By Panagiotis Sotiris

Although ‘historical bloc’ is one of the most-well known concepts associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, at the same time not enough attention has been paid to its strategic theoretical significance. In most cases, ‘historical block’ has been taken to refer to alliances. This is most obvious in various texts from the PCI tradition.[1] Of course the identification of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ simply with social alliances can also be attributed to a surface reading of some of Gramsci’s pre-Prison writings, such as the famous text on the Southern Question where one can find Gramsci’s elaborations on the question of how to dismantle the Southern agrarian bloc and its particular intellectual bloc in order to advance the alliance of between proletariat and southern masses.[2] However, a look at Gramsci’s references to the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks provides evidence that the concept has a broader significance for Gramsci in prison than simply a reference to social alliances.

The first reference to the historical bloc can be found in Notebook 4, in a reference to the importance of superstructures, as the terrain where people become conscious of their condition, and to the necessary relation between base and superstructure. It is there that Gramsci refers to “Sorel’s concept of the “historical bloc”.[3] It is interesting that in Sorel’s work there is no reference to the concept of ‘historical bloc’. Valentino Gerratana has suggested that Gramsci, who did not have the possibility to reread Sorel’s Reflection on Violence when in prison, had in mind Sorel’s well known references to myths, and in particular Sorel’s insistence that these images should be taken as a whole (in Italian “prenderli in blocco”), as historical forces. [4]

In Notebook 7, the concept of the historical bloc returns in Gramsci’s criticism of Croce’s philosophy. For Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc is the equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s idealist conception and it also refers to a dialectical activity and a process of distinction that does not negate its real unity.[5] In the second version of this passage in Notebook 10 the concept of historical bloc (again attributed to Sorel) is linked to the unity of the process of reality, conceived as ‘active reaction by humanity on the structure’.[6] In another passage from Notebook 7 Gramsci links the historical bloc to the force of ideology and also of the relation ideologies and material forces and insists that in reality it is a relation of organic dialectical unity, distinctions being made only for ‘didactic’ reasons.

Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces.[7]

In Notebook 8 the concept of historic bloc returns and we have Gramsci’s insistence on the identity of history and politics, the identity between ‘nature and spirit’, in an attempt towards a dialectic of distinct moments (a unity of the opposites and the distincts).[8] In the second version of this passage, in Notebook 13, the reference is on the identity between ‘structures and superstructures’.[9] This conception of the historical bloc as referring to the (dialectical) unity of the social whole and in particular to the relation between material tendencies and ideological representations and the importance of such a relation between material conditions and ideologies as a condition for revolutionary praxis, also emerges in the following extract from Notebook 8. It is important to note the way this passage maintains a close dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the ‘complex, contradictory ensemble of the superstructures’ as the basis for a strategic revolutionary political orientation that is conceived in terms of ideology but also maintains the dialectical relation with social relations of production.

Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only an all-encompassing (totalitario) system of ideologies gives a rational refection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis.  If a social group is formed which is one hundred per cent homogeneous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist one hundred per cent for this revolutionising : that is that the “rational” is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process.[10]

Later in a note that first appeared in Notebook 8 but also, slightly expanded in Notebook 10 Gramsci used the concept of historical bloc as part of his criticism of Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history. In particular, for Gramsci it is exactly the conception of historical bloc as the relation of social and economic relation with ideological–political forms that enables a theoretical relevance for the concept of ethico-political history. “Ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc, in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the reconstruction of the various historical periods, is nothing more  than a polemical presentation of more or less interesting philosophical propositions, but its is not history”[11]. In a similar tone, in the summary first note of Notebook 10, Gramsci treats the concept of the historical bloc as a crucial aspect of his attempt towards a philosophy of praxis that could answer the questions that Croce’s conception of ethico-political history brought forward. Moreover, hegemony and historical bloc are theoretically linked in the most emphatic way in this passage.

Credit must therefore be given to Croce’s thought for its instrumental value and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in state life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation that must be always be borne in mind in the study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is to construct an integral history rather than partial or extrinsic histories.[12]

The concept of historical bloc constantly returns in Gramsci’s confrontation with Crocean concepts. For Gramsci the historical bloc can offer a historical and not speculative solution to the question of the relation between the different moments of the social whole.

The question is this: given the Crocean principle of the dialectic of the distincts (which is to be criticised as the merely verbal solution to a real methodological exigency, in so far as it is true that there exist not only opposites but also distincts), what relationship, which is not that of ‘implication in the unity of the spirit’, will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solution of these problems possible, or only a historical one, given the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel?[13]

The concept of historical bloc also appears in the fragment on the relation of forces in Notebook 9 but also in the well known fragment on the structure of parties during a period of organic crisis in Notebook 13. There the main point Gramsci wanted to make was on the importance of political initiatives in order to liberate the economic and political potential of a new historical bloc, including the used of force.

An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed. And, since two “similar” forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is “productive” to use it.[14]

The strategic character of the concept of historical bloc and its relation to accomplished hegemony can be found the famous fragment on the Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing, from Notebook 4 and reproduced in Notebook 11. Here the emphasis is on the particular relation between intellectuals and the people-nation, but also between leaders and the led, and on the need for intellectuals not only to interpret the conjuncture in an abstract way but also to understand the ‘passions’ of the subaltern classes and dialectically transform them into a ‘superior conception of the world’. This for Gramsci is exactly the creation of an ‘historical bloc. It is exactly here that one might see the analogy between the concept of the historical bloc and a condition of hegemony. The following passage exemplifies this point.

