AUGUST 23-26: Water protectors to gather at Minnesota State Capitol in ceremony to stop Line 3 pipeline  Hundreds of supporters to rally on Wednesday, August 25th

AUGUST 23-26: Water protectors to gather at Minnesota State Capitol in ceremony to stop Line 3 pipeline Hundreds of supporters to rally on Wednesday, August 25th

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES

CONTACT: media@resistline3.org or 406-552-8764
Jennifer K. Falcon, jennifer@ienearth.org, 218-760- 9958

(St Paul)- Indigenous water protectors and allies will gather at the Minnesota State Capitol in late August for Treaties Not Tar Sands. From August 23rd to 26th, Indigenous grandmothers from White Earth Nation will hold ceremonial space on the Capitol lawn. On August 25th, hundreds of people will gather for a rally from 2 – 5 PM to call on Governor Walz and President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline from transporting tar sands oil across northern Minnesota. On Wednesday night after the rally, some water protectors intend to hold space and camp out on the Capitol lawn.

The primary public event, the rally on August 25th, coincides with the end of the Treaty People Walk for Water. Led by Indigenous water protectors, the walk began on August 7th from the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which is the site of several recent Line 3 spills. The walkers are bringing a message from the frontlines to Governor Tim Walz and President Joe Biden at the Capitol: “Stop Line 3!”

August 25th: Treaties not Tar Sands Rally details:

  • What: A rally with hundreds of water protectors featuring drumming, singing, and  remarks from Indigenous leaders in the movement to stop Line 3 and others.
  • Where: Minnesota State Capitol, 75 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd., St Paul, MN
  • When: August 25th, 2 – 5 PM
  • Interviews: spokespeople will be available before, during, and after the rally
  • Media check in: please check in at the media table when you arrive to coordinate interviews and get oriented to the event

August 24th: Additional Media Availability

Press are invited to attend a media availability with the Indigenous grandmothers leading ceremony and other organizers at the Capitol at 11:30 AM on August 24th.

Press are welcome to attend the second day’s ceremonial opening that morning at 10 AM. While you may be permitted to document some elements of ceremony, please respect requests from Indigenous leaders to stop filming or photographing at any point.

There are opportunities for photo and scheduled interviews Monday the 23rd to Friday the 27th.

The Ceremony at the Capitol has been organized by elder women from the White Earth Nation, and the events including the rally and encampment are organized by groups including the RISE Coalition, Indigenous Environmental Network, and MN350, and are endorsed by a broad coalition of Minnesota racial and environmental justice groups. For more information visit: Treaties Not Tar Sands and the event Facebook page.

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Established in 1990, The Indigenous Environmental Network is an international environmental justice nonprofit that works with tribal grassroots organizations to build the capacity of Indigenous communities. I EN’s activities include empowering Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.

Learn more here: ienearth.org

What is Marxism Part 2: Marxism after Marx

What is Marxism Part 2: Marxism after Marx

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

The post describes the many Marxism’s after Marx. It’s long so the introduction lists the contents of the post. There is a mixture of theory and history.

Marxism after Marx historically and geographically – David McLellan

In Marxism after Marx, David McLellan has written the most comprehensive description of the various Marxism that came after Marx. This includes:

1. The German Social Democrats

  • Friedrich Engels
  • revisionist controversy
  • The radicals
  • Austro-Marxism

2. Russian Marxism

  • Origins of Russian Marxism
  • Leon Trotsky
  • Vladimir Lenin
  • Russian Marxism in the 1920s
  • Stalinism
  • Post-Stalin Communism

3. European Marxism between the wars

  • Georg Lukács
  • Karl Korsch
  • Council Communism
  • Antonio Gramsci

4. China and Third World

  • The Making of the Chinese Revolution
  • Maoism in Power
  • Latin America
  • Marxism and Underdevelopment

5. Contemporary Marxism in Europe and the US

  • The Frankfurt School
  • Existential Marxism
  • Italian Marxism
  • Structural Marxism
  • British Marxism
  • US Marxism
  • Postmodern Marxism

Libertarian Marxism tenancies

  • Rosa Luxemberg
  • Council Communists
  • G.I.K. Group of International Communists
  • Socialism or Barbarism
  • Letterist and Situationist International
  • Early Hegalian Marxism
  • Frankfurt School
  • Johnson Forest Tendency
  • Raya Dunayevskaya
  • CLR James
  • Amadeo Bordiga
  • Operaismo or Workerism
  • Autonomia
  • Autonomist Marxism
  • post-’68ers German Marxists
  • Open Marxism

Neo-Marxism

Others Marxisms

  • Political Marxism
  • Praxis Marxism
  • Two Marxisms – Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism

Marxism after Marx historically and geographically – David McLellan

I have used the framework from David McLellan’s book Marxism After Marx for this section.

1. The German Social Democrats

Friedrich Engels worked and supported Marx, they co-authored The Communist Manifesto. After Marx’s death, Engels edited and published the second and third volumes of Capital. Engels published the Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1845 and the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884. Following Marx’s death, Engels continued working on several areas include applying knowledge from science to how he viewed the world, historical materialism, and the state. [1]

The revisionist controversy resulted from a crisis of Marxism in the 1890s, which was caused by a recovery of capitalism. Its main proponent was Eduard Bernstein who challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history as too determinist. He also challenged Marx’s theory of value, class conflict, and polarisation (working-class impoverishment vs wealth concentration). The revisionists argued that there could be a gradual transformation into socialism. [2]

The radicals were a pressure group within the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) from the early 1900s. They were mostly outsiders between the SPD and more radical movements. The two insiders were Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht. Mehring was a journalist who used historical materialism to analyse society and the SPD. Lieknecht was an anti-war SPD deputy (a member of parliament). The outsiders include Alexander Parvus/Israel Helphand, Antonie Pannekoek, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg Luxemburg wrote a strong critique of Bernstein’s focus on social reforms and disregarding revolution and capitalist breakdown. She also critiques Bernstein in the fields of economics, sociology, and politics. Luxemburg advocated spontaneity and the mass strike over the ‘vanguard party’. Arguably her great work was The Accumulation of Capital where “she argued that capitalism needs to constantly expand into non-capitalist areas in order to access new supply sources, markets for surplus value and reservoirs of labor.” [3]

From 1906 the conservative trade unions and SPD executive made life difficult from the radicals. They became a stronger political force in the SPD during the war with their focus on the mass strike and imperialism. Opposition to the war resulted in a split in the SPD, with the left radicals (now called the Spartacists) and the oppositional centralists were expelled. The Independent German Socialist Party (USDP) was formed and included a broad range on the left from the left radicals to Bernstein. The Spartacus League published on opposition to the war, the cause of the war was imperialist rivalry between capitalist classes in different countries and the need for mass strikes. The Spartacus League had minimal impact on the USDP and formed the Communist Party of Germany in 1919 made up of small and isolated groups. Large street demonstrations in January 1919 – not organised or supported by the League – gave the government an excuse to crush the weak left radicals. [4]

Austro-Marxism was a “Marxist theoretical current, led by Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria in Austria-Hungary and the First Austrian Republic (1918–1934). It is known for its theory of nationality and nationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it with socialism in the imperial context.” [5]

2. Russian Marxism

The Origins of Russian Marxism were in a country that only emancipated serfs in 1861 and was an underdeveloped capitalist agrarian society. The most radical revolutionary movement was called the Populists and had a powerful connection to the Russian people. It had two schools of thought: those that believed in the self-emancipation of the people by peaceful propaganda, and those the believed in attacking the autocracy through terrorist acts. Marx’s ideas arrived in the 1880s and most agreed with the sociological analysis and critique of society but not the materialist outlook or belief in proletarian revolution. The first group of Russian Marxists, Group for the Emancipation of Labour, formed in 1883. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in 1898. [6]

Leon Trotsky was a “Soviet revolutionary, Marxist theorist and politician whose particular strain of Marxist thought is known as Trotskyism. Trotsky took part in the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a leader within the Communist Party. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo. He was a prominent figure in the early People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army. After the rise of Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was removed from his positions and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. He spent the rest of his life in exile and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky’s ideas developed the basis of Trotskyism, a prime school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism.” [7]

McLellan identified two parts to Trotsky’s social and economic analysis of contemporary Russia: the socio-economic theory of combined and uneven development, and permanent revolution. [8]

Vladimir Lenin was a “Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.” [9]

McLellan describes the five significant contributions by Lenin: the PartyrevolutionImperialism, the national question or national self-determination, and philosophy. [10]

Russian Marxism in the 1920s focused on how to develop an industrialised socialist economy in a backwards peasant country. The first economic measures in 1917 were relatively moderate: selective nationalisation, eight hour working day, redistribution of nationalised land (Decree on Land) and some workers control.

In 1918 Lenin brought in ‘state capitalism’. This involved a centralisation of the control of the economy by increased labour discipline, wages incentives and managerial authority. There was also a compromise with larger financial interests so the attack on capitalism was suspended.

The start of the Russian civil war in the summer of 1918 made state capitalism ineffective. To survive the Russian government brought in ‘War Communism’. This included the huge increase of nationalisations of all large scale enterprises, runaway inflation causes the government to requisition supplies from the peasants, when the civil war ended demobilised soldiers took on urgent industrial tasks.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1921 and was a move back to a more market-oriented approach between agriculture and industry. Peasants could keep a fixed amount of their surplus to sell. Small scale enterprises were denationalised.

