this concerns more than our current activity. Social ownership of our social heritage, the results of past social labour, is an assertion that all living human beings have the right to the full development of their potential - to real wealth, the development of human capacity. It is the recognition that ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. 2. Social production organized by workers builds new relations among producers - relations of cooperation and solidarity. It allows workers to end ‘the cripphng of body and mind’ and the loss of ‘every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity’ that comes from the separation of head and hand. Organization of production in all spheres by workers, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers, for the development of their capabilities — a condition for the production of rich human beings. 3. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes as the goal of productive activity means that, instead of interacting as separate and indifferent individuals, we function as members of a community. Rather than looking upon our own capacity as our property and as a means of securing as much as possible in an exchange, we start from the recognition of our common humanity and, thus, of the importance of conditions in which everyone is able to develop her full potential. When our productive activity is oriented to the needs of

THE STATE AND THE FUTUIEE OF SOCIALISM

351

Others, it both builds solidarity among people and produces socialist human beings. These three sides of the ‘socialist triangle’ mutually interact to form a structure in which ‘all the elements coexist simultaneously and support one another’, as Marx put it. ‘This is the case with every organic whole.Yet, the very interdependence of the three sides suggests that realization of each element depends upon the existence of the other two. Without production for social needs, no real social property; without social property, no worker decision-making oriented toward society’s needs; without worker decision¬ making, no transformation of people and their needs. THE STATE’S PLACE WITHIN ‘SOCIALISM AS AN ORGANIC SYSTEM’ Is there a place for the state in socialism as an organic system? In the absence of a mechanism by which this particular combination of production, distribution and consumption can be realized, it remains purely a vision. Thus, implicit in the concept of socialism as an organic system is a set of institutions and practices through which all members of society can share the fruits of social labour and are able to satisfy their ‘own need for development’. To produce and reproduce ‘rich human beings’ in a society based upon solidarity requires a conscious attempt to ensure that the necessary conditions for full human development infuse all levels of society. Consider one possible scenario for a process of participatory diagnosis and planning.At the level of an individual neighbourhood, it is possible for neighbours to discuss directly the kind of community they want to live in and what they see as necessary for the development of their capacities and that of those around them.

While this process identifies needs, the discussion also

allows this community to explore its own ability to satisfy those needs itself; m other words, it identifies the capabilities of the community. Thus, at the level of the community, there is a direct attempt to coordinate the system of needs and the system of labours. In addition to being able to identify its needs and the extent to which those can be satisfied locally through the labour of community members, this process (which occurs under the guidance of elected neighbourhood councils) has a second product. By sharing and attempting to reconcile views of the most urgent needs of members of this community, there is a learning process - one in which protagonism builds and reinforces solidarity — i.e., the process of participatory diagnosis produces particular people, a particular joint product. At the core of this process, thus, is revolutionary practice — the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change.

352

SOCIALIST ILEGISTER 2013

Of course, the probabihty of a precise match between capabibties and needs within this community is negligible. The community is likely to have needs it cannot satisfy locally and capacities it does not need. In this situation, autarky supports neither the ability of people to secure the usevalues they identify as important for their development nor the satisfaction in meaningful activity that can come from meeting the needs of others outside their immediate neighbourhood. Thus, to satisfy ‘the worker’s own need for development’, the community needs to go beyond this barrier in order to coordinate with other communities in a larger body. The commune represents a further step, bringing together the information transmitted by local neighbourhood councils about the needs and capabibties of their communities as well as drawing upon the knowledge of workers within units of production in this geographical area.^^ Do workers have the capacity to satisfy the needs identified by the communities? By exploring this question in their workers councils, workers engage in conscious consideration of production options within their workplaces and focus upon the logic of producing for communal needs; however, to answer this question adequately requires more than responses from individual production units taken separately. By combining their knowledge and capabilities, workers in particular workplaces can achieve results which are greater than the sum of their individual parts taken separately. But, here again, more than a process of producing for communal needs and purposes occurs. Cooperation within and between units of production for this purpose generates solidarity among the combined workers and reinforces their understanding of the goals of production. Throughout this process, community members and workers can interact through communal meetings and a communal parliament. And, the result of the process is that the commune councils have at their disposal data on (a) needs that can be satisfied from within the commune and (b) the needs which cannot be satisfied locally. Further, there is information on (c) the potential output of workplaces that can be provisionally utihzed within the commune, and (d) the potential output of workplaces that is unutilized. Thus, there is both an indication of the level of needs that provisionally can be satisfied locally as well as identification of the excess demand and excess supply within each commune. To stop here would reproduce the problem of remaining at the level of the individual neighbourhood. To create the conditions for the free development of all, it is necessary to go beyond geographical barriers. Thus, this process is extended to larger areas: the data from communes is transnutted upward to cities (communal cities), to the states or provinces and

