A Marxist critique of post-Marxists

The space vacated by the reformist left [in Latin America] has in part been occupied by capitalist politicians and ideologues, technocrats and the traditional and fundamentalist churches (Pentecostals and the Vatican). In the past, this space was occupied by socialist, nationalist and populist politicians and church activists associated with the “theology of liberation”. The centre-left was very influential within the political regimes (at the top) or the less politicised popular classes (at the bottom). The vacant space of the radical left refers to the political intellectuals and politicised sectors of the trade unions and urban and rural social movements. It is among these groups that the conflict between Marxism and “post-Marxism” is most intense today.

Nurtured and, in many cases, subsidised by the principal financial institutions and governmental agencies promoting neo-liberalism, a massive number of “social” organisations have emerged whose ideology, linkages and practices are in direct competition and conflict with Marxist theory and practice. These organisations, in most cases describing themselves as “non-governmental” or as “independent research centres”, have been active inpropounding ideologies and political practices that are compatible with and complement the neo-liberal agenda of their financial patrons. This essay will proceed by describing and criticising the components of their ideology and then turn to describe their activities and non-activities, contrasting it with the class-based movements and approaches. This will be followed by a discussion of the origins of “post-Marxism” and its evolution and future in relation to the decline and possible return of Marxism.Components of post-Marxism

The intellectual proponents of post-Marxism in most instances are”ex-Marxists” whose point of departure is a “critique” of Marxism and the elaboration of counterpoints to each basic proposition as the basis for attempting to provide an alternative theory or at least a plausible line of analysis. It is possible to more or less synthesise ten basic arguments that are usually found in the post-Marxist discourse:

1. Socialism was a failure and all “general theories” of societies are condemned to repeat this process. Ideologies are false (except post-Marxism!) because they reflect a world of thought dominated by a single gender/race culture system.
2. The Marxist emphasis on social class is “reductionist” because classes are dissolving; the principle political points of departure are cultural and rooted in diverse identities (race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference).
3. The state is the enemy of democracy and freedom and a corruptand inefficient deliverer of social welfare. In its place, “civil society” is the protagonist of democracy and social improvement.
4. Central planning leads to and is a product of bureaucracy whichhinders the exchange of goods between producers. Markets and market exchanges, perhaps with limited regulations, allow for greater consumption and more efficient distribution.
5. The traditional left’s struggle for state power is corrupting and leads to authoritarian regimes which then subordinate civil society to its control. Local struggles over local issues by local organisations are the only democratic means of change, along with petition/pressure on national and international authorities.
6. Revolutions always end badly or are impossible: social transformations threaten to provoke authoritarian reactions. The alternative is to struggle for and consolidate democratic transitions to safeguard electoral processes.
7. Class solidarity is part of past ideologies, reflecting earlier politics and realities. Classes no longer exist. There are fragmented “locales” where specific groups (identities) and localities engage in self-help and reciprocal relations for “survival” based on cooperation with external supporters. Solidarity is a cross-class phenomena, a humanitarian gesture.
8. Class struggle and confrontation does not produce tangible results; it provokes defeats and fails to solve immediate problems. Government and international cooperation around specific projects does result in increases in production and development.
9. Anti-imperialism is another expression of the past that has outlived its time. In today’s globalised economy, there is no possibility of confronting the economic centres. The world is increasingly interdependent and in this world there is a need for greater international cooperation in transferring capital, technology and know-how from the “rich” to the “poor” countries.
10. Leaders of popular organisations should not be exclusively oriented toward organising the poor and sharing their conditions. Internal mobilisation should be based on external funding. Professionals should design programmes and secure external financing to organise local groups. Without outside aid, local groups and professional careers would collapse.