Socialism in One Country was implemented in 1928/9 by Joseph Stalin, following the failed revolutions in Europe. Russia strengthened itself internally through rapid industrialisation and mass collectivisation of agriculture. Following years of crisis and war, it was promoted as a policy of economic progress. It harnessed nationalistic sentiments so people felt proud of Russias economic independence. [11]

Stalinism was the political regime of Joseph Stalin in Russia from the 1920s until he died in 1953. He introduced a five-year plan in 1928/29 to rapidly increase industralisation and the large scale collectivisation of agriculture. These policies and shortages of food resulted in millions of deaths. Stalin also conducted political purges in the late 1930s and large scale murder of political opponents. Stalin’s theoretical contributions include Socialism in One CountryThe History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course), ‘revolution from above’ – the introduction of the different economic policies. [12]

Post-Stalin Communism in Russia did little to develop Marxist ideas. There were advances in Eastern Europe. In Poland, a government economics advisor Oskar Lange advocated the “use of market pricing tools in socialist systems and providing a model of market socialism.”  wrote several essays critiquing Marxism. Adam Schaff wrote about integrating linguistics into Marxism, alienation, and the slow rate it takes to abolish the state and social institutions under Socialism. In Czechoslovakia, a loosening of Russia’s influences “led the Czechs to rejuvenate their Marxism by drawing on their long democratic and cultural tradition, a process that culminated in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968.” Ota Sik described the importance of market relations under socialism and giving worker collectives plenty of autonomy – planning was important but needed feedback from producers. Karel Kosik reinterpreted Marx’s work with a focus on human consciousness. Yugoslavian Marxists were critical of the Soviet Union since 1948 about its bureaucracy, the state, the Leninist party. Yugoslavia saw a revival of Marxist humanist philosophy. [13]

3. European Marxism between the wars

Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian and critic. He used the philosophy of Hegel to conceptualise the problems of his time. In History and Class Consciousness he wrote on class consciousness, reification and totality. Later he wrote about Leninism and vanguard-party revolution. He was a supporter and then critic of Stalin. Lukács was supportive of Rosa Luxemburg and workers’ councils. [14]

Karl Korsch was a German Marxist theoretician and political philosopher. He believed the 1918-20 German revolution had failed because of a lack of ideological preparation and leadership of the working class. He supported workers’ councils and focused his research and writing how to build an alternative economic system. He published Marxism and Philosophy in 1923, which attempted to understand the evolution of Marxist theory by applying Marx’s and Hegel’s ideas to Marxism. He identified three phases of Marxism: from Marx to 1848, 1848 to 1900, 1900 onwards. [15]

Council Communism was inspired by the Soviets or workers’ councils during 1917-23 in Russia. Council Communists rejected parliamentary institutions, trade unions and the Leninist party form and vanguardism. They were active in Europe in the 1920s and included Antonie Pannekoek, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Rose Luxemburg, Herman Gorter and Otto Ruhle. [16]

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician. He was critical of the economic determinism of traditional Marxism so is considered a key neo-Marxist (see neo-Marxism sections at bottom of post). McLellan divides his life into four periods. Up to 1918, he developed his critique of Marxism and was a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). From 1919-20, he was a leader in the Factory Councils movement in Turin and editor of its newspaper. From 1921-26 he was one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). From 1926-37 (until his death) he was a prisoner and wrote his major theoretical contribution, the Prison Notebooks. McLellan identifies the main themes of the Prison Notebooks to be: the extended role assigned to intellectuals, the importance of the concept of hegemony, which led to different strategies for revolution in the West and East. [17]

“Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the ‘common sense’ values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.” [18]

4. China and Third World

The Making of the Chinese Revolution – the Communist Party of China or CCP was founded in 1921. It formed an alliance with the Kuomintang or KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) which then the KMT broke in 1927 and CCP members were targeted and killed. The Communists retreated to the countryside and set up local bases. This is when Mao Zedong recognised the central role of peasants in the revolution as they had more progressive political and economic aims than the workers. In the early 1930s, the KMT made several attempts to encircle the Communists to defeat them. The KMT’s fifth encirclement campaign in 1933 was successful leading to the Communist’s Long March of 6000 miles in 1934 for twelve months to set up a secure base in northwest China. Following this Mao became the undisputed leader of the party. Communist power in China expanded between 1935-49, first with a United Front with the KMT to resist the Japanese invasion. This was followed by the Chinese Civil War 1945-49 with the Communist victory over the KMT. [19]

McLellan describes Mao’s major contribution to the theory and practice of Marxism was his ideas on “guerilla tactics and the strategy to be adopted in a lengthy struggle against a militarily superior opponent.” Mao gave the CCP a philosophical basis in the form of two essays: On Practice and On Contradiction. [20]

Maoism in Power – The Chinese Communist Party inherited a ruined economy and a threat of famine in the cities. With a well-organised party infrastructure, support from the Soviet Union and the goodwill of the Chinese people several financial measures were introduced to fairly distribute tax and bring inflation under control. Large capitalist businesses were nationalised and smaller businesses were left alone. The party introduced the Land Law in 1950, which guaranteed each individual at the age of 16 their own land holding of about one hectare. This involved the execution of hundreds of thousands of landlords. Since 1953, China has organised its society through a series of social and economic development initiatives called Five Year Plans.

Maoism was focused on the Party and the peasantry. The ‘proletariat’ became a reference to proletarian moral qualities that could be presented to the masses as a norm of true collectivist behaviour. Maoism substituted the proletariat with the Party because the peasantry were not ‘sufficiently socialist’, which resulted in the authoritarian nature of the Party. Officially the Party adopted Lenin’s democratic centralism but the highly hierarchical nature of the Party resulted in it being more centralism than democracy. Freedom of discussion was allowed but once a decision was made, everyone had to obey. Mao introduced the ‘mass line’, of consulting the masses and then interpreting their responses within the Marxism-Leninism framework, and then implementing the resulting policies. Government decision making was made at the top of the Party, not through state departments. There was a lot of secrecy about how decisions were made. Mao was not a dictator and had to play other leaders in the party off against each other.

The Hundred Flower Campaign started in 1956 when the Party encouraged people to share their opinions about the communist regime. This was followed by Mao repressing those that were critical of the regime. The Cultural Revolution was a mass campaign that began in 1966 to remove the ‘Rightists’ or capitalists from China and to re-establish the importance of Mao’s thinking. There were problems with the roll out of the campaign – resistance to it and supportive groups splitting into factions and fighting each other. The army had to step in frequently. The Cultural Revolution ended in 1969 with an expanded Central Committee, the majority were new, and a new constitution.

Chinese Marxism was more focused on human and moral factors – the superstructure – compared to the Soviet Union that was more focused on economics and production – the base. Mao believed that ‘class’ was a subjective concept that was determined by a person’s attitude rather than their social origins.

McLellan describes Maoism as a “synthesis of Leninism and China’s economic backwardness with the addition of certain traditional Chinese ideas.” It retains the key Marxist concepts of “class analysis, working-class leadership, the idea of history moving through stages, and a social theory infused by the concepts of dialectical materialism and contradiction.”

He lists the central ideas of Maoism as

  • China aimed to develop the agricultural sector in harmony with the industrial sector.
  • to follow the Marxist doctrine of the proletariat, then it was necessary to develop a proletariat or social consciousness into the peasantry.
  • Mao’s ideas on guerrilla war, developed in the 1930s, involved the active engagement of the peasantry and had wide-spread influence in less developed countries.
  • Maoism encourages “emphasis on thrift and devotion to the common good.”

Marxists in other Asian countries attempted socio-economic analyses of their societies to develop strategies to gain power. These countries included Vietnam, North Korea, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Japan, India, Indonesia. Asian Marxism has mostly been Marxist-Leninist and violent with the used of guerrilla warfare. Asian Marxism was more focused on the superstructure and consciousness. [21]

Latin America was first introduced to Marxist Communism in the 1920s. It was seen to be protecting the interests of the small numbers of industrial proletariat resulting in the masses being influenced by populist or corporatists ideas such as Peronism. Communist parties were more focused on defending a specific interest group rather than following the Marxist-Leninist route. Alternative versions of Marxism follow on from Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who adapted Marxist to national circumstances, especially in relation to the indigenous struggle.

The Cuban revolution 1953-58, lead by Castro, took inspiration from traditional national liberation struggles against Spain and the US, and did not originate from the working class or the Communist Party. The working class did support the rebels, and the Communist Party also supported the rebels once it became clear they would be successful. The Cuban government declared itself socialist when it set up a new revolutionary party (PRS) in 1961. The new government introduced nationalist and agrarian cooperative policies resulting in boycotts from the US and the Cuban bourgeoise emigrating to the US. This combined with the failed US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, resulted in Cuban politics becoming more radical.

McLellan explains that violent revolution was rejected by Communist parties in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru. This was supported by the Soviet Union because it wanted to improve diplomatic and commercial relations with these countries.

The revolutionary guerrilla approach of Che Guevara and Regis Debray was based on the Cuban revolution and can be contrasted with the orthodox communist in Latin America, who advocated the classical Marxist process of stages. For them, Latin America needed a ‘democratic’ revolution, followed by a socialist revolution. Therefore, communists should engage in parliamentary and electoral activities.

Liberation theology was developed in the 1950/60s by Marxist Christians and focused on “social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples”. It was most significant in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru and Brazil. [22]

Marxism and Underdevelopment relate to the neo-Marxist theories of imperialism and underdevelopment (For more on neo-Marxism, see the section at bottom of post). Marx wrote about Colonisation, specifically of the British in India. Lenin wrote about Imperialism, and Trotsky had his theory of combined and uneven development. Luxemburg wrote about capitalism’s need to constantly expand into non-capitalist places to find more resources, markets for good and more workers. Imperialism is generally seen as a necessary development of capitalist economies that need raw materials, to find foreign places to invest in, and to find markets for commercial products.

The key neo-Marxist text on underdevelopment is Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth, which “expanded on the ideas of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky by linking them with the claim that the development of the West was directly at the expense of the less developed economies.”

Other underdevelopment theorists included Samir AminAndre Gunder FrankImmanuel Wallerstein. [23]

5. Contemporary Marxism in Europe and the US

The Frankfurt School was associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 1923. The rise of Hitler resulted in the emigration of the Institute’s members (most were Jews) to New Year to re-establish in 1936. Max Horkheimer became Director in 1930, resulting in the ideas the Frankfurt School is well known for. Members of the Institute reject Social Democrat reformism and the doctrines of Soviet Union communism. Members re-examined Marxist thought, focusing on the cultural superstructure of capitalist society.

