Any comments? - Macdonald
*******
Colin Leys and Leo Panitch
I
We are living in interesting times. The tide of reaction is still flowing, but with
diminishing confidence and force, while the counter-flow of progressive feeling and
ideas gathers strength but has yet to find effective political expression. As the
contradictions of unbridled neoliberalism become increasingly plain, fewer and fewer
people any longer mistake its real character. 'Stubborn historical facts' are
breaking through the illusions fostered by neoliberal rhetoric - and equally through
the pseudo-left illusions of 'new times', 'radicalism of the centre' and all similar
dreams of a capitalist world miraculously freed from alienation, immiseration and
crises.1
At the peripheries of the global economy - in most of Africa, in Central America, in
South Asia - historical facts have never permitted most people the luxury of such
illusions, even if the elites of these countries embrace and foster them. Such recent
experiences as the misery and barbarisms provoked by 'structural adjustment' in
dozens of countries in Africa, or the rape of the public sector in Mexico, have done
nothing to make neoliberalism more beguiling to ordinary people anywhere in the
former Third World. Where the propagandists of the 'Washington consensus' did achieve
some ideological sway over working people was above all in the 'North'. But there
too, after nearly two decades of capitalist restoration, painful reality increasingly
prevails over corporate newspeak.
Some 40,000 multinational corporations - fifty of them now receiving more revenue
than two-thirds of the world's states - frenetically merge, restructure,
're-engineer', 're-configure' and relocate themselves, in an almost parodic speed-up
and trans-nationalisation of Marx's famous Manifesto script. 'Whole populations' -
from the
19
women workers in the free trade zones of southern China and northern Mexico to the
huge new immigrant workforces of Western Europe and North America - are now 'conjured
out of the ground' (in Manes unforgettable phrase) in less than a generation; while
others - like older manual workers, and the growing reserve army of young people -
are as rapidly conjured back into it again.2 Ruthless downward pressure on real
incomes, enforced by the restoration of large-scale permanent unemployment
(thirty-four million people - plus their families - in the OECD countries alone)
through corporate 'downsizing', spectacular failures (Pan Am, British Leyland,
Barings, Yamaichi) and the re-casualisation of work - all of these give new meaning
to the Manifesto's portrait of how 'growing competition', 'commercial crises' and the
'unceasing improvement of machinery' make people's livelihoods 'more and more
precarious'. Nor is it any longer 'loosely connected provinces' that are being
'lumped together' by the bourgeoisie, with 'one national class-interest, one frontier
and one customs-tariff'; what the capitalist classes now seek is nothing less than
the abolition of all frontiers and all tariffs, and a Multilateral Agreement on
Investment, a universal treaty giving investors legally and if necessary, no doubt
militarily - enforceable rights, that would tie states even more securely to
capital's global class-interest.
All this is becoming clear. Journalists can no longer speak, as they did in the
1980s, of 'the business community', as if it were some benign college whose interests
were more or less identical to those of the nation as a whole; simply to stay
credible they must now talk about 'the corporate agenda' and the threat that
capitalism (no longer a taboo word) poses to the environment, and about the problems
of poverty and homelessness it is creating, the erosion of social security and the
negative impact on standards of health and education.3
As Boris Kagarlitsky has recently remarked: 'Reaction is a natural historical
phenomenon, but it becomes exhausted just as revolutions do. When this exhaustion
sets in, a new phase of revolution can begin.'4 We are still far from witnessing the
exhaustion of the neoliberal reaction, or restoration, although the symptoms of its
fatigue are accumulating (including the inability of parties too ostentatiously
identified with it to continue to win elections).5 But as is also normal with all
reactions, this one too is already overreaching itself, partly because, as
Kagarlitsky has also noted, the post-war settlement in the West was underpinned by
fear of the Communist threat and the lifting of this threat removed a significant
constraint on capital's political ambitions.
