A Marxist Critique of Post-Marxism
By James Petras
Introduction
“Post-Marxism” has become a
fashionable intellectual posture, with the triumph of neo-liberalism and
the retreat of the working class. 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 in propounding 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:
- 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.
- 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).
- The state is the enemy of democracy
and freedom and a corrupt and inefficient deliverer of social
welfare. In its place, “civil society” is the protagonist of
democracy and social improvement.
- Central planning leads to and is a
product of bureaucracy which hinders the exchange of goods between
producers. Markets and market exchanges, perhaps with limited
regulations, allow for greater consumption and more efficient
distribution.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Critique of post-Marxist ideology
The post-Marxists thus have an analysis,
a critique and a strategy of developmentin a word, the very general
ideology that they supposedly condemn 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 of power, 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 popular interests 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 from various 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 by the 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.
The argument that “the state” is the
source of authoritarianism is both true and untrue. Dictatorial states
have and will exist, but most have little or nothing to do with public
ownership, especially if it means expropriating foreign business. Most
dictatorships have been anti-statist and pro-free market, today and in
the past and probably in the future.
Moreover, the state has been an important
supporter of citizenship, promoting the incorporation of exploited
sectors of the population into the polity, recognising legitimate rights
of workers, blacks, women and others. States have provided the basis for
social justice by redistributing land, income and budgets to favour the
poor.
In a word, we need to go beyond the
statist/anti-statist rhetoric to define the class nature of the state
and its basis of political representation and legitimacy. The
generalised ahistorical, asocial attacks on the state are unwarranted
and only serve as a polemical instrument to disarm citizens of the free
market from forging an effective and rational alternative anchored in
the creative potentialities of public action.
The counter-position of “civil
society” to the state is also a false dichotomy. Much of the
discussion of civil society overlooks the basic social contradictions
that divide “civil society”. Civil society or, more accurately, the
leading classes of civil society, while attacking the “statism” of
the poor have always made a major point of strengthening their ties to
the treasury and military to promote and protect their dominant position
in “civil society”. Likewise, the popular classes in civil society
when aroused have sought to break the ruling classes’ monopoly of the
state. The poor have always looked to state resources to strengthen
their socio-economic position in relation to the rich. The issue is and
always has been the relation of different classes to the state.
The post-Marxist ideologues who are
marginalised from the state by the neo-liberals have made a virtue of
their impotence. Uncritically imbuing the stateless rhetoric from above,
they transmit it below. The post- Marxists try to justify their
organisational vehicles (NGOs) for upward mobility by arguing that they
operate outside of the state and in “civil society” when in fact
they are funded by foreign governments to work with domestic
governments.
“Civil society” is an abstraction
from the deep social cleavages engendered by capitalist society; social
divisions which have deepened under neo-liberalism. There is as much
conflict within civil society, between classes, as there is between
“civil society” and the state. Only in exceptionally rare moments do
we find it otherwise. Under fascist or totalitarian states which
torture, abuse and pillage the totality of social classes do we find
instances of a dichotomy between the state and civil society.
To speak or write of “civil society”
is to attempt to convert a legalistic distinction into major political
categories to organise politics. In doing so, the differences between
classes are obscured and ruling class domination is not challenged.
To counterpose the “citizen” to the
“state” is to overlook the profound links of certain citizens (the
export elites, upper middle class) to the state and the alienation and
exclusion of the majority of citizens (workers, unemployed, peasants)
from effective exercise of their elementary social rights. Elite
citizens using the state, empty citizenship of any practical meaning for
the majority, converting citizens into subjects. Discussion of civil
society, like the state, needs to specify the social contours of social
classes and the boundaries imposed by the privileged class. The way the
post-Marxists use the term as an uncritical, undifferentiated concept
serves to obscure more than reveal the dynamics of societal change.
Planning, bureaucracy and the market
There is no question that central
planning in the former Communist countries was “bureaucratic”,
authoritarian in conception and centralised in execution. From this
empirical observation, the post-Marxists argue that “planning”
(central or not) is by its nature antithetical to the needs of a modern
complex economy with its multiple demands, millions of consumers,
massive flows of information. Only the market can do the trick.