Horkheimer and his collaborator Theodor Adorno were inspired by the Council Communists from the 1920s such as Korsh and Lukács (see above). The Frankfurt School attempted to integrate non-Marxist disciplines such as psychoanalysis. They were influenced by idealist philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kant, and by ‘irrationalism’ thinkers such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson. They saw this irrationality as a “protest against the abstract uniformity that increasingly oppressed the individual in advanced capitalist society.”

McLellan describes how they saw the importance of the economy in capitalist society but failed to integrate their work in economics into their analysis of society as a whole. They did not have a specific programme for social change but did have a commitment to proletariat struggle and valued the importance of praxis. They saw their work as to clarify the opposing forces in society, to raise class consciousness of the exploited and provide them with a weapon in their struggle for emancipation.

Critical Theory is the “reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities to reveal and challenge power structures. It argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Critical theory has origins in sociology and also in literary criticism.” [24] . Critical Theory was inspired by the Western philosophical tradition especially the Enlightenment.

The Frankfurt school broadened their critique of capitalist society by adding the insights from psychoanalysis (the study of the unconsciousness mind), especially the work of Freud. They also analysed the spread of mass culture and the nature and development of authority. Wilhelm Reich showed the Marxism and psychoanalysis were compatible and that life was regulated by the ‘pleasure principle’ and limited by the ‘reality principle’. So the ruling class, use the reality principle to maintain their power – capitalist society is presented and accepted by many as the norm and unchangeable.

There were several theorists involved in the Frankfurt School, see a list here. McLellan notes Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas as making the most significant contributions.

Erich Fromm combined Marxism and psychoanalysis and was focused on the “emotional conflict produced by social interaction than in any theory of instincts” – so how individuals relate to the world. His key theme was how people’s feelings of powerless and loneliness are caused by being unable to live an “authentic, spontaneous life under contemporary political and economic arrangements”, which was the basis of authoritarianism.

The Frankfurt School’s analysis of Fascism focused on the “psychosocial mechanism of authority and violence at the expense of detailed examination of economic substructure.” They saw and direct link between capitalism and Fascism – capitalist economies evolved towards monopolies and liberalism evolved towards totalitarianism. Franz Neumann wrote about Nazism that it was a monopolistic economy and a command economy, ‘Totalitarian Monopoly capitalism’. There was still the profit motive and it needed totalitarian political power to support it, so the same people benefited, those who benefited from old monopoly capitalism.

The Frankfurt School made a large contribution to aesthetics or the philosophy of art The focus on culture was reinforced by how the US had achieved conformism through the spread of mass culture, instead of repression. Similar to Fascism, the difference between the private and public worlds had been broken down by creating needs in people to ‘support a particular system of domination’. They were critical of mass culture because it was forced on people and not created by them, serving the interests of domination. [25]

Existentialist Marxism developed in France following the Second World War. It was influenced by Hegel and the publishing of Marx’s early writings. The war had challenged the analytical rationalism of French philosophy. There was interest in Hegel’s philosophy of history, alienation, dialectic and consciousness concepts. Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite lectured on Hegel in the 1930s and were very influential on the existential thinkers.

The radical interpretation of Hegel and incorporation of Marx’s early writings were in opposition to the Stalin controlled French Communist Party. The Communist Party held a conservative position in French politics and its philosophy was limited to Stalin’s laws of dialectical materialism. Many of the Marxist thinkers started in the Communist Party and were thrown out for their new thinking. The new perspectives showed that an alternative Marxism was possible. The concepts of alienation and praxis were recovered that had been lost under Stalinism. Marx’s ideas around alienation were felt to be particularly relevant to the complex, highly developed societies that were developing. French social theorists were also reading earlier ‘Western Marxist‘ theorists such as Lukacs, Korsch and the Frankfurt School (see sections above).

Henri Lefebvre was a humanist and saw the idea of praxis as a dialectical relationship between man and nature. Lefebvre most important work was Everyday Life in the Modern World, where he looked at alienation in everyday life.

McLellan describes Jean-Paul Sartre’s work as the best example of combining existentialism and Marxism. He protested on how modern technology treated men as things, wrote about freedom being the core of human existence, was critical of Stalin’s’ description of materialism and was supportive of a workers Party to achieve freedom. McLellan describes how Sartre combined sociology and psychology into a framework of genuine dialectical Marxism. He wrote about the dialectic, comparing ‘dogmatic dialectic’ with ‘critical dialectic’. He wrote about how the social relations of individuals emerged in relation to scarcity.

Two further French revisions of Marxism in the late 1950s and early 1960s were the theorists of the ‘New Working Class’ influenced by the Frankfurt School and Lefebvre: the magazine Arguments (1956–1962), and Socialisme ou Barbarie. Arguments explore Marx’s ideas on philosophy, how to apply the concept of alienation to a society that valued leisure as much as work, and the “cultural superstructure as much as politics or economics. The Arguments group were Kostas Axelow, Fougeyrollas, Morin and Chatelet. Socialisme ou Barbarie was made up of ex-Trotskyist writers, such as Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, who analysed the problems of modern bureaucratization. André Gorz and Serge Mallet reassessed class struggle in Western countries. [26]

Italian Marxism since the 1950s has developed in several ways. From the Italian Communist Party in the 1950s/60s, Della Volpe and his followers rejected Hegelian interpretations of Marxism. They focused on philosophy, and methodology or scientific over sociology and economics. He was critical of idealism and Gramsci. We wrote about aesthetics and developed a materialist of aesthetics. Lucio Colletti was also critical of Hegelian idealism, instead advocating scientific materialism. He also valued the concept of alienation. Sebastiano Timpanaro focused on materialism and rejected combining Marxist materialism with psychoanalysis or structuralism.

McLellan writes “more recently, writers such as Badaloni and Lusurdo have produced innovating working, the former using Marx and Gramsci to produce a radical theory of democracy, the latter building on his critical history of liberal thought and practice to reformulate Marx’s political theory.”

McLellan describes the autonomista movement which formed by rejected the Communist Party (PCI) and Trade Union bureaucracy. It reframed workers to be powerful instead of passive, when not betrayed by their leaders as in the summer of 1968. Mario Tronti and others were strongly critical of the “orthodoxy of development of forces of production through determined stages and the gradualism of the PCI.” The argued that the growth of service jobs meant that the “regime of the factory had been extended to society as a whole with the proletarianisation of whole swathes of white-collar workers.” Antonio Negri expanded this to develop a theory of history where instead of the profit motive being the ‘motor force of capitalism’, it was class struggle: “Fordism was designed to overcome the resistance to capital of skilled workers and artisans; but the organized resistance of factory labour to capital led to technological innovation which permitted it to restructure labour away from factories (or overseas) into flexible, part-time, service sectors.” This would result in unwaged and Third World workers building resistance internationally: “with the arrival of immaterial labour and mass intellectuality, the time would soon be ripe for workers to revolt in such a manner as to rupture the self-reproduction of capital and liberate work from it.” [27] (see more on Italian Marxism – Operaismo or Workerism, Autonomia, Autonomist Marxismlist – in libertarian Marxism tenancies)

Structural Marxism developed in France in the mid-1960s. The major thinker is the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who rejected humanist Marxism of Lukács, Sartre and Gramsci, which saw men as the ‘subjects of history’; and the economic focus of traditional dialectical materialism. Structural Marxism identifies Marxism as a science that examines objective structures. The Structural Marxists were seeking an alternative to the base-and-superstructure model that gave equal weight to economic, political and ideological ‘structures’. These were called ‘structural instances’ or ‘regional structures’ and combined to form a ‘social formation’ that related to a mode of production.

Althusser believed that Marx’s work had a scientific conception of history but there were theoretical gaps. Althusser was trying to identify what Marxist philosophy was. He rejected the humanism in Marx’s early work and saw an ‘epistemological break’ between young Marx and mature Marx. He saw Marx’s early work as focusing on alienation, species being and the ‘ideological problematic of the subject’. Marx’s later work resulted in the development of a science. Althusser stated that ‘history is a process without a subject or a goal’.

Althusser argued that each instance or level develops at different rates and times. Althusser described how this complex and uneven relationship between the instances related to each other at a specific time a ‘conjuncture’. He rejected the idea that there was a simple relationship between ‘social forces’ and ‘relations of production’, or between base and superstructure.

Althusser in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, identified Repressive State Apparatuses (RPAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as trade unions, churches and schools. He described the ISAs as important sites of class struggle.

Nicos Poulantzas applied Althusser’s ideas to the state and classes. He argued against the orthodox communist view that that state is the direct servant of the capitalist or ruling class, with individuals in specific positions of power. Instead, the institutions of the state operate to ensure capitalism continues and to reproduce capitalist society as a whole. [28]

British Marxism began in 1881 with the Social Democratic Federation, set up to promote Chartist ideas, sharing Marx’s ideas. The Independent Labour Party forming in 1893 did not promote Marxism, revolution and class confrontation, instead favouring a gradualist approach to socialism. In the early twentieth century, there were three main Marxist organisation in Britain: British Socialist PartySocialist Labour Party, and Workers’ Socialist Federation.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1920. This did not form from a split in the main social democratic party like in Europe, so attempted to affiliate to the Labour Party but was rejected. The CPGB was encouraged to operate as the left-wing of the Labour Party following The United Front as instructed by Moscow. McLellan states that the CPGB made little progress in the 1930s, although did attract several intellectuals. McLellan describes Christopher Caudwell as the only original pre-war British Marxist but he died young in the Spanish Civil War.

McLellan describes how after 1956 several varieties of Marxism developed in Britain following the different forms of Communism that developing in the world – Soviet, Chinese, Cuban. The New Left formed with the New Left Review as its main publication.

The CPGB remained small and focused on trying to push the Labour Party leftwards, which was not a revolutionary programme. McLellan states that the revolutionary left in Britain has become “synonymous with Trotskyism.”. The largest group being the Socialist Workers’ Party (formally International Socialists), also the International Marxist Group. (I will write future posts on the history and current British Left).

