We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism

by Laurence Cox, Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Overview

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 network of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. We make our own History responds to these visions by reclaiming Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice.

This book marks a break both with established social movement theory, and with those forms of Marxism which treat the practice of social movement organising as an unproblematic process. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745334813
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	08/20/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Laurence Cox directs the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and co-edits the social movements journal Interface. He is active in a wide range of movements and has published Marxism and Social Movements (2013) and Understanding European Movements (2013).

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen. His research focuses on social movements in the global South. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India (2012) and co-editor of Social Movements in the Global South (2011) and Marxism and Social Movements (2013).

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CHAPTER 1

'The This-Worldliness of their Thought': Social Movements and Theory

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. It is in practice that human beings must prove the truth – i.e. the reality and power, the thisworldliness of their thought.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

In every country the process is different, although the content is the same. And the content is the crisis of the ruling class's hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking, for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of broad masses ... or because huge masses ... have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A 'crisis of authority ' is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state.

These are the words of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1998: 210), writing from behind the walls of Mussolini's prisons. The 'red years' of 1919–20, which saw north and central Italy swept by a wave of strikes, land and factory occupations and councils, had thrown liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy into a systemic crisis, to which fascism had appeared as offering a way out. Such crises – organic in Gramsci's terms – are essentially those moments in modern history when economic growth grinds to a halt, when existing political loyalties wither away, and when dominant groups are confronted with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups – that is, social movements from below – which no longer accept the terms on which they are ruled and therefore strive to develop alternative social orders. Organic crises, in other words, are those moments when subaltern groups develop forms of collective agency that push the limits of what they previously thought it possible to achieve in terms of progressive change.

The present is just such a moment. The spectacular failure of neoliberalism as a global, elite-led project of market-oriented economic reforms is increasingly evident. Launched in the late 1970s as a response from above to the stagnation of post-war models of state-regulated capitalist development and to the movement wave of 1968 (Lash and Urry 1987, Wainwright 1994), the neoliberal project has produced an economic system that systematically privileges the needs and interests of an ever-narrowing segment of the global population. This was already evident long before the onset of the financial crisis of 2008.

Between 1960 and 1997, for example, the ratio between the share of income received by the richest 20 per cent of the world's countries to that received by the poorest 20 per cent increased from 30:1 to 74:1; the richest 20 per cent of humanity received more than 85 per cent of the world's wealth, while the remaining 80 per cent had to make do with less than 15 per cent of the world's wealth (UNDP 1999, 2000). The trend towards spiralling inequality has accelerated during the crisis: in 2013, 1 per cent of the world's families own 46 per cent of the world's wealth, while the bottom half of the global population owns less than the world's 85 richest people (Oxfam 2014, UNDP 2014). Behind these figures lie the poverty, unemployment and dispossession that result from how neoliberalism has concentrated wealth and resources towards global elites across the North-South axis over a 30-year period (Harvey 2005, McNally 2011). Importantly, the rewards offered to the northern service class and petty bourgeoisie in the early years of Thatcherism and Reaganism have dwindled away to the point where the 'death of the middle class' is regularly announced (see OECD 2008, 2011; West and Nelson 2013, Peck 2011). In other words, the key allies of the neoliberal project in its northern heartlands are being systematically disaffected.

Conversely, since the mid-1990s, we have seen the development of large-scale social movements from below across most regions of the world-system (Polet and CETRI 2003, Juris 2008, Zibechi 2010, Manji and Ekine 2011). While this development has unfolded according to specific rhythms and assumed specific forms in different countries and regions, it is increasingly clear that these protests, campaigns, movements and – in some cases – revolutionary situations, or even perhaps new state forms, are not isolated occurrences, but rather a historical wave within which we can see an emerging if complex 'movement of movements'. Indeed, the past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented degree of transnational coordination and alliance building between movements in different locales across the world, as well as the articulation of direct challenges to the global structures of economic and political power that have been entrenched in and through the neoliberal project (de Sousa Santos 2006, McNally 2013, Wood 2012).

