Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age

Struggling to Be Born?

Colin Barker, Gareth Dale, Neil Davidson, Colin Barker, Gareth Dale, Neil Davidson

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642594898
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture--the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals--in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt. In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century.

PART 1:
THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS

CHAPTER 1

Social Movements and the Possibility of Socialist Revolution

Colin Barker¹

Introduction

Was there a time when many Marxists believed that the tracks of history led more or less inexorably—even with some delays and retreats—to a socialist future? If so, few such Marxists survive today. Rather, as Cinzia Arruzza recently suggested:

We are not on a train traveling toward universal liberation and equality. Irreversible ecological disaster is actually at the moment a more likely possibility than a global revolution dispensing with capitalism once and for all. In fact, by connecting us into a “world,” capitalism has created only the historical possibility for a politics of insurgent universality, not its historical necessity.²

It is now over a century since the last, indeed the only successful attempt at a socialist revolution, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. That attempt, moreover, ended in the “degeneration” and then the complete reversal of the democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist ideals of “October.” Every attempt since has failed. Just as the 1871 Paris Commune was defeated through its isolation in one city, so the revolution in Catalonia in 1936–37 was isolated and defeated; similar fates dogged the Central Workers Council of 1956–57 in Hungary and Solidarność in Poland in 1980–81.³ To be sure, there have been self-styled “socialist revolutions” that overthrew old regimes and indeed empires but that installed new regimes pursuing state-centered capitalist development, giving a new lease of life to varieties of schemes for “socialism from above,” but none of these was centered on the self-emancipation of labor or an explosion of democratic participation. Rather, Rousseau’s paradox, adopted by Solidarność in Poland in 1980, remains predominant: “The human being is born free but is everywhere in chains.” The chains may now be the insistent demands of debt and vulture capitalism, but they are nonetheless heavy. Perhaps the predominant mood today is what the late Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism”: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”⁴

It might, then, seem somewhat perverse to be still asking: How might social movements prepare the way for a renewed effort at the revolutionizing—the overthrow—of capitalist social relations and their associated system of states? Just when climate change—the result of everyday capitalist competition—threatens the very existence of ever larger numbers of human and other life forms, and when capitalist industry and commerce are throttling the deepest oceans with plastic debris, how might such movements “save the planet” and humanity’s place upon it? After a century of failures on the left, would we not be better engaged in refining our apocalyptic despair and preparing for a million Jonestowns?

And yet . . . every one of the failures that have branded the souls of today’s Left was at least explicable. Like Bertolt Brecht’s Rise of Arturo Ui, every political disaster was resistible. If “inevitability” never marked the road to socialism, it also never signposted capitalism’s Onward March. Victories have been won—even if they were not the “final victory” we and our forebears wanted. If the old Left has been “rolled back” under neoliberalism, that has happened before and New Lefts have emerged from unexpected quarters and with new vigor. Capitalist society is not characterized by inexorability but by class struggle, battles for alternatives, surges of popular opposition, always taking new forms, drawing in new forces, developing new repertoires, broadening imaginations, exploring and refining arguments, testing limits and boundaries.

1. Class struggle and social movements

“Class struggle” is a summary term for the conflicts in modern society whose central axis is the capitalist mode of production itself, that is, the current system of social relations that is doubly driven by competition among its producing and consuming units and by the ongoing exploitation and oppression of its dispossessed majorities. As a system, it generates both needs it cannot meet and variable resources for popular resistance. Class struggle is at least a two-sided affair, in which all sides are active strategists in the pursuit of their opposed aims. Within the Marxist tradition, it possesses an additional feature, as the potential source of systematic change. As Marx told his friend Joseph Weydemeyer:

No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.... What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.⁵

Marx thus credited class struggle as the means not simply for the pursuit of immediate objectives within existing society, but for far-reaching social and political transformation, for social revolution. As to why revolution is required, Marx provided a summary two-part answer. The first is familiar: no other method can separate the ruling class from their property and power. But second (and more important), “The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution”; only active participation in a revolutionary movement can enable the oppressed to get rid of “the muck of ages” and transform themselves into subjects capable of remaking the world.⁶ Using other language, Marx expressed the same idea in the opening sentence of the Rules of the First International, “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”⁷ In this light, the central problem facing revolutionary politics consists in identifying and overcoming the multiple obstacles and difficulties that the exploited and oppressed face in developing their own collective self-organization and self-empowerment. This was the heart of what Hal Draper, in a brilliant essay, termed “socialism from below” as against all the varieties of “socialism from above.”⁸ “Subalternity” is how Gramsci dubbed that problem of the muck of ages. His “subaltern” is a term whose usage develops through his Prison Notebooks.⁹ It first appears in the third Notebook, where he writes:

The history of the subaltern classes is necessarily fragmented and episodic; in the activity of these classes there is a tendency toward unification, albeit in provisional stages, but this is the least conspicuous aspect, and it manifests itself only when victory is secured. Subaltern classes are subject to the initiatives of the dominant class, even when they rebel; they are in a state of anxious defense.