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

353

ultimately to the national level — to bodies composed of delegates from the communes, cities and the states, respectively. At the national level, then, it is possible to identify (a) provisionally satisfied needs, (b) unsatisfied needs, (c) provisionally assigned output and (d) provisionally unassigned output. It is fair to assume that there will not be a balance between needs and capacities at the first iteration. Accordingly, the process of reconciling the system of needs and the system of labours is an essential requirement of the set of institutions and practices characteristic of sociaUsm as an organic system. If there are excess needs, there are two logical resorts: (1) find a way to increase output (a question for workers councils to explore), and (2) recognise the necessity to reduce satisfaction of some needs.

Thus, a critical discussion must occur

here - what is to be unsatisfied? Exploration of this question requires a discussion of the relative requirements of different areas and the different types of needs to be given priority. It is only at this level that identification of national and regional inequality occurs as well as a discussion of priorities and choices for the society as a whole. This dialogue needs to take place not only at the national level but at every level down to the neighbourhood. Such a discussion is absolutely essential because, through such a process of participatory planning, people learn about the needs and capacities of others elsewhere in the society. There is no other way to build solidarity than to put faces upon other members of society. Thus, throughout this process, there are two products: development of the plan and the development of the people who participate in its construction. The result of this scenario is a process of production for communal needs and communal purposes in which protagonism within the workplace and community ensures that this is social production organized by the producers. Obviously, too, the third side of the socialist triangle, social ownership, is present in that there is neither production for capital nor production for any particular group, i.e. a process of group ownership. In each workplace, workers are conscious that their productive activity is for society. In short, begin with communahty, and the product of our activity is a communal, general product from the outset’.^^ How, though, could the concept of socialism as an organic system be made real in the absence of institutions and practices such as these? This combination and articulation of councils and delegates at different levels of society is necessary to ensure the reproduction of a society in which the ‘free development of each is the condition for the free development of all . And, it is a state - a particular type of state, a state from below, a state of the commune-type. This state does not wither away - rather, it is an integral

354

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

part of socialism as an organic system. Of course, some people may not wish to call this set of institutions a state because these are society’s ‘own living forces’ — i.e., not ‘an organ standing above society’ but ‘one completely subordinate to it’.^^* How would designation of this as a state be compatible with the view that, by definition, as Holloway puts it, ‘the state is the assassin of hope’?^® Like those who conceive of labour as inherently a burden (and thus can think of nothing better than to reduce it to zero), those who reject these institutions as a state demonstrate that they are trapped in the categories of old societies. Old habits die slowly, though. And, taxonomy should not trump content. So, if some people prefer to call these articulated councils a non-state or the ‘Unstate’, this should not present a problem - as long as they agree that socialism as an organic system requires these institutions and practices in order to be real. SUBORDINATING THE OLD SOCIETY: CONTESTED REPRODUCTION However, an organic system does not drop from the sky. In socialism as an organic system (to paraphrase Marx’s description of capitalism as an organic system), ‘every economic relation presupposes every other in its [socialist] economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system’.^* Yet, a new system never produces its own premises at the outset. Rather, when a new system emerges, it necessanly inherits premises from the old. Its prenuses and presuppositions are ‘historic’ ones, premises which are produced outside the system and which thus do not arise upon its own foundations. In short, every new system as it emerges is inevitably defective: it is ‘in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society’.^’ Accordingly, the development of an organic system is a process of becoming. ‘Its development to its totality’, Marx indicated, ‘consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.’^® In the 1920s, the Soviet economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky made this very point about how a new system develops. ‘Not a single economic formation , he argued,

can develop m a pure form, on the basis merely

of the inmianent laws which are inherent to the particular formation. This would be in contradiction to the very idea of development. The development of any economic form means its ousting of other economic forms, the subordination of these forms to the new form, and their gradual

