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]
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]
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 Country, The 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]
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.”
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 Party, Socialist 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 Dobb, Christopher Hill, Rodney 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 Brenner, Giovanni 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.
Gregory Claeys in Marx and Marxism divides Marxism into seven stages:
Marx and Engels’ attempts to form a ‘Marx party’ following 1848.
The growth and German Social Democracy and reformism up to 1914.
The Russian Revolution, Lenin and dialectical materialism from 1917 to 1937.
The Chinese Revolution of 1949.
After 1945, Marxism-Leninism spreading through the Third World.
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.
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.
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.
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 Holloway, Simon Clarke, Werner Bonefeld, Ana C Dinerstein, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis, Adrian Wilding, Peter Burnham, Mike Rooke, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Johannes 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]
For this fascinating Green Flame episode Jennifer Murnan interviews Hanna Bohman. Hanna Bohman is a Canadian civilian who spent time volunteering in the effort to support women’s rights in the middle east, including battling ISIS and liberating women in Syria. Motivated to fight, Hanna joined an all-female Kurdish army, the YPJ. A film, Fear Us Women, was made about Hanna’s experiences as a member of the YPJ. She is an ongoing supporter of her YPJ sisters.
Hanna is a Canadian civilian who went to Syria and volunteered to battle ISIS. She joined an all-female Kurdish army called the YPJ. YPJ is pushing against the ISIS and their women hating ideology. It is liberating women forced into sex slavery by the Islamic State and participating in the education and liberation.
The Islamic State is often portrayed as a monolithic issue of terrorism and counterterrrorism. In reality, there are multiple aspects to this issue. Hanna’s interview sheds light to some complexities of this issue.
The YPJ is also part of a promising experiment in a new form of society. The model of society that they are working to build is called democratic confederation. It is a grassroots democracy, where people make direct decision of the direction of their lives, their communities and their societies. It is also incorporating the liberation of women, in an extremely conservative and religious fundamentalist area.
Hanna was smuggled into Syria, trained to be a sniper, and put into the frontlines, to defend this project and to support this liberation of women
In this episode, Hanna talks about her experience in the YPJ. She discusses patriarchy and feminism in both the Western context and in the YPJ. Hanna also talks about Jineology, the study of women. Finally, the experience also changed how it changed how she relates to women.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens has been fighting for decades against the privatization of water and for popular control over natural resources.
This article originally appeared in Roarmag.
Featured image: Vale open pit iron ore mine, Carajas, Para, 2009
A person can go a few weeks without food, years without proper shelter, but only a few days without water. Water is fundamental, yet we often forget how much we rely on it. Only 37 percent of the world’s rivers remain free-flowing and numerous hydro dams have destroyed freshwater systems on every continent, threatening food security for millions of people and contributing to the decimation of freshwater non-human life.
Dams and dam failures have catastrophic socio-environmental consequences. In the 20th century alone, large dam projects displaced 40 to 80 million people globally. At the same time, the communities most impacted by dams have been typically excluded from the political decision-making processes affecting their lives.
In Brazil there is an extensive network of mining companies, electric companies and other corporate powers that construct, own and operate dams throughout the country. But for the communities directly affected by hydro dam projects, water and energy are not commodities. Brazil’s Movement of People Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, or MAB — pronounced “mah-bee”) fights against the displacement and privatization of water, rivers and other natural resources in the belief that everyday people should have sovereignty and control over their own resources.
MAB is a member of La Via Campesina, a transnational social movement representing 300 million people across five continents with over 150 member organizations committed to food sovereignty and climate justice. MAB also works with social movements across Brazil, including the more widely-known Landless Workers Movement (MST), unions and human rights organizations. These alliances speak to the importance of peasant movements and Global South movements in constructing globalizations from below.
MAB focuses its fights on six interconnected areas: human rights, energy, water, dams, the Amazon and international solidarity. The movement organizes for tangible policy and system-level changes and actively creates an alternative to capitalist globalization.
DISASTER CAPITALISM
Just over two years ago, on January 25, 2019, the worst environmental crime in Brazil’s history resulted in the loss of 272 lives. In Córrego do Feijão in Brumadinho, in the state of Minas Gerais, a dam owned by the transnational mining company Vale collapsed. Originally a state-owned company, Vale was privatized in 1997 and since then has made untold billions of dollars mining iron ore and other minerals.
Brazil is the world’s second-largest producer of mineral ores and in 2018 iron ore accounted for 20 percent of all exports from Brazil to the United States. More than 45 percent of Vale’s shareholders are international, including some of the world’s largest investment management companies based in the US such as BlackRock and Capital Group.
The logic of profit has dispossessed people of their sovereignty, their wealth and their water, the very essence of life. The massive dams Vale uses in its mining operations privatize and pollute water used by thousands of people.
When you fly over the state of Minas Gerais, you can see the iron mines as large gaping holes in the ground. Vale and its subsidiaries own and control 175 dams in Brazil, of which 129 are iron ore dams and Minas Gerais accounts for the vast majority of these. Minas Gerais is a region where thousands of people depend upon the water for their livelihood and survival, but the mining leaves the water contaminated. Agriculture and fishing are disrupted or halted, and residents struggle to live without access to potable water.
Exacerbating the problems associated with the privatization and contamination of water for residents, local economy and ecosystems, the dams themselves are vulnerable: the types of dams Vale uses are relatively cheap to build, but also present higher security risks because of their poor structure. When the Brumadinho iron ore mine collapsed, it released a mudflow that swept through a worker cafeteria at lunchtime before wiping out homes, farms and infrastructure. The disaster killed 272 people and an additional 11 people were never found. What made it a crime was that Vale knew something like this could happen. In an earlier assessment, Vale had classified the dam as “two times more likely to fail than the maximum level of risk tolerated under internal guidelines.”
The Associação Estadual de Defesa Ambiental e Social (State Association of Environmental and Social Defense) conducted an assessment and released a report in collaboration with more than 7,000 residents in the regions impacted by the dam collapse. This report shows that depending on the town — the effects of the collapse vary from those communities buried in mud, to those impacted further downstream — 55 to 65 percent of people currently lack employment due to the dam disaster.
Brumadinho is considered one of the worst socio-environmental crimes in the history of Brazil, but it is far from the only one. Five years ago, a dam collapsed in Mariana, killing 20 people; the impacted communities still suffer the effects and are without reparations. On the second anniversary of the Brumadinho collapse, on January 24, 2021, another dam collapsed in Santa Catarina. On March 25, 2021, a dam in Maranhão state, owned by a subsidiary of the Canadian company Equinox Gold, collapsed, polluting the water reservoir of the city of Godofredo Viana, leaving 4,000 people without potable water.
