and creative engagement with Marxism, and challenge us to think beyond the comfort zone of our certainties and to open our minds to varied approaches to Marxism. While the volume offers a range of perspectives on Marxism, there are also important common strands that hold the diverse viewpoints and themes together. All the chapters take as their starting point a sympathy toward a critical Marxism, a rejection of vanguardism, a desire for and appreciation of involvement in political practice, and a belief that there is enough in Marxism broadly defined to make it relevant and necessary in the contemporary phase of capitalism.
This renewal of Marxism demonstrates a commitment to retrieving the critical impulse in Marxist thought and to drawing on new sources of Marxism to make sense of the contemporary contradictions of global capitalism. What is particularly interesting about the Marxism(s) emerging is the willingness to question the foundations of ‘Marxism’ and to look reflexively to new ways of integrating Marxism(s) today. The Marxism of today is anchored in new forms of rebellious activity that mark it apart from the deferential, vanguard politics of the twentieth century and has shifted from the academy to struggles led by the exploited themselves through participatory democratic processes. The chapters that make up this volume force us to rethink our dyed-in-the-wool understandings of Marx and Marxism. Issues of democracy, ecology, feminism, critique, globalisation, historical lessons and questions of agency, as well as lineages of thought from a range of anti-capitalist traditions, must feature in our engagements with Marxism for the complex age in which we live.
Note
1 Like all political parties, the SACP has varying factions vying for power. The shifts in ideological focus partly reflect which faction has come to the fore at any given time.
References
Callinicos, A. 1999. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Glaser, D. and Walker, D. 2010. Twentieth Century Marxism: A Global Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
Hobsbawm, E. 2011. How to Change the World: Tales in Marx and Marxism. London: Little, Brown and Company.
Renton, D. 2004. Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times. London and New York: Zed Books.
SACP (South African Communist Party). 2012. ‘Political Report to the 13th Congress’. Report presented to the 13th Congress of the South African Communist Party, 11–15 July.
Therborn, G. 2008. From Marxism to Post-Marxism. London: Verso.
Chapter 1
Marxism and Democracy: Liberal, Vanguard or Direct?
Michelle Williams
One of the most contentious and neglected issues in Marxism is the content, role and place of democracy in transformative visions and practices. For some, Marxism is antithetical to democracy; for others, vanguard democracy represents the pinnacle of Marxism, and still others pay little attention to democracy at all. Marxism has gone through different phases, each phase with its unique social base and foundational ideas. At the time of the Second and Third Internationals, Marxism’s social base was largely in working-class movements and parties, but shifted from the 1950s onwards to intellectuals overwhelmingly located in universities. This growth of and engagement with Marxism among intellectuals was in part due to the phenomenal growth and influence of university education (Hobsbawm 2011: 360). After reaching the peak of its influence in the academy during the 1970s, Marxism weakened through the course of the 1990s. In the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in Marxism emerged among multi-class movements, middle-and working-class activists and intellectuals. These diverse social strata do not necessarily converge in their understandings of history, or their views of the causes and consequences of the dynamics of capitalism, but rather, share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’.
This is the context within which I focus this chapter on literature – both liberal and Marxist – that has explicitly engaged the issue of democracy.1 Because Marxist influence over the last half-century has largely emanated from intellectuals located within universities, I focus on the various ways in which liberal and Marxist scholars have placed democracy against and within Marxism. While democracy is a contested concept that often incorporates very different notions of social change and control, with various actors and processes, twentieth-century liberals and Marxists tended to focus on representative and vanguard democracy respectively, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy.2 Bertrand Russell (1946: 14) pithily captured the central distinction: the Western understanding of democracy ‘is that it consists in the rule of the majority; the Russian view is that it consists in the interests of the majority’. Neither tradition emphasised government by the people. The bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy severely limited the debate on democracy in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, political movements are attempting to transcend this dichotomous view of democracy and have placed direct and participatory democracy at the centre of alternative, emancipatory visions of the future through meaningful deliberation and participation in political and economic life by ordinary citizens.3
Liberal Critiques of Marxist-Inspired Soviet Communism
In this section, the focus is on scholarship that has equated Marxism with twentieth-century ‘communism’ as this literature problematises the role of democracy in the communist movement and juxtaposes authoritarianism with representative democracy. Historically, Marxists did not focus their gaze on the importance of direct democracy,4 content with either vanguard notions of democracy led by the Party together with the advanced working class or with the representative democracy of the Eurocommunists and social democrats. This neglect of the importance of direct democracy and its relation to representative democracy was exacerbated by the liberal tradition’s collapsing of Marxism with authoritarianism and juxtaposing this with representative democracy as the only viable alternative.
There is a vast literature on Marxism that has been dominated by studies delving into the totalitarian and undemocratic nature of communism (for example, the work of Gabriel A. Almond, Hannah Arendt, Fernando Claudin, Joseph Schumpeter, Philip Selznick and Jacob Talmon). This image of Marxism as totalitarian, influenced by the larger political milieu of cold-war politics, was uniform in liberal literature on communism, which was concerned with demonstrating the Party’s absolute control over the ‘masses’ (see, for example, the work of Almond, Selznick and Talmon) and continues to influence scholarship, as is evident in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) which posits market capitalism and representative democracy as the pinnacle of human history. Similarly, Stéphane Courtois et al.’s Black Book of Communism (1999) concludes that communism is morally similar to Nazism, implicitly positing representative democracy as the only morally acceptable alternative. This anti-Marxist position also influenced the apartheid state, which framed the liberation struggle as part of the ‘rooi gevaar’ (red danger) coming out of the Soviet Union and influencing the South African liberation movement. The roots of this cold-war tradition hark back to the 1950s.
Many scholars in the mid-twentieth century were heavily informed by the liberal political tradition, taking representative democracy to be the one and only alternative to totalitarian communism (for example, Almond, Schumpeter, Selznick and Talmon). This tradition referred to vanguard democracy as totalitarian because of the way in which the Party (ostensibly made up of the advanced working class and revolutionary activists) enjoyed absolute power in the name of working