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

355

elimination.’^^ So, what is to be subordinated? If socialism is to develop into an organic system, social ownership of the means of production must supplant private ownership; worker management must replace despotism in the workplace; and productive activity based upon solidarity and community must subordinate individual self-interest. And, of course, the old state must be transcended, replaced by the new organs which foster the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. Obviously, this cannot happen overnight. It also, however, is something that cannot take place in stages. The idea ol putting off some questions until a later stage is prepared is alien to a concept of an organic system. The continued presence of elements of capitalism does not simply mean that socialism is at yet incomplete because a few parts are missing. After all, what kinds of people are produced within the old relations? In fact, every moment that people act within old relations is a process of reproducing old ideas and attitudes. Working within a hierarchy, functioning without the ability to make decisions in the workplace and society, focusing upon self-interest rather than upon solidarity - these activities produce people on a daily basis; It is the reproduction of the conservatism of everyday life - indeed, the reproduction of elements of capitalism. The concept of socialism for the twenty-first century as an organic system theoretically posits what the experience of the twentieth century has demonstrated - the need to build all sides of the socialist triangle. One war, three fronts. In the absence of a struggle to subordinate all the elements of the old society, the new society is inevitably infected by the old society. And, the matter is worse if we choose homeopathic medicine to cure the infection. In short, rather than build upon defects (such as the orientation toward material self-interest that Marx warned about in his Critique of the Gotha Programme), the point is to subordinate them."*^ Just as capitalism, though, required the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production to be an organic system, socialism also cannot subordinate all elements of society to itself until it develops a specifically socialist mode of production. Consider capitalism before it developed to the point where it produced its own premises in their capitalist form - i.e., when it was still in the process of becoming. That process of beconung necessarily involved the contracted reproduction of the existing relations - relations Marx descnbed as ones in which the producer ‘as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist . The separation of producers from those means of production and the compulsion to sell their labour-power marked the beginning of capitalist relations. Wherever possible, however, workers attempted to extract themselves and

356

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

to become independent producers rather than to sell their ‘birth-right for a mess of pottage’. This possibility was always present as wages increased with the accumulation of capital in the absence of the specifically capitahst mode of production. ‘Two diametrically opposed economic systems’ were present - and not only in the colonies where the problem of non-reproduction of wage-labourers was most marked.”^^ The struggle over the subordination of the elements of production, thus, did not end with the original (or primitive) development of capitahst relations of production. Reproduction of those new relations was not secure until the development of the specifically capitahst mode of production that ensures reproduction of the premises of the system. ‘As soon as capitahst production stands on its own feet’, Marx noted, ‘it not only maintains this separation [between workers and the means of production] but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale.Until capital developed upon its own foundations, however, differing relations and differing logics existed simultaneously. So, what happens when differing relations coexist? Rather than peaceful coexistence, there is contested reproduction — with each system attempting to expand at the expense of the other. Considering the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Preobrazhensky argued that the state economy was in ‘an uninterrupted economic war with the tendencies of capitahst development, with the tendencies of capitalist restoration’.'^^ This, he proposed, was a ‘struggle between two mutually hostile systems’, a war between two regulating pnnciples - one, the result of the spontaneous effects of commodity - capitalist relations (‘the law of value’); and the other, based upon the conscious decisions of the regulatory organs of the state (which he called the law of primitive socialist accumulation’). And, Preobrazhensky argued that each of these regulating principles was ‘fighting for the type of regulation which is organically characteristic of the particular system of production-relations, taken in its pure form’. However, the result of their interaction was that the Soviet economy was regulated by neither in its pure fomi. There was not a simple combination or addition of the productive relations and their associated regulating principles; rather, they interpenetrated — coexisting, limiting and (significantly) deforming each other.'*'* Preobrazhensky s insight, in short, was that in the process of becoming of a new system, two systems and two logics do not simply exist side-by-side. They interact. They interpenetrate. And, they deform each other. Rather than the combination permitting the best of both worlds, the effect can be the worst of the two worlds. Precisely because there is contested reproduction between differing sets of productive relations, the interaction of the systems