On January 22, 2021, MAB held a virtual international press conference to commemorate two years since the Brumadinho collapse. Jôelisia Feitosa, an atingida (an “affected person”) from Juatuba, one of the communities affected by the dam collapse, described the fallout. People are suffering from skin diseases due to the contaminated water; small farmers cannot continue with their livelihood; people who relied on fishing can no longer do so. As a result, many people have been forced to leave. The lack of potable water has created an emergency. Feitosa said that presently, there are “not conditions for surviving here” anymore. The after-effects of the collapse, compounded by the pandemic, continue to take lives.
There are more than 100,000 atingidos in the region, but people do not know what is going to happen or when emergency aid will come. Further, government negotiations with Vale for “reparations” were conducted without the participation of atingidos. On February 4, 2021, the Brazilian government and Vale reached an accord. Nearly US$7 billion was awarded to the state of Minas Gerais, making it the largest settlement in Brazil’s history, along with murder charges for company officials.
To MAB, however, the accord is illegitimate. It was made under false pretenses, the affected population was not included in the process, and the money, which is not even going to those who are most impacted, does not begin to cover the irreparable and continuing damages. As José Geraldo Martins, a member of the MAB state coordination, said: “[Vale’s] crime destroyed ways of life, dreams, personal projects and the possibility of a future as planned. This leads to people becoming ill, emotionally, mentally, and physically. It aggravates existing health problems and creates new ones.”
As Feitosa put it: “Vale is manipulating the government, manipulating justice.” The accord was reached without the full participation of atingidos, and to make matters worse, Vale decided who qualifies as an atingido based on whether or not people have formal titles to ancestral lands. Vale’s actions create a dangerous precedent that allows corporations to extract, exploit and take human life with impunity. Nearly 300 people died from the 2019 dam collapse, and since then almost 400,000 people have died in Brazil from COVID-19. Yet, during this time, Vale has made a record profit. Neither the dam collapse nor the pandemic has stopped production or profits, even as workers are dying.
FIGHTING BACK: MAB’S STRUGGLE FOR WATER AND LIFE
MAB is committed to continued resistance and will bring the case to the Supreme Court. MAB organizes marches and direct actions and also partners with other movements in activities all across Brazil. They have recently occupied highways and blocked the entrance and exit of trucks to Vale’s facilities. MAB also uses powerful, embodied art and theater calledmística that tells a real story and asks participants to put themselves into mindset that “we are all affected.”
MAB emphasizes popular education to understand how historical processes inform present-day struggles. Drawing heavily on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, they focus on collaborative learning and literacy by making use, for example, of small break-out groups where people take turns reading and discussing short passages. In these projects, there is an intentional effort to fight against interlocking systems of oppression: classism, racism, heterosexism and patriarchy, which are viewed as interlinked with capitalism at the root.
MAB also has a skilled communication team that makes use of online media, including holding frequent talks and panels broadcast via Facebook Live. A recent MAP pamphlet entitled, “Our fight is for life, Enough with Impunity!” details four women important to MAB’s struggle: Dilma, Nicinha, Berta and Marielle. Dilma and Nichina are two women atingidas who were murdered in their fights against dam projects in their communities. Berta was a Honduran environmentalist who also engaged in dam struggles and was murdered. Marielle was a Black, lesbian, socialist city-councilwoman (with Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party) in Rio who was murdered in 2018.
For MAB, the struggles of those who have died in their fight for a better world serve as seeds of resistance, a theme further explored in their film “Women Embroidering Resistance.”
For the past two years, MAB has organized events to commemorate the anniversary of the crime committed by Vale in Brumadinho. In 2020, MAB organized a five-day march and international seminar, beginning in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais’ state capital, and ending in Córrego do Feijão with a memorial service. Hundreds of people from around Brazil as well as allies from 17 countries marched through Belo Horizonte, chanting, “Vale killed the people, killed the river, killed the fish!”
Famed liberation theologian Leonardo Boff is a supporter of MAB and spoke at the seminar, decrying that letting people starve is a sin and asserting that “everyone has the right to land; everyone has the right to education; everyone has the right to culture; we all need security and have the right to housing—these are common and basic rights.” He went on: “We don’t get this world by voting — we need participatory democracy.”
MAB commemorated the second anniversary of Brumadinho this past January with various symbolic actions. In one such event, people tossed 11 roses into the water to honor the 11 people who have still not been found, with additional petals to honor the river that has been killed by the mining company. They also organized various virtual actions since the pandemic precluded an in-person convergence like the one held the year before.
JUSTICE THROUGH STRUGGLE AND ORGANIZATION
Less than a month after commemorating Brumadinho in 2020, COVID-19 exploded and the world went into lockdown. Brazil is now one of the hardest-hit countries with the actions and inactions of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro — from calling COVID-19 a “little flu” to encouraging people to take hydroxychloroquine as a remedy, to defunding the public health system, and cutting back social services — leading to a dire situation.
In April, Brazil recorded over 4,000 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours, with a death toll second only to the United States. On May 30, the official death toll from COVID-19 was 461,931. Brazil will not soon realize vaccine distribution to the entire population, and people continue to die from lack of oxygen in some regions, prompting an investigation of Bolsonaro and the health minister for mismanagement.
On May 29, 2021, MAB participated in protests with other social movements, unions and the population in general that spanned across 213 cities in Brazil (and 14 cities around the world). The protesters called for Bolsonaro’s impeachment, demanded vaccines and emergency aid for all, and denounced cuts to public health care and education as well as efforts to privatize public services.
In the past five years, the number of Brazilians experiencing hunger has grown to nearly 37 percent. The COVID-19 crisis has only worsened this reality. In August 2020, Bolsonaro vetoed a bill that would have granted emergency assistance to family farmers.
But Brazil’s story is one of resistance, resilience and hope. Efforts bringing together many social movements, unions and other popular organizations have mounted critical mutual aid efforts. MAB is a leader in these efforts, putting together baskets with essential food, hand sanitizer and other essential goods for families in need. The pandemic presents significant challenges, but MAB has continued to resist Bolsonaro’s policies. For example, they are fighting against the defunding of the national public health care system and continuing to organize in communities impacted by dam projects or threatened by new ones.
The fight for the right to water and against the socio-environmental impacts of dams is global. MAB’s struggle is one of resistance against the capitalist system for a world where the rights of people come ahead of profit. As MAB has said: “In 2020, Brazil did not sow rights; on the contrary, the country took lives, especially the lives of women, Black and poor people, all with a lot of violence and impunity.”