Democracy and the market go togetheranother point of convergence between
the “post-Marxists” and the neo-liberals. The problem with this
notion is that most of the major institutions in a capitalist economy
engage in central planning.
General Motors, Wal-Mart, Microsoft all
centrally programme and plan direct investments and expenditures toward
further production and marketing. Few, if any, post-Marxists focus their
critical attention on these enterprises. The post-Marxists do not call
into question the efficiency of central planning by the multinational
corporations or their compatibility with the competitive electoral
systems characteristic of capitalist democracies.
The theoretical problem is the
post-Marxists’ confusion of central planning with one particular
historic-political variant of it. If we accept that planning systems can
be embedded in a variety of political systems (authoritarian or
democratic), then it is logical that the accountability and
responsiveness of the planning system will vary.
Today in capitalist societies, the
military budget is part of state planning and expenditures based on
“commands” to the producers (and owners of capital) who respond in
their own inefficient way, producing and profiting for over 50 years.
While no “model” of planning, the point that needs to be made is
that central state planning, is not a phenomenon confined to
“Communist systems”. The defects are generalised and found also in
capitalist economies. The problem in both instances (Pentagon and
Communism) is the lack of democratic accountability: the
military-industrial complex elite fix production, costs, demand and
supply.
The central allocation of state resources
is essential in most countries because of regional inequalities in
resource endowment, immigration, productivity, demand for products or
for a wealth of historical reasons. Only a decision made at the centre
can redistribute resources to compensate less developed regions,
classes, gender and racial groups adversely affected by the above
factors. Otherwise, the “market” tends to favour those with historic
advantages and favorable endowments creating polar patterns of
development or even fostering inter-regional/class exploitation and
ethnic conflicts.
The fundamental problem of planning is
the political structure which informs the planning process. Planning
officials elected and subject to organised communities and social groups
(producers, consumers, youth, women, racial minorities) will allocate
resources between production, consumption and reinvestment different
from those who are beholden to elites embedded in industrial-military
complexes.
Secondly, planning does not mean detailed
specification. The size of social budgets can be decided nationally by
elected representatives and allocated according to public assemblies
where citizens can vote on their local priorities. This practice has
been successful in Porto Alegré in Brazil for the past several years
under a municipal government led by the Workers’ Party. The relation
between general and local planning is not written in stone, nor are the
levels of specification of expenditures and investments to be determined
at the “higher levels”. General allocations to promote strategic
targets that benefit the whole country, such as infrastructure, high
technology and education, are complemented by local decisions on
subsidising schools, clinics, cultural centres.
Planning is a key instrument in today’s
capitalist economy. To dismiss socialist planning is to reject an
important tool in organising social change. To reverse the vast
inequalities, concentration of property, unjust budget allocations,
requires an overall plan with a democratic authority empowered to
implement it. Together with public enterprises and self-management
councils of producers and consumers, central planning is the third
pillar to a democratic transformation.
Finally, central planning is not
incompatible with locally owned productive and service activities, such
as restaurants, cafes, repair shops and family farms. Clearly, public
authorities will have their hands full managing the macro-structures of
society.
The complex decisions and information
flows are much easier to manage today with the mega-information
processing computers. The formula is: democratic representation plus
computers plus central planning equals efficient and socially equitable
production and distribution.
‘State power corrupts’: local politics submits
One of the principal critiques of Marxism
among the post-Marxists is the notion that state power corrupts and that
the struggle for it is the original sin. They argue that this is so
because the state is so distant from the citizens, that the authorities
become autonomous and arbitrary, forgetting the original goals and
pursuing their own self-interest. There is no doubt that throughout
history people seizing power have become tyrants. But it is also the
case that the rise to power of individuals leading social movements have
had an emancipating effect. The abolition of slavery and the overthrow
of absolutist monarchies are two examples. So “power” in the state
has a double meaning depending on the historic context. Likewise, local
movements have had successes in mobilising communities and improving
immediate conditions, in some cases significantly. But it is also the
case that macro-political economic decisions have undermined local
efforts. Today, structural adjustment policies at the national and
international level have generated poverty and unemployment, depleting
local resources, forcing local people to migrate or to engage in crime.