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

357

can generate crises, inefficiencies and irrationality that wouldn’t be found in either system in its purity. Accordingly, as is well known, Preobrazhensky argued that rather than search for balance between the two, it was essential that what he called primitive socialist accumulation subordinate and replace the law of value. But consider capitahsm in its process of becoming. How, in the absence of the specifically capitahst mode of production, were capitalist relations of production reproduced? After all, the interaction between what Marx had called ‘two diametrically opposed economic systems’ was definitely producing problems that would not occur outside that combination. This was exactly what was occurring when the labour-intensive accumulation of capital produced a tendency for the non-reproduction of wage-labour as the result of rising wages. Marx was quite clear on what capital’s answer was — i.e., how capital ensured the reproduction of capitalist relations of production under these conditions. He detailed the measures undertaken with the emergence of capitahsm — ‘the bloody discipline’, the ‘police methods’, ‘the state compulsion to confine the struggle between capital and labour within limits convenient for capital’. In direct contrast to the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist relations once the specifically capitalist mode of production has been developed, he argued that ‘the rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to “regulate” wages’.'*^ In short, until capital produced its own premises with the development of the specifically capitahst mode of production, it needed what I have called a ‘capitalist mode of regulation’ — a mode of regulation which could ensure the compatibility of the behaviour of workers with the requirements of capital.In the absence of what Marx called ‘the sheer force of econonnc relations’, that specific mode of regulation relied upon the coercive power of the state to prevent wages from rising and to compel workers (through ‘grotesquely terroristic laws’) ‘into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour’."*^ THE NECESSITY OF A SOCIALIST MODE OF REGULATION Can the associated producers, m their turn, use such a state to support socialist productive relations before the development of socialism as an organic system? Consider the situation described in the Communist Manifesto where the ‘battle of democracy’ has been won (through a revolutionary rupture or a longer process) with the result that a government representing workers exists. At every step in the process of the becoming of socialism, the elements of capitalism and socialism (‘two diametrically opposed economic systems’) will interact and produce systemic incoherence and cnsis. For

358

SOCIALIST FLEGISTER 2013

example, when capitalist elements dominate, attempts to subordinate or make ‘despotic inroads’ upon them will tend to generate a capital strike and an economic crisis. If a government is prepared to break with the logic of capital, it will understand (as the Manifesto indicates) that it is ‘compelled to go always further’ and to make ‘further inroads upon the old social order’ and thus to ‘wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centrahse all instruments of production in the hands of the State’.In contrast, the sorry history of social democracy has been that, sooner or later, it yields to the logic of capital and reinforces its rule. A socialist mode

of regulation must achieve

consciously what a

specifically socialist mode of production will tend to do spontaneously — ensure the reproduction of sociahst relations of production. The building and reproduction of those relations (represented by the sides of the socialist triangle) ‘consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks’. Thus, the socialist mode of regulation must subordinate consciously every element which supports the old society — both the institutions and the common sense that supports those old relations. Further, it must create new sociahst elements which can become the premises and foundation for the new society. The socialist mode of regulation, accordingly, must embrace the Battle of Ideas — the ideological struggle oriented toward human development. It must stress how the logic of capital is contrary to the development of our potential, and it must use every example of capital’s response to measures supportive of human development as yet another demonstration of the perversion of capitalism. Further, the acceptance of the logic of capital as ‘self-evident natural laws’ must be challenged by development of a coherent alternative which stresses the importance of democratic, participatory and protagonistic practice in workplaces and communities and emphasizes a new social rationality based upon cooperation and solidarity. Of course, an ideological struggle cannot succeed by itself Without the creation of institutions like workers councils and neighbourhood councils, which provide the necessary space for human development through practice, the battle of ideas lacks a real basis for the development (‘both individual and collective ) of new socialist subjects. Indeed, this mode of regulation requires a state that supports this struggle ideologically, economically and militarily and thus serves as the midwite for the birth of the new society. But, what do we mean by the state? Do we mean the old state or the emerging new state based upon workers councils and neighbourhood councils as its cells? How could the old infected state whose very institutions involve a systematic and hierarchic division of labour’ — a state which has the character