The post-Marxists thus have an analysis, a critique and a strategy ofdevelopmentin a word, the very general ideology that they supposedlycondemn when discussing Marxism. Moreover, it is an ideology that fails to identify the crises of capitalism (prolonged stagnation and periodic financial panics) and the social contradictions (inequalities and social polarisation) at the national and international level that impinge on the specific local social problems they focus on. For example, the origins of neo-liberalism (the socio-political and economic milieu in which the post-Marxists function) is a product of class conflict. Specific sectors of capital allied with the state and the empire defeated the popular classes and imposed the model. A non-class perspective cannot explain the origins of the social world in which the post-Marxists operate. Moreover, the same problem surfaces in discussion of the origins of the post-Marxiststheir own biography reflects the abrupt and radical shift in power at the national and international levels, in the economic and cultural spheres, limiting the space and resources in which Marxism operated while increasing the opportunities and funds for post-Marxists. Sociological origins of post-Marxism are embedded in the shift in political power away from the working class towards export capital.

Let us shift now from a sociology of knowledge critique of post-Marxist ideology and its generally inconsistent view of general theorising to discuss its specific propositions.

Let us start with its notion of the “failure of socialism” and the “end of ideologies”. What is meant by the “failure of socialism”? The collapse of the ussr and Eastern European Communist regimes? First, that is only a single concept of socialism. Secondly, even here it is not clear what failed—the political system, the socio-economic system? Recent election returns in Russia, Poland, Hungary and many of the ex-Soviet republics suggest that a majority of voters prefer a return of aspects of past social welfare policies and economic practices. If popular opinion in the ex-Communist countries is an indicator of “failure&148;, the results are not definitive.

Secondly, if by the “failure of socialism” the post-Marxists mean the decline in power of the left we must insist on a distinction between “failure” due to internal inadequacies of socialist practices and politico-military defeats by external aggressors. No one would say that Hitler’s destruction of Western European democracies was a “failure of democracy”. Terrorist capitalist regimes and/or US intervention in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan played a major role in the “decline” of the revolutionary left. Military defeats are not failures of the economic system and do not reflect on the effectiveness of socialist experiences. Moreover, when we analyse the internal performances during the period of relatively stable socialist or popular governance, by many social indicators the results are far more favorable than that which came afterwards: popular participation, health, education and equitable growth under Allende compared very favorably to what came afterward with Pinochet. The same indicators under the Sandinistas compared favorably to Chamorro’s regime in Nicaragua. The Arbenz government’s agrarian reform and human rights policies compared favorably to the installed government’s policy of land concentration and 150,000 assassinations.

Today, while it is true that neo-liberals govern and Marxists are out ofpower, there is hardly a country in the Western hemisphere where Marxist- or socialist-influenced mass movements are not leading major demonstrations and challenging neo-liberal policies and regimes. In Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia, successful general strikes; in Mexico, major peasant movements and Indian guerrillas; in Brazil, the landless workers’ movementsall reflect Marxist influence.

Socialism outside of the Communist bloc was an essentially democratic, popular force that secured major support because it represented popularinterests freely decided. The post-Marxists confuse Soviet Communism with grassroots revolutionary democratic socialist movements in Latin America. They confuse military defeats with leftists’ political failures, accepting the neo-liberal amalgamation of the two opposing concepts. Finally, even in the case of Eastern Communism, they fail to see the changing and dynamic nature of communism. The growing popularity of a new socialist synthesis of social ownership, welfare programmes, agrarian reform and council democracy is based on the new socio-political movements.

In this sense, the post-Marxist view of the “end of ideologies” is not only inconsistent with their own ideological pronouncements but with the continuing ideological debate between past and present Marxists and present debates and confrontations with neo-liberalism and its post-Marxist offspring.