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive) , then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the “historical bloc”.[15]

Jacques Texier was one of the theorists that have insisted on the strategic theoretical importance of the concept of the historical bloc, within Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration. For Texier the concept of the historical bloc is exactly the concept that enables us think of the unity and interrelation between economics, politics and ideology, within Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the integral State. “Without the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the Gramscian theory of superstructures would not be Marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce.”[16] Based upon this conception, Texier treats the concept of the historical block as a theoretical node in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

The point of departure must be the concept of the’ historical bloc’ Gramsci stipulates. What does this mean? To think the unity of the distinct aspects or moments of superstructural activity, the moment of force and consent, of dictatorship and hegemony and the economico-political and ethico-politicaJ moment one must begin from the basis of the organic unity of the superstructures and infrastructure in the historical bloc and recognise the ultimately determinant character of economic conditions.[17]

For Texier it is important to follow carefully Gramsci’s novel redefinition of ‘civil society’ and how this encompasses a whole series of political and ideological practices, relations, beliefs conditioned by determinate social relations of production.

In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows lip on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethiico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses’ on the other.[18]

Therefore, the construction of a new historical bloc, a new articulation of economic, politics and ideology, is for Texier what is the stake in a struggle for hegemony: “the winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. A historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production.”[19]

Also of particular importance is Texier’s insistence[20] that in Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc implies an ‘organic unity’ between the State and the economy, in sharp contrast to every form of economism. In particular, Texier has offered a forceful reading of the concept civil society, which also points towards this particular dialectic of economics and politics within the historical bloc. For Texier the concept of civil society does not refer simply to the field of political and cultural hegemony, but also to economic activities. Although Texier distinguishes the economic structure and civil society, at the same time he provides textual evidence of Gramsci’s inclusion of the crucial aspects of economic activity and behaviour within the field of civil society, especially around the crucial Gramscian notions of “homo oeconomicus” and “determinate market”. In this sense we can say that a crucial aspect of the emergence of a new historical bloc is exactly the emergence not only of a new economic structure but also of a new “homo oeconomicus” and a new configuration of civil society.[21]

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has also offered an important reading of the theoretical centrality of the concept of historical materialism. For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s reference to structure and superstructure forming an historical bloc is the point to begin. The first error is the “simple identification between historical bloc and class alliances … or even the fusion … that embraces workers and intellectuals”.[22] For Buci-Glucksmann historical bloc goes beyond social alliances since it implies both a specific form of hegemonic leadership but also the development of the superstructures, “an ‘integral state’ rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and masses”.[23] Moreover, the concept of historical bloc is for Buci-Glucksmann not s a materialist position and anti-economistic answer to the relation between the different instances of the social whole; it is mainly an attempt to rethink a revolutionary strategy within the transition period.

Compared with Bukharin’s worker-peasant bloc of 1925-26, the Gramscian historic bloc demonstrates major new feature. This bloc is cultural and political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led. The cultural revolution, as an on-going process of adequation between culture and practice, is neither luxury nor a simple guarantee, but rather an actual dimension of the self-government of the masses and of democracy.[24]

For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s conception of revolutionary strategy as construction of a new historical bloc[25] leads to a “reformulation of the entire Marxist problematic of the withering away of the State as a passage to a regulated society, where political society is reabsorbed by civil society”.[26] Therefore, it is much more than a simple reference to a social alliance that manages to capture political power, since it entails the construction of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political, ideological and economic forms                                           . In opposition to a simple ‘bloc in power’, the historical bloc “presupposes the historical construction of long duration of new hegemonic system, without which classes become only a mechanical aggregate, managed by the State or a bureaucracy”.[27]

From the above elaboration it is obvious that historical bloc is a strategic not a descriptive or an analytical concept. It defines not an actual social alliance, but a social and political condition to be achieved. Historical bloc does not refer to the formation of an electoral alliance or to various social strata and movements fighting side by side. It refers to the emergence of a different configuration within civil society, namely to the emergence, on a broad scale, of different forms of politics, different forms of organization, alternative discourses and narratives, that materialize the ability for society to be organized and administrated in a different way. At the same time it refers to a specific relation between politics and economics, namely to the articulation not simply of demands and aspirations but of an alternative social and economic paradigm. Therefore, a new historical bloc defines that specific historical condition when not only a new social alliance demands power but is also in a position to impose its own particular economic form and social strategy and lead society. It also includes a particular relation between the broad masses of the subaltern classes and new intellectual practices, along with the emergence of new forms of mass critical and antagonistic political intellectuality, exactly that passage from knowledge to understanding and passion. Regarding political organizations, it refers to that particular condition of leadership, in the form of actual rooting, participation, and mass mobilization that defines an ‘organic relation’ between leaders and led, which when we refer to the politics of proletarian hegemony implies a condition of mass politicization and collective elaboration. It also implies the actuality of the new political and economic forms, and the full elaboration of what can be defined as a ‘dual power’ strategy conceived in the broadest sense of the term.

In this sense, it is obvious that the concept of the historical bloc, when used in relation to the politics of the subaltern classes, refers to a strategy of (counter)hegemony. A potential hegemony of the forces of labour, namely their ability to become actually leading in a broader front, that would make possible a process of social transformation, means exactly creating the conditions for a new historical bloc. This means a new articulation between social forces, alternative economic form[28]s in rupture with capitalist social relations of productions, new political forms of organization and participatory democratic decision-making. The struggle for hegemony means a struggle for the formation of a new historic bloc.

That is why the concept of the historical bloc is more than ever pertinent to contemporary discussions within the Left. The reasons for this are above all political and have to do with the dynamics of the conjuncture. The long retreat of the Left through as the combined result of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” for a long time seemed to make questions of strategy unimportant. What seemed to be necessary was the unity around basic struggles and movements of resistance. Strategic discussion was left either to theoretical elaborations or was postponed for a better day. Even after the return of mass protest movements after Seattle 1999, the return of the strategic questions Daniel Bensaïd talked about in 2006,[29] has yet to produce some specific strategic recommendations.

