MARXISMS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
CRISIS, CRITIQUE & STRUGGLE
Editors: Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
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 978-1-86814-846-2 (digital)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
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, transnational 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
This volume was long in the making and because of this we would like to give special thanks to all of the contributors for their patience and perseverance. 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.
Introduction
Michelle Williams
Karl Marx’s writings on and ideas about social transformation have figured 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.
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 capitalism 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 capitalism 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 shortlived as their prescriptive ideas wreaked havoc on the global economy as well as