MAB’s struggle extends beyond the fight against water privatization. It is part of a global effort to regain the commons of water and fight against the commodification and privatization of life. MAB’s insistence that all forms of oppression are interconnected is also a statement of hope and a catalyst for envisioning a different world. Imagining new possibilities is a prerequisite for creating them.
This year, MAB celebrates 30 years of fighting to guarantee rights and their message is that the only way is to fight and organize: “Justice only with struggle and organization.” In doing so, they are sending a strong message to Vale: they cannot commit a crime like Brumadinho again and profit will not be valued over life.
Caitlin Schroering holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh. She has 16 years of experience in community, political, environmental and labor organizing.
Part one looked at Marxist and non-Marxist concepts of ideology, the challenges of defining ideology, ideology and the political spectrum, and the classical and new ideologies. Based on Political Ideologies: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood (4th edition from 2007) this post describes the classical ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, anarchism, fascism, plus the new ideology feminism.
Liberalism
Heywood describes the central theme of liberal ideology to be a commitment to the individual and the desire to build a society where people can satisfy their interests and achieve fulfilment. Human beings are seen as individuals, invested with reason. Therefore, each individual should enjoy the maximum possible freedom, ensuring a similar freedom for all. Individuals are given equal political and legal rights but they are only rewarded in line with their talents and willingness to work. Liberalism is based on a number of values and beliefs: the individual, freedom, reason, justice, toleration.
Liberals believe in the need for a state, government and laws to protect individuals from others that might be a threat to them. Liberal societies are organized politically around principles of constitutionalism and consent, intended to protect citizens from the dangers of government tyranny. The core features of Liberal democracy are:
constitutional government based on formal legal rules
guaranteed civil liberties and individual rights
institutional fragmentation and a system of checks and balances
regular elections respecting the principles of universal suffrage and ‘one person, one vote’
political pluralism, in the form of electoral choice and party completion
a healthy civil society in which organized groups and interests enjoy independence from government
a capitalist or private-enterprise economy organised along market lines
Heywood explains that there are significant differences between classical liberalism and modern liberalism. Classical liberalism from the nineteenth century has a number of common characteristics. First, it views human beings as rationally self-interested creatures, who have a strong capacity for self reliance. Second, an individual is free by being left alone, not interfered with or coerced by others. Third, it is in favour of a minimal state that maintains domestic order and personal security. Finally, it has a positive view of civil society, that reflects the principle of balance or equilibrium. A good example of this is the classical liberal faith in a self-regulating market economy. Classical liberalism is based on a number of doctrines and theories: natural rights, utilitarianism, economic liberalism, social Darwinism, neoliberalism.
Modern Liberalism, also known as ‘twentieth-century liberalism’, developed in response to the industrialisation and the realisation by some liberals that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest did not produce a socially just society. Modern liberals believe that the state should help people help themselves. It includes the following ideas: individuality, positive freedom, social liberalism, economic management [1].
Conservatism
According to Heywood, as a political ideology, conservatism is defined by the desire to conserve, with a resistance or suspicion of change. It is characterised by supporting tradition, a belief in human imperfection and an attempt to maintain the structure of society. Conservatives seem to have a clearer understanding of what they are against than what they are for. Conservatives describe their beliefs as a ‘state of mind’ or ‘common sense’ as opposed to an ideology. Its supporters argue that it is based on history or experience, not rational thought. Its central beliefs include: tradition, human imperfection, organic society, hierarchy and authority, property.
The main distinction within conservatism is between traditional conservatism and the ‘new right’. Traditional conservatism defends established institutions and values as they are seen to safeguard the fragile ‘fabric of society’, giving security-seeking human beings a sense of stability and rootedness.
Heywood identifies three forms of traditional conservatism. Authoritarian conservatism is a tradition that favours authoritarianism – a belief in or practice of government ‘from above’, in which authority is exercised over a population with or without its consent.
Paternalistic conservatism is based on the idea that the values that are important to conservatives – tradition, order, authority, property, etc – will only be maintained if policy is developed based on practical circumstances and experience, rather than based on theory. This accepts a prudent willingness to ‘change in order to conserve’. There are two main traditions of paternalistic conservatism: one-nation conservatism, and Christian democracy.
Libertarian conservatism advocates the greatest possible economic liberty and least possible government regulation of social life. Heywood suggests that libertarian conservatives are attached to free-market theories because they ensure social order.
Heywood describes the new right as a combination of two ideological traditions. The first is called the ‘liberal new right,’ or ‘neoliberalism’. This is based on classical liberal economics, specifically free market economics with a critique of ‘big’ government, economic and social intervention.
The second is called the ‘conservative new right’ or ‘neoconservatism’. This is based on traditional conservatism that defends order, authority and discipline. The new right is therefore a fusion of economic libertarianism and social authoritarianism.
Heywood describes the new right as a blend of radical, reactionary and traditional features. It is radical in that it aims to ‘roll back’ interventionist government. The reactionary element relates to the liberal and conservative new right looking back to a past ‘golden age’ of supposed economic propriety and moral fortitude. The new right also prizes the traditional values listed above [2].
Socialism
Heywood describes socialism as in opposition to capitalism and the attempt to create a more humane and socially worthwhile alternative. The foundation of socialism is a view that human beings are social creatures united by their common humanity. Individual identity is formed by social interaction and the involvement of social groups and collective bodies. Socialists value cooperation over competition. Equality, especially social equality is seens as the central value. Social equality is seen to ensure social stability and cohesion, providing freedom because it meets material needs and provides a basis for personal development.
Heywood explains that the difficulties of analysing socialism are due to the term being understood in at least three different ways. First, it is seen as an economic model related to collectivisation and planning and as an alternative to capitalism. The second approach views socialism as an instrument of the labour movement, known as labourism. It represents the interests of the working class and provides a programme for workers to gain political and economic power. In the third approach, socialism is seen as a broader political creed or ideology with a cluster of ideas, values and theories. These include: community, cooperation, equality, class politics, common ownership.
Socialism has a number of divisions and rival traditions, according to Heywood. The divisions have been about the ‘means’ (how socialism should be achieved) and ‘ends’ (the nature of the future socialist society).
The roads to socialism or ‘means’ of achieving it can be divided into revolutionary socialism and evolutionary socialism. Heywood defines revolution as “a fundamental and irreversible change, often a brief but dramatic period of upheaval; systemic change.” Revolution is more than a tactical consideration for socialists, it also relates to their negative analysis of the state and state power. Evolutionary socialists, also known as democratic socialists or social democrats support gradualism, aiming to reform or ‘humanize’ the capitalist system by reducing material inequalities and ending poverty.