The dialectics between state and local power operates to undermine or
reinforce local initiatives and changes depending on the class power
manifested at both levels. There are numerous cases of progressive
municipal governments that have been undermined because reactionary
national regimes cut off their funding. On the other hand, progressive
municipal governments have been a very positive force helping
neighborhood-local organisations, as has been the case with the
socialist mayor of Montevideo in Uruguay or the leftist mayor in Porto
Alegre in Brazil.
The post-Marxists who counterpose
“local” to “state power” are not basing their discussion on
historical experience, at least not of Latin America. The antinomy is a
result of the attempt to justify the role of NGOs as mediators between
local organisations and neo liberal foreign donors (World Bank, Europe
or the us) and the local free market regimes. In order to
“legitimate” their role, the post-Marxist NGO professionals, as
“agents of the democratic grassroots”, have to disparage the left at
the level of state power. In the process, they complement the activity
of the neo-liberals by severing the link between local struggles and
organisation and national/international political movements. The
emphasis on “local activity” serves the neo-liberal regimes just
right, as it allows its foreign and domestic backers to dominate
macro-socio-economic policy and to channel most of the state’s
resources on behalf of export capitalists and financial interests.
The post-Marxists, as managers of NGOs,
have become skilled in designing projects and transmitting the new
“identity” and “globalist” jargon into the popular movements.
Their talk and writing about international cooperation and self-help
micro-enterprises creates ideological bonds with the neo-liberals while
forging dependency on external donors and their neo-liberal
socio-economic agenda. It is no surprise that after a decade of NGO
activity that the post-Marxist professionals have “depoliticised”
and deradicalised whole areas of social life: women, neighborhood and
youth organisations. The case of Peru and Chile is classic: where the
NGOs have become firmly established, the radical social movements have
retreated.
Local struggles over immediate issues are
the food and substance that nurture emerging movements. The crucial
question is over their direction and dynamic: whether they raise the
larger issues of the social system and link up with other local forces
to confront the state and its imperial backers or whether it turns
inward, looking to foreign donors and fragmenting into a series of
competing supplicants for external subsidies. The ideology of
post-Marxism promotes the latter; the Marxists the former.
Revolutions always end badly: the ‘possibilism’ of post-Marxism
There is a pessimistic variant to
post-Marxism which speaks less of the failures of revolution as the
impossibility of socialism. They cite the decline of the revolutionary
left, the triumph of capitalism in the East, the “crisis of
Marxism”, the loss of alternatives, the strength of the us, the coups
and repression by the military—all these arguments are mobilised to
urge the left to support “possibilism”: the need to work within the
niches of the free market imposed by the World Bank and its structural
adjustment agenda, and to confine politics to the electoral parameters
imposed by the military. This is called “pragmatism” or
incrementalism. Post-Marxists played a major ideological role in
promoting and defending the so-called electoral transition from military
rule in which social changes were subordinated to the reintroduction of
an electoral system.
Most of the arguments of the
post-Marxists are based on static and selective observations of
contemporary reality and are tied to predetermined conclusions. Having
decided that revolutions are out of date, they focus on neo-liberal
electoral victories and not on the post-electoral mass protests and
general strikes that mobilise large numbers of people in
extra-parliamentary activity. They look at the demise of communism in
the late 1980s and not to its revival in the mid-1990s. They describe
the constraints of the military on electoral politicians without looking
at the challenges to the military by the Zapatista guerrillas, the urban
rebellions in Caracas, the general strikes in Bolivia. In a word, the
possibilists overlook the dynamics of struggles that begin at the
sectoral or local level within the electoral parameters of the military
and then are propelled upward and beyond those limits by the failures
and impotence of the electoral possibilists to satisfy the elementary
demands and needs of the people. The possibilists have failed to end the
impunity of the military, to pay the back salaries of public employees
(the provinces of Argentina) or to end crop destruction of the cocoa
farmers (in Bolivia).
