Marxism and social movements

481 Pages·2013·4.1 MB·English

by  Colin Barker

Marxism and Social Movements
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 46
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
Marxism and Social Movements
Edited by
Colin Barker, Laurence Cox,
John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
LEidEN • BOSTON
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Marxism and social movements / edited by Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald.
  pages cm. — (Historical materialis m book series ; volume 46)
 includes bibliographical references and index.
 iSBN 978-90-04-21175-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — iSBN 978-90-04-25143-4 (e-book) 1. Communism.
2. Social movements. i. Barker, Colin, 1939–
 HX21.M387 2013
 303.48’401—dc23
2013009547
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iSSN 1570-1522
iSBN 978-90-04-21175-9 (hardback)
iSBN 978-90-04-25143-4 (e-book)
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Contents
Marxism and Social Movements: An introduction  ........................................... 1
Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Part One: Theoretical Frameworks
Marxism and Social Movements
1. Class Struggle and Social Movements  .............................................................. 41
Colin Barker
2. What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Look Like?  ........... 63
Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Laurence Cox
Social Movements Studies and its discontents
3. The Strange disappearance of Capitalism from Social Movement
Studies  ........................................................................................................................ 83
Gabriel Hetland and Jeff Goodwin
4. Marxism and the Politics of Possibility: Beyond Academic
Boundaries  ................................................................................................................ 103
John Krinsky
Part Two: How Social Movements Work
developmental Perspectives on Social Movements
1. Eppur Si Muove: Thinking ‘The Social Movement’  ....................................... 125
Laurence Cox
2. Class Formation and the Labour Movement in Revolutionary China  ... 147
Marc Blecher
3. Contesting the Postcolonial development Project: A Marxist
Perspective on Popular Resistance in the Narmada Valley  ....................... 167
Alf Gunvald Nilsen
vi • Contents
The Politics of Social Movements
4. The Marxist Rank-and-File/Bureaucracy Analysis of Trade Unionism:
Some implications for the Study of Social Movement Organisations  .... 187
Ralph Darlington
5. defending Place, Remaking Space: Social Movements in Oaxaca
and Chiapas  .............................................................................................................. 209
Chris Hesketh
6. Uneven and Combined Marxism within South Africa’s Urban Social
Movements  ............................................................................................................... 233
Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane
Part Three: Seeing the Bigger Picture
Comparative-Historical Perspective
1. Thinking About (New) Social Movements: Some insights from the
British Marxist Historians  .................................................................................... 259
Paul Blackledge
2. Right-Wing Social Movements: The Political indeterminacy of Mass
Mobilisation  .............................................................................................................. 277
Neil Davidson
3. Class, Caste, Colonial Rule, and Resistance: The Revolt of 1857
in india  ....................................................................................................................... 299
Hira Singh
4. The Black international as Social Movement Wave: C.L.R. James’s
History of Pan-African Revolt  ............................................................................... 317
Christian Høgsbjerg
Social Movements Against Neoliberalism
5. Language, Marxism and the Grasping of Policy Agendas: Neoliberalism
and Political Voice in Scotland’s Poorest Communities  ............................. 337
Chik Collins
6. Organic intellectuals in the Australian Global Justice Movement:
The Weight of 9/11  .................................................................................................. 357
Elizabeth Humphrys
7. ‘disorganisation’ as Social Movement Tactic: Reappropriating Politics
during the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism  ...................................................... 377
Heike Schaumberg
Contents • vii
8. ‘Unity of the diverse’: Working-Class Formations and Popular
Uprisings From Cochabamba to Cairo  ............................................................ 401
David McNally
References  ...................................................................................................................... 425
index  ................................................................................................................................ 459

Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction
Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and
Alf Gunvald Nilsen
A case for a Marxist revival?
This book starts from a paradox.
On the one hand, Marxism is a body of theory that
developed from and was crafted for social movements.
The work of Marx and Engels represents a distillation
of the experiences, debates, theories and conflicts
faced by the popular movements of the nineteenth
century, that sought in turn to contribute to those
movements’ further development. Subsequent devel-
opments of Marxist theory in the twentieth century
were intimately linked to the development of opposi-
tional political projects across the globe, ranging from
revolutionary struggles against imperialist wars and
capitalism itself, to anti-colonial movements and the
emergence of new forms of popular assertion in the
post-WWII era.
On the other hand, if the main figures of ‘classical
Marxism’ all used the term ‘movement’, none seems to
have developed any explicit theorisation of the term.
Moreover, while Marxists have produced ground-
breaking studies of specific movements, they have
apparently not produced an explicit ‘theory of move-
ments’ – that is, a theory which specifically explains
the emergence, character and development of social
movements. Nor have they explored how the concept
of ‘movement’ might be interwoven with other foun-
dational concepts in Marxist theory like class struggle,
hegemony and revolution or human species being,
alienation and praxis.
2 • Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
There is, in short, a distinct lack of work – scholarly or activist – devoted to
thinking through what an integrated Marxist theory of social movements might
look like, and what its impact on Marxist theory itself might be. This situation
is compounded by the fact that mainstream social movement theory – whether
it emerges from American or European academia – consistently avoids debate
with Marxist perspectives, although they constitute by some margin the largest
alternative body of research on popular movements. Instead, what can only be
described as caricatures or straw-man versions of Marxist theory are as wide-
spread in scholarship as in some forms of anti-Marxist activism.
This is, we believe, detrimental for those scholars who are interested in pur-
suing what Bevington and Dixon have called ‘movement-relevant research’1 –
research that is attuned to and addresses the knowledge interests of activists,
as opposed to merely scholastic dissections of the character and dynamics of
collective action – and especially for activists concerned with the progressive
development of their oppositional political projects. The present time is increas-
ingly starting to look like one of those decisive moments in history when ‘a chain
reaction of insurrections and revolts’ give rise to ‘new forms of power . . . in oppo-
sition to the established order, and new visions of the meaning of freedom [are]
formulated in the actions of millions of people’.2
For the current conjuncture is saturated with protest, with massive demon-
strations and sometimes armed conflict erupting across North Africa and the
Middle East, Europe and Latin America, with significant echoes elsewhere. It
seems appropriate, therefore, to ask whether there are significant connections
between these eruptions of popular protest. Large numbers of those actively par-
ticipating, from Cairo to Athens, from New York to Santiago, think there are. And
the connections they draw concern a combination of austerity, rising inequality,
dispossession of rights and entitlements and a democratic deficit which enables
the imposition of all these by tiny élites, against a background of the world
economy’s biggest crisis since the 1930s.
There is, in short, ‘a system’ against which so many of today’s protests are
pitched, even if they are not articulated solely, or even at all, in the language of
‘class’. Yet, there seems to be little recognition of this in contemporary litera-
ture on social movements. Indeed, as Gabriel Hetland and Jeff Goodwin docu-
ment in their contribution to this volume, the very term ‘capitalism’ has largely
disappeared from contemporary social movement theory. Does this mean that
social movement scholars must always treat these struggles as discrete and dis-
connected instances of protest? Or should we, perhaps, try to understand these
protests as a ‘wave’ or an upswing in a ‘cycle of contention’, and to trace the
1. Bevington and Dixon 1995.
2. Katsiaficas 1987, p. 6.