For the goals or ‘ends’ of socialism, Heywood describes the different and competing conceptions of what a socialist society should look like. He divides them into Marxist and social democrat.
Marxist
Communists and Marxists support revolution and the abolition of capitalism through the creation of a classless society based on the common ownership of wealth. Marxism is based on the work of Karl Marx and later generations of Marxist thinkers. Their aim has been to develop a systematic and comprehensive worldview that suits the needs of the socialist movement.
Heywood describes three forms of Marxism. The first is classical Marxism: “a philosophy of history that outlines why capitalism is doomed and why socialism is destined to replace it, based on supposedly scientific analysis.” The second is orthodox communism, which refers to communist regimes from the twentieth-century based on the theories of classical Marxism, that had to be adapted to the tasks of winning and retaining political power. The main example is the Russian Revolution, that dominated how communism was viewed in the twentieth-century. The third is modern Marxism, also known as neo-Marxism: “an updated and revised form of Marxism that rejects determinism, the primacy of economics and the privileged status of the proletariat.” Modern 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.
Social democrat
Social democracy stands for a balance between the market economy and state intervention. Its features include: liberal-democratic principles with peaceful and constitutional political change; capitalism being accepted as the only reliable means of generating wealth; capitalism being viewed as defective at distributing wealth; defects of capitalism can be reduced by state intervention; the nation-state is the meaningful unit of political rule.
Heywood describes how the theoretical basis for social democracy is based on moral or religious beliefs, rather than scientific analysis. Social democracy is primarily concerned with the idea of a just and fair distribution of wealth in society – social justice.
Another form of social democracy is ‘revisionist socialism’, which is based on those that came to see Marx’s analysis of capitalism as defective and thus rejected it. Capitalism was no longer seen as a system of naked class oppression. Instead it could be reformed by the nationalisation of major industries, economic regulation and a welfare state. This is also known as ‘managerialism’.
Since the 1980s reformist socialist parties have gone through another round of revisionism, know as the ‘third way’. It is an unclear term but is broadly a continuation of neoliberalism by parties that were on the left [3].
Nationalism
Classical nationalism is based on the belief that the nation is the natural and proper unit of government. Nationalism is a complex and highly diverse ideology, with distinct political, cultural and ethnic forms. Heywood describes the core feature of nationalism to be its broader connection to movements and ideas that accept the central importance of political life of the nation, not simply its narrow association with self-government and the nation-state.
The political implications have been varied and sometimes contradictory:
“at different times, nationalism has been progressive and reactionary, democratic and authoritarian, rational and irrational, and left-wing and right-wing. It has been associated with almost all the major ideological traditions. In their different ways, liberals, conservatives, socialists, fascists and even communists have been attracted to nationalism; perhaps only anarchism, by virtue of its outright rejection of the state, is fundamentally at odds with nationalism. Nevertheless, although nationalist doctrines have been used by a bewildering variety of political movements and associated with sometimes diametrically opposed political causes…”
Heywood defines cultural nationalism as: “a form of nationalism that places primary emphasis on the regeneration of the nation as a distinctive civilization rather than on self-government.” He defines ethnic nationalism as: “a form of nationalism that is fuelled primarily by a keen sense of ethnic distinctiveness and the desire to preserve it.”
Nationalism has emerged in very different historical contexts, influenced by different cultural traditions, and has been used to advance a wide range of political causes. Heywood describes how nationalism has a capacity to combine with other political doctrines and ideas, which has created a number of rival nationalist traditions. These include: liberal nationalism, conservative nationalism, expansionist nationalism, anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism.
Liberal nationalism is the oldest form of nationalism, dating back to the French Revolution. Liberal nationalism is a liberating force in that it opposes all forms of foreign domination and oppression, and that it stands for the ideal of self-government. Liberal nationalists also believe that nations, like individuals, are equal, in the sense that they are entitled to the right of self-determination.
Conservative nationalism took shape in the late nineteenth-century and was used by conservative and reactionary politicians to promote social cohesion, order and stability, in response to the increasing international challenge of socialism. Conservative nationalism is maintained by its relationship to tradition and history; it defends traditional institutions and a traditional way of life. It is nostalgic of a past age of national glory and triumph.
Expansionist nationalism is aggressive and militaristic, most clearly displayed by the imperialism of the late nineteenth century by European powers to colonise territories. This form of popular nationalism had a lot of public support, where national prestige was linked the expansion of empire.
Anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism came about from a desire of ‘national liberation’ by people living in Africa and Asia under foreign imperial rule. Most anti-colonisation movements were based on some form of socialism. In recent decades, postcolonial nationalism has rejected western ideas and culture in favour of religious fundamentalism related to political Islam.
Looking beyond nationalism, there is internationalism. Heywood describes this as a theory or practice of politics based on transnational or global cooperation. There is liberal internationalism based on human rights within nations, national interdependence-based free trade, and where national ambition is limited by supranational bodies. Socialist internationalism treats internationalism as an article of faith or core value, with working class or proletarian class solidarity transcending national borders, especially as capitalism is an international system, and thus can only be challenged by a genuinely international movement [4].
Anarchism
Heywood describes the Anarchist central belief as being that political authority in all forms, especially in the form of the state, is evil and unnecessary. Anarchists therefore want to create a stateless society through the abolition of law and government. The state is viewed as evil because it manages sovereign, compulsory and coercive authority, which are an offence against the principles of freedom and equality. The core value of anarchism is unrestrained personal autonomy. The state is seen as unnecessary, because order and social harmony can exist naturally and do not need to be enforced ‘from above’ by government. Heywood describes the utopian character of anarchist thought, which is reflected in the highly optimistic assumptions about human nature. The broad principles and positions of anarchism are: anti-statism, natural order, anti-clericalism, economic freedom.
In addition, anarchism draws from two different ideological traditions: liberalism and socialism. This has resulted in rival forms of anarchism: individualist and collectivist. Both accept the goal of no state, but promote different ideas of the future anarchist society.
He describes collectivist anarchism developing by pushing socialist collectivism to its limits – the belief that human beings are social animals, well suited to working together for the common good, rather than individual self-interest. This is also called social anarchism, based on the human capacity for social solidarity or ‘mutual aid’. Anarchists have also worked in the broad revolutionary socialist movement.
Heywood identifies a number of theoretical overlaps between anarchism and Marxism: rejection of capitalism, social change through revolution, preference for the collective ownership of wealth and communal organisation of social life, a belief that a communist society would be anarchic, and that human beings have the capacity to run society without political authority.
