Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique & Struggle

306 Pages·2014·4.26 MB·English

by  Michelle Williams

Wits University Press
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South Africa
www.witspress.co.za
Published edition © Wits University Press 2013
Compilation © Edition editors 2013
Chapter © Individual contributors 2013
First published 2013
ISBN 978-1-86814-753-3 (print)
ISBN 978-1-86814-754-0 (digital)
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Edited by Inga Norenius
Proofread by Alison Lockhart
Index by Clifford Perusset
Cover design by Farm Design – www.farmdesign.co.za
Book design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Paarl Media, South Africa
Democratic Marxism Series
Series Editor: Vishwas Satgar
The crisis of Marxism in the late twentieth century was the crisis
of orthodox and vanguardist Marxism associated mainly with
hierarchical communist parties, and which was imposed – even
as state ideology – as the ‘correct’ Marxism. The Stalinisation of
the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse exposed the inherent
weaknesses and authoritarian mould of vanguardist Marxism.
More fundamentally, vanguardist Marxism was rendered obsolete
but for its residual existence in a few parts of the world, including
authoritarian national liberation movements in Africa and in China.
With the deepening crises of capitalism, a new democratic Marxism
(or democratic historical materialism) is coming to the fore. Such a
democratic Marxism is characterised in the following ways:
• Its sources span non-vanguardist grassroots movements,
unions, political fronts, mass parties, radical intellectuals,
transn ational activist networks and the progressive academy;
• It seeks to ensure that the inherent categories of Marxism are
theorised within constantly changing historical conditions to
find meaning;
• Marxism is understood as a body of social thought that is
unfinished and hence challenged by the need to explain
the dynamics of a globalising capitalism and the futures of
social change;
• It is open to other forms of anti-capitalist thought and
practice, including currents within radical ecology, feminism,
emancipatory utopianism and indigenous thought;
• It does not seek to be a monolithic and singular school of
thought but engenders contending perspectives;
• Democracy, as part of the heritage of people’s struggles,
is understood as the basis for articulating alternatives to
capitalism and as the primary means for constituting a
transformative subject of historical change.
This series seeks to elaborate the social theorising and politics of
democratic Marxism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
his volume was long in the making and because of this we would like to
T
give special thanks to all of the contributors for their patience and perse-
verance. Thanks also for the two extremely constructive and encouraging
blind reviews received from Wits University Press. We are also grateful to the
Wolpe Trust, and in particular the former director, Lionel Louw, for funding
the original workshop out of which the idea for the volume sprang. We owe
special thanks to our students in the National Union of Metalworkers of South
Africa’s (Numsa) Social Theory and Research course, where we explored and
engaged many of the ideas in this volume. We are grateful to our postgraduate
students Katherine Joynt, Tatenda Mukwedeya and Andrew Bennie for editing
and bibliographic assistance at various stages of the manuscript development.
Katherine deserves special mention as she worked through the night (actually a
couple of nights) in order for us to meet our deadline. Thanks to our excellent
copy editor Inga Norenius. We also thank Roshan Cader and Veronica Klipp at
Wits University Press for their enthusiastic support of the project.
contents
Acknowledgements iv
Acronyms And AbbreviAtions vi
introduction Michelle Williams 1