However, recent developments have made us all realize the urgency of these questions. The developments include the global economic crisis of the end of the 2000s, the crisis of neoliberalism, the impressive return of mass protest politics, from 2011 until now, and the evidences of an open hegemonic crisis in various “weak links” of the imperialist chain, a crisis that can be described in Gramscian terms.

And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example) , or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.[30]

At the same time, we have the possibility that the Left can lead an impressive reversal in the political balance of forces in countries such as Greece, and face the possibility of arriving at governmental power.

I would like to insist that the debate is more urgent than before. Recent developments, such as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have shown that what would be called the new age of insurrections is far from over. However, especially the developments regarding the developments within what has been termed the ‘Arab Spring’ has shown that when mass popular insurrections cannot be ‘translated’ politically into autonomously defined democratic and emancipator political projects, then the results can be tragic. At same time, regarding the crisis of neoliberalism and the current authoritarian, disciplinary turn of neoliberal governance, the only contribution the dominant elites can make is to only prolong the crisis. This situation is similar to one described by Gramsci.

What makes things worse, is that it is about a crisis for which the elements of its resolution are prevented from being developed with the necessary speed; those that are dominant can no longer resolve the crisis but have the power (to impede) others from resolving it, namely they have the power only to prolong the crisis.[31]

This means the need to think in terms of the necessary renewal of a revolutionary strategy. The fact that there are perhaps no ‘ideal types’ for revolution, does not mean that we do not need revolutionary changes. A new historical bloc refers exactly such a revolutionary process.

In light of the above, a strategy for a new ‘historical bloc’ suggests that we must elaborate upon an alternative productive paradigm, in a non market and non profit-oriented direction, an alternative non capitalist developmental path (as an aspect of the dialectics of economy and politics within the historical bloc). We refer to a developmental paradigm neither in the sense of quantitative growth, nor in the sense of an alternative capitalist development, but in the sense of a new conception of how to make good use of collective social productive capabilities and resources. This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non commercial networks of distribution, regaining the public character of goods and service that are currently under the threat of the tendency for ‘new enclosures’.  It could also include a new emphasis on self-reliance and decreased dependence upon international flows of commodities and resources, along with a break with consumerist conceptions of well-being.

Such a thinking of the ‘economic program’ of process of transformation, as part of a strategy for a new historic bloc, should not be seen as an attempt to simply devise or think of alternative economic forms. In reality, it is a process of collective experimentation based upon the emergence of alternative economic forms within movements, collective struggles and resistances to the commercialization of social goods. From the defence of public services and the new forms of solidary economy, to the new forms of self-management and worker’s control (from occupied factories in Argentina to Public Television in Greece), we have many important experiences. These have not been simply “resistances” but also collective experimenting sites that can help us understand how things can be organized in a different non-capitalist way. In a way, it means taking hold of the ‘traces of communism’ in actual movements and social resistances to the violence of capital and the markets. The Left should not consider these experiences to be simply “movements” and think of economic policy only in terms of non-austerity macroeconomics, however important these are.

Moreover, thinking in terms of a new “historical bloc”, means that the Left attempts to elaborate on the possibility of an alternative narrative for society, in an attempt exactly for the forces of labour to be leading (dirigente). And in this we must also think how the very experience of today’s’ forces of labour, despite their fragmentation into multifarious employment situation and prospects, with their unity undermined by precariousness, offers the basis for such a (counter)hegemony. Today’s collective labour force is not only more fragmented, it is also more educated, with more access to knowledge and communication recourse, and in an ability to voice its grievances in a more articulate way. Moreover, all over the advanced capitalist societies, those social strata that traditional sociology describes as middle class, in reality segments of intellectual labour or what Poulantzas described as the salaried new petite-bourgeoisie,[32] are under attack by stagnant wages, increased barriers to ‘upward social mobility’, private debt burden, workplace precariousness. Consequently, they have seen the class divide with various segments of the capitalist class grow, and have moved closer to working class demands and aspirations. All these developments are also reflected in the mass unemployment (and precariousness) of youth an element that has produced social explosions, and probably will in the future. This brings together, in mass collective practises, all those social forces that, one way or the other, depend upon selling their labour power to make ends meet. This offers not the only the material ground for social alliances, exemplified in the co-presence of all these strata in contemporary protests from the Indignados to the Syntagma to Occupy!, but also of collective experiences, aspirations and demands. New forms of “public spheres’ emerge that enable not simply tactical cooperation within protest movements, but the potential of collectively elaborating a new vision and perspective beyond “actually existing neoliberalism”.

This means that today rethinking socialist and revolutionary politics is not only about ‘injecting’ socialist consciousness into the movement – however necessary the defence of the socialist and communist tradition might be in a period of ideological erasure. It is also about elaborating upon collective aspirations, demands and ideological representations that emerge from the very materiality of today’s condition and struggles of the forces of labour. Creating conditions for a new historical bloc is not only about articulating a political project; it is about working upon actual social and historical tendencies and dynamics, in order to create new political forms that would enable a new dialectical relation between ‘structure’ and ‘superstructures’.

This gives a new importance to the question of the program. Contrary to the tendency to ignore the program in the name of a simple unity around the negation of austerity, it is important to insist that a strategy for a new historical bloc requires articulating an alternative narrative for society, not just a sum of grievances and demands. Such a program should not restrict itself to income redistribution, increased public spending and nationalization. It should also include experiments with new productive forms and relations based upon self-management, new forms of workers’ control, and alternative forms of economic coordination and planning, in sum a collective to move beyond the capitalist logic.  This is in contrast to the ‘pragmatist turn’ of some parties of the European Left that make a distinction between an anti-austerity politics aiming at ‘saving society from austerity’ and social transformation. On the contrary, it is now time to think of the transition program as offering at the same time an exit from austerity and the beginning of a process of transformation in sharp break not only with neo-liberalism but also with aspects of capitalist relations. This is today one of the most crucial aspects of a potential revolutionary strategy today.