Heywood also describes how anarchism and socialism differ on two main points. First, anarchists dismiss parliamentary socialism as a contradiction in terms – it is not possible to reform capitalism, and the expansion of the role and responsibilities of the state will only entrench oppression, even if in the name of equality and social justice. Second, collective anarchists and some Marxists have very different conceptions of the transition from capitalism to communism. Marxists believe a revolution will bring a proletariat state, which will then ‘wither away’ as capitalist class conflict dimmishes. Anarchists view any form of state power as evil and oppressive in its own right, with its existence being corrupt and corrupting. Genuine anarchist revolution requires the end of capitalism and state power.
Collectivist anarchism is made up of a number ideas. One is mutualism; “a system of fair and equitable exchange, in which individuals or groups bargain with one another, trading goods and services without profiteering or exploitation.” A second is anarcho-syndicalism, which is a form of revolutionary trade unionism, emerging in France in 1914 and spreading to other industrialised countries. Anarcho-syndicalists reject conventional politics as corrupting, instead believe that working-class power should be utilised through direct action, boycotts, sabotage, strikes, and general strikes. They also organise their unions as a model for a decentralised, non-hierarchical society. This results in a high degree of grassroots democracy, with syndicates forming federations. A third, is anarcho-communism, the most radical form, that requires the abolition of the state. This form envisages that an anarchic society would be made up of a collection of self-sufficient communities, each owning wealth in common. Social and economic life is based on sharing, direct democracy and small scale or ‘human-scale’ communities.
Individualist anarchism is based on the liberal idea of the sovereign individual. When individualism is taken to its extreme, the result is individual sovereignty, which is the idea that absolute and unlimited authority resides with each human being. Any constraint on the individual is evil. It is based on: egoism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism.
Heywood states that anarchists reject state power, political power and political parties so have pursued alternative routes to achieving anarchy. One route was revolutionary violence; bombing and assassinations were conducted in the nineteenth century and 1970s. Another route is direct action, which is political action taken outside the constitutional and legal framework, including passive resistance, boycotts, strikes, popular protest. A third route is non-violence or pacifism – the principled rejection of war and all forms of violence as fundamentally evil [5].
Fascism
Heywood identifies the core theme of fascism as being the idea of an organically unified national community, strengthened by the belief in ‘strength through unity’. Individual identity must be absorbed into the community. The ‘new man’ is motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, and is prepared to dedicate his life to the glory of his nation or race, and give complete obedience to a supreme leader.
Fascism is a revolt against the ideas and values that have dominated western political thought from the French Revolution onwards. Values such as rationalism, progress, freedom and equality were replaced by struggle, leadership, power, heroism and war. Fascism has a strong ‘anti-character’, it is” anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalism, anti-communist, etc. Fascism embraces an extreme version of expansionist nationalism or ultranationalism, that views nations as rivals in a struggle for dominance.
Fascism is made up for two distinct traditions. Italian fascism was an extreme form of statism that was based on absolute loyalty towards a ‘totalitarian’ state. German fascism or Nazism, was founded on racial theories, presenting the Aryan people as a ‘master race’ and promoting extreme anti-Semitism [6].
Feminism
For Heywood, feminist ideology is defined by two core beliefs: that women are disadvantaged because of their sex, and that this disadvantage can and should be abolished. The feminist view of the political relationship between the sexes is the dominance of men and subjugation of women in societies. By viewing gender divisions as ‘political,’ feminists challenge generations of male thinkers that have been unwilling to examine the privileges and power held by men that have kept the role of women off the political agenda.
The feminist movement has had a diversity of views and political positions. These range from achieving female suffrage, increase in the number of women in elite positions in public life, legalisation of abortion, and the ending of female circumcision.
Heywood describes how feminists have used reformist and revolutionary political strategies. Liberal feminism is essentially reformist; it aims to open up public life to equal competition between men and women, instead of challenge what most feminists view as the patriarchal structure of society.
Socialist feminists argue that the political and legal disadvantages that women face cannot be resolved by equal legal rights or equal opportunities as liberal feminists believe. In their view, the relationship between the sexes is a core part of the social and economic structure, therefore significant social change or social revolution is needed for genuine emancipation.
Radical feminists belief that sexual oppression is the most fundamental feature of society and that other forms of injustice, such as class exploitation or racism, are less important. Gender is seen as the most important social issue. Radical feminists see society as ‘patriarchal’, which is the systematic, institutionalized and all-encompassing process of gender oppression.
Heywood describes some forms of feminism that have emerged since the 1960s: psychoanalytical feminism, postmodern feminism, black feminism, transfeminism [7].
Endnotes
[1] Political Ideologies : An Introduction by Andrew Heywood, 4th edition, 2007, page 23-62
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
David Kaimowitz describes his career as a “a 30-year quest to understand what causes deforestation,” one that has brought him full circle to where he started: at the issue of land rights.
Kaimowitz, who heads the Forest and Farm Facility, based at FAO, says the evidence shows that secure communal tenure rights is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb deforestation.
In that time, he’s also seen the discourse around the drivers of deforestation change from blaming smallholders, to realizing that a handful of large commodities companies are responsible for the majority of tropical forest loss.
In an interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler, Kaimowitz talks about why it took so long for Indigenous people to be recognized as guardians of the forest, the need for conservation NGOs to address social justice, and society’s capacity to effect meaningful change.
Over the past 20 years, the conservation sector has increasingly recognized the contributions Indigenous communities have made toward achieving conservation goals, including protecting biodiversity and maintaining ecosystems that sustain us. Accordingly, some large conservation NGOs that a generation ago were heavily focused on establishing and fortifying protected areas are today advocating for Indigenous rights and helping communities secure land tenure.
As a researcher who has worked at the intersection of forests, agriculture and local communities for more than 30 years now, David Kaimowitz has been well-positioned to observe the recent evolution of the conservation sector’s relationship with such communities.
“Indigenous Peoples and local communities have increasingly been recast as heroes, rather than villains,” said Kaimowitz, who currently serves as the manager of the Forest and Farm Facility, a partnership between the the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the IUCN, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and the AgriCord Alliance. He attributes this shift to three factors: changing realities on the ground, a growing body of evidence, and better messaging.
“As more and more forest not managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities disappears, the conservation community has realized that increasingly these are the only forests left; at least, the only intact forests with large undisturbed areas,” Kaimowitz told Mongabay. “A growing [amount of] literature showed that, given a favorable policy environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities often manage common property forests and other natural resources sustainably.