The post-Marxist possibilists become part
of the problem instead of part of the solution. It is a decade and a
half since the negotiated transitions began and in each instance the
post-Marxists have adapted to neo-liberalism and deepened its free
market policies. The possibilists are unable to effectively oppose the
negative social effects of the free market on the people, but are
pressured by the neo-liberals to impose new and more austere measures in
order to continue to hold office. The post-Marxists have gradually moved
from being pragmatic critics of the neo-liberals to promoting themselves
as efficient and honest managers of neo-liberalism, capable of securing
investor confidence and pacifying social unrest.
In the meantime, the pragmatism of the
post-Marxists is matched by the extremism of the neo-liberals: the
decade of the 1990s has witnessed a radicalisation of neo-liberal
policies, designed to forestall crisis by handing over even more
lucrative investment and speculative opportunities to overseas banks and
multinationals.
The neo-liberals are creating a polarised
class structure, much closer to the Marxist paradigm of society than the
post-Marxist vision. Contemporary Latin American class structure is more
rigid, more deterministic, more linked to class politics or the state,
than in the past. In these circumstances revolutionary politics are far
more relevant than the pragmatic proposals of the post-Marxists.
Class solidarity and the ‘solidarity’ of foreign donors
The word “solidarity” has been abused
to the point that in many contexts it has lost meaning. The term
“solidarity” for the post-Marxists includes foreign aid channelled
to any designated “impoverished” group. Mere “research” or
“popular education” of the poor by professionals is designated as
“solidarity”. In many ways the hierarchical structures and the forms
of transmission of “aid” and “training” resemble nineteenth
century charity and the promoters are not very different from Christian
missionaries.
The post-Marxists emphasise
“self-help” in attacking the “paternalism and dependence” on the
state. In this competition among NGOs to capture the victims of
neo-liberalism, the post-Marxists receive important subsidies from their
counterparts in Europe and the usa. The self-help ideology emphasises
the replacement of public employees for volunteers and upwardly mobile
professionals contracted on a temporary basis. The basic philosophy of
the post-Marxist view is to transform “solidarity” into
collaboration and subordination to the macro-economy of neo-liberalism
by focusing attention away from state resources of the wealthy
classes toward self-exploitation of the poor. The poor do
not need to be made virtuous by the post-Marxists for what the state
obligates them to do.
The Marxist concept of solidarity in
contrast emphasises class solidarity and within the class, solidarity of
oppressed groups (women and people of colour) against their
foreign and domestic exploiters. The major focus is not on the donations
that divide classes and pacify small groups for a limited time period.
The focus of the Marxist concept of solidarity is on the common
action of the same members of the class sharing their
common economic predicament and struggling for collective
improvement.
It involves intellectuals who write and
speak for the social movements in struggle, committed to sharing the
same political consequences. The concept of solidarity is linked to
“organic” intellectuals who are basically part of the
movementthe resource people providing analysis and education for class
struggle. In contrast, the post-Marxists are embedded in the world of
institutions, academic seminars, foreign foundations, international
conferences and bureaucratic reports. They write in esoteric postmodern
jargon understood only by those “initiated” into the subjectivist
cult of essentialist identities.
Marxists view solidarity as sharing the
risks of the movements, not being outside commentators who question
everything and defend nothing. For the post-Marxists, the main object is
“getting” the foreign funding for the “project”. The main issue
for the Marxist is the process of political struggle and
education in securing social improvement. The objective is raising
consciousness for societal change; constructing political power to
transform the general condition of the great majority. “Solidarity”
for the post-Marxists is divorced from the general object of liberation;
it is merely a way of bringing people together to attend a job
retraining seminar, to build a latrine. For the Marxists, the solidarity
of a collective struggle contains the seeds of the future democratic
collectivist society. The larger vision or its absence is what gives the
different conceptions of solidarity their distinct meaning.