The dissolution of classes and the rise of identities

The post-Marxists attack the Marxist notion of class analysis fromvarious perspectives. On the one hand, they claim that it obscures the equal or more significant importance of cultural identities (gender, ethnicity). They accuse class analysts of being “economic reductionists” and failing to explain gender and ethnic differences within classes. They then proceed further to argue that these “differences” define the nature of contemporary politics. The second line of attack on class analysis stems from a view that class is merely an intellectual constructionit is essentially a subjective phenomenon that is culturally determined. Hence, there are no “objective class interests” that divide society since “interests” are purely subjective and each culture defines individual preferences. The third line of attack argues that there have been vast transformations in the economy and society that have obliterated the old class distinctions. In “post-industrial” society, some post-Marxists argue, the source of power is in the new information systems, the new technologies and those who manage and control them. Society, according to this view, is evolving toward a new society in which industrial workers are disappearing in two directions: upward into the “new middle class” of high technology and downward into the marginal “underclass”.

Marxists have never denied the importance of racial, gender and ethnic divisions within classes. What they have emphasised, however, is the wider social system which generates these differences and the need to join class forces to eliminate these inequalities at every point: work, neighborhood, family. What most Marxists object to is the idea that gender and race inequalities can and should be analysed and solved outside of the class framework: that landowner women with servants and wealth have an essential “identity” with the peasant women who are employed at starvation wages; that Indian bureaucrats of neo-liberal governments have a common “identity” with peasant Indians who are displaced from their land by the free market economic policies. For example, Bolivia has an Indian vice-president presiding over the mass arrest of cocoa-growing Indian farmers.

Identity politics in the sense of consciousness of a particular form of oppression by an immediate group can be an appropriate point of departure. This understanding, however, will become an “identity&148; prison (race or gender) isolated from other exploited social groups unless it transcends the immediate points of oppression and confronts the social system in which it is embedded. And that requires a broader class analysis of the structure of social power which presides over and defines the conditions of general and specific inequalities.

The essentialism of identity politics isolates groups into competing groups unable to transcend the politico-economic universe that defines and confines the poor, workers, peasants, employees. Class politics is the terrain within which to confront “identity politics” and to transform the institutions that sustain class and other inequalities.

Classes do not come into being by subjective fiat: they are organised bythe capitalist class to appropriate value. Hence, the notion that class is a subjective notion, dependent on time, place and perception confuses class and class consciousness. While the former has objective status, the latter is conditioned by social and cultural factors. Class consciousness is a social construct which, however, does not make it less “real” and important in history. While the social forms and expressions of class consciousness vary, it is a recurring phenomenon throughout history and most of the world, even as it is overshadowed by other forms of consciousness at different moments (that is, race, gender, national) or combined with them (nationalism and class consciousness).

It is obvious that there are major changes in the class structure, but not in the direction that the post-Marxists point to. The major changes have reinforced class differences and class exploitation, even as the nature and conditions of the exploited and exploiter classes has changed. There are more temporary wage workers today than in the past. There are many more workers employed in unregulated labour markets (the so-called informal sector today) than in the past. The issue of unregulated exploitation does not describe a system that “transcends” past capitalism: it is the return to nineteenth century forms of labour exploitation. What requires new analysis is capitalism after the welfare populist state has been demolished. This means that the complex roles of states and parties which mediated between capital and labour have been replaced by state institutions more clearly and directly linked to the dominant capitalist class. Neo-liberalism is unmediated ruling class state power. Whatever the “multiple determinants” of state and regime behavior in the recent past, today the neo-liberal model of accumulation depends most directly on centralised state control horizontally linked to the international banks to implement debt payments and to export sectors to earn foreign exchange. Its vertical ties to the citizen as subject and the primary link is through a repressive state apparatus and para-statal “NGOs” who defuse social explosions.

The dismantling of the welfare state means that the social structure is more polarised: between low-paid or unemployed public employees in health, education, social security on the one hand and on the other hand, well-paid professionals linked to multinational corporations, NGOs and other externally financed institutions linked to the world market and centres of political power. The struggle today is not only between classes in factories but between the state and uprooted classes in the streets and markets displaced from fixed employment and forced to produce and sell and bear the costs of their social reproduction. Integration into the world market by elite exporters and medium and small compradores (importers of electronic goods, tourist functionaries of multinational hotels and resorts) has its counterpart in the disintegration of the economy of the interior: local industry, small farms with the concomitant displacement of producers to the city and overseas.