“The Indigenous Peoples and forest community groups themselves have become more effective at getting their messages across and making their voices heard. They have become powerful political forces in many countries and on the global stage, and conservation groups have had to listen.”
But while conservation is changing, it hasn’t yet been transformed: Indigenous peoples and local communities still face marginalization, lack of meaningful engagement, and underrepresentation, especially in conservation decision-making an leadership roles. Kaimowitz says conservation organizations need to become more inclusive.
“The more these organizations reflect the true diversity of the broader societies, the better they will be able to do that,” he said.
“Conservation has two strong long-standing strains. One harks back to nobles and moguls, who wanted to stop villagers from poaching big animals they hunted for trophies. The other finds its voice among those who depend on (and often nurture) nature to survive. The question is who will speak for conservation? The sheriff of Nottingham, protecting his majesty’s fowl and game, or Robin Hood, with his merry men (and women), living in the forest. That same unresolved tensions persist today; and will determine the movements’ future.”
In parts of the world, those tensions have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led some international conservation groups to pull out of projects, triggered a collapse in ecotourism, disrupted access to markets and the flow of remittances, and led some city dwellers to return to the countryside to farm. In some places, those developments have pushed local communities to take up subsistence farming and hunting in protected areas or become poachers, putting them in conflict with conservationists.
Colombia. Photo credit: Rhett A. Butler
The pandemic, says Kaimowitz, has been devastating to local communities, causing “profound pain” and loss of traditional knowledge with the death of elders. But COVID-19 has also shown us that governments are capable of taking dramatic action when facing a crisis.
“If the pandemic proves anything, it is that political and economic elites can take extraordinary measures to stave off disaster if they decide to do so,” he said. “Many things that ‘could not be done’ suddenly were. Central banks and ministries of finance pulled out their checkbooks and spent money they supposedly did not have. Both governments and the broader society stepped up to the plate. It has not been smooth or easy, but the world has largely pulled back from the abyss.
“Something similar will have to happen to avert catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss; and there are signs that elites are getting the message.”
Kaimowitz spoke about these issues and more during an April 2021 conversation with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.
Mongabay: What sparked your interest in land rights and land use change?
David Kaimowitz: My whole life has revolved around an intertwined concern for social justice and the environment.
The land rights interest comes from undergraduate courses I took highlighting the huge inequalities in Latin American landholdings. It became clear that, in places where natural resources represent a large share of economic wealth, who owns and manages them influences every aspect of society.
We studied agrarian reforms in class, but I never imagined that one day I would be involved in one myself. Then, by pure coincidence, I entered a doctoral program in Wisconsin, just after the Nicaraguans overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The university had just gotten funding for a project with Nicaragua’s Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA), and I became a research assistant. When Somoza fell, the Sandinistas took over many large farms and prominent experts flocked to the country to debate what to do with them. As a budding professional, it was an amazing opportunity to witness history being made.
Soon after, MIDINRA hired me directly, and we were asked to do oral histories of village elders in the northern Segovias region. The elders talked about major changes in how they farmed during their lifetime and the rapid loss of forest cover and soil fertility. That brought home how much daily life and the environment could change in a single lifetime.
Even so, I did not focus on land use change until the 1990s, when the United Nations held the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and “sustainable development” became the buzzword. I had read about how government subsidies and burgeoning export markets for beef triggered mass forest clearing for pastures in Central America. But by 1994 the situation had changed, and the region’s livestock sector was in crisis. That made me wonder if high beef prices and subsidized credit bolstered deforestation, would low prices and no credit bring the forest back? (It turned out, not much; but that is a story for another day.)
This initial puzzle led to a 30-year quest to understand what causes deforestation. Ironically, that has now brought me back full circle, to land rights. Because the evidence shows that secure communal tenure rights is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb deforestation and people won’t restore forests unless they have rights to trees.
Mongabay: What is your current focus at the FAO?
David Kaimowitz: The realization that Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ land and forest rights were so important for protecting forests led me to champion the need for greater funding to that end. It turns out that such rights and community resource management are key for addressing many major global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, social conflict, and rural poverty, as well as forest loss per se.
So, I left my job in forest research (at CIFOR) and moved to the Ford Foundation to fund this work. Much of my work centered on supporting Indigenous Peoples and community groups and convincing international agencies to do the same. Many colleagues at those agencies found the arguments compelling but did not know how they could fund that work. Some great new initiatives emerged, like the International Forest and Land Tenure Facility, Indigenous and community-managed territorial funds in Brazil, the Nia Tero Fund [Mongabay Interview with Nia Tero’s Peter Seligmann], and the World Bank’s Direct Grant Mechanism, but they were all tiny compared to the need.
Rainforest creek in the Colombian Amazon. Photo by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
So, I became manager of the Forest and Farm Facility so I could champion that cause. The Forest and Farm Facility is a partnership between the FAO, IUCN, IIED, and AgriCord, which supports forest and farm organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which has been doing great work since 2013. I saw an opportunity to build on that and demonstrate that international agencies can support rural grassroots organizations effectively and achieve results at scale.
The FFF focuses on improving rural livelihoods and resilience and promoting more climate and biodiversity friendly landscapes. We provide funding and technical support and advocate for local, national, regional, and global farmer, community forestry, and Indigenous Peoples organizations. We also help organizations strengthen their advocacy, community enterprises, and operations, with special attention to women’s rights and youth inclusion, and facilitate links between these rural membership organizations with other internationally funded programs and with private investors and buyers.
Mongabay: How are the drivers of deforestation different today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s?
David Kaimowitz: Not only have the drivers of deforestation changed since then, but people’s thinking has also changed. The discourse of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was that poverty drove deforestation. Environmental policies might be important, but ultimately the trick was to lift people out of poverty, so they would not have to overexploit their natural resources. While some talked about large cattle ranchers and logging companies, blame for deforestation was squarely on small-scale shifting cultivation.
Deforestation in Kapuas Hulu, Indonesian Borneo. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
That discourse probably overplayed the role of poverty and poor people in forest clearing even back then. Moving to forested regions, logging or clearing large forests and replacing them with crops or livestock requires more capital and labor than poor people usually have. It is true that clearing many small patches of forest can affect large areas — and we definitely see that in some regions — but that has always been responsible for a smaller portion of total tropical forest loss than many people thought.
In any case, since the 1990s large companies and landholders have played a more dominant role in global deforestation, both empirically and in the discourse. An increasing portion of deforestation has been linked to a small number of commodities — beef, palm oil, soy, and pulp and paper — where only a few hundred large companies dominate global value chains. The trend has been toward clearing larger areas (although this has varied over time and by region).