In an era of increased forms of capitalist internationalization, this also means taking a stand regarding a country’s place in the international plane. In this sense, recent debates within the European Left, such as the ones pertaining to the relation to the Eurozone and the European Union should be read in a strategic manner. Breaking away from the Eurozone and the European Union, for the peripheral countries of the European South, such as Greece, is not simply about monetary sovereignty (which per se is a necessary aspect of regaining democratic control of economic policy). It is about the forces of labour offering an alternative orientation for society, especially since in countries such as Greece, the bourgeois ‘historical bloc, based both its strategy and its legitimacy, upon the ‘European Road’ as a road to capitalist modernization.

Moreover, a politics of a potential new ‘historical bloc’ means exactly aiming at political power, both in the sense of a left wing government but also and mainly in the sense of a change in actual social power configuration. If we are fully aware that it will be part of a long and contradictory process of transition and transformation and struggle ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, then a ‘government of the Left’ can be indeed be part of a modern revolutionary strategy. This would require making use of both governmental power (the radicalization of current institutional and constitutional framework) and forms of ‘popular power’ from below, without underestimating the constant confrontation with the forces of capital. This has been an open question in the communist movement, from the ‘Workers’ Government’ described in the 4^th Congress of the Communist International,[33] to Gramsci’s proposal for a ‘Constituent Assembly’ of the anti-fascist forces,[34] to Poulantzas’ confrontation with a possible ‘democratic road to socialism’,[35] to the contradictions of contemporary experiments in left governance such as the one in Bolivia. However, without a strong labour movement, without radical social movements, without the full development of all forms of people’s power and self-organization, any government of the Left will not manage to stand up to the immense pressure it will get from the forces of capital, the EU and the IMF. That is why it is necessary to experiment with new forms of social and political power from below and to create new forms of social practice and interaction based on solidarity and common work, new forms of direct democracy.

In this sense, a strategy for a new historical bloc also requires a new practice of politics, new social and political forms of organization beyond the traditional Party-form, beyond traditional trade unionism and beyond the limits of traditional parliamentary bourgeois politics. This corresponds exactly to the need for new forms of civil society organizations, in the broad sense that Gramsci gave to this notion. In a way, Louis Althusser pointed to this direction of the political forms associated with a potential historical bloc in his intervention in the debates of the 22^nd Congress of the French Communist Party.

In the best of cases, it is conceivable that the union of the people of France may become something quite different from the means to a new electoral balance, but is rather aimed, over and above the organizations of the Left, at the popular masses themselves. Why address the popular masses in this way? To tell them, even if still only as a hint, that they will have to organize themselves autonomously, in original forms, in firms, urban districts and villages, around the questions of labour and living conditions, the questions of housing, education, health, transport, the environment, etc.; in order to define and defend their demands, first to prepare for the establishment of a revolutionary state, then to maintain it, stimulate it and at the same time force it to ‘wither away’. Such mass organizations, which no one can define in advance and on behalf of the masses, already exist or are being sought in Italy, Spain and Portugal, where they play an important part, despite all difficulties. If the masses seize on the slogan of the union of the people of France and interpret it in this mass sense, they will be re-establishing connections with a living tradition of popular struggle in our country and will be able to help give a new content to the political forms by which the power of the working people will be exercised under socialism.[36]

Moreover, it is exactly this combination of popular power from below and new forms of self-management, workers’ control and alternative forms of economic coordination that can create the conditions for a modern form of ‘dual power’, namely the actual emergence of new, non capitalist social and political forms. Both Lenin and Gramsci thought that there can be no process of social transformation without a vast social and political experimentation, both before and after the revolution, which will guaranty that within the struggles we can already witness the emergence of new social forms and new ways to organize production and social life.

It is not going to be an ‘easy road’. It would require a struggling society actually changing values, priorities, narratives. It would also require a new ethics of collective participation and responsibility, of struggle and commitment to change, a transformed and educated common sense. In this sense, the promise of Left-wing politics cannot be a simple return to 2009, not least because it is materially impossible, but because we want to go beyond confidence to the markers and debt-ridden consumerism. In such a ‘world-view’ public education, public health, public transport, environmental protection, non market collective determination of priorities, and quality of everyday sociality, are more important than imported consumer goods and cheap credit.

At the same time, a strategy for a new historical block also implies an attempt towards a re-appropriation and redefinition of the very notion of the people. This refers to the complex process, political, ideological and social, through which the people can re-emerge in a situation of struggle, neither as the abstract subject of the bourgeois polity, nor as the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’, but as a potentially anti-capitalist alliance of all those social strata that one way or the other depend upon their labour power in order to make ends meet. This also means a new form of people’s unity, especially against the dividing results of racism and the varieties of neofascism.[37]

Such a process can (and should…) also be a knowledge process, both in the sense of using the knowledge accumulated by people in social movements (who can run better a hospital or a school? Appointed technocrats or the people actually working and struggling there) and also in the sense of struggle, solidarity and common practices being forms that help people acquire knowledge, learn how to do things differently and collectively re-invent new forms of mass intellectuality and a new cultural hegemony. Moreover, if political organizations cannot learn from actual experiences, if they are not themselves collective processes of learning and transforming the experiences from the struggles into political strategy, then they cannot contribute to a process of social transformation.