20
Since the collapse of the post-war settlement in the 1970s capitalists had wanted to
'lower expectations', and a clear reaction in the West began to emerge, led by
Thatcher and Reagan, aimed at breaking the power of organized labour, expanding the
scope for capital accumulation through privatisation, and replacing collective
welfare by entrepreneurship and individualism as the legitimating values of liberal
democracy. With the collapse of Communism, however, the project could be pursued even
more ruthlessly. Unemployment could be raised to mass levels, public services and
welfare programmes could be cut more and more' drastically, and inequality restored
to nineteenth century levels, without any anxiety about the need to maintain social
cohesion in face of the red menace, or to prove to workers in the West that they were
as secure as their Soviet bloc counterparts, as well as better paid.6
So the social contradictions of capitalist competition returned in force. Even with
over 20 million unemployed in Europe, among those still in full-time jobs the weekly
hours worked rose, and so did chronic sickness, and so did crime, and the numbers of
people in jail.7 The great economic 'success', story of the mid-1990s, the United
States, with an official unemployment rate of only 5% compared to over 11% in the
European Union, rests on an unprecedented reduction in American workers' real incomes
over the past quarter century. Even during the economic 'recovery of recent years
'the proportion of people losing jobs is ... at an all-time high. Between 1992 and
1995, 15 percent of people holding jobs for more than one year lost those jobs; their
new jobs, if they found one, paid 14 percent less on average.'8
All this could happen without capital any longer feeling even a lingering vestige of
concern about the threat of communism. But it could not continue without even the
western working class eventually starting to ask themselves again for whose benefit
all these sacrifices were being made, and when they would end. By the mid- I 990s
strikes in France, the USA and Canada once more occupied the front pages alongside
reports of strikes in South Korea and 'IMF riots' throughout much of the former Third
World from Zimbabwe to Mexico. There was also a sharp rise in class awareness. As
even the Economist noted, 'Many commentators think that class is dying, but ordinary
people are not convinced. In fact class antagonisms may even be worsening - the
proportion of voters believing there is a "class struggle" in Britain rose from
around 60% in the early 1960s to 81% in the mid-1990s, according to Gallup. . .'9 And
in the United States, a New York Times
21
poll in 1996 found that 55% of Americans now defined themselves as working class
while only 36% defined themselves as middle class, a major reversal of the
traditional American pattern; and no less than 60% of those who had experienced a
layoff in their family thought that 'the government should step in to do something'
and attributed 'a lot of the blame for the loss of jobs on the economic system in
this country'.10
II
To see the outlines of a new period of class struggle taking shape, however, is not
the same thing as seeing clearly how to engage in it; and it remains true that the
left has been severely disempowered and disorganized by the scope and ruthlessness of
the capitalist restoration and the effects of global deregulation. The independent
left, the militant activists in both the trade unions and the new social movements
who have withstood the pressures to capitulate to market hegemony, are a potentially
far more significant force than the right likes to pretend. But there is nonetheless
an acute sense, within this left, of a political absence: the lack of a capacity to
go beyond 'networking', beyond pluralism (hard-won and rightly cherished as that is),
to find new ways to give coherence and strategic direction to collective efforts to
mobilise and make effective the developing reaction against the market, against
capital.
It is this widespread sense of a political absence that makes the political legacy of
the Manifesto especially relevant today. As Rob Beamish shows in his essay in this
volume, the Manifesto, while drafted by Marx, was 'the product of an extended and
intense but open debate among committed communist-internationalists' who were trying
to fashion political organizations through which the collective efforts of the
working classes to understand and confront the major problems of their time could
cohere and have greater effect. The eventual result was the mass working-class
parties of the late nineteenth century; and so much did these become part of the
political landscape that it is easy to forget that such autonomous political
organizations of the subordinate classes were an entirely new historical phenomenon,
and that it took the better part of a half-century, after the defeats of 1848, to
make them a reality. By the time of the Manifesto's centenary in 1948, Social
Democratic and Communist parties were among the leading forces on the world's
political stage. Nevertheless, it was because these parties no longer embodied the
22
radical legacy of the Manifesto that so many of the '1968 generation', only two
decades later, not only rejected these particular parties, but eventually came to
doubt the appropriateness of the 'party as a political form.
Yet most people who are active in political and social struggles today feel the need
for something that will perform some essential tasks that used to be performed by
parties. This confirms Cynthia Cockburn's premonition in the 1970s that, for all the
exciting and energetic pluralism of the new community movements, there was something
lacking; that their struggles, if conceived apart from 'an arena of conflict between
the dominant and exploited class', would be in danger of failing to cohere despite
their proximity to each other
within the working class and its near neighbours.... They shake out as tenants,
ratepayers, teenage youth, houseowners, swimming enthusiasts and squatters. All are
asked to compete and defend their special interests, while the class with real power
remains untouched ....l1
The necessity of going 'beyond the fragments', while not replicating the defects of
the old parties or their sectarian offshoots, was already being argued brilliantly by
Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright by the end of the 1970s;12 but the 'articulation'
actually achieved between social movements and progressive trade unions - in forms
that range from the Rainbow Coalition in the USA and the Action Canada Network in
Canada to the Anti-GATT/WTO Movement in India and the Opposition to the Devastation
Caused by the World Bank/IMF in Sri Lanka - have consisted mainly of 'popular front'-
style strategic networking between the top leaderships of the various organizations.
What has always been missing -and this is now strongly felt by many social movement
leaders themselves -is something that would be more than the sum of the parts,
something which the Social Democratic and Communist parties did partly provide in
their heyday.