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

359

of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism — possibly be part of the socialist mode of regulation?'^^ Marx and Engels grasped that the working class ‘cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and use it for its own purpose’.At last, Marx proclaimed, following what he saw as the spontaneous discovery by workers in the Paris Commune of an alternative form of state — a new democratic and decentralized state where the legitimate functions of the state were to be ‘wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society’. At last, the necessary form of the workers’ state has been discovered: the Commune (which combined legislative and executive functions) was ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour’. Here was the state which would ‘serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class-rule’. The commune form represented the destruction of centralized state power insofar as that state stands above society. Marx called it ‘the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, fornnng their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression - the political form of their social emancipation’. With the conversion of the state ‘from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to It’, self-governing producers thus wield the state for their own purposes, continuously changing both circumstances and themselves.^^ This new type of state, based upon direct protagonistic democracy in workplace and community, is indeed essential for the development of socialism as an organic system. Not only does it permit the unleashing of tacit knowledge and popular energy to link the capacities of people to communal needs and purposes but it has as its joint product new social subjects with new capacities, pride and dignity. With the transparency that is necessary for any control from below, those councils m workplaces and communities can police waste, sabotage and other attempts to reverse the process efiectively; and, this too, reinforces the sense that the process belongs to the people and is not alien to and above them. Yet, that new state does not drop from the sky. For one, given the effects of the ‘education, tradition and habit’ of those formed within the old society, we should not be surpnsed at the power of the old ideas to undermine efforts to build the new state from below. 7\lthough people transform themselves through their practice m workers and communal councils, they do so in small units and the spontaneous focus of these cells of the new state inevitably

360

SOCIALIST P^GISTER 2013

will be one of localism and self-interest (both individual and collective). The development of solidarity and a concept of community that goes beyond the local to other communities and workplaces (and beyond the self-interest that is manifested as consumerism) will tend to emerge only through practice. These cells, of course, need to be connected if they are to emerge as the new state. They need to develop horizontal and vertical hnks with other workplaces and communities (as well as with bodies which consohdate these). But the creation of such links through the delegation of spokespersons on their behalf is not the same as the development of solidarity that transcends local self-interest. It takes time before the concept of the whole develops organically in these units and is internalized. In short, although the course of development of socialism as an organic system requires the creation of links based upon solidarity from below and the acceptance of collective democracy that transcends the particular, that process cannot be instantaneous. Accordingly, the new state is not capable initially of making essential decisions that require concentration and coordination of forces. In contrast, the old state is more likely to be able to see the overall picture at the outset. With the presence of revolutionary actors in the government of the old state, it is possible to confront not only individual capitals but the power of capital as a whole. This is essential because the process of subordinating capital requires the working class to take the power of the existing state away from capital (and thereby to remove its access to the military forces of the state). This is the strength of the old state; it is well situated to identify critical bottlenecks and places for initiatives that require a concentration of forces (including actions to defend the process mihtarily against internal and external enemies determined to reverse every inroad). Can we imagine building a new society without taking the existing power away from those who possess it in the old society? In contrast to modern fantasists, Marx understood that ‘the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves’ is necessary; he understood that you cannot change the world without taking power.^^ However, as nught be expected from this ‘engine of despotism’, with its

systematic and hierarchic division of labour’ and ‘ready-made state

machinery , the old state has the tendency to act from above to change circumstances for people rather than to foster revolutionary practice. That state remains above society; it divides society into two parts, one part of which is superior to society and which would bestow socialism as a gift to an underlying population. How could the old hierarchical state - even if made more democratic

foster the key link of human development and practice?

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

361

Inherent in the logic of representative democracy is the separation of governing from the governed. Thus, rather than the necessary involvement of people which ‘ensures their complete development, both individual and collective’, the spontaneous tendency of such a state is to reproduce ‘the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste’. The faces may change in the legislative branch, but the face of the old state to those below is that of the functionary, ‘an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself. That is precisely why the Commune’s combination of legislative and executive bodies is so central to the development of a state which is society’s ‘own hving forces instead of...forces controlling and subduing it’.^'^ During the interregnum when the old state cannot yet die and the new state is not yet able to stand upon its own feet, a great many morbid symptoms appear. Both states are necessary at the outset for the subordination of the old society and the nurturing of the new. However, the inherent tension between the top-down orientation from within the old state and the bottom-up emphasis of the worker and community councils is obvious. In their interaction over a period of indeterminate length, each state will tend to deform the other. Thus, the desire on the part of revolutionaries in the old state to enact national policies according to a predetermined timetable, for example, tends toward the creation of uniform rules which ignore differences in the history and practices of the cells of the emerging state ffom below. Both in those cases where organic development is lagging and those where it is more advanced, the effect of demands placed by the old state upon the new shoots will tend to deform their development, as the impatience of functionaries of the old state will either turn the cells of the new into instruments of the old state, or impose a uniformity that tends to reverse unique advances and thereby to discourage initiative and enthusiasm. Nor, viewed from the other angle, can the old state easily achieve goals of coherent planning, balance and equality when worker and communal councils assert their right to self-determination. As long as these local units insist upon their unique character and the right to pursue their own collective self-interest without interference, the tendency will be to foster relations of exchange (the quid pro quo), inequaHty and a lack of solidarity. Here, again, the combination of the two states produces incoherence rather than the best of both worlds. In the context of growing tension and crises produced by the interaction of two diametrically opposed systems, there will be those in the old state