Such a strategy (and dialectic of strategy and tactics) can transform current emerging alliances, changes to the relations of representation, struggles, resistances and proposals for ‘concrete utopias’, into a new and highly original ‘historical block’, the necessary condition for an open-ended process of social transformation. It is an attempt to actually rethink revolutionary strategy, not as phantasy but as an open – ended sequence of transformation and experimentation. Talking today about socialism cannot be simply about “catch phrases” on worker’s power and worker’s control or worker’s democracy, however necessary it is to revisit in a self-critical manner the socialist experiences of the 20^th century. Talking about socialism today means building upon the dynamics of struggles, upon the new forms of democracy and popular sovereignty from below emerging within struggles, upon the attempt at re-appropriating public space and creating new public spheres, upon what Althusser described as ‘virtual forms of communism in contemporary movements and aspirations.[38]

Finally, all these also require a fresh thinking of the collective political subject. All recent developments have shown the importance of front politics. Contrary to the metaphysics of the Party as a guarantor of truth and the correct line, we need a more broad conception of the left political front that is not only unity but also dialectical process, a terrain of struggle itself, a collective democratic process, and a laboratory of ideas, projects and sensitivities.

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their  historical ‘laboratory’. [...] The relation of theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and all-encompassing intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. ^[39]

Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society.

To conclude recent developments have shown the potential for political change and breaks with “actually existing neoliberalism”. For the first time after a long time the forces of the Left are facing the challenge of political power and hegemony. We do not have the luxury of avoiding the discussion on a revolutionary strategy and a socialist perspective for the 21^st century. Concepts such as Gramsci’s historical bloc offer us the possibility to rethink politics in a strategic way.

References

Althusser, Louis 1977, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party”, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1977/22nd-congress.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Althusser, Louis 1998, Solitude de Machiavel, Paris: Actuel Marx / PUF.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2006, “On the return of the politico-strategic question”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2006/08/polstrat.htm#p5 (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Berlinguer, Enrico 1977, Historical Compromise, (In Greek). Athens: Themelio.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Comintern 1922, “Theses on Comintern Tactics” (Fourth Congress). http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978-1994, Cahiers de Prison. 5 vols. Paris : Gallimard.

Gramsci, Antonio 1995, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio ²1977, Quaderni di Carcere. Edited by Valention Gerratana, Rome: Einauidi.

Lisa, Athos 1933, Discusion political con Gramsci en la carcel, http://www.gramsci.org.ar/8/53.htm (Accesses 30 October 2013.)

Poulantzas, Nicos, 1975, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1980, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Sorel, Georges 1999, Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2013, “The Dark of Greek Neo-fascism”, Overland 210.

Texier, Jacques 1979, “Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures”. In Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 48-79.

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[40]

By Carl Davidson

Feb. 27, 2022

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.”

 –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, in particular gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture, of all the political and economic forces involved (Sun Tzu’s Earth) and what they are thinking, about themselves and others, at any given time. (Sun Tzu’s Heaven). It’s not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised.

This statement above was part of the opening to a widely circulated article I wrote four times now, about two, four, six, and eight years ago. With the upcoming November 2022 elections, it’s time to take my own advice again and do another update. The electoral strategic terrain is constantly changing, and we don’t want to be stuck with old maps and faulty models.

In the earlier versions, I suggested setting aside the traditional ‘two-party system’ frame, which obscures far more than it reveals, and making use of a ‘six-party’ model instead. I suggested that the new hypothesis had far more explanatory power regarding the events unfolding before us. I still like this hypothesis.

Some critics have objected to my use of the term ‘party’ for factional or interest group clusters. The point is taken, but I would also argue that U.S. major parties, in general, are not ideological parties in the European sense. Instead, they are constantly changing coalitions of these clusters with no firm commitment to program or discipline. So I will continue to use ‘parties,’ but with the objection noted. You can substitute ‘factions’ if you like. Or find us a better term.

For the most part, the strategic picture still holds. The ‘six parties’, under two tents, were first labeled as the Tea Party and the Multinationalists under the GOP tent, and the Blue Dogs, the Third Way New Democrats, the Old New Dealers, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the Democratic tent. We had three ‘parties’ under each tent in the second and following versions.

There are still a few minor players outside of either tent—the Green Party campaigns in California, Kshama Sawant’s ongoing battles in the Seattle City Council, the local independent candidates of the Richmond Alliance, and a few more. They might be pretty important in local areas, but still lack the weight to be featured in this analysis.

But let’s move to the central terrain.

First and most essential for us on the left now is Biden’s victory over Trump alongside the persistent clout of Senator Bernie Sanders, who keeps showing far more strength than imagined. Today we would also certainly add the gains made by Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and the growth of ‘the Squad.’ Other progressives wins in Congress and DSA gains in several state legislatures are also noteworthy.

But here’s the danger. Biden’s won by a clear margin, but Trump also gained in total votes over his past numbers. This is dangerous and too close for comfort. Given a 50/50 Senate and a narrow margin in the House, Biden has to govern, as best as he can, alongside the continuing power of Trump and rightwing populism. Moreover, the right includes the full integration of Trump’s forces into the GOP national and state apparatus and Trump’s now overt alliances with growing fascist militias and related groups

Trump’s still refuses to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes. Acceptance of this ‘Big Steal,’ transformed into a ‘Big Lie,’ is now a loyalty test throughout the Republican party, from top to bottom. Moreover, we all witnessed Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, complete with an insurrectionary assault on the Capitol. Hundreds are now sitting in jail and their trials are underway. . The number of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys on trial is a case in point. More importantly, the House Committee on Jan. 6 is starting its public hearings, which promises to be a powerful media exposure.

Therefore, what has moved from the margins to the center of political discourse is the question of a clear and present danger of fascism. Far from an ongoing abstract debate, we are now watching its hidden elements come to light every day in the media. We also see the ongoing machinations in the GOP hierarchy and in state legislatures reshaping election laws in their favor. Now, the question is not whether a fascist danger exists, but how to fight and defeat it.