McLellan describes the key thinkers of British Marxism. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn wrote controversially about Britain’s bourgeois revolutions and why Britain didn’t develop in a ‘normal way’. There is also an older generation such as Edward Thompson, and John Saville. Marxist historians focused on “detailed, empirical, narrative history ‘from below’”, including Gordon Childe, Maurice DobbChristopher HillRodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm.

McLellan describes how Anderson, through the New Left Review was aiming to assimilate European Marxism to the ‘perceived insular backwardness of British culture.” Anderson focused more on institutions, with a more abstract analysis that aimed to provide a “comprehensive theory of the modern bourgeois state as it evolved in the West.” Those at the New Left Review briefly engaged with Althusser’s structural marxism. McLellan describes a clear debate between theoreticians and a “more native empirical approach.”

In the field of literature and culture broadly, Raymond Williams was the main figure and “produced a libertarian version of Marxism which emphasised the cultural possibilities for social change and the capacity for individuals and groups to modify their conditions of existence.” Terry Eagleton is a well known Marxist critic of Williams. The view that culture and ideology as the sites of domination and resistance came from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, run by Stuart Hall. It focused on “ideological struggle around politics and institutions” with Gramsci being the main influence.

McLellan describes British political economy as one of the major areas of Marxist thought. This includes debates of the “labour theory of value, the relations of value to price, and the falling rate of profit.” Rowthron wrote an analysis of the influence of British institutions on the British economy. Then Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison wrote about the importance of overaccumulation in explaining the crises of the 1970s.

There was much analysis of the Soviet Union. Trotsky described it as a ‘degenerated workers state.’ Tony Cliff described the Soviet Union as ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’ – the Soviet bureaucracy controlled the economy and the state, another form of an exploiting class. Hillel Ticktin  and the people around the journal Critique did a detailed analysis of the workings of the Soviet Union so were not surprised by its collapse.

The Miliband–Poulantzas debate between Ralph Miliband who viewed the “British state as an instrument serving the interests of the bourgeoisie since it was dominated by them through a network of interpersonal relations”, and Nicos Poulantzas, a structural Marxist, who saw the capitalist state as a system that functioned independently of the ‘mindset of the ruling class’. Bob Jessop then wrote about the transition from the Keynesian welfare state under ‘Fordism‘ – “mass production, mass consumption, and massive semi-skilled labour” to ‘post-Fordism‘ where “permanent innovation and labour flexibility in an increasingly globalised economy means the subordination of welfare to the discipline of the labour market.” Jessop has written extensively about the state and combines European structuralist and British agency approaches that make up British Marxist divisions. [29]

Marxism in the United States started with Joseph Wydemeyer who set up the unsuccessful American Workers’ League in New York City in 1856. The First International had limited influence in the US. By 1872 there were several sections, with Frederick Sorge as secretary. In 1876 the Socialist Party of North America (SLP) was formed with limited success. There was an increase in trade union activity in the 1880s resulting in the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Knights of Labor. They campaigned for an eight-hour day and worked with the new Independent Labor Party. Daniel De Leon was the leading spokesman for the SLP and an uncompromising Marxist. De Leon rejected the American Federation of Labor philosophy of non-political trade unionism. The SLP split in 1899 when a large number left to set up the Socialist Party, which was more supportive of the trade unions. De Leon was part of founding the International Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, a proletarian and revolutionary trade union. The IWW evolved along syndicalist lines with a belief in direct action and sabotage. This was in opposition to Marxists so De Leon was ejected in 1908.

The Socialist Party (SP) membership grew to over one hundred thousand by 1912. It President, Eugene Debs got almost one million votes in the 1912 presidential election. The SP was not strongly influenced by Marx according to McLellan, being ideological broad. It had three main tendencies: “a right-wing led by Victor Berger and composed of the municipal reformers of the Mid-West; a centre based on the Eastern seaboard, and led by Morris Hillquit who had left the SLP in 1899; and the left, drawing its strength from the West and led by Debs.” McLellan describes the years before the First World War as a time of a ‘lyrical left’, where socialists ideas combined with many art forms. The war resulted in the repression of socialists that opposed it.

Following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the formation of the Third International in 1919, a number left the SL to for the Communist Party (CP). A Community Labour Party also formed of mainly native Americans. They had limited success in engaging with electoral and trade union politics. The CP had splits in the 1920s related to positions on the Soviet Union. Followers of Trotsky were expelled and formed two groups: the Workers’ Party (later the Independent Socialist League); and the Socialist Workers’ Party. There was also the independently radical American Workers’ Party founded in 1934. During the 1930s the CP made gains and the SP declined. The SLP remained small. The CP become influential in the new Confederation of Industrial Organisations (CIO) and had almost one hundred thousand members by 1943. After the Second World War, the economic boom and McCarthyism resulted in a decline of the CP and Marxism in general until 1960.

The revival of Marxism took a different form in the radicalism from the early 1960s in the form of the New Left in response to the Vietnam War and increasing understanding of the levels of widespread poverty and misery of workers. There was also the civil rights movement in the south that raised the suffering of people of colour. The feminism movement grew in response to the conformist, patriarchal society of the 1950s. The Old Left rejected the New Lefts humanism, moralism, individualism, idealism and its positions that were more linked with anarchism than the ‘class-based social and political analyses of Marxism.’

The New Left had a student base, the main organisation was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (originally Students’ League for Industrial Democracy). The SDS started with agitation for more student power in universities. The SDS developed a “New Working Class’ theory: “students were being trained in knowledge factories to fit the bureaucratic demands of advanced capitalism in which they would be as exploited and alienated as the industrial proletariat of the nineteenth century but at the same time possess a radical consciousness of that situation that would enable them to resist it more effectively.”

C. Wright Mills was very influential on the New Left with the book The Power Elite which describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites. He rejected the idea that the working class of advanced capitalist society is a historic agent. Erich Fromm’s work on alienation and Herbert Marcus’s Marxist humanism were influential on the New Left. The SDS evolved from reform, to resistance and then revolution as it was taken over by determined minorities to tackle more complex issues such as Imperialism.

The 1960s also saw a revival of the CP, the Trotskyists, the Maoists and all their youth wings. The most successful was the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance set up by the Socialist Workers’ Party. There was also the Johnson-Forest Tendency a radical left Marxist humanist group. The Progressive Labor Party was Marxist Leninist that aligned themselves with black nationalists such as the Black Panthers. At the 1969 SDS convention, the Progressive Labor Party gained control resulting in brief activities by guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Weather Underground. Following the decision to withdraw from Vietnam the left’s agitation declined.

McLellan describes the growth of interest in Marxist theory in the 1960/70s, with many books and journals being published. These can be grouped into three broad areas: “the theories of the New Left about the nature of contemporary American society, the historiography of the United State from a Marxist standpoint, and, most importantly, the economic studies of American capitalism.” The 1980s saw a revival of American capitalism and interest in how to combine the market and socialism. There were two versions of market socialism: “maximisation and equal distribution of profit while the other centres on workers’ control of the means of production.” The 1980s also saw the development of Analytical Marxism or ‘rational choice’ Marxism: “this approach combines the rigorousness of contemporary Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy with a conception of society as consisting of self-interested individuals reminiscent of neoclassical economics.”

McLellan describes Fredric Jameson as the “most prominent American intellectual working within the Marxist tradition.” Jameson has produced and important account of postmodernism and Western Marxism. In his book, The Political Unconscious, his ‘basic theoretical work”, Jameson describes his Marxist approach to culture. He has also written about politics and class consciousness, ideology and utopia. McLellan describes how Jameson’s sources are wide-ranging and he writes in ‘broad sweep’ in a sort of ‘grand narrative that has gone our fashion. His later work has a focus on space as important for understanding the globalised world. Here he builds on the work of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre.

US Marxism has seen a lot of interest in globalisation and empire. McLellan describes three significant recent socio-economic developments: a high volume of activity on world financial markets; increase in, and increasingly integrated nature of world trade; globalisation is more than an economic process, it is the transformation and compression of time and space for all those who live in it. McLellan states that the “most globalised of all the accounts of globalisation is that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”, in the Empire series of books. For Ellen Meiksins Wood “globalisation is a response to the crisis of overcapacity and overproduction beginning in the 1970s. It is not concerned with free trade or integrating the world market.” For Wood, nothing has come close to replacing the nation-state and its importance for maintaining capitalism. The US reliance on other nation-states and economic decline have resulted in increasing militarism and wars without end.

When considering political economy, the two main questions fro Marxists are explaining the repeating US economic crises and is it in long-term decline. These questions have been considered by Robert BrennerGiovanni Arrighi, and David Harvey. [30]

Postmodern Marxism (also known as post-Marxism) is described by McLellan as a ‘new mode of social production’ that emerged in the 1970s. He lists four contextual changes that took places in the 1970s that led to postmodernism: increasing impact of electronic communications; the change in the mode of economic production from Fordism to post-Fordism; the defeat of 1960s emancipatory forces by the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan; and in philosophy, structuralism was influential, then the post-structuralists advocated ignoring claims to objectivity and truth.

McLellan describes postmodernism to be in strong opposition to a ‘metanarrative’ – “any view which aims to give a unified, consistent, and objective account of the world by unifying the different narratives in one overarching framework.” He describes how “postmodern thought rejects the legacy of the Enlightenment which attempts to ground its approach to the world ideas of universal applicability – common human nature, reason – which would reveal the way the world actually was. In postmodernism, by contrast, the emphasis is on diversification, particularity, and difference.” McLellan describes how postmodernism has little in common with Marxism. It is the opposite of classical Marxism, where the economic base influences the superstructure. Postmodernism merges everything into a vague cultural superstructure.

McLellan lists the key postmodernist thinkers: Jean-François Lyotard writing on narratives, knowledge, science; Michel Foucault who focused on the origins of psychiatry, modern prisons, history of sexuality, and the concepts of power and anti-system; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who wrote about Freud and orthodox psychoanalysis, with the concept of desire being central; Jacques Derrida who focuses on language and concept of difference.

