capitalism and marketised solutions are becoming transnational. Their political positioning and alignments in the context of the crises of capitalism need to be clearly unpacked. Are their interests served by national capitalism or transnational capitalism? Left projects that have tried to win over national capital are showing serious limits in the context of transnationalising capitalism. This is demonstrated in the chapters on Brazil and India in this volume. Class is also being remade from below. Fractions of the working class are coming to the fore, some more precariously than others, and some outside the labour market as a permanent reserve army of labour of the unemployed and the landless. The youth character of the working class is also accentuated in particular national contexts. In some societies the process of ‘de-peasantisation’ is proceeding through violence and dispossession. This volume brings into view these various class-formation dynamics.
The third difference is that, in the twentieth century, vanguards proliferated: Soviet, social-democratic or revolutionary-nationalist vanguards. Class politics then was about aggregating interests of workers or peasants, or multi-class alliances within such political forms. At the same time, a political line and imagination was diffused from the centres of these ideological projects. In some instances, international movements transmitted mechanistic politics, while in others capital cities loomed large, such as Havana, Moscow and Beijing. In the end, vanguardism capitulated to neoliberalism and workers were betrayed. In contrast to this history of vanguards, today the political forms coming to the fore to champion alternatives to capitalism are diverse and include transnational think tanks, workers’ parties, anti-systemic movements, parties of the unemployed, unions and other political entities. No single political group has the monopoly on how the class struggle should be fought and how the Left should advance. This diversity of left agency has also thrown up a challenge for how political instruments are constituted to aggregate different types of social power. Hence we have entered the era of building democratic political forms, such as fronts, alliances, networks, mass party movements and mass movements – all with a transnational dimension and a diversity in their institutional and social forces. This is largely what characterises the new form of political instruments emerging to challenge state power and advance alternatives. This volume brings this phenomenon to the fore in a number of chapters.
Finally, twentieth-century resistance was bedevilled by model thinking, with a strong tendency to copy dominant models, such as centralised planning and the one-party state. In the current cycle of resistance, however, there is a more open way of approaching alternatives to capitalism. This is partly a function of the multifaceted nature of the crises of capitalism. Transnational movements that challenge neoliberalism, whether on food, climate, cyber freedom or the labour front, are all articulating alternatives. Some are more transformative than others, but it nonetheless affirms that the power for change lies with a plurality of left forces. Moreover, every society and context has its own challenges, despite the common reach and presence of the crises of global capitalism. Each context therefore demands different responses from the Left in terms of regionalisation, national development strategies, macro-economic policy and transformation from below. In Latin America, for example, the countries that have moved to the Left are not uniform. Some have tried to add a social dimension to neoliberalism and some have tried to break with it completely. All of these experiences create important strategic lessons. At the same time, such contextual differences caution one against crudely attempting to transplant a ‘Lula moment’ into, for example, South Africa. This volume underlines this new aspect to left agency in the world today: alternatives for the Left are advanced in their context and translated in a manner that is informed by local realities, political traditions and dynamics of class formation. Of course, this approach does not diminish the importance of learning critically from other experiences and advancing international solidarity.
DEMOCRATIC MARXIST PERSPECTIVES: THE CONJUNCTURE OF CAPITALIST CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIVE RESISTANCE
Part 1 of this volume focuses on contemporary understandings of capitalism’s crises.
In Chapter 1, Vishwas Satgar confronts the limitations of classical Marxist theory for understanding the contemporary capitalist crisis. He offers a reading of Marx to understand how Marx thought about the crisis tendencies of capitalism and examines the different conceptions of crisis present in Marx’s work. In some of his work before Capital, Marx tended to exaggerate the prospects for breakdown or collapse. However, Satgar argues that Marx did not have a single or even a systematic theory of crisis, even at the level of abstract and pure capitalism.
The chapter sets out the limits of Marx’s understanding of the tendencies for capitalist crisis. The aim is not to reject Marx, but to find new openings and ways forward for thinking about contemporary capitalist crises. Although Marx abstracted his categories about the workings of the capitalist mode of production, he was grappling with the historical dynamics of a competitive mid-Victorian industrial capitalism, which is different from contemporary transnationalising techno-financial accumulation. Moreover, given that we are dealing with crises in the plural, at a systemic level and on a world scale, which capitalist historical form is in crisis? This poses a challenge for how we think about periodising historical capitalism. This chapter argues for the periodisation of ‘capitalist civilisation’ not only as the basis to understand its main characteristics, but also to understand the scale at which the systemic crises of capitalism are manifest.
The chapter also looks at how capitalism’s tendencies for systemic crisis are rooted structurally, institutionally and ideologically in US imperial power and transnational class-based practices. The chapter concludes with the challenges confronting left agency today by responding to the question: catastrophism or transformative moment? In answering this question, there is an attempt to identify challenges and requirements for a new type of transformative left agency to sustain life.
In Chapter 2, William K Carroll investigates activist understandings of the crises of capitalism through neo-Gramscian political economy. He asks the following questions: how do movement intellectuals and activist researchers associated with the production and mobilisation of counter-hegemonic knowledge view the crisis? And what can we learn from their reflections? This chapter addresses these questions on the basis of interviews with 91 activist intellectuals in 16 transnational alternative policy groups.
Carroll unpacks Gramsci’s notion of organic crisis in his engagements with movement intellectuals. Many of the reflections shared by them add substance to a dialectical conception of crisis as objective and subjective, as disintegration and re-formation, as passive revolution and anti-passive revolution. There is a translation of Gramsci at work that recognises that contemporary structural contradictions are ‘incurable’, thus shifting relations of force away from neoliberal hegemony towards a new conjuncture while rendering the course of history open. Many movement intellectuals show an acute awareness of radical contingency, of various aspects of organic crisis, and of the fierce challenges they face in building a counter-hegemonic bloc in a non-vanguardist manner. This also means organising in ways that reach beyond problematic currents in contemporary activism.
Part 2 of the volume focuses on capitalist crises in the global North and the Left’s responses to them.
Three years into the crisis that began in 2008, the world’s imagination was suddenly captured by the emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the slogan ‘99 per cent versus 1 per cent’. This represented a rupturing in the neoliberal domination of public discourse and asserted the rage of good common sense. In Chapter 3, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Isham Christie examine the Left’s response to the financial crisis of 2008 in the US, focusing in particular on the emergence of Occupy Wall Street. As participants in the movement, the authors relate their angle on the context and the constraints that shaped the mobilisation. Although not representative of the Left as a whole, Occupy offers insight into some of the dynamics that characterise the Left in the US today, including its antagonism towards the history of dogmatic Marxism, the weakness of current models of organising, and widespread scepticism of the state. By embracing participatory democracy and anti-organisational suspicion, Occupy represents
