Marxisms in the 21st Century. John Saul
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Rather, he argues for ‘Marxism as a living tradition that enjoys renewal and reconstruction as the world it describes and seeks to transform, undergoes change’. Thus, as globalisation increasingly defines our reality, Marxism too must take on a global character, which requires ‘rethinking the material basis of Marxism through the lens of the market, but not in terms of its geographical scope (since markets have always been global as well as local), nor even in terms of neoliberal ascendancy (since markets have always moved through periods of expansion and contraction) but in terms of the novel modes of commodification’.
Suggesting a totally new periodisation of Marxism, Burawoy maps the history of new configurations of Marxism onto three waves of marketisation in which labour, money and nature were commodified. Each wave of commodification engenders a countermovement which corresponds to a new configuration of Marxism – ‘classical Marxism based on the projection of an economic utopia; Soviet, Western, and Third World Marxism based on state regulation; and finally, sociological Marxism based on an expanding and self-regulating civil society’. Burawoy is essentially analysing the historical development of Marxism, based on waves of commodification. Thus, as labour was commodified, Marxism responded with visions of breaking free from the chains of exploitation; as money was commodified, Marxism envisioned state regulation of the economy; and, as nature was increasingly commodified, Marxism responded with notions of a fully realised and global civil society shaping governance, production and consumption. Indeed, Burawoy tells us that 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 … third-wave Marxism constructs socialism piecemeal as an archipelago of real utopias that stretch across the world’. In short, Burawoy argues that the third wave of Marxism, the current period, is characterised by transformative projects anchored in concrete experiments in a myriad of local spaces that rely on fundamentally participatory democratic processes. Burawoy is thus providing a radically novel periodisation of Marxism that shows how its evolution has been integrally linked to the essential commodification of labour, money and nature.
Moving from the commodification of labour, money and nature and the concomitant shifts in Marxist theory and practice, Satgar looks to Gramsci to take forward our renewal of Marxism. Satgar powerfully demonstrates how Gramsci’s Marxism is renewed by bringing it into discussion with international relations and the global political economy. In his contribution he shows how Gramscian interpretations have reduced Gramsci’s theoretical legacy either to a narrow Western Marxist tradition or to that of an Italian thinker. In this framing, Gramsci’s Marxism was married to a political economy bounded in the national space. Satgar shows, however, that over the past three decades Gramsci’s Marxism has been globalised, which has disrupted the dominance of classical Marxist understandings of imperialism and neo-Marxist approaches to hegemony within the world system. Thus Satgar challenges the version of Gramscian thought that locates Gramsci within Western Marxism or even more narrowly, as an Italian thinker, and he places neo-Gramscian scholarship within Burawoy’s third wave of Marxism. Through the efforts of a Gramscianinspired, transnational historical materialism a new approach to global political economy has emerged. This scholarship has added to critical theory, introducing a new way of understanding power and how social relations constitute global capitalism. In particular, Satgar highlights that a historicised understanding of global capitalist restructuring, the emergence of transnational classes, the disciplining role of transnational neoliberalism, the forms of neoliberal rule evoked by transnational classes (neoliberal constitutionalism and passive revolution) and the importance of counter-hegemonic resistance are some of the crucial themes emerging within a transnationalised neo-Gramscian Marxism to understand, explain and transform the current dynamics of global capitalism. Central in Satgar’s embrace of a neo-Gramscian global political economy is the challenge of characterising and understanding post-apartheid South Africa’s neoliberalisation as the making of a ‘passive revolution’. Satgar concludes by challenging some of the limits within a transnationalising Gramscian Marxism, in particular the need to posit a new analysis of the crisis of global capitalism, the need for a stronger ecological perspective and for greater engagement with anti-capitalist politics and alternatives. Satgar thus provides us with an innovative and creative approach to understanding the global character of capitalism and the importance of resistance.
Having provided new and exciting ideas about the periodisation of Marxism, democracy and global relevance in Part One, in Part Two of the volume we look at the engagement of Marxism with left politics. Here the emphasis is on ‘redeeming’ Marx through critique, social reproduction and ecological awareness. In the first chapter of this section, Veriava recovers the dying tradition of critique and powerfully argues that at the heart of Marx’s ideas about social transformation is the importance of critique. Veriava argues for critique that is ‘self-consciously, and militantly, directed at a positive, or better, constitutive task’ and asks how critique might play this ‘constitutive task’ that is required for politics today. He explores this question through the work of Michel Foucault and Marx and ultimately shows how central a component of modern political theory and political practice critique has been historically, and still is, to our understanding of transformative politics today. By reminding us of the importance of critique, Veriava has reinserted a fundamental aspect of political theorising and practice that is often neglected.
Moving from the importance of critique for left politics, Cock and Luxton trace the history of feminist engagement with Marxism, showing how the ‘women’s question’ was seen as a problem of capitalism by classical Marxists, including Engels and Lenin. Cock and Luxton show how later attempts by feminists to integrate feminism with socialism tended toward dualistic and essentialist analyses of the modes of production and patriarchy. They argue that the success of the current Marxist revitalisation hinges on a more equal relationship and that ‘this integration is best described as a socialist feminism based on the understanding that “the liberation of women depends on the liberation of all people”’. They trace the debate on domestic labour to the broader concept of social reproduction, which sees society as a totality in which social reproduction is central. Cock and Luxton suggest that gender is no longer collapsed into capitalism nor are there attempts to ‘appropriate Marxist concepts of value or productive and unproductive work and apply them uncritically in an attempt to establish the value of domestic work’. They conclude that Marxists must confront the specificity of different women’s oppression in specific historical contexts. Cock and Luxton provide an innovative approach, resting on the idea of social reproduction, to bring Marxism into dialogue with feminism.
While Cock and Luxton argue for creative synergies between Marxism and feminism, we also find similar innovative thinking in the dialogue between Marxism and ecology. Pillay introduces the idea that Marx had a deep appreciation for ecology and was not the anti-environmental theorist that many have suggested. Pillay situates the discussion in an analysis of the recent crisis of capitalism that is both a crisis of accumulation and a crisis of nature. Indeed, the economic and ecological moments are interlocked with the one profoundly affecting the other. Like Burawoy, Pillay suggests that humanity’s future hinges on our ability to halt capitalism’s destruction of nature by acknowledging the limits of a fossil-fuel capitalism that is threatening the planet’s capacity to reproduce itself. Pillay shows how most Marxists’ readings of Marx highlight the social critique of capitalism and see nature’s role as simply instrumental to human exchange. Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Pillay rediscovers a deeply ecological side to Marx’s writings. Pillay provides two sets of analyses: first, he shows how the recent crisis of capitalism is not a financial crisis, as many analysts claim, but has its roots in stagnation in the real economy, and second, he shows an ecological Marx who never saw nature as something simply to be conquered but as something that human existence depends on. With regard to this second point, in particular, Pillay argues that nature was central to Marx’s thinking. He maintains that rescuing an ecological Marx is necessary both for our analysis of the link between the social and ecological crises, and for our political mobilisation of alliances between ecologists (green) and socialists/Marxists (red). Pillay thus provides a powerful argument for a greening of Marxism and looks to Marx to pave the way in this effort.
In Part Three, we look specifically at Marxism and socialism in Africa, with an emphasis on South Africa. This section is particularly important as Marxism in Africa is