McLellan describes how one of the main features of postmodernism is the focus on difference” “Classical Marxism offered a united front of opposition to capitalism based on the working class, many of the proponents of postmodernism have moved from the revolutionary hopes for global transformation of the 1960s to enthusiasm for single issues and the new social movements of, for example, feminists, ecologists, or anti-racists.”

McLellan describes the best example of the postmodernist approach to Marxism as the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. They describe Marxism as on ’emancipatory discourse’ amongst many, that is compatible with feminism, anti-racism etc. The Gramsci concept of Hegemony is central.

The Marxists that have been critical of postmodernism include Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismDavid Harvey in The Condition of PostmodernityJürgen HabermasJohn Urry and Scott LashTerry EagletonAlex Callinicos. [31]

Seven Stages of Marxism

Gregory Claeys in Marx and Marxism divides Marxism into seven stages:

  1. Marx and Engels’ attempts to form a ‘Marx party’ following 1848.
  2. The growth and German Social Democracy and reformism up to 1914.
  3. The Russian Revolution, Lenin and dialectical materialism from 1917 to 1937.
  4. The Chinese Revolution of 1949.
  5. After 1945, Marxism-Leninism spreading through the Third World.
  6. 1950s to 1980s limited development of Marxism in command economics such as Russia. In parallel is a revival of interest in Marx, based on his early writings.
  7. The collapse of the Soviet Union 1989-91, followed by the transformation in China and Vietnam, extreme Stalinism in North Korea, and moderate versions in Cuba and Belarus.

[32]

Marxism after Marx – libertarian Marxism tenancies

This is based on this map on libcom.org. See here for a description of liberatarian socialism.

Rosa Luxemberg was a democratic socialist but critical of both ‘bourgeois democracy’ and the centralising tendencies of socialism. She valued international solidarity and the spontaneity of revolutionary action. She was a humanist because she believed in the human potential for social and political transformation. [33]

Council Communists see Council Communism above in McLellan section

G.I.K. Group of International Communists was a left communist dutch group in the 1920s that advocated council communism. It ideas we influenced by the Russia Revolution 1917 and the Germany Revolution 1918. [34]

Socialism or Barbarism (Socialisme ou Barbarie in French) was a French libertarian socialist group from 1948 to 1967. The name comes from Rosa Luxemburg. That had a journal of the same name. The dominant character was Cornelius Castoriadis. The group was critical of Leninism and the idea of a revolutionary party. They advocated workers’ councils.

Letterist and Situationist International – The Letterist International was a radical Paris based collective of artists and cultural theorists from 1952 to 1957. It was set up by Guy Debord after falling out with Isidore Isou’s Letterism group. They went on to join up with other groups to form the Situationist International

Situationist International – the Situationist International was a European organisation made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists from 1957 to 1972. It was based on libertarian or anti-authoritarian Marxism and art movements from the early twentieth century. They were influenced by early Hegelian Marxism (or Western Marxism), the Frankfurt School, Henri Lefebvre, council communist ideas and Socialism or Barbarism. Later they focused on revolutionary and political theory. They attempted to synthesize a broad range of theoretical disciplines to develop a comprehensive critique of twentieth-century capitalism. They agreed with the classical Marxism analysis of the capitalist mode of production, but it needed updating. They emphasised Marxist concepts such as alienation and commodity fetishism. They rejected the claims by advanced capitalism that technology innovation, higher standards of living and more leisure, could outweigh the negative social impacts on people’s everyday lives. A key situationist concept was ‘the spectacle’, a critique of advanced capitalism’s social relations through objects and consumption of commodities. Their way of counteracting the spectacle was through the construction of situations “moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feelings of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.” Their two key texts were The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. These texts were very influential to the May 1968 insurrections in France.

Early Hegalian Marxism – see Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch sections above. There is also Evgeny Pashukanis and I.I. Rubin

Frankfurt School, see McLellan section above

Johnson-Forest Tendency formed in the 1940s within US Trotskyism. The founders were CLR James (Johnson), Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest) and Grace Lee. They wrote a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society, referring to it as ‘state-capitalism’. They were influenced by Humanist Marxism, Hegel, Marx and Lenin, having split from Trotskyism by 1948. In 1950 the published State Capitalism and World Revolution. Splits in the Johnson-Forest Tendency led to new groups Correspondence Publishing Committee 1951-62 and Facing Reality 1962-70.

Raya Dunayevskaya 1910 – 1987 was a Russian who moved to the US and was the founder of Marxist Humanism there. She was also known as Rae Spiegel and the pseudonym Freddie Forest. After splitting from Johnson-Forest Tendency she founded the organisation News and Letters Committees and the Marxist-Humanist newspaper, News & Letters.

CLR James 1901-89 was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and socialist, who wrote under the name J. R. Johnson. He wrote about the history of the Communist International and the Haitian revolution. He moved to Britain in 1932 from Trinidad. Then moved to the US from 1940, where he set up the Johnson-Forest Tendency, he was deported in 1952. He described himself as a Leninist but rejected the vanguard party. Instead, he advocated supporting black nationalist movements.

Amadeo Bordiga 1889-1970, was an Italian Marxist, a founder of the Communist Party of Italy, leader of Communist International (Comintern) and International Communist Party. Following World War 2 he moved to a left communist position. Bordiga developed theories on Stalinism, democracy, the united front, and communism. He inspired several ‘Bordiga groups’ in Italy and France.

Operaismo or Workerism developed in Italy in the early 1960s and emphasises the importance of the working class. It developed in factories as workers were struggling for better wages, working conditions and hours, in the two main left-wing parties PCI (Communist) and PSI (Socialist). Activists were conducting ‘worker inquiries’, analysing the work environment and opportunities for struggle from the worker’s point of view. There was a split in Workerism, with some such a Negri and Bologna rejecting the conservative trade unions and left political parties, who were seen as disciplinary institutions that kept workers in their weak position within capitalism. Others such as Tronti and Asor Rosa returned to the PCI and its associated union confederation Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL). This led to a new practice of self-organised labour representation outside the traditional trade unions. They were influenced by the Johnson Forest Tendency in the US and Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. The movement included several journals Quaderni Rossi (“Red Notebooks”, 1961–5), along with its successor Classe Operaia (“Working Class”, 1963–6). There was a series of strikes and occupations of factories by workers and universities by students during the 1960s. The movement was at its height in 1969-70 during the ‘Hot Autumn‘, when there were a series of large strikes in factories in Northern Italy. [35]

Autonomia (Operaia) or Autonomist is the name given for the new youth and student movements that emerged in the early 1970s. The movement was never unified and was made up of changing organisations and shifting alliances in a decentralised network. It was extra-parliamentary and came from the factory, educational and community struggles and included second wave feminism concerns – today this is known as social reproduction theory and was pioneered by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. This movement had expanded its critique of capitalism to include all aspects of life, from the struggle in the industrial factory, including occupations, sabotage and strikes, to ‘the social factory‘ and cities where thousands of buildings were squatted between 1969–1975. This social movement gathered around free radio stations and publications in several cities in Italy in the 1970s. The key thinkers and writers included: Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Oreste Scalzone, and Franco Piperno. Influential political groups included Potere Operaio from 1967 to 1973 when it merged with the broader movement and Lotta Continua from 1969 to 1976. 1977 saw large demonstrations and the occupations of universities in response to the killing of a Lotta Continua member by police. From 1979 the movement was repressed by the Italian state, which accused it of supporting and protecting the armed Red Brigades. This resulted in thousands of movement activists being arrested or fleeing the country. There is no evidence of a direct link between the Autonomia movement and the Red Brigades. A revival of the movement started in the mid-1980s with the second wave of social centre occupations. [36]

Autonomist Marxism can be described as the theoretical work based on the Operaismo/Workerism and the Autonomia/Autonomist movements described above. A key observation made by Mario Tronti in Lenin in England is the ‘Copernican Inversion’, where he argues that capitalist development of the production process follows working-class struggle instead of going first. Workers are not dependent on capitalism for their existence, they existed before capitalism. Capitalism is dependent on workers, which shows its weakness. The second insight of autonomist Marxism is that it is labour struggles that drive technological development in the production process as capitalists react to worker demands and resistance. For example, workers go on strike and win some demands. In response, capitalists restructure the production process to their advantage making it more difficult for workers to repeat their successes. This links to the concept of class composition and decomposition. When the capitalists change the production process to their advantage and the worker’s disadvantage, this decomposes the workers’ power. The workers then have to find new ways to exert their interests, recompose their power by finding new tactics to interfere with the production process. If they are successful then this will lead to the capitalists restructuring the production process again, starting a new cycle.

Autonomist Marxists argue that the working class can force changes to the way the capitalist system is organised independently from the state, political parties and trade unions. Autonomist Marxists focus on self-organised activities away from traditional left institutions. It promotes “everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, such as absenteeism, slow working, socialization in the workplace, sabotage, and other subversive activities.” [37]

Autonomist Marxists see class struggle as fundamental. And they have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists. They include manual and office workers, also the unwaged (students, unemployed, homeworkers) who do not normally get trade union representation. Also important are the concepts ‘immaterial labour‘, and the ‘worker inquiry‘ process. They emphasised the Marxist perspective that modern society’s wealth is produced by the collective work of the working class, but very little of this is shared with workers in their wages. Feminist autonomists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici describe the amount of unwaged (but paid indirectly through the male worker’s wage) female labour in capitalist society.

Other key autonomist Marxist thinkers and writers are Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Paulo Virno. There are a number o different strands of autonomist Marxism. There is ‘classic’ Operaismo/Workerism of Panzieri, Alquati, Tronti; post-operaismo of Negri, Virno, Lazzarato; autonomist feminism of Dalla Costa, James, Federici, Fortunati;, ‘American” autonomism’ of Harry Cleaver, George Caffentzis. [38]

post-’68ers German Marxists formed in the late 1960s. The main people included Helmut Reichelt, Hans Jurgen Krahl, and Johannes Agnoli. They were influenced by Council Communism, the early Hegelians, and the Frankfurt School.