Class struggle and cooperation
The post-Marxists frequently write of the
“cooperation” of everyone, near and far, without delving too
profoundly into the price and conditions for securing the cooperation of
neo-liberal regimes and overseas funding agencies. Class struggle is
viewed as an atavism to a past that no longer exists. So we are told
“the poor” are intent on building a new life. They are fed up with
traditional politics, ideologies and politicians.
So far, so good. The problem is that the
post-Marxists are not so forthcoming in describing their role as
mediators and brokers, hustling funds overseas and matching the funds to
projects acceptable to donors and local recipients. The foundation
entrepreneurs are engaged in a new type of politics similar to
the “labour contractors” (enganchadores) of the
not-too-distant past: herding together women to be “trained”;
setting up micro-firms subcontracted to larger producers of exports.
The new politics of the post-Marxists is
essentially the politics of compradors: they produce no national
products, rather they link foreign funders with local labour (self-help
micro-enterprises) to facilitate the continuation of the neo-liberal
regime. In that sense the post-Marxists in their role of managers of
NGOs are fundamentally political actors whose projects, training
and workshops do not make any significant economic impact either
on the gnp or in terms of lessening poverty. But their activities do
make an impact in diverting people from the class struggle into
harmless and ineffective forms of collaboration with their
oppressors.
The Marxist perspective of class struggle
and confrontation is built upon the real social divisions of
society: between those who extract profits, interest, rent and
regressive taxes and those who struggle to maximise wages, social
expenditures and productive investments. The results of post-Marxist
perspectives are today evident everywhere: the concentration of income
and the growth of inequalities are greater than ever, after a decade of
preaching cooperation, micro-enterprises and self help. Today banks like
the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) fund the export agribusinesses
that exploit and poison millions of farm labourers while providing funds
to finance small micro-projects. The role of the post-Marxists in the
micro projects is to neutralise political opposition at the bottom while
neo-liberalism is promoted at the top.
The ideology of “cooperation” links
the poor through the post-Marxists to the neo-liberals at the
top. Intellectually, the post-Marxists are the intellectual policemen
who define acceptable research, distribute research funds and
filter out topics and perspectives that project class analysis and
struggle perspectives. Marxists are excluded from the conferences and
stigmatised as “ideologists” , while post-Marxists present
themselves as “social scientists”. The control of intellectual
fashion, publications, conferences and research funds provide the
post-Marxists with an important power basebut one ultimately dependent
on avoiding conflict with their external funding patrons.
The critical Marxist intellectuals have
their strength in the fact that their ideas resonate with the evolving
social realities. The polarisation of classes and the violent
confrontations are growing, as their theories predict. It is in this
sense that the Marxists are tactically weak and strategically strong
vis-a-vis the post-Marxists.
Is anti-imperialism dead?
In recent years anti-imperialism has
disappeared from the political lexicon of the post-Marxists. The
ex-guerrillas of Central American turned electoral politicians, and the
professionals who run the NGOs speak of international cooperation and
interdependence. Yet debt repayments continue to transfer huge sums from
the poor in Latin America to the European, us and Japanese banks. Public
properties, banks, and above all natural resources are being taken over
at very cheap prices by us and European multinationals. There are more
Latin American billionaires with the bulk of their funds in us and
European banks than ever before. Meanwhile, entire provinces have become
industrial cemeteries and the countryside is depopulated. The us has
more military advisers, drug officials and federal police directing
Latin American “policing” than ever before in history. Yet we are
told by some former Sandinistas and ex-Farabundistas that
anti-imperialism/imperialism disappeared with the end of the Cold War.
The problem, we are told, is not foreign investments or foreign aid but
their absence and they ask for more imperial aid. The political and
economic myopia that accompanies this perspective fails to understand
that the political conditions for the loans and investment is the
cheapening of labour, the elimination of social legislation and the
transformation of Latin America into one big plantation, one big mining
camp, one big free trade zone stripped of rights, sovereignty and
wealth.