Hence, he concluded, “every trace of autonomous initiative is therefore of inestimable value.”¹⁰

Subalternity—dependence on the initiatives of the dominant class—manifests itself in practical passivity and in disbelief that our own and our fellows’ collective activity has the potential to alter the conditions of everyday life. In its extreme, it is portrayed in Javier Auyero’s anthropological explorations of the powerlessness and confusion of the Argentinian poor in the face of both environmental poisoning and welfare dependency.¹¹ More generally, it is expressed most of the time in what Gramsci terms people’s “contradictory consciousness.” While it’s never the case that popular consciousness is completely dominated by ruling-class ideas, it mostly remains an unstable amalgam, mixing together elements of a conception of the world borrowed from ruling groups along with elements of independent critical judgment that may only manifest themselves “occasionally and in flashes.” This second set of elements involves what Gramsci means by “good sense,” “the healthy nucleus that exists in ‘common sense’ . . . and which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent.”¹²

The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.... The active person-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of their practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. Their theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to their activity. One might also say that he or she has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in their activity and which in reality unites them with all their fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which they have inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.... Critical understanding of self therefore takes place through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions, in order to arrive at the working out of at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality.... The unity of theory and practice is a part of the historical process, whose elementary and primitive phase is to be found in the sense of being “different” and “apart,” in an instinctive feeling of independence, and which progresses to the level of real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world.¹³

Subaltern groups in Gramsci are never simply “objects” of historical development, the products of outside influence, although it can seem that way, especially in periods of time and in sectors of society when organized struggle from below is at a low ebb. Not seeing the potentials of “good sense” within “common sense” involves a one-sided appreciation of popular consciousness, associated with cynicism and elitism: not uncommonly, this can be witnessed among the exploited and oppressed themselves as expressions of defeat. Rather like Gramsci’s “fatalism,” such cynicism “is nothing but the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position.” It is always a partial stance: “In fact, however, some part of even a subaltern mass is always directive and responsible.”¹⁴

This implies a theory of “ideology,” an often misused term, several aspects of whose functioning demand recognition. First, ideologies are inherently practical, action-oriented. They tell us not only what the world is like, and what value-standards we should apply to experience, but also what is and is not practically feasible. As well as telling us who we are, how to understand our relations to the material and social worlds, what counts as good and beautiful, our ideas also suggest what we can hope and what we can do.¹⁵ Second, we think “in groups” and not as isolated monads, forming our ideas in ongoing, never-completed interactive conversations. Language and thought are, as V. N. Voloshinov, the Marxist philosopher of “signs,” insisted, intrinsically “dialogical.”¹⁶ Third, ideologies are consequently open-ended, self-transforming, and hence operate in a condition of “disorder.”¹⁷ Our formulations are constantly being “tested” against material and social reality, hence—even when we believe them to be fixed and certain—are always provisional.¹⁸ Fourth, there is commonly a disjunction between what people think “privately” and what they say and do. One source of this is their practical caution in the face of power, exercised both by those in superordinate positions but also by relative equals. The American anthropologist James C. Scott offers a very fruitful account of the critical but “hidden transcripts” of the powerless, which too easily escape the attention of historians and social scientists.¹⁹ Fifth, there is “unevenness” and a lack of homogeneity within the thinking of all classes and groups, such that collective responses to situations must always be negotiated and argued.²⁰

Often, the “provisional” character of ideological containment is too little stressed. At any given moment, a majority of people may feel that key aspects of the social structure are unchangeable. But such feelings are rooted not in some fixed and unchanging permanent “self-mystification” generated by social relations, but in the context of ongoing critical dialogue and action. People give challengeable reasons for their sense of “unchangeability,” and these reveal pragmatic judgments about social forces and experiences. “Socialism is impossible—look at my husband”; “We can’t strike, the miners were defeated”; “Most workers are just stupid—how else did the Tories get back in?” Pragmatic judgments are experiential, hence fluid.

2. Social movement heterogeneity

Under what conditions might we expect the balance between “common sense” and “good sense” to shift away from “subalternity,” or dependence on initiatives by others?²¹ When might “rebellious” activity lose its feeling of “anxious defense” and assert itself more confidently? To attempt answers to such questions is to inquire into the potentials contained in collective activity and organization from below, in short into “social movements.”

“Social movements” are a shorthand term for the forms through which the exploited and oppressed engage together in struggle against aspects of their conditions of life. They are the phenomenal forms in which class struggle from below appears.²² Defining social movements has been accounted a “theoretical nightmare”;²³ it is certainly impossible outside the conflicts in which they emerge. People associate together in an effort to oppose some pressing feature of the situation in which they find themselves, and in the process establish informal or formal organizational links among themselves through which they can determine how their mutual activity might ameliorate or remove the obstacles to their needs, and how they may act in concert.²⁴ Movements then develop through their practical interactions with their opponents and with those they seek to draw into their ranks and as they work to make sense of their own existence and the tasks they undertake.

The social phenomena that comprise movements range enormously in scale, from “local” formations contesting particular offending situations to broader “campaigns” all the way to society-wide revolutionary challenges to states and capital.²⁵ Movements at any scale in their development are varied in their composition, and what makes them a relative “unity” as entities is the emergence among them of some kind of shared “project” for change. They combine together individuals and groups with particular interests and grievances, always to some degree overcoming differences among them yet at the same time remaining heterogeneous.

In this view, movements are not so much fixed entities following predetermined pathways as developing fields of activity and argument. Romanticist commentators sometimes miss this: they see the relative unity that movements sometimes achieve but miss their inner differentiation. Therewith they also miss the “cycles of learning” that movements undergo in their dealings with opponents and their efforts to steer themselves.²⁶ Movements are bodies engaged in popular learning and experimentation of a practical and theoretical character, processes involving internal debate and the practical testing of strategic and tactical conceptions.

Where the actions and organizational links that mark the presence of social movements have any degree of longevity, the activists whose networks form their core architecture are liable to develop systems of communication among themselves, woven through the everyday networks of work, community, and other forms of associational life. Alan Sears conceives of these as “infrastructures of dissent,” referring to

the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together. This process of collective capacity-building takes a variety of forms, ranging fro...