Open Marxism is based on libertarian socialist critiques of left-wing political parties. It advocates and openness to praxis, combining theory and practice, and understanding history through an anti-positivist method, when studying the social world a scientific method can not be used. It is close to autonomism, somewhere between autonomism and ‘value form theory‘, which comes more from the Frankfurt School. The ‘open’ refers to a non-deterministic view of history, that history can’t be predicted, and that the unpredictability of class struggle is most significant. Open Marxism is influenced by council communism, anarchism, autonomism and situationalism. There have been several open Marxism journals Arguments (1958–1962), Common Sense (1987–1999) and The Commoner (2001–2012). There is the San Francisco-based working group Kapitalistate and the Conference of Socialist Economists journal Capital & Class. There is also the four-volume series titled Open Marxism. Open Marxism writers and theorists include John HollowaySimon ClarkeWerner BonefeldAna C DinersteinRichard GunnKosmas PsychopedisAdrian WildingPeter BurnhamMike RookeHans-Georg BackhausHelmut ReicheltJohannes Agnoli, and Kostas Axelos. [39]

Neo-Marxism

In Political Ideologies: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood (4th edition from 2007) he describes neo-Marxism as: “an updated and revised form of Marxism that rejects determinism, the primacy of economics and the privileged status of the proletariat.” Heywood argues that neo-Marxism was shaped by two factors: a re-examination of conventional class analysis due to the collapse of capitalism not happening as Marx predicted, and a rejection of the Russian Bolshevik model of orthodox communism. [40]

In Sociological Theory, George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky describe the following schools of thought forms part of the neo-Marxist tradition: Economic determinism, Hegelian Marxism, Critical Theory, neo-Marxian economic sociology, historically oriented Marxism, neo-Marxian spatial analysis, post-Marxist theory (Ritzer 2011). They all take Marx’s work as the starting point by go in several different directions.

Economic determinism was a limited theory that led to other forms of neo-Marxism developing. Hegalian Marxism by the work of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács that rejected economic determinism and focused on human subjectivity. Critical Theory is described above. Neo-Marxist economic sociology aims to update Marxist economic sociology based on contemporary capitalist society. It looks at the relationship between capital and labour, and the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Historically oriented Marxism relates to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his world systems theory. Neo-Marxist spatial analysis is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and David Harvey. Post-Marxist theory includes analytical Marxism and postmodern Marxian theory, see McLellan section above.

Others Marxisms

Political Marxism is focused on how capitalism came into being – the transition to capitalism. Also how to define capitalism: “nature of the system, the structural features that differentiate it from other modes of production, and its relationship to precapitalist (and potentially postcapitalist) social systems.”

Jonathan Joseph in Marxism and Social Theory describes Praxis Marxism, share a humanist perspective, value the importance of history, and are against the mechanical approach of orthodox Marxism. They focus on human subjectivity, class consciousness, class struggle and alienation. Joseph lists the praxis Marxists to be Gramsci, Lukacs, Korsch and Sartre. (Jonathan Joseph, Marxism and Social Theory p4 and CH4)

Two Marxisms

In 1980, Alvin Gouldner in The Two Marxism describes Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism.

Michael Burawoy describes them:

“Scientific Marxism begins from a rational understanding of society that postulates the determinism of objective structures. It uncovers historical tendencies leading to socialism when conditions are ripe. Concepts reflect real mechanisms; politics are epiphenomenal; ideology is a distortion of the truth. Critical Marxism, on the other hand, starts out from the ubiquity of alienation obstructing the potential for human self- realization. It highlights human intervention against the obduracy of objective structures—history has no pre-ordained end, but is the product of collective mobilization. In the view of Critical Marxism, concepts exist to interpret social processes; politics is an arena for the realization of ultimate values; ideology is a moral force. In revolutionary times Critical Marxism and Scientific Marxism may form a contradictory unity, but in non-revolutionary times they more easily go their separate ways.” [41]

Endnotes

  1. Marxism After Marx, David McLellan, 2007, p9-14
  2. Marxism After Marx CH2
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg#The_Accumulation_of_Capital
  4. Marxism After Marx CH3
  5. Marxism After Marx CH4, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austromarxism
  6. Marxism After Marx CH5
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
  8. Marxism After Marx CH6
  9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin
  10. Marxism After Marx CH7
  11. Marxism After Marx CH8
  12. Marxism After Marx CH9
  13. Marxism After Marx CH10
  14. Marxism After Marx CH11
  15. Marxism After Marx CH12
  16. Marxism After Marx CH13
  17. Marxism After Marx CH14
  18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
  19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution
  20. Marxism After Marx CH15
  21. Marxism After Marx CH16
  22. Marxism After Marx CH17
  23. Marxism After Marx CH18, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdevelopment#Dependency_theoryhttps://www.ppesydney.net/three-theories-of-underdevelopment/
  24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
  25. Marxism After Marx CH19
  26. Marxism After Marx CH20
  27. Marxism After Marx CH21
  28. Marxism After Marx CH22, CH5 Understanding Marxism Geoff Boucher https://tuxdoc.com/download/understanding-marxism-geoff-boucher_pdf#download-require
  29. Marxism After Marx CH23
  30. Marxism After Marx CH24
  31. Marxism After Marx CH25
  32. CH6 Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, 2018, CH6
  33. Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal, Jon Nixon, 2018, page iix-ix
  34. http://libcom.org/library/gik-introduction
  35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workerismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomismhttps://medium.com/@sethwheeler/tronti-and-the-many-faces-of-autonomy-a111cced7bdf)
  36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomia_Operaiahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomismhttps://medium.com/@sethwheeler/tronti-and-the-many-faces-of-autonomy-a111cced7bdf, Social Movements Key Concepts, Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh, 2011, page 37)
  37. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomism#The_Marxist_Autonomist_theory
  38. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomismhttps://culturepowerpolitics.org/2016/05/04/the-multitude-and-the-metropolis/https://notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition, Autonomy Capitalism, Class and Politics, David Eden, 2017, page 12-15
  39. https://marx.libcom.org/library/libertarian-marxist-tendency-map
  40. https://buildingarevolutionarymovement.org/2019/03/30/political-ideology-part-2/
  41. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/michael-burawoy-a-tale-of-two-marxisms?pc=126
Army Corps Orders Full Environmental Review of Formosa Plastics’ Controversial Louisiana Plant

Army Corps Orders Full Environmental Review of Formosa Plastics’ Controversial Louisiana Plant

The Center for Biological Diversity
For Immediate Release, August 18, 2021

Contact:
Julie Teel Simmonds, Center for Biological Diversity, (619) 990-2999, jteelsimmonds@biologicaldiversity.org
Sharon Lavigne, RISE St. James, (225) 206-0900, sharonclavigne@gmail.com
Anne Rolfes, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, (504) 452-4909, anne@labucketbrigade.org

Decision Follows Lawsuit, Permit Suspension, Public Pressure

WASHINGTON— The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Wednesday it will require a full “environmental impact statement” for the massive petrochemical complex Formosa Plastics proposes to build in St. James Parish, Louisiana. The decision is a major victory for opponents of the plant, who sued to block the project in January 2020 and convinced the Army Corps to suspend its permit last fall.

Wednesday’s announcement means the Army Corps will now do a complete analysis of the public health, environmental, climate, environmental justice and cultural impacts of what would be one of the world’s biggest plastic-making plants. Plaintiff groups representing the Black and low-income communities affected by the project — from an already polluted industrial corridor known as Cancer Alley or Death Alley — have long said a proper environmental review would show the project should never be built.

“The Army Corps has finally heard our pleas and understands our pain. With God’s help, Formosa Plastics will soon pull out of our community,” said Sharon Lavigne with RISE St. James, who earlier this year was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work defending her community from petrochemical polluters. “Nobody took it upon themselves to speak for St. James Parish until we started working to stop Formosa Plastics. Now the world is watching this important victory for environmental justice.”

RISE St. James, Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Healthy Gulf were represented in the litigation over this permit by the Center for Biological Diversity. Local opponents of the project have been aggressively dismissedarrested and publicly criticized over their work to stop this project, which received huge taxpayer subsidies from the state.

“Today’s announcement is the ultimate David v. Goliath victory,” said Anne Rolfes, executive director of Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “We were not scared of Formosa Plastics and its $9 billion project, or the fact that our governor has been cheering for Formosa all along. St. James Parish residents are the ones who have shown leadership and wisdom. What the Corps has done today is common sense. Of course one of the biggest plastics plants in the world should require an environmental impact statement. Our state and federal officials should have demanded it from the outset. I am hopeful that this is the nail in the coffin of Formosa Plastics in St. James Parish. And don’t try to build somewhere else. Pack up and go home.”

The proposed facility would emit 13.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, the equivalent of 3.5 coal-fired power plants. It will also produce 800 tons of toxic air pollutants annually, doubling air emissions in St. James Parish, to produce plastic for single-use packaging and other products. Recent studies have linked exposure to air pollution with higher COVID-19 death rates. It’s one likely factor in the disease’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans.

The lawsuit sought to invalidate Clean Water Act permits issued by the Army Corps in 2019. It asserted that officials violated federal laws in approving the destruction and damage of wetlands, which help protect the region from hurricanes that are intensifying with climate change. The Corps also ignored the water, air, climate, and health impacts of the complex and failed to properly evaluate and protect burial sites of enslaved people discovered on the property.

“This long-overdue review will show the unacceptable harm Formosa Plastics’ massive petrochemical complex would inflict on this community, our waterways, and our climate,” said Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center. “This terrible project shouldn’t have been rubber-stamped and it should never be built. Climate action and environmental justice mean we have to stop sacrificing communities and a healthy environment just to make throwaway plastic.”

The growing chorus of project opponents includes the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, which called the project “environmental racism” in March and urged U.S. officials to reject the project.