The Marxist emphasis on the deepening of
imperial exploitation is rooted in the social relations of production
and state relations between imperial and dependent capitalism. The
collapse of the ussr has intensified imperial exploitation. The
post-Marxists (ex-Marxists) who believe that the unipolar world will
result in greater “cooperation” have misread US intervention in
Panama, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. More fundamentally, the dynamic of
imperialism is embedded in the internal dynamic of capital not
in external competition with the Soviet Union. The loss of the
domestic market and external sector of Latin America is a return to a
“pre-national” phase: the Latin economies begin to resemble their
“colonial” past.
The struggle against imperialism today
involves the reconstruction of the nation, the domestic market,
the productive economy and a working class linked to social production
and consumption.
Two perspectives on social transformation: class organisations and
NGOs
To advance the struggle against
imperialism and its domestic neo-comprador collaborators passes
through an ideological and cultural debate with the post-Marxists inside
and on the periphery of the popular movements.
Neo-liberalism operates today on two
fronts: the economic and the cultural-political, and at two levels, the
regime and the popular classes. At the top, neo-liberal policies are
formulated and implemented by the usual characters: the World Bank, the
IMF working with Washington, Bonn and Tokyo in association with
neo-liberal regimes and domestic exporters, big business conglomerates
and bankers.
By the early 1980s the more perceptive
sectors of the neo-liberal ruling classes realised that their policies
were polarising the society and provoking large-scale social discontent.
Neo-liberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel
strategy of “from below”, the promotion of “grassroots”
organisation with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among
potentially conflicting classes, to create a “social cushion”. These
organisations were financially dependent on neo-liberal sources and were
directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the
allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these
organisations, described as “non-governmental”, numbered in the
thousands and were receiving close to US$4 billion world-wide.
The confusion concerning the political
character of the NGOs stems from their earlier history in the 1970s
during the days of the dictatorships. In this period they were active in
providing humanitarian support to the victims of the military
dictatorships and denouncing human rights violations. The NGOs supported
“soup kitchens” which allowed victimised families to survive the
first wave of shock treatments administered by the neo-liberal
dictatorships. This period created a favorable image of NGOs even among
the left. They were considered part of the “progressive camp”. Even
then, however, the limits of the NGOs were evident. While they attacked
the human rights violations of local dictatorships, they rarely
denounced their and European patrons who financed and advised them. Nor
was there a serious effort to link the neo-liberal economic policies and
human rights violations to the new turn in the imperialist system.
Obviously the external sources of funding limited the sphere of
criticism and human rights action.
As opposition to neo-liberalism grew in
the early 1980s, the and European governments and the World Bank
increased funding of NGOs. There is a direct relation between the growth
of movements challenging the neo-liberal model and the effort to subvert
them by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs.
The basic point of convergence between the NGOs and the World Bank was
their common opposition to “statism”. On the surface the NGOs
criticised the state from a “left” perspective defending civil
society, while the right did so in the name of the market. In reality,
however, the World Bank, the neo-liberal regimes and Western foundations
co-opted and encouraged the NGOs to undermine the national welfare state
by providing social services to compensate the victims of the MNCs. In
other words, as the neo-liberal regimes at the top devastated
communities by inundating the country with cheap imports, external debt
payments and abolishing labour legislation, creating a growing mass of
low-paid and unemployed workers, the NGOs were funded to provide
“self-help” projects, “popular education” and job training, to
absorb temporarily, small groups of poor, to co-opt local leaders and to
undermine anti-system struggles.
The NGOs became the “community face”
of neo-liberalism, intimately related to those at the top and
complementing their destructive work with local projects. In effect, the
neo-liberals organised a “pincer” operation or dual strategy.
Unfortunately, many on the left focused only on “neo-liberalism”
from above and the outside (IMF, World Bank) and not on neo-liberalism
from below (NGOs, micro-enterprises). A major reason for this oversight
was the conversion of many ex-Marxists to the NGO formula and practice. Post-Marxism
was the ideological transit ticket from class politics to
“community development”, from Marxism to the NGOs.