In this book, we suggest that the current crisis can be thought of as the twilight of neoliberalism. Dramatic movements in Latin America and the Arab world have shown the limits of US geopolitical control of these once-crucial regions, while what once seemed an all-powerful New World Order has run into the sands of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. European anti-austerity struggles have pushed the EU to the limits of governability, while North American movements have started to rebuild the alliances broken apart by post-9/11 nationalism and repression. Indian and Chinese capitalism are both facing large-scale resistance in rural areas, India's 'special economic zones' and Chinese factories. The ability of neoliberal institutions to weather financial crisis, continue delivering the goods for their core supporters, maintain internal and international alliances and (literally) turn back the tide is increasingly feeble. In the absence of any capacity to develop alternative strategies, neoliberal actors are increasingly adopting a siege mentality, marked by a narrowing of public debate, the tightening of the screws of austerity and a quicker resort to repression. Indeed, 'neoliberalism' itself has become a dirty word in public, and its representatives now have to meet in remote locations protected by alpine mountains or deserts in order to be safe from their own publics.

But it is not enough, we argue, to critique the nature of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005), celebrate the existence and practices of the movement (Maeckelbergh 2009), or proclaim a refusal to engage in traditional statist politics (Holloway 2002). Movement participants have already done their own thinking – on which much sympathetic academic writing relies, in a hall-of-mirrors relationship. It is certainly useful to movements to find books which articulate their current points of view well; it does not, however, help them think forwards, or more exactly, it does not take them beyond the belief that if only we keep on doing what we are doing, as we are doing it, hopefully with more participants and more adherence to our specific approach, we will win. As activists, we need something more from theory or research; we hope for the ability to think beyond our current understanding and identify perspectives that help us develop our practice, form alliances and learn from other people's struggles. Not all activists, of course, see things this way.

Why Do Activists Need Theory?

We start from the existential situation of activists as we understand and have experienced it. In this perspective, the process of becoming an activist is primarily a process of learning, which we describe in individual terms, though of course often this learning is that of a subaltern group, movement, or organisation (Vester 1975, Flett 2006, Raschke 1993). Initially, we become 'activists' because we find that something is not right in the world, and more specifically that it cannot be fixed within the normal channels. To become an activist, then, is to learn that the system does not work as it claims, and to move towards the understanding that to achieve change, we need to organise and create pressure.

For some, though not all, activists, this learning process continues, as we find that the system2 is itself part of the problem, and that its resistance to our struggles for change is not accidental or contingent but, at some level, fundamental to its nature. Thus we come to connect our own issues with those of others, and to create solidarity in opposition to given power structures. This experience – of finding that we have to face off against a system, and that that system is both powerful and fundamentally opposed to us – raises some very large questions. The first, and most obvious, theoretical question that arises from this existential situation is simply 'What should we do?' (Barker and Cox 2002). Secondly, as we come to understand the agency of the various parts of the system, we ask 'How will the system react?' Thirdly, we have to ask ourselves, as struggle deepens and success does not seem easily within our grasp, 'What will work and how can we win?'

Laurence remembers very clearly the moment of realising that he had to think further than he had ever done before. It was early 1991, and the second Gulf War3 was just about to start. As an activist researcher, he was spending the year in Hamburg, partly working with a local branch of the Green Party (going through its own convulsions), but becoming increasingly involved in a peace camp outside the US embassy in sub-zero temperatures. In Germany, as in several other countries, a massive movement had opposed the war, and the key arguments had apparently been won. Yet not only was the war going ahead, but opinion polls were suddenly swinging around in favour of it. Something was happening that was not caused by surface events; despite winning the public debates and on the streets, the movement was encountering hidden structures, and deeper resistances than could be explained by any conspiracy theory.

Focusing as it does on the structural nature of social problems and political issues, Marxism constitutes a particularly relevant resource when we seek answers to questions like these. This flows from the fact that Marxism is one among several bodies of theory that strive to go beyond everyday 'common sense' and ideological justifications of why things are as they are, by drawing on the knowledge built up by activists in movements grounded in communities in struggle. Such theories – movement theorising – are shaped very differently to the understandings of the world generated within the official institutions of 'intellectual production', such as universities, newspapers, government departments, or churches. They are grounded in the experience and activism of subaltern groups – working-class people, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples and others – who do not hold power, own the 'means of intellectual production', or benefit from high cultural status. Most fundamentally, the key goal of theories coming from such movements is not to reaffirm a given power structure but to change such structures, and their key resource is what activists have learned in their own lives and struggles, and from other movements, about how to do so (Eyerman and Jamison 1991, Conway 2005, Cox and Flesher Fominaya 2009, Choudry and Kapoor 2010, Hall et al. 2012, Cox 2014a).