362

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

who see the solution as the enforcement of power from above. Similarly, there will be those in the new cells who will see the solution as the removal of any authority above the individual unit in order to permit the unfettered pursuit of their particular collective interest. Both those tendencies must be struggled against because each leads to a different deformation of the socialist triangle of social production organised by workers, using socially owned means of production for the purpose of satisfying social needs. The socialist mode of regulation requires a combination of revolutionary actors within both the old state and the new. Within the old state, it is essential that the policies pursued focus upon both the changing of circumstances and the changing of human beings; this calls for the rejection of capitalist measures of accounting and efficiency and their replacement by a concept of socialist accounting which explicitly recognises the joint product which emerges from the key link of human development and practice.Within the cells of the new socialist state, on the other hand, the struggle must be against the defects associated with the self-orientation inherited from the old society. In both workplaces and communities, it is essential to find ways to build solidarity with other communities and society as a whole and to develop the understanding that the free development of each has as its condition the free development of all. In short, the socialist mode of regulation involves a combination of the nurturing of the new state and the withering away of the old. In this process, there is a natural alliance within both the old and the new, not with the goal of achieving a balance between the two states, but unified in the commitment toward building a new socialism oriented explicitly toward human development and defined by the socialist triangle. THE STATE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM This combination of old and new states, however, is not only essential for ensuring the reproduction of socialist relations. A struggle against one¬ sidedness must be at the core of a strategy to end capitalism and to build socialism. Some people, however, focus only upon the new state (or, if you wiU, the ‘Unstate’) and reject the idea of using the old state. ‘The very notion that society can be changed through the winning of state power’, Holloway argues, is the source of all our sense of betrayal; we need to understand, he announces, that to struggle through the state is to become involved in the active process of defeating yourself.’ Why? Because ‘once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost’. And, why even try? After aU, the existing state cannot ‘be made to function in the interests of the working class because as a capitalist state ‘its own continued existence is tied

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

363

to the reproduction of capitalist social relations as a whole’. The state is ‘just one node in a web of social relations’ and, indeed, is ‘not the locus of power that it appears to be’.^^ From this perspective, the need to use the state (the armed ‘node’) to rip apart that web of social relations is just so old fashioned — so nineteenth and twentieth century. Forget the military, police, judicial and legislative apparatus now at the disposal of capital. The alternative to capital’s power is already there: ‘ubiquitous power implies ubiquitous resistance. Ubiquitous yes implies ubiquitous no.’^^ With the Hegelian magic by which things can be miraculously transformed into their opposites (as long as we don’t watch too closely), we come to understand that electoral abstention is victory, lack of leadership is leadership, and the ‘Many’ (the multiplicity of negative struggles against capitalism) is by definition ‘One’. Negating the existing state through the mind means that it continues in the hands of capital in reality. The other form of one-sidedness focuses exclusively upon the capture of the old state. Whether choosing the electoral road or invoking glorious victones of the past to support a direct assault upon state power, from this perspective the process of building the institutions and practices characteristic of the new state must be subordinated to the pnncipal task. Social movements essential for the organic development of a new socialist consciousness based upon practice are viewed instrumentally — as fodder for election committees or as the source of cadres for the party. Subordinate, subordinate - that is holy Moses and the prophets! Thus, whether due to the imperatives of electoral rhythm or to the perceived need to rehearse military discipline, the tendency of parties fixated upon the old state is to draw the lifeblood from the incipient elements of the new state and to suppress within their own ranks those who would argue otherwise. According to Marta Harnecker, this lack of respect for the autonomous development of popular movements was characteristic of elements of the political left in Latin America and brought with it a ‘verticahsm, which cancels out people’s initiative’ and a ‘traditional narrow conception ofpolitics’ which ‘tends to reduce politics to the struggle that has to do with politicallegal institutions and to exaggerate the role of the state’.And, the tendency for ‘hierarchisation’ is the kernel of truth, too, in Holloway’s argument that the party, ‘whether vanguardist or parliamentary’, subordinates ‘the mynad forms of class struggle to the overriding aim of gaining control of the state’. However, rather than inherent in a party as such, this ‘hegemomst’ characteristic is precisely the result of a one-sidedness focused upon the old state. A different left is possible. As Harnecker argues, to build the left