While the neo-liberals were transferring
lucrative state properties to the private rich, the NGOs were not
part of the trade union resistance. On the contrary, they were active in
local private projects, promoting the private enterprise
discourse (self-help) in the local community by focussing on
micro-enterprises. The NGOs built ideological bridges between the
small-scale capitalists and the monopolies benefitting from
privatisation all in the name of “anti-statism”, and building civil
societies. While the rich accumulated vast financial empires from the
privatisation, the NGO middle-class professionals got small sums of
funds to finance offices, transportation and small-scale economic
activity. The important political point is that the NGOs depoliticised
sectors of the population, undermined their commitment to public
employment and co-opted potential leaders in small projects. NGOs
abstain from public school teacher struggles as the neo-liberal regimes
attack public education and public educators. Rarely if ever do NGOs
support the strikes and protests against low wages and budget cuts.
Since their education funding comes from the neo-liberal governments
they avoid solidarity with public educators in struggle. In practice,
“non-governmental” translates into anti-public spending activities,
freeing the bulk of funds for neo-liberals to subsidise export
capitalists while small sums trickle from the government to NGOs.
In reality, non-governmental
organisations are not non-governmental. They receive funds from
overseas governments or work as private sub-contractors of local
governments. Frequently they openly collaborate with governmental
agencies at home or overseas. This “sub-contracting” undermines
professionals with fixed contracts, replacing them with contingent
professionals. The NGOs cannot provide the long term comprehensive
programmes that the welfare state can furnish. Instead they provide
limited services to narrow groups of communities. More importantly,
their programmes are not accountable to the local people but to overseas
donors. In this sense NGOs undermine democracy by taking social
programmes out of the hands of the local people and their elected
officials and creating dependence on non-elected, overseas officials and
their locally anointed officials.
NGOs shift people’s attention and
struggles away from the national budget toward self-exploitation to
secure local social services. This allows the neo-liberals to cut social
budgets and transfer state funds to subsidise bad debts of private banks
and loans to exporters. Self-exploitation (self-help) means that, in
addition to paying taxes to the state and not getting anything in
return, working people have to work extra hours with marginal resources,
expending scarce energies to obtain services that the bourgeoisie
receives free from the state. More fundamentally, the NGO ideology of
“private voluntary activity” undermines the idea that the government
has an obligation to look after its citizens and provide them
with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that political
responsibility of the state is essential for the well-being of citizens.
Against this notion of public responsibility, the NGOs foster the
neo-liberal idea of private responsibility for social problems and the
importance of private resources to solve these problem. In effect, they
impose a double burden on the poor: paying taxes to finance the
neo-liberal state to serve the rich and private self-exploitation to
take care of their own needs.
NGOs and socio-political movements
NGOs
emphasise projects not movements. They “mobilise” people to produce
at the margins not to struggle to control the basic means of production
and wealth. They focus on technical financial assistance of projects not
on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people. The
NGOs co-opt the language of the left: “popular power”,
“empowerment”, “gender equality”, “sustainable development”
and “bottom up leadership”. The problem is that this language is
linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and government
agencies that subordinate practical activity to non-confrontational
politics. The local nature of NGO activity means “empowerment” which
never goes beyond influencing small areas of social life with limited
resources within the conditions permitted by the neo-liberal state and
macro-economy.
The NGOs and their post-Marxist
professional staff directly compete with the socio-political movements
for influence among the poor, women, racially excluded and such like.
Their ideology and practice diverts attention from the sources and
solutions of poverty (looking downward and inward instead of upward and
outward). To speak of micro-enterprises as solutions, instead of
the exploitation by the overseas banks, is based on the notion that the
problem is one of individual initiative rather than the transference of
income overseas. The NGOs’ aid affects small sectors of the
population, setting up competition between communities for scarce
resources, generating insidious distinction and inter- and
intra-community rivalries thus undermining class solidarity. The same is
true among the professionals: each sets up their NGO to solicit
overseas funds. They compete by presenting proposals closer to the
liking of the overseas donors for lower prices, while claiming to speak
for more followers. The net effect is a proliferation of NGOs that
fragment poor communities into sectoral and sub-sectoral groupings
unable to see the larger social picture that afflicts them and even less
able to unite in struggle against the system. Recent experience also
demonstrates that foreign donors finance projects during
“crises”—political and social challenges to the status quo.
