Marxisms in the 21st Century. John Saul
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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 imagination. Marx’s ideas about a future post-capitalist order have inspired political movements 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: (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 enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anti-capitalist traditions such as feminism, 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 movements 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 movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive; rather, it is open, searching, dialectical, humanist, utopian and inspirational. Central to these movements is the importance 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 transformation rooted in radical democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism – to more orthodox understandings 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 increasingly 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 utopian possibilities, the Marxism of the SACP has retreated to Marxism as a rigid ideology prescribing the laws of history.
Outside of the SACP, there is also a strong Marxist tradition that has been heavily influenced by Leon Trotsky’s writings. Trotsky’s continued influence on Marxism is unquestionable. His concepts of combined and uneven development, permanent revolution, and his understanding of Bonapartism, for example, are important sources of inspiration for Marxist analysis. Alex Callinicos’s (1999) work perhaps best characterises the important and lasting influence of Trotsky’s ideas on Marxism. In addition, many movements draw inspiration from his writings. However, in South Africa, like the SACP, many Trotskyist Marxists have been marred by dogmatic certainty. Neither tradition of Marxism – communist or Trotskyist – has grappled sufficiently with the deficiencies of Marxism as a theory, especially with reference to democracy and the changes in world capitalism, as both remain committed to the paramount role of vanguard parties (tied to traditional and limited notions of the ‘working class’) as the crucial historical agent. The two traditions have also not adequately reflected on the failures of historical experiences, not even the Marxist experiments in Africa, and have not had a thorough-going engagement with democracy, tending to dismiss it as liberal (‘bourgeois’) democracy and to argue, rather, in favour of ‘revolution’ and vanguard democracy in which the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, together with the Party, play the leading role in society.
Despite these traditions within the South African context, there has also been a renewed interest in Marxism that seeks to explore new politics grounded in democratic, egalitarian and ecologically sensitive alternatives to capitalism. This renewed interest in Marxism and its intersection with other anti-capitalist traditions has inspired us to produce an edited volume that introduces some of these contemporary approaches to Marxism and explores some of the ways in which Marxism has been engaged in Africa. I now turn to a discussion of the remaining chapters in the volume, which challenge us to see Marxism in often unfamiliar ways by exploring themes such as democracy, globalisation, feminism, critique, ecology, historical lessons and agency, each chapter offering novel and creative approaches to the Marxist tradition. While the range of perspectives in the following chapters might lead some to wonder what is left of ‘Marx’ in these positions, I would argue it is precisely the plurality of approaches that is the strength of current Marxist theorising and practice.
Reflections on Marxism in the Twenty-First Century
In this volume we explore Marxism as a set of analytical ideas and as an ideology inspiring political movements. Thus, we take stock of various Marxisms today and ask questions about their potential for helping us navigate alternatives. The chapters span a wide range of issues and perspectives, all having to do in some way with Marxism. Part One democratises and globalises Marxism by situating Marxism in debates about democracy (Michelle Williams), reperiodising Marxism along three waves of commodification (Burawoy) and globalising Gramscian Marxism (Satgar). Part Two looks at Marxism’s engagement with left politics such as Marxism as critique (Ahmed Veriava), Marxism and feminism (Jacklyn Cock and Meg Luxton) and eco-Marxism (Devan Pillay). Part Three investigates Marxism and socialism in Africa (Daryl Glaser, John S. Saul) and South Africa (Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane and Mazibuko K. Jara).
Part One situates Marxism in global capitalism today. In chapter one Williams explores the way in which twentieth-century debates have bifurcated democracy into either liberal or vanguard democracy. Williams shows how mid-twentieth-century scholarship – both liberal and Marxist – promoted either representative democracy or vanguard democracy as the only organising mechanism in society, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy. In recent movements, however, Williams finds new sources of inspiration that are explicitly looking to the importance of direct democracy for twenty-first-century alternatives.
Turning from an explicit attention to democracy, the next two chapters focus on globalising Marxism. For most of the twentieth century, Marxism largely confined itself to national developments. However, with the changing and global nature of capitalism today, we have to rethink our Marxism to speak to this global capitalism. In his chapter, Burawoy eloquently challenges us with the simple yet provocative claim: as the world changes so must Marxism. For some this might seem an obvious claim, but for many Marxists it is a fundamental challenge. He suggests that the anti-Marxist euphoria that followed the Soviet Union’s demise and China’s transition to capitalism (or what the Chinese Communist Party calls market socialism) must be met by a sociological Marxism that seeks neither to immortalise Marx and Friedrich Engels as all-knowing gods whose ideas are laid out in their scriptures, nor to bury Marxism as anachronistic theories for a bygone era. Burawoy is not interested in reconstructing Marx and Engels (and others such as Lenin, Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Franz Fanon and Mao Zedong) as theorists of ‘eternal