364

SOCIALIST RJEGISTER 2013

essential for socialism for the twenty-first century, we have to change the traditional vision of politics and overcome the narrow definition of power. The new poHtical instrument must grasp the importance of practice for developing consciousness and capacities, needs to learn to Hsten to popular movements and to respect and nourish them. But it also has a special role — it should not ‘try to gather to its bosom aU the legitimate representatives of struggles for emancipation but should strive to coordinate their practices into a single pohtical project’ — i.e., to create the spaces where they can learn from each other.^° There is an organic link between state and party, and a party which recognises the necessity for the articulation of old and new state in the process of building socialism differs substantially from one which focuses solely upon the capture of the old state.It is necessarily ‘a pohtical organisation which, as it advances a national programme which enables broad sectors of society to rally round the same battle standard, also helps these sectors to transform themselves into the active subjects building the new society for which the battle is being waged’.“ In short, the party that is needed is one that learns to walk on two legs. Two sides, two struggles: a party determined to defeat capital and to build the new state from below must always be consciousness of the danger of one-sidedness. Thus, if crises within capitahsm propel a political organization into government, it must not only use that opportunity to defeat the logic of capital and to reduce capital’s power over the old state but also to use the power it has to foster the accelerated development of the sprouts of the new state. And, if conditions are not such as to permit a party to grasp the reins of power in the old state, then it must work to create those conditions by encouraging the autonomous development of social movements through which people can develop their powers and capacities and by building unity among them based upon recognition of difference. Thus, just as a socialist mode of regulation requires the articulation of old and new state in the process of building socialism as an organic system, so also must we walk on two legs in order to defeat capital and to build collective power. And, at no time is it more possible to demonstrate clearly the gap between the logic of capital and the logic of human development than in the intensified class war when capital is in crisis and the nature of capital comes to the surface. It provides the opportunity to shatter the idea that accepting the demands of capital is common sense. But to show there is an alternative we need the vision of a society in which the free development of each is understood as the condition for the free development of all. And we need to reinforce that vision with more than rhetonc. Unless we are

THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

365

creating through our struggles the spaces which prefigure the new society, we face more glorious defeats. When capital is in crisis, there are always two options — to give in or to move in. If masses are armed with a clear conception of the socialist alternative, they can turn a crisis in capitalism into the crisis of capitalism. Of course, it is possible that, as the result of our ideological disarmament, the current struggles against the capitalist offensive ultimately may lead to a glorious defeat. It is possible but we must take that chance. NOTES This essay revises and develops a talk originally presented as the Fourth Annual Poulantzas Memorial Lecture in December 2010. See Michael Lebowitz, Building Socialism for the 2V‘ Century: the Logic of the State, Athens: Nicos Poulantzas Institute,

2011. 1

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 12, New York: International Publishers, p. 169. See the discussion in Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 181-3.

2

Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010, pp. 21, 27.

3

Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, p. 17.

4

Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 14 July 1853, Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 169; Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 182-3.

5

See John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, London: Pluto Press, 2002, especially p. 157; and my cntique, ‘Holloway’s Scream’, Historical Materialism, 13(4), 2005. On the original celebration of the peasant who ‘bows deeply and silently farts’ as the landlord passes, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

6

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 899.

7

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 899, emphasis added.

8 9

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 284. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, New York: International Publishers, 1976,

10

p. 510. Michael A. Lebowitz, Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006, p. 109.

11 12

Marx, Capital, Vol. 1. p. 772. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, New York: Vintage Books 1973, pp. 488, 541, 708. See the discussion of Marx’s concept of the ‘rich human being’ and the concept of human wealth in Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 131-31; and in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010, pp. 42-4.

13 14

Lebowitz, Build it Now, pp. 53-60. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 4.

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

366 15

Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 180-3.

16

Marx, Grundrisse, p. 494.

17

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 799.

18

Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 50-5, 154-9.

19

Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 192-6.

20

See the presence of this key link in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela, which indicates that ‘the participation of the people in forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective’. See Lebowitz, Build It Now, pp. 72, 89-90; and Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 14-5.