Soy field and forest at the transition zone of the Cerrado, Chaco and Amazon biomes. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Mining, of various scales, and production of illicit crops and related money laundering have become much more prominent causes of deforestation. In contrast, commercial timber production has lost prominence in the discussion, in part because timber resources have largely been exhausted in many regions, especially in the dipterocarp and teak forests of Southeast Asia.
Small-scale shifting cultivation, logging, and charcoal and fuelwood collection have increasingly disappeared from the global agenda and have lost importance in many regions. The main exception has been Sub-Saharan Africa, where small farms and common property resources remain dominant and burgeoning urban markets for forest products sometimes fuel overexploitation.
Mongabay: You’ve been working at the intersection of forests, agriculture and local communities for more than 30 years now. In that time, what have been the biggest changes in this space?
David Kaimowitz: As I began to discuss earlier, both the drivers of forest loss and the narratives about them have changed. To some extent the narrative change reflected empirical trends, but it is more complex than that.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities have increasingly been recast as heroes, rather than villains. Studies from different regions of the world called into question alarmist reports about the fuelwood crisis, devastating effects of shifting cultivation, and the extent of small farmer deforestation more generally. The motives behind these discourses were also questioned and cataloged as neocolonial attempts to justify stripping poor families of their resources, as often occurred in colonial days.
Indigenous man holding Tinamou eggs.
A growing literature showed that, given a favorable policy environment, Indigenous Peoples and local communities often manage common property forests and other natural resources sustainably. Elinor Ostrom became the first woman (and first non-economist) to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for demonstrating that, and it was a clear sign the tide had changed.
I recently wrote a report about forests in Indigenous and tribal territories in Latin America, published by FAO and FILAC, that cites dozens of relatively new studies that show that these territories’ inhabitants have generally managed their forests better than other groups. The most surprising thing about the peoples’ reaction to that conclusion was that no one was surprised. In a few decades, claiming that Indigenous Peoples were “guardians of the forests” went from being heresy to an established fact.
That is not to say that small farmers, or Indigenous Peoples for that matter, never destroy forests, or that it is not a problem when they do. Poor rural households clearly overexploit forest resources in some places, and the issue must be addressed. However, most experts now hold large-scale actors responsible for a majority of global tropical forest destruction and think it is better to work with communities to reduce smallholder overexploitation of forest resources, rather than repressing them.
Mongabay: Over the past decade, there seems to be much greater awareness in the conservation sector about the contributions Indigenous peoples and local communities have made toward achieving conservation outcomes. What has driven this shift?
David Kaimowitz: Part has to do with changing realities on the ground. As more and more forest not managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities disappears, the conservation community has realized that increasingly these are the only forests left; at least, the only intact forests with large undisturbed areas.
Part also has to do with the avalanche of rigorous research highlighting those contributions. When I did my meta-analysis of research on forests in Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories in Latin America for the FAO-FILAC report, the sheer volume of high-quality recent research that all pointed in the same direction amazed me. These territories’ forests have been better preserved, even when accounting for things such as distance from roads and soil fertility. When the territories have formal rights and additional support, their forests are doing better still.
Finally, the Indigenous Peoples and forest community groups themselves have become more effective at getting their messages across and making their voices heard. They have become powerful political forces in many countries and on the global stage, and conservation groups have had to listen.
Mongabay: We’ve heard a lot more about stakeholder inclusivity in recent years, especially in the context of the past year between the social justice movement in the U.S. and criticisms of colonial practices among some big NGOs. Is this being translated at the levels of decision-making within the institutions that fund and implement conservation projects?
David Kaimowitz: The big conservation NGOs are large bureaucracies with strong institutional cultures, dominated by upper-middle-class whites, like me. In any such bureaucracy, transformative change rarely happens overnight. I do think, though, that the dramatic upswing of the racial justice movement in the United States and elsewhere, and the growing environmental justice movements have shaken them to their core. They have been forced to come to grips with sordid elements in their past, recognize implicit bias against people of color, and focus more on how environmental problems affect poor people and people of color disproportionately.
How far this will get is hard to say. Many previous efforts to get these organizations to address social and racial justice concerns petered out over time. But I am cautiously optimistic that this time will be different, and we will see real change. Many funders that support these organizations expect that.
Mongabay: What do you see as major gaps that still persist in the conservation sector?
David Kaimowitz: Most immediately, there are staffing issues, bringing in more people of color and from low-income households. But more broadly the question is, will they embrace an approach that is not so elite? Can they speak to regular peoples’ daily lives in ways that they can understand and respect those peoples’ lived experience and traditional knowledge, be they rural or urban? The more these organizations reflect the true diversity of the broader societies, the better they will be able to do that.
Clouds reflected in a blackwater oxbow lake in the Peruvian Amazon.
Conservation has two strong long-standing strains. One harks back to nobles and moguls, who wanted to stop villagers from poaching big animals they hunted for trophies. The other finds its voice among those who depend on (and often nurture) nature to survive. The question is who will speak for conservation? The sheriff of Nottingham, protecting his majesty’s fowl and game, or Robin Hood, with his merry men (and women), living in the forest. That same unresolved tensions persist today; and will determine the movement’s future.
Mongabay: You spent some time in the philanthropic sector. What was your most impactful grant during that time? And why? Or if not a single grant, what type of grant was the most impactful?
David Kaimowitz: The greatest impact came from communications grants, which allowed Indigenous and community leaders to be heard for the first time. Most media coverage about tropical forests cites government officials, companies, NGOs, and scientists from the Global North. Everyone except those who live in and from forests and often protect them most. When politicians plant a tree, it is a big photo op. Farmers plant millions of them all the time, and no one seems to notice.
We funded communications firms, filmmakers, social media wizards, innovative digital media groups like Mongabay, and worked with musicians and actors to help grassroots leaders and villagers give their own account, in their own words. Not to be used as props by some NGO or project, but to tell their own story. What they were proud of, worried them, or needed to change.
Arhauco indigenous leader in a former coca-producing area of Colombia.
It was incredibly powerful, authentic, like reality TV. These were people who walked the walk, and often risked their lives; and made the world greener and cooler in the process. These were the real Guardians of the Forests; and their message resonated well beyond Wall Street and ivory towers.
Minutes ago, I watched an advertisement from the Guatemalan government showcasing the community forest concessions in the Peten. That would have been almost unimaginable a few short years ago. These communities that manage the concessions have gone toe to toe to keep some of Central America’s most powerful groups from wresting control over their forests. But once the wider audiences heard their stories, they won the PR battle. Now even the president wants them in the photo.