The import of luxury goods for the upper middle class is based on the earnings remitted by “exported” labour of the poor. The nexus of exploitation begins in the impoverishment of the interior, the uprooting of the peasants and their immigration to the cities and overseas. The income remitted by “exported labour” provides hard currency to finance imports and neo-liberal infrastructure projects to promote the reign of domestic export and tourist businesses. The chain of exploitation is more circuitous, but it still is located ultimately in the capital-labour relation.

In the age of neo-liberalism, the struggle to recreate the “nation”, the national market, national production and exchange is once again a basic historic demand just as the growth of deregulated employment (informality) requires a powerful public investment and regulatory centre to generate formal employment with livable social conditions. In a word, class analysis needs to be adapted to the rule of unmediated capital in an unregulated labour market with international linkages in which the reformist redistributive politics of the past have been replaced by neo-liberal policies reconcentrating income and power at the top. The homogenisation and downward mobility of vast sectors of workers and peasants formerly in the regulated labour market creates a great objective potential for unified revolutionary action. In a word, there is a common class identity which forms the terrain for organising the struggles of the poor.

In summary, contrary to what the post-Marxists argue, the transformations of capitalism have made class analysis more relevant than ever.

The growth of technology has exacerbated class differences, not abolished them. The workers in micro-chip industries and those industries in which the new chips have been incorporated have not eliminated the working class. Rather, it has shifted the sites of activity and the mode of producing within the continuing process of exploitation. The new class structure insofar as it is visible combines the new technologies to more controlling forms of exploitation. Automation of some sectors increases the tempo of work down the line; television cameras increase worker surveillance while decreasing administrative staff; “quality work circles”, in which workers pressure workers, increase self-exploitation without increases in pay or power. The “technological revolution” is ultimately shaped by the class structure of the neo-liberal counter-revolution. Computers allow for agribusiness to control the costs and volume of pesticides, but it is the low-paid temporary workers who spray and are poisoned. Information networks are linked to putting out work to the sweatshop or household (the informal economy) for production of textiles, shoes and such like.

The key to understanding this process of combined and uneven development of technology and labour is class analysis and within that gender and race.

State and civil society

The post-Marxists paint a one-sided picture of the state. The state is described as a huge inefficient bureaucracy that plundered the public treasury and left the people poor and the economy bankrupt. In the political sphere, the state was the source of authoritarian rule and arbitrary rulings, hindering the exercise of citizenship (democracy) and the free exchange of commodities (”the market”). On the other hand, the post-Marxists argue, “civil society” was the source of freedom, social movements, citizenship. Out of an active civil society would come an equitable and dynamic economy. What is strange about this ideology is its peculiar capacity to overlook 50 years of [Latin American] history. The public sector was of necessity instrumental in stimulating industrialisation in the absence of private investment and because of economic crisis, that is, world crisis of the 1930s and war in the 1940s. Secondly, the growth of literacy and basic public health was largely a public initiative.

In the century and a half of free enterprise, roughly from the eighteenth century to the 1930s, Latin America suffered the seven scourges of the Bible, while the invisible hand of the market looked on: genocide, famine, disease, tyranny, dependency, uprootedness and exploitation.

The public sector grew in response to these problems and deviated from its public functions to the degree that it was privately appropriated by business and political elites. The “inefficiency of the state” is a result of it being directed toward private gaineither in subsidising business interests (through low costs of energy) or providing employment to political followers. The inefficiency of the state is directly related to its subordination to private interests. The state’s comprehensive health and educational programmes have never been adequately replaced by the private economy, the church or the NGOs. Both the private sector and the church-funded private clinics and education cater to a wealthy minority. The NGOs, at best, provide short-term care and education for limited groups in local circumstances dependent on the whims and interests of foreign donors.

As a systematic comparison indicates, the post-Marxists have read the historical record wrong: they have let their anti-statist rhetoric blind them to the positive comparative accomplishments of the public over the private.