21

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 617-8.

22

Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume II, Moscow; Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, p. 24.

23

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 643, 614.

24

Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, p. 24.

25

Lebowitz, Build It Now, p. 66.

26

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 447.

27

Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 24-5.

28

Karl Marx, ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 167; Marx,

29

I owe much to Marta Hamecker’s work on participatory diagnosis and

Grundrisse, pp. 99-100. planning for my ideas on this process. See Marta Hamecker (with Noel Lopez), Planificacion participativa en comunidad, 2009; and Marta Hamecker, De los consejos comunales a las comunas. construyendo el socialismo del sigh xxi, 2009, both available at http://www.rebelion.org. 30

As an example of the size of such units, in Venezuela communal councils represent 200-400 families in urban areas. See Lebowitz, Build it Now, p. 112.

31

It is assumed that workers in units of production within the commune live in different neighbourhoods and, thus, direct representation of workers councils begins at the commune level. While those who discuss these questions in the workplace are members of tbe communities and presumably have been involved in community discussions, in their workers councils they explore the question as collective producers.

32

Part of that imbalance may be able to be resolved by going outside the national

33

level - i.e. by imports and exports - but we don’t need to explore this here. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 158, 171-2.

34

Karl Marx, ‘First Outline of The Civil War in France’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On the Paris Commune, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971, pp. 1523; Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, p. 30. See the discussion of the ‘workers’ state’ in Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 189-96.

35

John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, London: Pluto Press 2002, p. 12.

36

Marx, Grundrisse, p. 278.

37

Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, p. 23.

THE STATE AND THE FUTUIEE OF SOCIALISM

367

38

Marx, Grundrisse, p. 278.

39

Evgeny Preobrazhensky, 77ie New Economics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, p. 77.

40

Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 70-2, 78-81, 108-9.

41

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 900, 931.

42

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 874, 1083.

43

Donald A Filzer, ed.. The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization: Selected Essays ofE.A. Preobrazhensky, White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1979, p. 173.

44

Preobrazhensky,

The New Economics,

pp.

62-65.

Note

the

analysis

of

interpenetration and deformation in ‘real socialism’ in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. 45

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 899, 904, 905.

46

Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 96-9.

47

Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 382, 899.

48

Marx and Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, p. 504; Lebowitz, Beyond

49

‘Capital’, pp. 189-93. Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, in On the Paris Commune, pp. 68-9.

50

Lebowitz, Beyond ‘Capital’, pp. 189-96.

51

Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, p. 75.

52

Marx, ‘First Outline of The Civil War in France’, pp. 152-3; Marx, ‘Critique of

53

the Gotha Programme’, p. 32. Karl Marx, ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Questions’, in Minutes of the General Council of the First International, 1864-66, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d., p. 346.

54

Marx, ‘First Outline of The Civil War in France’, pp. 152-4; Marx, ‘The Civil

55

Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternatwe, pp. 154-9.

56

Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, pp. 12-3, 17, 72-3, 91-4,

57

214. Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, pp. 76, 88-9.

58

Marta Hamecker, Rebudding the Left, London: Zed Books, 2007, pp. 86-8. See

War in France’, pp. 72-3.

also Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, pp. 60-3. 59

Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, p. 17.

60 61

Hamecker, Rebuilding the Left, pp. 70-1, 83-91. See the discussion of the interaction between state and party in Lebowitz, The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’.

62

Hamecker, Rebuilding the Left, p. 99.

Socialist Register is now available online Individual subscribers:

Permanent online access to the current volume, plus access to all previous volumes for the period of the subscription.

Details at www.merhnpress.co.uk

Institutional subscribers: Options: A. To buy current volume only: 1. Permanent ordine resource 2. Permanent online access plus hardback printed copy. Mixed Media B. For ongoing subscriptions: ISSN 0081-0606 3. Ongoing online access with permanent access to the current volume and access to previous volumes for the period of the subscription. 4. As 3 plus hardback printed copy. Prices and other infomiation available at www.merhnpress.co.uk (or order through a subscription agent) e-mail: [email protected] Merlin Press 6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street Pontypool, NP4 6ND, Wales

i

•^>4. .

v..*

-

1^

•w

U u ^u ii vail able online If

'W'J^

-

> W#f

ut i'hi^«40i47m •I'niMTH!,

if* iC

' •*■» fsrrrtj