Once the movements have ebbed, they shift funding to NGO-regime “collaboration”,
fitting the NGO projects into the neo-liberal agenda. Economic
development compatible with the “free market” rather than social
organisation for social change becomes the dominant item on the funding
agenda. The structure and nature of NGOs with their “apolitical”
posture and their focus on self-help depoliticises and demobilises the
poor. They reinforce the electoral processes encouraged by the
neo-liberal parties and mass media. Political education about the nature
of imperialism, the class basis of neo-liberalism, like class struggle
between exporters and temporary workers are avoided. Instead the NGOs
discuss “the excluded”, the “powerless”, “extreme poverty”,
“gender or racial discrimination” without moving beyond the
superficial symptom, to engaging the social system that produces these
conditions. Incorporating the poor into the neo-liberal economy through
purely “private voluntary action”, the NGOs create a political world
where the appearance of solidarity and social action cloaks a
conservative conformity with the international and national structure of
power.
It is no coincidence that as NGOs have
become dominant in certain regions, independent class political action
has declined, and neo-liberalism goes uncontested. The bottom line is
that the growth of NGOs coincides with increased funding from
neo-liberalism and the deepening of poverty everywhere. Despite its
claims of many local successes, the overall power of neo-liberalism
stands unchallenged and the NGOs increasingly search for niches in the
interstices of power. The problem of formulating alternatives has been
hindered in another way. Many of the former leaders of guerrilla and
social movements, trade union and popular women’s organisations have
been co-opted by the NGOs. The offer is tempting: higher pay
(occasionally in hard currency), prestige and recognition by overseas
donors, overseas conferences and networks, office staff and relative
security from repression. In contrast, the socio-political movements
offer few material benefits but greater respect and independence and,
more importantly, the freedom to challenge the political and economic
system. The NGOs and their overseas banking supporters (Inter-American
Bank, the World Bank) publish newsletters featuring success stories of
micro-enterprises and other self-help projects—without mentioning the
high rates of failure as popular consumption declines, low price imports
flood the market and as interest rates spiralas is the case in Mexico
today.
Even the “successes” affect only a
small fraction of the total poor and succeed only to the degree that
others cannot enter into the same market. However, the propaganda value
of individual micro-enterprise success is important in fostering the
illusion that neo-liberalism is a popular phenomenon. The frequent
violent mass outbursts that take place in regions of micro-enterprise
promotion suggests that the ideology is not hegemonic and the NGOs have
not yet displaced independent class movements.
Finally, NGOs foster a new type of
cultural and economic colonialism and dependency. Projects are designed,
or at least approved, according to “guidelines” and priorities of
the imperial centres or their institutions. They are administered and
“sold” to communities. Evaluations are done by and for the imperial
institutions. Shifts in funding priorities or bad evaluations result in
the dumping of groups, communities, farms and cooperatives. Everything
and everybody is increasingly disciplined to comply with the donors’
demands and their project evaluators. The new viceroys supervise and
ensure conformity with the goals, values and ideologies of the donor as
well as the proper use of funds. Where “successes” occur they are
heavily dependent on continued outside support, otherwise they could
collapse.
While the mass of NGOs are increasingly
instruments of neo-liberalism there is a small minority which attempt to
develop an alternative strategy that is supportive of class and
anti-imperialist politics. None of them receive funds from the World
Bank or European and governmental agencies. They support efforts to link
local power to struggles for state power. They link local projects to
national socio-political movements occupying large landed estates,
defending public property and national ownership against multinationals.
They provide political solidarity to social movements involved in
struggles to expropriate land. They support women’s struggles linked
to class perspectives. They recognise the importance of putting politics
in command in defining local and immediate struggles. They believe that
local organisations should fight at the national level and that national
leaders must be accountable to local activists. In a word, they are not
post-Marxists. 
James
Petras, a Links contributing
editor, is professor of sociology at Binghampton University, New
York and the author of many works on revolutionary movements in Latin
America.