This book is unashamedly based on this kind of activist theorising, whether it comes to us through our own lives and those of our friends and comrades, or through other writers who have attempted to articulate it. While we focus primarily on the example of Marxism, this is more because of our own familiarity with this body of thought than because we want to claim it as the only such kind of theorising. Our concern is not to produce yet another defence of one activist theory against others. Rather, it is to show how we can reclaim activist knowledge – 'frozen' in the very specific form of Marxism – for our own movements and problems, and to encourage others to do the same with other forms of activist knowledge. The theoretical discourse of Marxism, in other words, has to show its 'this-worldliness' in practice, by offering something helpful to activists in terms of telling us what to do, what to expect, and how to win. What we have found, and what we want to discuss, then, is not a set of pre-packaged answers but rather a way of thinking about these issues.

Notoriously, classical Marxism offers relatively little in the way of explicit political prescriptions. Marx and Engels's own political practice and writings are 'multi-vocal' and have been interpreted and developed in many different ways through the Second (social-democratic), Third (orthodox communist) and Fourth Internationals (Mills 1962, Thompson 1997), to say nothing of the various council-communist, humanist, autonomist and non-dogmatic Marxisms which we find ourselves in closer alignment with politically (Gottlieb 1989, Jay 1984). What we are interested in here, however, is not so much the specific 'lines' developed in these traditions as a particular understanding of what politics is, and hence of the social situation we find ourselves in as activists.

We have developed this understanding (Cox 1999a, Nilsen 2007, 2009a) around the proposition that Marxism is, at its core, a theory of organised human practice, and thus an alternative theory of social movements, very different in its shape from the academic school of that name. In this chapter, we explore an outline of that understanding, to see what it can have to offer other activists, whether Marxists or not. Our hope is that others will be inspired to do something similar with whichever forms of frozen activist knowledge they are most familiar with: to break them free of the academy and its tendency to reward theoretical competition, and return them where they started, in the struggles of ordinary people not only to make sense of their world, but to change it.

Nothing is more urgent, within this kind of intellectual production, than to free activists from disempowering versions of 'theory' that tell them how impossible change is and how futile or impossible all activism is, and to 'reclaim, recycle and reuse' for our own purposes the precious learning of earlier generations of struggle. In our own exploration of Marxism, we start where activists start in our own learning processes: with human beings' experience of the world and ourselves, our understanding of this experience, and the ways in which we develop this understanding.

An Active Concept of Experience

What is experience anyway? As a point of departure, it is important to see experience as active rather than passive: experience is not just what happens to people, but also what people do with, and about, the things that happen to them (Thompson 1963). In this perspective, experience is the practical and tacit knowledge that we as human beings generate about the material (social and non-human) world, through our encounters with and interaction with this material world. In other words, experience is what we know about how we can meet our needs – of whatever kind – in the specific world that we inhabit. This practical-tacit knowledge is thus 'an attribute of individuals by reason of their social character, their participation, active or passive, in relations with others within inherited structures' (Wainwright 1994: 107). It is also, as William Blake knew, an attribute of our experience of ourselves as beings with needs and as agents engaging in struggles (Thompson 1998).

As Chapter 3 argues, experience is also the seedbed from which consciousness grows. Experience informs our consciousness of the world 'out there' and our place in it, and on the basis of this we choose to act – or not to act – in certain ways: '... human consciousness [is] produced by creative human beings trying to understand their existence so that they can purposefully choose how to better organise their efforts to fulfil their potentials' (Cole 1999: 250). This is central to what Marxist theory calls a materialist understanding of human consciousness: consciousness is fundamentally oriented towards real-world practical problems, not in the sense that all thought is explicitly concerned with practicalities, but that it is the problems that we encounter in our own lives which push us to think, and which push us to change how we think when our current way of thinking is not working for us (see Marx and Engels 1974).

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "We Make Our Own History"
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Copyright © 2014 Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents

Preface: About This Book
1: ‘The This-Worldliness of their Thought’: Social Movements and Theory
2: ‘History Does Nothing’: The Primacy of Praxis in Movement Theorising
3: ‘The Authors and the Actors of their Own Drama’: A Marxist Theory of Social Movements
4: ‘The Bourgeoisie, Historically, Has Played a Most Revolutionary Part’: Social Movements from Above and Below in Historical Capitalism
5. ‘The point is to change it’: movements from below against neoliberalism
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

'Readers will be vastly rewarded by this outstanding book and its understanding of the class struggles of social movements' - Adam David Morton, University of Sydney, Australia

'The authors refresh historical materialism and social movement theory in this imaginative, lucid book' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag

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