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Notes
“Many thinkers are of the view that the left should focus on building a model of post-liberal capitalism. This … assumes that being on the left is to be post-liberal that to be on the left is to slog away for an organized, human, productive capitalism. This idea has undermined the left for several years now because being left means fighting capitalism. To me, this is ABC. To be socialist is to fight for a communist world. At each stage that horizon changes and the strategic parameters are renewed.” Italics added.
If we are to take Russell Brand’s quarrel with Jeremy Paxman as a case in point [BBC News 23/10/13. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk].
“As paradoxical as it may seem, at the very moment when the prospects for a revival of radical politics appear especially bleak,” remark Manza and McCarthy (2011) with scarcely disguised glee, “Developing blueprints for new kinds of utopian ideas for socialist transition have been a remarkably brisk undertaking in recent years, strangely enough often emanating from North America where real socialism (or social democracy) is furthest from the political agenda.” [In view of the fact that a social democratic party was actually the official opposition in Canada at the time they were writing, perhaps we should conclude that, unsurprisingly for these two members of NYU’s sociology department, “North America” means the U.S.].
Referring to it as “ultra-imperialism” Kautsky (along with Hilferding) took the view that under conditions of large capitalist cartels it would be in the interests of capital in general to reduce unevenness. Lenin, by contrast, argued that the interests of specific capitals would always prevail over “capital in general” and unevenness would result. “Kautsky’s utterly meaningless talk about ultra-imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of apologists of imperialism, viz. that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.” (Lenin 1960: 35) (see inter alia: Holloway 1983; Davidson 2012a) It was in part Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s optimism about late capitalism’s natural forms that inclined them towards the social democratic alternative practiced in “Red Vienna” from 1918 to 1934, whence Kautsky repaired in 1924 until his death in 1938. This early belief that capitalism had at least some “social” tendencies that made efforts to reform it preferable to social revolution was the basis for its later liberal versions. See footnote 10.
Neil Smith astutely pointed out that for Trotsky unevenness was “a political concept which referred to the uneven development of class struggle” (ibid: 5. Itals added) But this of course leads us a long way from uneven temporal and spatial relations understood as entirely the result of the capitalist economy.
…. albeit revolution in his view taking varying forms and complex class formations in its “permanent” version.
Revolutionary times being characterized by their aspirational sentiments rather than their political outcomes is to be found too in Grandin and Joseph’s (2010) A century of revolutions.
See for example Harootunian’s (2015) use of Marx’s “formal subsumption.”
Lefebvre was uneasy with narrow uses of the terms “production” and “work.” He preferred a broader usage to include the production of social relations and “in the fullest sense of the term, reproduction.” (Quoted in Ronneberger 2009: 91). So against the ideal of integration conjured by the worker-citizen should more properly be posed the appropriator-resistant who actively appropriates their world rather than being alienated from it. (see ibid).
As a result of the complexity of the relationship between revolutionary socialism in Russia and social democracy in Germany and Austria following the revolution, the latter term covers a wide spectrum of meanings. In this essay, I refer to its liberal socialist inclinations following the migration of the German SPD in the wake of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and then the Cold War version after 1945. The “angst” however did not become acute until social democratic parties embraced neoliberal programmes in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
And some of which possibly don’t have very clearly articulated goals at all.
This is a distinction sometimes associated with Luxemburg’s view of the role of workers’ experience during mass strikes versus Lenin’s stress on the importance of class consciousness.
In late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Britain apprentices and other workers spoke of “long pay” when, in lieu of unpaid wages, they carried off bits and pieces of equipment or the finished product itself.
Though in a different context this is captured well in a one old French payson’s response to the query as to how he was getting along, “On resiste, Mademoiselle. On resiste.” (Lem 1998)
To avoid the unwanted imagery of the isolated outside, Sanyal (2007) distinguishes between “capital” that refers only to Bloch’s synchronous relations, and “capitalism” which he uses to embrace also particularistic social spheres. Chatterjee (2008: 57) by contrast remarks that insofar as neither “political society [n]or electoral democracy have … given these marginalized groups the means to make claims on governmentality…[they] represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political society.”
It may be, as Kevin Anderson (2010) notes, that resistance of the kind Marx toyed with for the Indian village does not result in something more “progressive” than what it resists, yet it needs to be taken for what it is anyway.
Ciccariello-Maher (2013) frames his interpretation of the Bolivarian Revolution in terms of dual power much along these lines, while focusing more on questions of politics and less on those of political economy: “…the vanguard position played by the buherones and the lumpen more generally is no accident, but is precisely the result of the strategic position this massive class currently holds in Venezuelan society… the barrios express this dual consciousness and potential for creative self-activity in their physical being.” (2013: 231; 234–255). See also Bitter et al. n/d.
“Freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be, and that more civil liberties exist even in countries where the revolution was defeated than in those where revolutions were victorious.” (Arendt 1963: 41)
I do not discuss the issue of violence as such in insurgent situations. For excellent discussions of violence and the subjective experience of “revolutionary time[s],” see the collection in Grandin and Joseph’s (2010), the former noting, “Studies of third world violence increasingly replace analytic categories with metaphysical ones.” (Grandin 2010: 7) Unfortunately a great deal of analytical precision is lost by Grandin himself in his strange fixation on the work of Arno Mayer who is congratulated for avoiding, “diffusing power into the mysteries of bureaucratic alienation, commodity fetishism, cultural hegemony, or similar abstractions that others identified as the keystones of modern life.” (ibid: 12) Analytic categories, it seems, are fortunate in having a concreteness that distinguishes them from abstractions.
All published by Semiotext(e).
De Angelis (2014: 301), however, appears to use the term “political revolution” to refer to social revolutionary outbreaks, as defined here, and “social revolution” to refer to a longer-term series of “recompositions.”
These are a modified version of the chapters in Bailey Stone’s (2014) Anatomy of Revolution Revisited.
The same is the case for the institutions currently being run by Islamic State in many of its areas of control.
As Neil Davidson (2015: 144) notes for the recent case of Greece’s fight with the “Troika,” “reforms themselves have the potential to constitute revolutionary demands in a context where the system is unable to allow them, for fear of interrupting the restoration of profitability.”
I expand then, on Lenin’s usage, thus distancing myself from the earlier usage by Proudhon. This latter anarchist heritage has led to suggestions that any “alternative institutions” from currencies to coops are instances of dual power.
Though he does not employ the notion of dual power in the article cited, the following account is indebted to Jeffery Webber’s work.
By far the most interesting work in this regard is Neil Davidson’s (2012b) How revolutionary was the bourgeois revolution? For an especially provocative argument see his (2015) “Is revolution still possible in the twenty-first century?”
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Smith, G. Against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis. Dialect Anthropol 40, 221–239 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9421-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9421-x