Formosa Plastics’ massive proposed petrochemical complex would include 10 chemical manufacturing plants and numerous support facilities, spanning 2,500 acres, just one mile from an elementary school. By turning fracked gas into the building blocks for a massive amount of single-use packaging and other wasteful plastic products, the project would worsen climate change and the ocean plastic pollution crisis.

Last year Formosa Plastics agreed to pay a record $50 million in cleanup and restoration costs to settle a civil lawsuit after its Point Comfort plant discharged billions of plastic pellets into Texas waterways over many years. That settlement included a commitment to zero future plastic discharges from the Texas plant — a standard that has not been applied to its plant in Louisiana.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

RISE St. James is a faith-based organization working to protect the land, air, water and health of the people of St. James Parish from the petrochemical industry.

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade collaborates with communities adjacent to petrochemical plants, using grassroots action to create an informed, healthy society and hasten the transition from fossil fuels.

Healthy Gulf is a regional nonprofit whose purpose is to collaborate with and serve communities who love the Gulf of Mexico by providing the research, communications, and coalition-building tools needed to reverse the long pattern of over exploitation of the Gulf’s natural resources.

Electric Cars or Gas Accelerate Us Towards Ecological Collapse

Electric Cars or Gas Accelerate Us Towards Ecological Collapse

This article originally appeared in Protect Thacker Pass.

By Max Wilbert

The great poet and playwright James Baldwin wrote in 1953 that “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”

Perhaps never has this been truer than in this era of converging ecological crises: global warming, biodiversity collapse, desertification and soil erosion, ocean acidification, dead zones, plastic pollution, sprawling habitat destruction, and the total saturation of our environment with radioactive or toxic chemicals.

Ignorance is not bliss; it is dangerous.

That is why I am so concerned that, while searching for solutions to global warming, many people imagine that fossil fuels can be simply replaced with solar and wind energy, that gas tanks can be swapped for lithium batteries, and that this will solve the problem.

For years, I have been arguing that this is wrong, and that we need much more fundamental changes to our economy, our society, and our way of life.

For the last 6 months, I have been camped at a place in northern Nevada called Thacker Pass, which is threatened by a vast planned open-pit mine that threatens to destroy 28 square miles of biodiverse sagebrush habitat, release millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, bulldoze Paiute and Shoshone sacred sites, and leave behind piles of toxic waste for generations to come.

Electric cars and fossil fuel cars don’t differ as much as lithium mining companies would like us to believe. In fact, a direct link connects the water protectors fighting the new Line 3 oil pipeline in the Ojibwe territory in Minnesota and the land defenders working to protect Peehee Mu’huh, the original name for Thacker Pass in the Paiute language.

The new Line 3 pipeline would carry almost a million barrels a day of crude oil from the Alberta Tar Sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project on the planet, to refineries in the United States. On the way, it would threaten more than 200 waterbodies and carve a path through what CNN called “some of the most pristine woods and wetlands in North America.” The project would be directly responsible for millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

For the last 7 years, indigenous water protectors and allies have rallied, petitioned, established resistance camps, held events, protested, and engaged in direct action to stop the Line 3 pipeline from being built. More than 350 people have been arrested over the past few months, but pipeline construction continues to progress for now.

Ironically, the proposed Thacker Pass lithium mine would require importing nearly 700,000 tons of sulfur per year — roughly equivalent to the mass of two Empire State Buildings — for processing the lithium. This sulfur would likely come (at least in part) from the Alberta tar sands, perhaps even from oil that would flow through Line 3.

Almost all sulfur, which is used in a wide range of chemical processes and fertilizers, comes from oil and gas refineries, where it’s a byproduct of producing low-sulfur fuels to meet air-quality regulations around acid rain.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, tar sands contain 11 times as much sulfur as conventional heavy crude oil, and literal “mountains” of sulfur are piling up in Alberta and at other refineries which process tar sands fuel. Sulfur sales revenue is important to the economics of tar sands oil extraction. One report released in the early years of tar sands extraction found that “developing a plan for storing, selling or disposing of the sulfur [extracted during processing] will help to ensure the profitability of oil sands operations.”

This means that Thacker Pass lithium destined for use in “green” electric cars and solar energy storage batteries would almost certainly be directly linked to the Line 3 pipeline and the harms caused by the Tar Sands, including the destruction of boreal forest, the poisoning of the Athabasca River and other waters, and an epidemic of cancers, rare diseases, and missing and murdered indigenous women facing Alberta First Nations. And, of course, the tar sands significantly exacerbate global warming. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over recent decades as tar sands oil production has increased.

Mining is exceptionally destructive. There is no getting around it. According to the EPA, hard-rock mining is the single largest source of water pollution in the United States. The same statistic probably applies globally, but no one really knows how many rivers have been poisoned, how many mountains blown up, how many meadows and forests bulldozed for the sake of mining.

The water protectors at Line 3 fight to protect Ojibwe territory, wild rice beds, and critical wildlife habitat from a tar sands oil pipeline, oil spills, and the greenhouse gas emissions that would harm the entire world. Here at Thacker Pass, we fight the same fight. The indigenous people here, too, face the destruction of their first foods; the poisoning of their water; the desecration of their sacred sites; and the probability of a toxic legacy for future generations. I fight alongside them for this place.

Our fights are not separate. Our planet will not cool, our waters will not begin to flow clean again, our forests will not regrow, and our children will not have security unless we organize, stop the destruction, and build a new way of life. The Line 3 pipeline, and all the other pipelines, must be stopped. And so must the lithium mines.

The wind howls at Thacker Pass. Rain beats against the walls of my tent. A steady drip falls onto the foot of my sleeping bag. It’s June, but we are a mile above sea level. Summer is slow in coming here, and so the storm rages outside, and I cannot sleep. Nightmare visions of open-pit mines, climate breakdown, and ecological collapse haunt me.

James Baldwin gave good advice. In this time, we must not shut our eyes to the reality that industrial production, including the production of oil and the production of electric cars, results in industrial devastation. And with our eyes wide open, we must take action to protect our only home, and the future generations who rely on us.

Also available at The Sierra Nevada Ally, Dispatches from Thacker Pass series.

Pronghorn


For more on the Protect Thacker Pass campaign

#ProtectThackerPass #NativeLivesMatter #NativeLandsMatter


What is Neoliberalism?

What is Neoliberalism?

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

This post provides a brief introduction to the current form of capitalism: neoliberalism. It includes sections on: neoliberal ideology; Governmentality – how neoliberalism governs, neoliberal government policies; how neoliberalism is a capitalist class project of domination; the history of neoliberalism in the twentieth century; and the three phase of neoliberalism in government since the 1980s.

Neoliberalism is a form of capitalism and liberalism. Neoliberalism is the most aggressive form of liberalism ever formulated. Liberals generally assume that being a “self-interested, competitive entrepreneur is the natural state for human beings, neoliberals know that it isn’t.” But the neoliberals still want people to behave that way. They achieve this by using the state and corporate power to make us act in that way, regardless of what most people want. [1]

Neoliberal ideology

Ideology can be defined as a set of assumptions about how society does and should work, it structures both what we think and how we act. Our world has competing truths, values, and theories, ideologies aim to favour some values over others and to legitimise certain theories or sets of meanings. Ideologies provide intellectual maps of the social world that establish relationships between individuals and groups versus the larger structure of power. They therefore play an essential role in maintaining the current power structure as fair and natural, or in challenging it by highlighting its injustices and pointing out the benefits of alternative power structures. [2] An ideology is most effectively when it denies its own existence and can pass itself off as the normal state of things or ‘common sense’ [3]

Jeremy Gilbert describes how it is difficult to differentiate between capitalism and neoliberalism:

“because neoliberalism is the most fanatically pro-capitalist ideology ever, and because it has become the default ideology of almost all actual capitalists, and certainly of almost all pro-capitalist political parties..it is important to differentiate between capitalism and neoliberalism because they are not the same thing – they are not the same KIND of thing. Capitalism is an economic practice. Neoliberalism is a philosophy about how societies in which that practice prevails should be managed, and a programme which is at least nominally informed that philosophy, or looks like it is.” [4]

Neoliberal ideology can be summarised as “a single global marketplace to the public, they portray globalizing markets in a positive light as an indispensable tool for the realization of a better world. Such market visions of globalization pervade public opinion and political choices in many parts of the world. Indeed, neoliberal decision-makers function as expert designers of an attractive ideological container for their market-friendly political agenda. Their ideological claims are laced with references to global economic interdependence rooted in the principles of free-market capitalism: global trade and financial markets, worldwide flows of goods, services, and labour, transnational corporations, offshore financial centres, and so on.” [5]

George Monbiot describes the ideology of neoliberalism as:

“Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.” [6]

Meritocracy is a key feature of neoliberal ideology. This promotes a “hierarchical and highly unequal set of social relations while claiming to offer individuals from all backgrounds an equal chance to compete for elite status.” [7] This is good propaganda for neoliberalism, but in fact social equality and social mobility have decreased since the 1970s. [8]

Mark Fisher describes the ‘capitalist realism’ of neoliberalism as: “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism…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.” [9]

Governmentality

A second dimension on neoliberalism is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called ‘Governmentality’:

“certain modes of governance based on particular premises, logics, and power relations. A neoliberal governmentality is rooted in entrepreneurial values such as competitiveness, self-interest, and decentralization. It celebrates individual empowerment and the devolution of central state power to smaller localized units. Such a neoliberal mode of governance adopts the self-regulating free market as the model for proper government. Rather than operating along more traditional lines of pursuing the public good (rather than profits) by enhancing civil society and social justice, neoliberals call for the employment of governmental technologies that are taken from the world of business and commerce: mandatory development of ‘strategic plans’ and ‘risk-management’ schemes oriented toward the creation of ‘surpluses’; cost–benefit analyses and other efficiency calculations; the shrinking of political governance (so-called ‘best-practice governance’); the setting of quantitative targets; the close monitoring of outcomes; the creation of highly individualized, performance-based work plans; and the introduction of ‘rational choice’ models that internalize and thus normalize market-oriented behaviour. Neoliberal modes of governance encourage the transformation of bureaucratic mentalities into entrepreneurial identities where government workers see themselves no longer as public servants and guardians of a qualitatively defined ‘public good’ but as self-interested actors responsible to the market and contributing to the monetary success of slimmed-down state ‘enterprises’. In the early 1980s, a novel model of public administration known as ‘new public management’ took the world’s state bureaucracies by storm. Operationalizing the neoliberal mode of governance for public servants, it redefined citizens as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ and encouraged administrators to cultivate an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. If private enterprises must nurture innovation and enhance productivity in order to survive in the competitive marketplace, why shouldn’t government workers embrace neoliberal ideals to improve the public sector?” [10]

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes the ‘bureaucratic managerialism’ of neoliberalism. Bureaucracy has been decentralised so that we actively produce it ourselves through “continuing professional development, performance reviews, log books, not to mention the whole machine of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).” Workers are encouraged to be highly self critical, but are assured that there will not be any consequences from this self criticism. The demonising nature of having to self criticise, that will then be ignored. Assessments at work have changed from periodic to continuous: “Our status is never fully ratified; it is always up for review.” [11]

A set of government policies

Jeremy Gilbert describes the main aim of neoliberal government programmes as being the promotion of the interests of finance capital and the processes of financialisation  above all other interests. [12] He lists neoliberalism’s policy agenda or ‘actually existing neoliberal’ as:

  • privatising public services
  • deregulating labour markets so workers have fewer rights and protections
  • attacking labour unions
  • cutting taxes on the rich
  • reducing public spending and welfare entitlements
  • forcing services in the public sector to behave, as much as possible, like competitive, profit-seeking business. [13]

Capitalist class project

Neoliberalism can be described as a project of the capitalist class to restore their own class power, following their loss of power through the middle of the twentieth century, during the Keynesian period of high public spending and a strong welfare state. There has also been a recomposition of the capitalist class, with finance capital now dominating over all other sectors. [14]

Neoliberalism can also be seen as a reaction by capitalist elites to the increase in democratic demands in the 1960s. This was followed by a crisis in the 1970s between the capitalists and labour movement. The neoliberal response to was to offer increased private consumption and easily accessible credit, which “re-asserted the supremacy of finance capital over both industrial capital and the rest of the population for the first time since the great crash of 1929”. [15]

At this point of crisis in the 1970s, the neoliberals had two ‘revolutionary goals’ to restore the profitability of capitalism. The first was to “re-organize capitalism on a universal, transnational scale and thus place global markets out of reach of the influence of national governments, making markets less subject to national-scale popular democratic demands and freeing corporations to exploit labor and the environment at will.” The second was to “apply global economics in a ‘race to the bottom’ competition between nations, creating ‘austerity societies’ of disempowered consumers at the expense of social groups and their ‘market-distorting’ demands. The formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 capped-off this revolutionary process of transferring economic power from nations—which ostensibly could be controlled democratically—to the much-less accountable global level.” [16]

A key function of neoliberal ideology is to “secure consent and generate political inertia precisely by enabling the experience of precarity and individualised impotence to be experienced as normal and inevitable.” Only a small number of people support neoliberal policies, namely the core neoliberal elite. For everyone else, neoliberal ideology aims “to console us that the sense of insecurity, of perpetual competition and individual isolation produced by neoliberal government is natural, because ‘that’s what life is really like’.” [17] Most people do not support neoliberalism, but as long as there is no viable alternative that wins broad popular support, then this results in a general ‘disaffected consent’ with the current system. [18]

In neoliberalism, capitalists have worked out the sweet spot to stop any serious challenge to their dominance: “as long as feeding one’s children (still the principal preoccupation of most adult humans, as it has been throughout history and before) remains an achievable but difficult task, then energies are likely to be devoted to the accomplishment of that goal: energies which cannot then be channelled into political activity of any kind. Where this objective becomes unachievable, populations are likely to resort to desperate, perhaps revolutionary, measures. Where it becomes too easily realised – as it did for the generation which came to maturity in the post-war years of social-democratic ascendancy – then capitalism is also likely to find itself subject to challenge by constituencies no longer intimidated by the immediate threat of destitution. Much of the neoliberal programme can be understood in terms of the efficacy and precision with which it engineers precisely the outcome of an economy and a society within which feeding their children and keeping them out of relative poverty remains an achievable but highly demanding task for most actors: actively producing insecurity and ‘precarity’ across the working population, without allowing the level of widespread desperation to pass critical thresholds. [19]

The making of neoliberalism

George Monbiot provides a good summary of the history of neoliberalism:

“The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism. In 1944 Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations. They created a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency. The neolibers stopped using the name for their ideology ‘neoliberalism’ in the 1950s.

In the post war period neoliberalism remained at the margins, despite its lavish funding. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high, and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets. But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain. After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world.” [20]

Phases of neoliberalism

There are a number of different perspectives on the phases of neoliberalism. [21] I believe there have been three phases of neoliberalism in government:

  1. First-wave neoliberalism in the 1980s: Reaganomics and Thatcherism

The ‘New Right’ of Thatcher and Reagan in the US and UK implemented a basic neoliberal economic programme with a range of conservative social policies such as restoring traditional family values, increased military spending, a tough law and order agenda, and limiting multiculturalism. [22]

  1. Second-wave neoliberalism in the 1990s: Clinton’s and Blair’s Third Way

The Blair and Clinton governments in the 1990s took a more centrist approach, that included the majority of neoliberalism combined with socially progressive policies. The governments supported private-sector-led economic growth, combined with the government providing a consistent level of social services to citizens. They also promoted equality for gay people and supported women in the labour market. [22]

  1. The third phase of neoliberalism began with bailing out the banks following the 2008 financial crisis. This was followed by austerity – massive cuts to public services. Inequality has increased, life expectancy has declined or stagnated, living standards have dropped. All this has polarised politics with the election of authoritarian, right-wing, isolationist politicians.

Endnotes

  1. Twenty-First Century Socialism, Jeremy Gilbert, 2020, page 27-8
  2. https://buildingarevolutionarymovement.org/2019/02/25/political-ideology-part-1/
  3. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? in New Formations, Jeremy Gilbert, 2013, page 12, https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/80-81/what-kind-thing-neoliberalism
  4. https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/neoliberalism-and-capitalism-whats-the-difference/
  5. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Manfred B. Steger, 2010, page 11-12
  6. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
  7. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 15. Also see Meritocracy as Plutocracy: the Marketising of Equality under Neoliberalism, Jo Littler, 2013 https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/80-81/meritocracy-plutocracy-marketising-equality-under-neoliberalism. And Against Meritocracy, Jo Littler, 2017
  8. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 22
  9. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative Mark Fisher, 2009, page 2 and a summary https://videomole.tv/events/mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-part-2/. Also see Capitalist Realism, Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue, in New Formations, Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, 2013, https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/80-81/capitalist-realism-neoliberal-hegemony-dialogue
  10. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, page 12-14
  11. Capitalist Realism, Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue, in New Formations page 91
  12. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 17
  13. Twenty-First Century Socialism page 28-9. Also see A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey, 2007
  14. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 16. Also see A Brief History of Neoliberalism
  15. Neoliberal Europe section of http://nearfuturesonline.org/corbynism-and-its-futures/#en-70-10
  16. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/revolution-that-will-not-die/
  17. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 15
  18. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 18-19
  19. What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? Page 14. Also 28 minutes into https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2016/06/08/how-did-we-get-here-radical-histories-of-the-uk-1974-88/
  20. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
  21. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2015/05/20/session-one-neoliberal-common-sense/https://medium.com/@efblake/the-corporatocracy-and-three-waves-of-neo-liberalism-e0eb2f5afc6b; A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Neoliberalism; A Very Short Introduction chapters 2 and 3; The Handbook of Neoliberalism, Simon Springer , Kean Birch , et al., 2016; https://newleftreview.org/issues/II101/articles/william-davies-the-new-neoliberalism; Neoliberalism in Context: Governance, Subjectivity and Knowledge, Simon Dawes (Editor), Marc Lenormand (Editor), 2020; Third-Wave Neoliberalism in Theory and Practice: A Case Study of the Halifax Centre Plan, Sandy Mackay, 2016, http://theoryandpractice.planning.dal.ca/_pdf/multiple_plans/smackay_2016.pdf
  22. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2015/05/20/session-one-neoliberal-common-sense/
Protecting Your Community From Mining and Other Extractive Operations

Protecting Your Community From Mining and Other Extractive Operations

A Guide for Resistance

By Carlos Zorrilla with Arden Buck and David Pellow

Resistance to mining is growing worldwide. Although extractive companies are powerful, they are also vulnerable.

About this guide

This guide is intended for leaders and organizers who can work with communities to carry out local actions, and who can also work at the regional, national, and international levels. It describes aspects of the mining process and the dangers your community faces when mining companies seek to operate in your community (Sect. 1), the many strategies you can use to fight back (Sect. 2 and Appendices A and B), examples of successful resistance by communities who fought back (Appendix C), and helpful resources in a companion volume (Supplement). Our hope is that with this guide, you too can succeed in protecting your community against these dangers.

This guide is not only for mining.

Most of the tactics and countermeasures described herein apply equally well to other extractive and exploitative activities: oil, gas, logging, various polluting industries, and large hydroelectric dams. Most activities proposed by large corporations, although they promise benefits, ultimately devastate local communities and their surroundings. If your community is targeted, it is essential to organize and resist. Acknowledgements: The material in this guide draws on the experience of several experts on mining and its impacts, particularly principle author Carlos Zorrilla. The guide came about because he realized that other communities around the world could benefit from the knowledge and experience that he and his colleagues gained while fighting to keep his area from being destroyed by mining companies.

Download the whole guide as PDF here:

Protecting Your Community From Extractive Industries