Something similar happened with the murder of local environmentalists and land rights defenders, many of them Indigenous. This is a long-standing problem, although the situation may be getting worse. But the communications groups were able to shine a light on it, and help people realize that these were not just local disputes over land or water, the outcomes affect us all. Indigenous martyrs like Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Edwin Chota in Peru, Isidro Baldenegro in Mexico, Charlie Taylor in Nicaragua, or Paulo Paulino Guajajara in Brazil died in the defense of Mother Earth, and we all have a stake in that.
At first Global Witness was the only high-profile NGO to raise the issue. But as it got more attention, all the big international human rights groups got on board. The problem is by no means solved, but the intellectual authors of these attacks can no longer be so confident that they can act with total impunity.
Mongabay: COVID-19 has obviously had an enormous impact around the world. What have you heard from the partners and allies you have in the field?
David Kaimowitz: The first thing, of course, is the profound pain. So many leaders and elders lost. People we knew or hoped to meet. Stories, wisdom, languages gone. Sickness, hunger, markets lost. And too many governments shamelessly indifferent.
But also, amazing resilience. One Forest and Farm Facility partner, AgriCord, surveyed grassroots forest and farm organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and found that practically all had stepped up and were responding to the pandemic. They were providing masks and information, planting gardens, finding new markets, pressing governments for support, and caring for those in need. They didn’t sit back and wait for aid. They acted.
A U.N. study about the pandemic and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America found the same thing. Indigenous organizations took the initiative and monitored the virus’s spread, regulated entrance into communities, and supplied Western and traditional medicine, with women often in the lead.
Mongabay: And what do you expect the impacts of the pandemic to be on deforestation in the near term?
David Kaimowitz: It is hard to say. At first, I thought the global economy would practically collapse, and deforestation would decline as a result. Last March and April there were many signs of that. But then the world’s central banks stepped in with huge stimulus plans, which turned things around. Now the global economy is starting to boom and that could easily increase the pressure on forests.
The pandemic has also affected politics, not just economics. For example, one could argue that Trump would still be president in the United States if it were not for the pandemic, and that might have affected what happened to forests. We may see similar stories play out elsewhere, but it is too early to say who stands to benefit.
Mongabay: And what do you see the longer-term impact of COVID-19 being on the relationship between society, especially Western society, and the world around us?
David Kaimowitz: The pandemic made us all feel more vulnerable and realize how fragile and tenuous our societies are. Now when we hear discussions about the devastating effects of climate change, they seem less abstract and distant. COVID-19 was a wake-up call, a reminder that we are still linked to the natural world, and of the many links between forests and health. But it is still unclear how many heard that wake-up call or how long they will stay awake.
Short term, most people are probably desperate to go back to how things were. To go out, socialize, and travel. That will tend to pull us back toward the status quo. But there does seem to be greater awareness of the Anthropocene; that the ecosystems we depend on are severely strained and the limits are not far away. As people experience that in daily life, that awareness will probably grow.
So will the backlash. Denialism, Western fundamentalism. The parallel universe on Facebook and Youtube. Many people are scared and feel threatened, and that rarely leads anywhere good.
Mongabay: You’ve done a lot of research in Latin America. While there are exceptions, taken as a whole, the region is experiencing rising authoritarianism, tropical deforestation, and violence against defenders. Why is this and what’s your medium and long-term outlook for the region in terms of these issues?
David Kaimowitz: Latin America faces difficult dilemmas. The population is increasingly urban, but the economies depend heavily on rural agriculture, oil, and mining. The predominant economic and political model of the last decade was to increase government revenues from extractive activities and use them for clientelist programs that earned political support. But this model has largely run its course; and the environmental costs piled up. Nor can countries simply expect to live off remittances from migrants abroad. Most countries failed to invest enough in education, research, innovation, and technology, so they could transition to less extractive economies, based on more skilled labor. On top of this, the pandemic has left the region much more indebted, and no one knows how it can pay its bills.
All of this has tended to undermine the existing political systems, opening paths for authoritarians. Organized crime has become an erosive force, filling in spaces where governments are fragile, and weakening them even more. Meanwhile, many predominantly white middle-class civil society groups run by professionals concerned with conservation, human rights, feminism, and other important issues failed to connect with the broader public, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
There are no simple solutions or magic bullets, but my vision of a potential route forward includes some of the following: Economic models that depend more on small-scale and communal enterprises that can innovate and produce value added. Less funds for buying votes and more for investing in people and landscapes. A renaissance of local democracy, real recognition of the plurinational and multiracial character of most Latin American societies, and more political space for women and youth.
It will not be simple and may not happen. But the region needs to find a way forward, because it cannot go back to where it was.
Mongabay: What are the levers that need to be pulled to drive systemic change toward averting catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss?
David Kaimowitz: If the pandemic proves anything, it is that political and economic elites can take extraordinary measures to stave off disaster if they decide to do so. Many things that “could not be done” suddenly were. Central banks and ministries of finance pulled out their checkbooks and spent money they supposedly did not have. Both governments and the broader society stepped up to the plate. It has not been smooth or easy, but the world has largely pulled back from the abyss.
Something similar will have to happen to avert catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss; and there are signs that elites are getting the message. We may soon see truly massive investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. It is less clear whether the forest and biodiversity messages are getting across. There is no way to meet global climate goals without more robust forests, but most people don’t realize that, not even many experts.
Sungai Utik rainforest in Indonesian Borneo. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
In any case these efforts will only succeed if they address inequality. One reason climate action is moving forward is it has been linked to jobs. “Green New Deals” are not just partisan political slogans, they are essential to reach wider audiences. Agriculture and land use are big parts of the problem and must be front and center in the solutions; but the policies must speak to — and with — rural and small-town people, in all their diversity. Cleaner air, more urban trees, parks and gardens, public transportation. It is nice to listen to the scientists; but we also have to listen to workers, farmers, nurses and waitresses, people of faith.
Mongabay: What would you say to young people who are distressed about the current trajectory of the planet?
David Kaimowitz: I am truly sorry we let you down. We thought we knew what we were doing and got many things wrong. But it is not too late, and you have many things going for you that we never had. New ways to organize and communicate, more empathetic and accountable women leaders.
No matter how things seem now they may look different later. Many things I used to believe proved wrong and many I thought were permanent proved ephemeral. Some turned out worse than I expected, but others much better. No matter how things look these days, they can and will change. In the meantime, we cannot afford to stop trying to make things better and learn along the way.
Continue to demand the impossible. It is only impossible until it is not. It may be too late to restore much of the natural and cultural riches we lost, but you/we can still save some; and it is definitely worth the effort.