The outcomes for Biden and Trump, then, challenge, narrow, and weaken the old dominant neoliberal hegemony from different directions. For decades, the ruling bloc had spanned both the GOP transnationals and those transnational globalists in the Third Way Democrats. Now neoliberalism is largely exhausted. This is a major change, opening the terrain for new bids for policy dominance. Team Biden is groping for a yet-to-be-fully -defined LBJ 2.0, largely making major investments in physical and social infrastructure, like universal child care or free community college. Weirdly, the GOP claims to stand for nothing, save fealty, Mafia-style, to Trump. Behind that smokescreen are the politics of fascism and a neo-confederacy.

But the GOP still has three parties. Back in 2016, Politico had characterized them this way: “After the Iowa caucuses” the GOP emerged “with three front-runners who are, respectively, a proto-fascist, [Trump] a Christian theocrat [Cruz] and an Ayn Rand neoliberal [Rubio] who wants to privatize all aspects of public life while simultaneously waging war on the poor and working classes.”

So here’s the new snapshot of the range of forces for today (including a graphic map above).

Under the Dem tent, the three main groups remain as the Blue Dogs, the Third Way Centrists and the Rainbow Social Democrats. Although small, the Blue Dogs persist, especially given their partnership with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin in the Senate. With Biden in the White House, the Third Way group keeps and grows its major clout and keeps most of its African American, feminist and labor allies. The Sanders Social Democratic bloc has gained strength, especially with the growing popularity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the growth of ‘The Squad. ‘Sanders has also formed and kept a progressive-center unity against Trump and has helped define ‘Build Back Better’ and other Biden reform packages.

The changes under the GOP tent have been radical, although keeping its three parties. The ‘Never Trumpers’, despite voting for Biden, have yet to split off entirely. In fact, despite the efforts to purge her, Liz Cheney of Wyoming continues fighting fiercely against Trump and his fascist measures and minions. The Jan. 6 insurrection also brought to the surface the tensions between the Christian nationalists headed by former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s rightwing populists. Apart from tactics, a key difference between the two is Koch money and its institutional power. The Koch brothers never liked or trusted Trump, and never funded him directly, pouring their millions into the Christian Nationalist bloc instead.

Trump still has a tight grip on the entire party, but without his White House power, the number of his GOP critics is on the rise. Daily. Trump has denounced all rivals from these two groupings, and is building his alliances with the Jan. 6 insurrectionist supporters in state legislatures. The goal is new anti-voter laws to control those counting the votes and defining the districts in the years ahead.

Let’s now look closer, starting from the left upper corner of the map:

The Rightwing Populists

This ‘party’, as mentioned, has taken over the GOP and is now tightening its grip. Trump was originally an ‘outlier elite’ with his own bankroll but now supplemented with funds from Russian oligarchs and Arab oil fortunes (See ‘Proof of Conspiracy ‘by Seth Abhramson). He is also still directly connected to the Robert Mercer family fortune, the 4th ranking billionaire funding rightwing causes. For example, the Mercers keep Breitbart News afloat and funded the career of Steve Bannon, former Trump ‘strategist’ that took him to victory in the last stretch. Along with Breitbart, Fox News is the main hourly mouthpiece for Trump’s war against the mainstream ‘fake news’ mass media. There are dozens of smaller outfits, but with millons of followers

Trump is also pulling in some new wealth. One example is Julia Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the fortune of the popular Publix supermarket chain. Alternet reports others: “One example is Dan and Farris Wilks, two billionaire siblings who have worked in the fracking industry in Texas and have “given a combined $100,000 toward the president’s reelection.” The Wilkes Brothers supported Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary but are supporting Trump in 2020.”

But major events reveal some fault lines. The House has now impeached Trump twice, once following the Jan. 6 events and earlier in 2019. The Senate followed up by acquitting him in both cases. In Trump’s second impeachment, 10 GOPers in the House and seven in the Senate votes against him. This is as good of an indictor as any of the remaining small but persistent strength of ‘regular’ Republicans in their own party.

The impeachment efforts, worthy in their own right, were also a major result of Trump’s fierce ongoing political warfare against the ‘Deep State.’ The battle is actually a contest for a new ‘America First’ white nationalist hegemony against the old neoliberal globalists under both tents. The ‘Deep State’ is the federal civil service and includes the ‘Intelligence Community,’ with a long list of Trump-targeted CIA and FBI leaders, supposedly corrupt, of which FBI director James Comey was the first to be purged. The real ‘corruption’ was their refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, again like an old-style Mafia boss.

In the first impeachment vote in Feb. 2020, the sole breakaway vote was Mitt Romney on Article One. Romney, with considerable wealth himself, is also a Mormon bishop, and his LDS church recently listed holdings of over $37 billion with the SEC. This is a factor in Romney’s ability to stand alone. At the moment, however, the much-weakened GOP’s old Establishment is left with the choice of surrender, or crossing over to the Third Way bloc under the Dem tent. A good number already did so to vote for Biden in the Dem 2020 primary and general, expanding the Dem electorate to the right.

Trump now needs even more to shore up an alliance with the Blue Dogs. But it remains tactical, stemming from his appeals to ‘Rust Belt’ Democrats and some unions on trade and tariff issues, plus white identity resentment politics. The economic core of rightwing populism remains anti-global ‘producerism’ vs ‘parasitism’. Employed workers, business owners, real estate developers, small bankers are all ‘producers’. They oppose ‘parasite’ groups above and below, but mainly those below them—the unemployed (Get a Job! as an epithet), the immigrants, poor people of color, Muslims, and ‘the Other’ generally. When they attack those above, the target is usually George Soros, a Jew.

Recall that Trump entered politics by declaring Obama to be an illegal alien and an illegitimate officeholder (a parasite above), but quickly shifted to Mexicans and Muslims and anyone associated with ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This aimed to pull out the fascist and white supremacist groups of the ‘Alt Right’–using Breitbart and worse to widen their circles, bringing them closer to Trump’s core. With these fascists as ready reserves, Trump reached farther into Blue Dog territory, and its better-off workers, retirees, and business owners conflicted with white identity issues—immigration, Islamophobia, misogyny, and more. Today they still largely make up the audience at his mass rallies.