This is, at one level, simply a matter of offering electoral alternatives. The
century-long frustration that American political activists have experienced through
being unable to translate political agitation and mobilization into meaningful
electoral choices is now increasingly felt elsewhere; the accommodation of the old
Communist and Social Democratic parties in Europe to the neo-liberal agenda -
epitomised now by 'New' Labour in Britain - is giving activists there a taste of what
the absence of a mass working class party in the USA has meant throughout this
century (and which the American left is now trying again to rectify with the New
Party and Labour Party initiatives).'13
23
But it is much more than a matter of what to do on election day. It is about all the
things Marx had in mind when he wrote that the 'immediate aim' of all proletarian
parties was the 'formation of the proletariat into a class. These included providing
activists with a strategic, ideological and educational vehicle; a political home
which is open to individuals to enter (rather than restricted, as today's social
movement networking often is, to representatives of groups); a political community
which explicitly seeks to transcend particularistic identities while supporting and
building on the struggles they generate; and through all of these things, serving as
the incubator of a new social force, providing a structure but also an agency which
expresses the pre-existing range of identities while also expanding them - 'helping
to organize what it claims to represent', as Margaret Keck aptly put it in relation
to the Workers' Party of Brazil -14 and which in doing so achieves the capacity to
'make history. This, at any rate, is what Marx meant by 'revolutionising praxis', by
'the alteration of men on a mass scale' - and what a party today must be able to do.
The 'formation of the proletariat into a class' is, moreover, not something that once
attempted and even partially accomplished, is then finished; the working class, once
'made', is not 'fixed and frozen' as imagined by traditionalists who cling to every
cultural as well as socio-economic encrustation - nor by (post?) modernizers who
abandon the working class as hopelessly outdated and unchangeable, and go in search
of more fashionable agencies. New parties have already arisen and more will arise,
profoundly conscious of how much they need to be different from the old Social
Democratic and Communist parties if they are to form today's proletariat into a new
class, a class once again capable of making history. But 'making history' in what
sense? A discriminating view of the Manifesto and its legacy is needed in this
respect.
III
We need to ask, first of all, what was the nature of the revolutionary message of the
Manifesto, as opposed to the way it has been understood, especially by its critics.
It was certainly above all a revolutionary document, and it has always been taken as
calling for a political revolution as a prelude to a social and economic one; the
October revolution has been seen as a response to its call, and Stalinism as a
logical consequence. But it is worth reminding ourselves that this is not true.
24
The revolution Marx called for (and thought inevitable) was a revolution in social
relations. As Bernard Moss points out elsewhere in this volume, Marx, like all his
contemporaries, had the example of the French Revolution sixty years earlier very
much in mind, and thought a new political revolution - 'the forcible overthrow of
existing conditions' - would be necessary in order to achieve the social revolution
in most countries, given the predictable resistance that would be offered by the
bourgeoisie and its allies to any fundamental change in relations of production. Only
in 1872 -twenty-four years after writing the Manifesto - did he cautiously allow that
in countries with long traditions of democracy (like the USA, Britain, and perhaps
the Netherlands) the workers might 'attain their goal by peaceful means'.15 In later
writings Marx was also apt to put more stress on the possibility of revolution
spreading to the capitalist heartlands from the system's unstable 'extremities; and,
as Shanin and others have pointed out, since he was always impatient for action, he
backed the revolutionary wing of the Russian populists against their proto-Menshevik
opponents, even though this was not fully consistent with his analysis in the main
body of his work, whether the Manifesto of 1848, or the Grundrisse written in the
late 1850s, or Capital completed in the mid-1860s. What this did show, however, was
that he did not believe that all peoples were fated to tread an identical path to
socialism.16
Revolutions in the 'periphery' would, evidently, also be more or less violent. Marx's
attitude to this was practical. The right of revolution , the only really historical
right', as Engels put it just before his death in 1895, 'the only right on which all
modern states rest' - was a democratic right, the right of the majority to make their
own history; it would be exercised peaceably if possible, forcibly if not.17 Marx's
profoundest political commitment was to this democratic right, as his subsequent
idealisation of the Paris Commune of 1870 as exemplifying an unprecedentedly radical
kind of democracy also makes clear; it was from the opponents of socialism that he
anticipated violence, and not without cause.
Having said this, it remains true that there was also an unresolved tension in Marx's
attitude, reflected in the concept of 'proletarian dictatorship'. On the one hand it
meant, for him, 'democracy carried to its fullest' (with the Commune as its example),
in the sense of the majority class becoming the ruling class for the first time in
history; on the other hand, it meant a period of centralised and repressive rule
entailing strict measures to defeat the old ruling classes and prevent
counter-revolution. The risk that coercion might become institution-
-------------------------------------------
Macdonald Stainsby
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