PArt one: democrAtising And globAlising mArxism 15
Chapter 1: Marxism and democracy: Liberal, vanguard or direct? 16
Michelle Williams
Chapter 2: Marxism after Polanyi 34
Michael Burawoy
Chapter 3: Transnationalising Gramscian Marxism 53
Vishwas Satgar
PArt two: mArxism And left Politics 83
Chapter 4: Notes on critique 84
ahmed Veriava
Chapter 5: Marxism and feminism: ‘Unhappy marriage’ or creative partnership? 116
Jacklyn Cock and Meg Luxton
Chapter 6: Marx and the eco-logic of fossil capitalism 143
Devan pillay
PArt three: crises of mArxism in AfricA And Possibilities
for the future 167
Chapter 7: Retrospect: Seven theses about Africa’s Marxist regimes 168
Daryl Glaser
Chapter 8: Socialism and southern Africa 196
John S. Saul
Chapter 9: Uneven and combined Marxism within South Africa’s
urban social movements 220
patrick Bond, ashwin Desai and trevor Ngwane
Chapter 10: Critical reflections on the crisis and limits of ANC ‘Marxism’ 260
Mazibuko K. Jara
CoNCLuSioN Vishwas Satgar 281
CoNtriButorS 287
iNDex 289
v
ACrONyMS AND AbbrEviATiONS
Amcu Association of Mining and Construction Union
ANC African National Congress
bEE Black Economic Empowerment
Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions
CPi(M) Communist Party of India (Marxist)
CPSu Communist Party of the Soviet Union
CST colonialism of a special type
DLf Democratic Left Front
EPLf Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
EPrDf Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
frelimo Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
Gear Growth, Employment and Redistribution
iMf International Monetary Fund
MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
NDr national democratic revolution
NrM National Resistance Movement
NuM National Union of Mineworkers
Numsa National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
PAiGC African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde
PCi Italian Communist Party
PT Brazilian Workers’ Party
rDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
SACP South African Communist Party
SPLM Sudan People’s Liberation Movement
Swapo South West African People’s Organisation
Tanu Tanganyika African National Union
TPLf Tigray People’s Liberation Front
unita National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
Zanu Zimbabwe African National Union
vi
iNTrODuCTiON
Michelle Williams
arl Marx’s writings on and ideas about social transformation have figured
K
prominently in the Global Left imagination for more than 150 years.
Regardless of political hue, scholars, activists and politicos, on the Left and the
Right, have engaged with Marx’s and Marxists’ ideas in some form or another.
Marxism’s extraordinary influence has been twofold: as a set of analytical ideas
and as an ideology influencing the practices of political movements. History
is littered with examples of Marx’s impact on the world: Marxist-inspired
working-class organisations in Europe and the US in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, European socialist and communist parties’ lineages
of Marxism, Marxist–Leninist political organisations of the twentieth century,
Latin American dependency theory’s influence on development, Marxism–
Leninism in the Soviet Union and Marxist-influenced anti-colonial struggles
(for example, in Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique). Whereas Marxist ideas
have clearly had enormous impact on the world, many of these experiments
have inglorious histories, culminating in the demise of the Soviet Union. At the
end of the twentieth century a number of factors seemed to converge to mark
the end of Marxism’s influence on the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the Chinese and Vietnamese move to market capitalism, the shift away from
class-based issues to the dominance of identity politics in social movements,
and the rise of postmodernism in academia with its anti-Marxist conceptions
of power, alienation and marginalisation. As a result, by the late twentieth
century the relevance of Marxism was under question.
Marxisms in the twenty-first century
Neoclassical economists and liberal political theorists were triumphant
in the post-cold-war 1990s, not only declaring Marxian ideas dead but that
there was no alternative to neoliberalism. Unlike what Marx (and the classical
Marxists of the Second International) had predicted, the stages of history did
not lead to an emancipated communism, but rather perambulated from capi-
talism to an even fiercer form of capitalism (for some this journey went via
‘state socialism’). Thus, by the turn of the century, it seemed clear that Marxism
was, if not already dead, clearly dying an ignominious death. Neoliberal capi-
talism and the concomitant penetration of the market into all spheres of social
life seemed well entrenched for the foreseeable future.
The triumphalism of neoclassical economists was, however, relatively short-
lived as their prescriptive ideas wreaked havoc on the global economy as well as
on the livelihoods of the vast majority of peoples around the world, helping to
reinvigorate Marxist scholarship in the twenty-first century. Not without irony,
in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, even mainstream economists
– who normally disdain Marxian ideas – publicly acknowledged that Marx’s
analysi s of the dynamics of capitalism has much to teach us (for a fuller discus-
sion see Hobsbawm 2011). There is now widespread agreement that Marx offers
a soph isticated and trenchant analysis of capitalism. For example, the tendency
toward the concentration of capital has been vividly demonstrated over the
twentieth century:
In 1905, the fifty largest US corporations, by nominal capitalisation, had
assets equal to 16 per cent of GNP. By 1999, the assets of the fifty largest
US industrial companies amounted to 37 per cent of GNP. [For] the
UK’s ten largest industrial companies, the rise was from 5 per cent of
GNP in 1905 to 41 per cent in 1999 (Therborn 2008: 13).
Just as Marx had anticipated, this concentration of capital came with a massive
increase in global industrial unemployment, leaving the vast majority of the
world’s peoples on the margins of economic activity and creating a ‘reserve
army’ of labour (18–19).
It is not just the analysis of capitalism that has captured the left imagina-
tion. Marx’s ideas about a future post-capitalist order have inspired political
move ments for much of the past century and a half. Despite the chequered
history of experiments in the name of Marxism, the revival of Marxism is
finding new sources of inspiration that revolve around four primary factors:
2
introduction
(i) the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project; (ii) the ecological
limits of capitalism; (iii) the crisis of global capitalism and (iv) the lessons to be
learned from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. The recent revival
of Marxism, then, is not simply a return to nineteenth- and twentieth-century
understandings of Marxism. Rather, the twenty-first century has seen enor-
mous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the
past by forging funda mentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration
from Marxism along with many other anti-capitalist traditions such as femi-
nism, ecology, anarchism and indigenous traditions (Renton 2004). Thus we
have movements led by indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Hugo Chávez’s ‘twenty-
first century socialism’ that involves the rural and urban poor in Venezuela,
radical democratic decentralisation in Kerala, participatory budgeting in
Brazil, the World Social Forum, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity move-
ments in Spain and Greece and the Arab Spring. These movements do not seek
a coherent ideological blueprint, but rather share in their belief that ‘another
world is possible’ through democratic, egalitarian, ecological alternatives to
capitalism, built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these move-
ments is not dogmatic or prescriptive; rather, it is open, searching, dialectical,
humanist, utopian and inspirational. Central to these movements is the impor-
tance of radical, direct and participatory democracy in forging an alternative to
and an appreciation for the limits of fossil-fuel capitalism.
Whereas there has been a flowering of creativity around the world, in South
Africa the main party of Marxism, the South African Communist Party (SACP),
has gone the other way by retreating into a scientific, dogmatic Marxism-cum-
Soviet communism of the twentieth century.1 In the new millennium, the SACP
has turned away from its open Marxism of the 1990s – which was characterised
by deep searching for new Marxist approaches to social transformat ion rooted
in radical democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism – to more orthodox under-
standings of historical materialism and scientific Marxism. Political education
in the SACP focuses on the writings of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and
the empirical reference points include the former Soviet Union and increas-
ingly the Chinese Communist Party (SACP 2012: 15). For the SACP, democracy
can be reduced to vanguard democracy in which the Party plays the pivotal
role. Radical democracy and egalitarianism have become rhetorical devices,
giving way to populism and authoritarian organisational practices and leaders’
elite consumption habits. Unlike many of the movements around the world
that look to Marxist theory for assistance in analysing the world and re-finding
3