Trump’s outlook is not new. It has deep roots in American history, from the anti-Indian ethnic cleansing of President Andrew Jackson to the nativism of the Know-Nothings, to the nullification theories of Joh C. Calhoun, to the lynch terror of the KKK, to the anti-elitism and segregation of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats. Internationally, Trump combines aggressive jingoism, threats of trade wars, and an isolationist ‘economic nationalism’ aimed at getting others abroad to fight your battles for you. At the same time, your team picks up the loot (‘we should have seized and kept the oil!’).

Trump’s GOP still contains his internal weaknesses: the volatile support of distressed white workers and small producers. At present, they are still forming a key social base. But the problem is that Trump did not implement any substantive programs apart from tax cuts. These mainly benefited the top 10% and created an unstable class contradiction in his operation. Moreover, apart from supporting heavy vaccine research, his inability to deal adequately with the coronavirus emergency– over 900,000 dead—is is still undermining the confidence of some of his base. Most of what Trump has paid out is what WEB Dubois called the ‘psychological wage’ of ‘whiteness’, a dubious status position. Thus white supremacist demagogy and misogyny will also continue to unite a wide array of all nationalities of color and many women and youth against him.

Trump’s religious ignorance, sexual assaults and a porn star scandal always pained his alliance with the Christian Nationalist faction: (Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, et. al.), and the DeVos family (Amway fortune). They were willing to go along with it for the sake of judicial appointments, with the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling against Black voters in Alabama only one major achievement. The alliance, nonetheless, has become more frayed since Jan. 6 and the ‘Hang Mike Pence’ spectacle.  But some stalwarts stood fast. The billionaire donor to the GOP right, Devos’s brother Erik Prince is a case in point. He amassed billions from his Blackwater/Xe firms that train thousands of mercenaries, These forces serve as ‘private contractors’ for U.S. armed intervention anywhere. Prinz is now reportedly preparing to spend a few million sending spies and other disruptors into ‘liberal groups’ to do dirty work in Trump’s favor.

The Christian Nationalists

This ‘party’ grew from a subset of the former Tea Party bloc. It’s made up of several Christian rightist trends developed over decades, which gained more coherence under Vice President Mike Pence. It includes conservative evangelicals seeking to recast a patriarchal and racist John Wayne into a new warrior version of Jesus. It was strengthened for a period by the  addition of William Barr as the Attorney General, He brought Opus Dei and the Catholic far-right, a minority with the American Catholic Church, closer to the White house. But seeing that Trump was about to go beyond the law in trying to overturn the 2020 election, Barr jumped ship and resigned just in time

A good number of Christian nationalists, however, are the Protestant theocracy-minded fundamentalists, especially the ‘Dominionist’ sects in which Ted Cruz’s father was active. They present themselves as the only true, ‘values-centered’ (Biblical) conservatives. They argue against any kind of compromise with the globalist ‘liberal-socialist bloc’, which ranges, in their view, from the GOP’s Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders. They are more akin to classical liberalism than neoliberalism in economic policy. This means abandoning nearly all regulations, much of the safety net, overturning Roe v. Wade, getting rid of marriage equality (in the name of ‘religious liberty’) and abolishing the IRS and any progressive taxation in favor of a single flat tax. Salon in April 2018 reported:

“This rightwing Christian movement is fundamentally anti-democratic. Their ‘prayer warriors’ do not believe that secular laws apply to them, thus making it acceptable, if not honorable, to deceive non-believers in order to do God’s work. Many evangelicals in the Christian nationalist or ‘dominionist’ wing of the movement want the United States to be a theocracy. In some ways, this subset of the evangelical population resembles an American-style Taliban or ISIS, restrained (so far) only by the Constitution.”

The classic liberalism of most Christian Nationalist is also a key reason they attract money from the Koch Brothers networks. While the Koch’s hold Trump and his populists in some contempt, as mentioned above, the Christian Nationalist faction has access to Koch funds and its ALEC legislative projects, along with access to the DeVos fortunes. Effectively, Christian nationalist’ prosperity economics’ amounts to affirmative action for the better off, where the rise of the rich is supposed to pull everyone else upwards. Those below must also pay their tithes and pull upward with their ‘bootstraps.’ They argue for neo-isolationism on some matters of foreign policy. But as ‘Christian Zionists’ they favor an all-out holy war on ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ to the point of ‘making the sand glow’ with the use of nuclear weapons. They pushed for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ripping up the Iran nuclear deal. All this is aimed at greasing the skids for the ‘End Times,’ the ‘Rapture, ‘and the ‘Second Coming.’ With Cruz, Pence and Devos as leaders, they have become the second most powerful grouping under the GOP tent, and the one with the most reactionary platform and outlook, even more so than Trump himself in some ways.

 The Establishment Neoliberal ‘RINOs’

This is the name now widely used in the media for what we previously labeled the Multinationalists. It’s mainly the upper crust and neoliberal business elites that have owned and run the GOP for years, but are now largely out in the cold. It included the quasi-libertarian House’ Freedom Caucus,’ the smaller group of NeoCons on foreign policy (John Bolton and John McCain), and the shrinking number of RINO (Republican In Name Only) moderates in The Lincoln Project. The Establishment also favors a globalist, U.S. hegemonist and even, at times, unilateralist approach abroad, with some still defending the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq. Their prominent voice today is Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

We also need to keep in mind the global backdrop to these shifts. The worldwide process of technology-driven financialization has divided the ruling class of late capitalism in every major country into three—a local sector of the transnational capitalist class, the nation-based multinationals, and an anti-globalist national sector. Thus among traditional U.S. neoliberals, some are U.S. hegemonists, but many have a transnational globalist understanding of the world with vast amounts of their money in foreign stock. China and global value chains integrate them with other global capitalists. This is why Trump’s trade policy is so controversial with Wall Street elites of both Republican and Democratic leanings. U.S. economic hegemony makes no sense at this financial and productive integration level. The global three way division also serves to explain why Trump’s rightwing populism, despite its American characteristics, is connected to the rightwing nationalist-populist rise in all European countries. He is not ‘explainable’ in American terns alone.

