We are the authors and actors of our own history (original) (raw)
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We make our own history: Marxism and social movements in the twilight of neoliberalism
2014
We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North. From this movement of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. 'We Make Our Own History’ responds to this crisis. The first systematic Marxist analysis of social movements, this book reclaims Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.
Neoliberalism is in a hegemonic crisis. In the political-economic conditions since the global financial crisis of 2008, it has lost much of its ideological capacity for subject mobilisation. This in turn has made its innate coercive, disciplinary and panoptic tendencies more apparent to the popular classes, sparking populist rebellions from both the left and right. Davidson (2016) coined the term “Crisis Neoliberalism” to demarcate this era. I feel that this marks a larger break and prefer the term New Feudalism to emphasise that in the wake of the great transformation global society saw from roughly 1973-2008, we are transitioning out of liberal democratic capitalist order and into a mode of production which is qualitatively new. More on that later. Three global crises: climate change, austerity and militarised, racialized policing are identified as policy pressure points; areas in which the regime is sensitive and vulnerable to activism. Drawing on a comparative sociology approach this thesis explores what have been the consequences of three global, populist, networked social movements in order to understand how their activism has shaped the decline of Neoliberalism in relation to these three global crises, and influenced the emergent potential of a more participatory-democratic system of global governance which I refer to as New Global Democracy. The three social movements case studies are the Climate Justice Movement, the Podemos Movement-Party and the Black Lives Matter Movement. For each of the case studies, a local group in one city was selected based on its role as an important hub in the movement’s global network. The three cities are Melbourne, Barcelona and Oakland, in the above respective order. The thesis involves a qualitative methodology of in-depth interviews with activists, participant observation of protest mobilisations and a subsequent critical content analysis of the social media and mass media coverage of the mobilisations. Although they each face a different set of political opportunity structures, each of the movements has had consequences on society at the level of culture, institutions and policy which this thesis seeks to explore. For example, the Climate Justice Movement, while being the victim of circumstance with the ‘state of emergency’ ban on protests due to terror attacks in Paris in the lead-up to COP21 which severely curtailed the movement’s capacity to exert popular pressure during the summit, has impacted on culture through its development and evolution of South-North activist solidarity discourses and practices from the Global Justice Movement of the previous decade. Meanwhile the Podemos-Movement Party has impacted on Spanish institutions such as the conservative Popular Party and the traditional social democratic PSOE party by branding the duumvirate the ‘corrupt regime of 1978’. Through the election results (becoming the third major party in Spain with 21% of the primary vote), the PMP has thoroughly disrupted the state of affairs which had existed prior, and sent shockwaves across the Eurozone about the potential for new parties aimed at creating a participatory democratic governance in other states affected by austerity and local social movements against it. Finally, the Black Lives Matter Movement has dramatically impacted on culture through shining a relentless spotlight on police brutality, remaining in the mass media and popular culture evident on social media for over three years. In the process it has mainstreamed a previously ‘radical’ emancipatory discourse of Black Liberation, and sparked a policy debate about the need to re-evaluate how society should manage inequality through policy means other than mass incarceration and militarized policing.
On Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism
2015
My intervention this afternoon will attempt to summarize some of the main ideas put forward in We Make Our Own History – a book that it took my good friend and comrade Laurence Cox and myself well over a decade to write. We Make Our own History is intended, above all, to explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, and in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we are calling the twilight of neoliberalism. Or – put slightly differently – I’ll be talking about how we can reclaim Marxism as a theory that can serve activist purposes and knowledge interests in a context where neoliberalism appears to be undergoing a moment of organic crisis.
Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new
This article argues that humanity's prospects in the 21 st century hinge on the creation of a counter-hegemonic historical bloc within which practices and social visions capable of fashioning a post-capitalist economic democracy begin to flourish. The organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism creates openings for such a breakthrough; the deepening ecological crisis renders such a breakthrough an urgent necessity. The analytical challenge pursued here is to discern, in the contemporary conjuncture, elements of practice that might weld the present to an alternative future. How can new movement practices and sensibilities can be pulled into a historical bloc -an ensemble of social relations and human agency for democratic socialism; how might that bloc move on the terrain of civil society, and vis-à-vis states, opening spaces for practices that prefigure a post-capitalist world? These questions are too big for a single paper; the objective here is to show how a Gramscian problematic furnishes us with an analytical and strategic lens that can illuminate practical answers.
Modernity and the Study of Social Movements: Do we Need a Paradigm Shift
The notion of modernity is the dominant frame in histories of the present, both in the West and globally. Across competing intellectual traditions, including world-systems theory, the "social movement" is regarded as a distinctively modern phenomenon, appearing in Europe around the time of the French Revolution, stabilizing as a social form and diffusing with processes of modernization to the rest of the world. In this lineage, social movements are creatures of European modernity and the privileged carriers of modernity's emancipatory traditions.
Waves of protest and revolution: elements of a Marxist analysis
Revolutionaries and scholars alike have noted the recurrence within capitalism of “waves” of large-scale social movement mobilisation and revolutionary situations, including the C18th Atlantic Revolutions, the Latin American wars of independence, the events of 1848 in Europe, the events of 1916-23 in Europe and North America, resistance to fascism in Europe and Asia, anti-colonial uprisings in postwar Asia and Africa, the events of 1968 across the northern hemisphere and the events of 1989 in the Soviet bloc and China. At present the overlap of a global “movement of movements” with the Latin American “pink tide”, the anti-war movement of 2003, anti-austerity and Occupy movements in the global North and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa suggest that another such wave is underway. This paper attempts to understand the broad historical experience in ways that are relevant to the present and enable effective action. It proposes an analysis of such waves as occurring within one or more regions of the capitalist world-system and involving an organic crisis of a particular regime of accumulation – entailing a growing popular capacity for action, the detachment of subaltern elements of the previously hegemonic coalition and a declining elite capacity to either offer significant concessions or to mobilise effective repression. By placing the analysis at this level it avoids the superficial requirement that such waves share a common popular actor or set of demands – what similarities exist in terms of leading popular actors and modes of organisation are to be explained by this broader situation (notably, the difficulties experienced by the existing regime of accumulation in accommodating given needs and social groups). It also makes it clear that a revolutionary outcome is by no means a given, nor is it a requirement for a “real” wave. However the historical experience has often been that even where a given regime was able to recover temporarily in the longer term a new set of hegemonic arrangements, incorporating some movement demands, has been necessary. In relation to the present crisis, with its multiple popular actors, this analysis suggests particular attention to the weaknesses of neoliberalism in securing continued hegemony – and to demands, and popular institutions, which accentuate this. It notes in particular the length of this crisis, which is historically unusual and politically encouraging, as is the narrowness of neoliberal orthodoxy and the difficulties experienced in finding new modes of organisation to incorporate popular pressures. It concludes with some suggestions as to what movements can do in this situation.
ANTI-NEOLIBERAL STRUGGLES IN THE 21 st CENTURY
2014
The dominance of neoliberalism in the past three decades suggests the capacity of capitalism to adapt and restructure itself in periods of crisis and to curb progressive movements that threaten its he- gemony. Yet social movements that challenge neoliberalism continue to emerge, sending hopeful signs of its potential demise by ushering in progressive governments that often appear to fall short of expecta- tions. Building off the growing body of research that utilizes Gramscian theory to categorize neoliberalism as a passive revolution, I examine the concept of anti-passive revolution with empirical data to propose a theory of resistance against neoliberalism. The empirical data comes from two movements against neolib- eralism: the coalition that challenged the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000; and, the movement that challenged the results of the Mexican presidential election in 2006. By examining the tra- jectories of these movements over a timespan of several y...