Marxisms in the 21st Century. John Saul
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but also interrogate them for their potential generalisability (see Burawoy and Wright 2002).
If classical Marxism offered a universality based on flawed laws of history, and Soviet Marxism offered a universality based on a singular dictatorial regime, sociological Marxism offers us no guarantees, only an eternal search and reconstruction, a universality that is always contingent, created from the concrete with the help of the abstract (see Hall 1986).
Toward a global Marxism
To some, sociological Marxism is an oxymoron – after all, classical Marxism dismissed sociology as bourgeois ideology, and if Western Marxism borrowed from sociology, especially from Weber and Sigmund Freud, it was not to elevate the idea of civil society. Gramsci himself was dismissive of sociology as concerned only with the spontaneous and thus the trivial.8
Why now sociological Marxism? Simply put, sociology’s credentials as critic of marketisation and statisation are unquestioned. Whether we turn to the writings of Weber or Durkheim, Georg Simmel or Roberto Michels, Norbert Elias or Parsons, Habermas or Bourdieu, the critique of economic reductionism and instrumental rationality is central. Perhaps the state might have been seen as a potential or partial neutraliser but today that possibility seems to have evaporated. As the state seems to be ever more in thrall to the market, the defence of an independent ‘civil society’ seems to become all the more necessary. The problem, however, with sociology – and we might say the same of Gramsci and Polanyi – is that the notion of ‘civil society’ was contained within national boundaries. Today, we have to give the idea a transnational scope.
Marketisation – the commodification of labour, money and nature – is affecting all parts of the planet. No one escapes the tsunami, although some are able to mount more effective dykes. On the face of it, there needs to be a global solution but here we should proceed carefully as solutions can turn out to be as bad as the problem they seek to fix. What could be worse than a planetary totalitarianism, constituted in the name of preventing destruction of the environment? We might be better off knitting together national solutions that centre on society. However, here again we see problems as the state of societies is very different: in South Africa it is fissiparous; in China it is precarious; in Russia it is gelatinous. In every country we need to reconnoitre the trenches of civil society, map out the relations between society and state, society and market. Only in that way can we better understand the possibilities for global connections. Only in that way can we better understand the possibilities for real utopias.
As we think about a global civil society, we must also think of a global Marxism, that is, a Marxism that transcends but also recognises national and regional configurations. If first-wave Marxism was national in scope, and second-wave Marxism was regional (Soviet, Western and Third World), today we have the possibility of a Marxism that still recognises nation and region but also encompasses pressing experiences shared across the world, albeit unevenly. And if first-wave Marxism projected socialism as a utopia guaranteed by laws of history, and if second-wave Marxism became a ruling ideology, justifying socialism as Stalinism – utopia-become-dystopia – then third-wave Marxism constructs socialism piecemeal as an archipelago of real utopias that stretch across the world, attracting to themselves populations made ever more precarious by third-wave marketisation. The Marxist becomes an archaeologist digging up alternatives spawned and wrecked by the storms of capitalism and state socialism.
Finally, and most ominously, we face the creation of another fictitious commodity, one that Polanyi never anticipated – knowledge. We live in a world where knowledge is ever more important as a factor of production, whose production and dissemination is ever-more commodified. The university, once a taken-for-granted public good has become a private good subject to the dictates of the market. Students become fee-paying consumers in search of vocational credentials that guarantee them little but lifetime debt, faculties are diced and spliced into the casualised labour of teachers and researchers, non-academic staff are outsourced while administrators become highly paid managers and corporate executives. The university that cultivated citizens for a democratic polity and produced knowledge to solve societal problems, is being transformed into an instrument of the short-term demands of capital at the very time its contributions to the survival of the planet are most needed. The struggle for the university becomes a struggle not just for its own survival; it has a central role to play in any countermovement to third-wave marketisation, a possible Modern Prince for the defence of modern society.
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the comments I have received in the many places I have given variants of this paper before its evolution into the chapter in this book. I’m especially grateful to Stephen Gelb for his thorough-going critique as a reviewer for Transformation and to Michelle Williams for encouraging me to continue despite those criticisms.
Notes
1 There have, of course, been other periodisations of Marxism, but most offer a story of collapse. Thus, George Lichteim (1961) traces the birth and rise of Marxism and then the fall after the Russian Revolution. Writing in the aftermath of the European upsurge, Perry Anderson (1976) focuses on the rise of a classical Marxism, followed by the retreat of Western Marxism into philosophy as it lost touch with its revolutionary mainspring. Leszek Kolakowski (1978) describes Marxism’s fall from grace with the rise of the Soviet Union and Western Marxism, followed by its final degeneration with the student movements of the 1960s. Note that all these classic accounts were written before the collapse of communism, whose existence was taken for granted.
2 Harvey identifies the wave of marketisation with accumulation through dispossession, a necessary accompaniment to commodification which Marx had only seen as part of the pre-history of capitalism, what he called primitive accumulation.
3 Naomi Klein (2007) offers a magnificent panorama of capitalism’s capacity to exploit the crises it generates through processes of primitive accumulation.
4 Polanyi argues that it is the extreme form of dispossession (disembedding) that leads to working-class revolt whereas later historians, most notably E.P. Thompson (1963) argue that it was the strength of tradition founded in the skilled crafts, in other words a pre-formed working class, rather than its destruction, that accounted for mounting mobilisation.
5 As regards the contradictions of the state socialist economy, see two non-Marxists: János Kornai (1992) and Alec Nove (1983).
6 I refer here to a broad genre of works that would include Louis Althusser (1969 and 1971), Ralph Miliband (1969), Nicos Poulantzas (1973) and William Appleman Williams (1961).
7 I have developed this complementary relation in Burawoy (2003).
8 In this regard Gramsci’s critique of sociology applies especially well to Polanyi’s invocation of ‘society’ as a deus ex machina. For Gramsci, society or ‘civil society’ is something that organises but is also organised by specific social and political forces.
References
Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. London: Allen and Unwin.
Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books.