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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 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, iPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. iSSN 1570-1522 iSBN 978-90-04-21175-9 (hardback) iSBN 978-90-04-25143-4 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, idC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood drive, Suite 910, danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 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.

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