This subordination is a big change for the traditional GOP top dogs. They would like to purge a weakened Trump from the party and rebuild, but so far lack the ability. They could try to form a new party with neoliberal Dems. Or, more likely, they could join the Dems and try to push out or smother those to the left of the Third Way grouping.

Now let’s turn to the Dem tent, starting at the top right of the graphic.

The Blue Dogs

The Blue Dogs, according to the online newsletter Sludge, “operates a political action committee, Blue Dog PAC, that raises millions of dollars each election cycle, mainly from corporate PACs, and spends money to help elect more conservative Democrats. Corporate PACs that donated to Blue Dog PAC in the 2018 election cycle include those affiliated with drug company Pfizer, defense contractor Northrop Grumman, oil company ExxonMobil, and Wall Street bank Citigroup.”

This small ‘party’ has persisted and gained some energy. The recent effort of West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin to bloc or gut Biden’s reforms is a case in point. One earlier reason was that the United Steel Workers and a few craft unions had decided ‘to work with Trump’ on tariffs and trade. The USW also got firmly behind Connor Lamb (D-PA) for Congress. Lamb won a narrow victory in a Western PA CD in a rural and conservative area, but with many USW miner’s votes. He was endorsed by the Blue Dog PAC, although he is not yet a formal member of the caucus. Getting into a nearly physical floor fight with the GOP over Jan. 6 ‘radicalized’ Lamb a bit, moving him leftward.

But the small Blue Dog resurgence may not last. On the one hand, the DNC Third Way gang currently loves people like Lamb, and wants to see more candidates leaning to the center and even the right. On the other hand, an unstableTrump out of office has little to offer on major infrastructure plans save for ‘Build The Wall’ chanting at rallies. His potential votes among USW and other union members may shrink.

The Third Way New Democrats

First formed by the Clintons, with international assistance from Tony Blair and others, this dominant ‘party’ was funded by Wall Street finance capitalists. The founding idea was to move toward neoliberalism by ‘creating distance’ between themselves and the traditional Left-Labor-Liberal bloc, i.e., the traditional unions and civil rights groups still connected to the New Deal legacy. Another part of ‘Third Way’ thinking was to shift the key social base away from the core of the working class toward college-educated suburban voters, but keeping alliances with Black and women’s groups still functional.

Thus the Third Way had tried to temper the harsher neoliberalism of the GOP by ‘triangulating’ with neo-Keynesian and left-Keynesian policies. But the overall effect is to move Democrats and their platform generally rightward. With Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat, the Third Way’s power in the party has diminished somewhat but gained clout with the victory of Biden. As mentioned above, its labor alliances have weakened, with unions now going in three directions. Most of labor has remained with the Third Way. Some moved rightward to the Blue Dogs while others—Communications Workers, National Nurses United, and the U.E.—are part of the Sanders bloc. Regarding the current relation of forces in the party apparatus, the Third Way has about 60% of the positions and still controls the major money. In California in 2018, for example, the Regulars kept control of the state party committee only with extremely narrow margins over Bernie supporters.

The key test was the November battle with Trump: Who inspired and mobilized the much-needed ‘Blue Wave’, gave it focus and put the right numbers in the right places? The measured Third Way moderates? Or the Social Democrat insurgents? This question brings us to the last of the six’ parties.’

The Rainbow Social Democrats

This description is better than simply calling it the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), as this article’s first version did. I’ve kept the ‘Rainbow’ designation because of the dynamic energy of AOC and the Squad. The Third Way, which has kept the older and more pragmatic voters of the rainbow groupings under its centrist influence, can still share it as well.

As explained before, the ‘Social Democrat’ title doesn’t mean each leader or activist here is in a social-democrat or democratic socialist group like DSA. It means the core groups–the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Working Families Party (WFP), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Justice Democrats and Our Revolution and Indivisible—all have platforms are roughly similar to the left social democrat groupings in Europe. This is made even more evident with AOC’s and Bernie’s self-description as ‘democratic socialists’ in the primaries and the general, where it only seemed to help. The platform, however, is not socialist itself, but best described as a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist and fascist right. This is true of groups like Die Linke (‘The Left’) in Germany as well, which met recently with PDA and CPC members. In that sense, the ‘Third Reconstruction,’ promoted by Rev William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign, might also serves as a good designation and goal.

Finally, there is the ongoing dramatic growth of the DSA due to their wise tactics in the 2016 Bernie campaign. They went all in for Bernie but also lost no opening to make themselves visible. Prominent Justice Democrat and DSAer Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who has been a firebrand in the House, has made the ‘Green New Deal’ a household term, and joined Sanders in his efforts to shape Biden’s agenda. Now with nearly 100.000 members with chapters in every state, DSA has already won a few local and statehouse races the first time out. They are now an important player in their own right within these local clusters. But their growth may have peaked for a while. Their surfacing weaknesses reside in sorting out their own internal differences with sectarianism and even chauvinism against Black candidates.

This overall growth of this ‘party’ is all to the good. The common front approach of the Social Democratic bloc can unite more than a militant minority of actual socialists. Instead, it has a platform that can also unite a progressive majority around both immediate needs and structural reforms, including both socialists and non-socialists, the ‘Third Reconstruction.’ Apart from winning 46% of the 2016 Dem convention delegates and a good number of statehous seats, this ‘party’ is now noted for two things. First is the huge, elemental outpourings of young people–mainly women, students and the young workers of the distressed ‘precariat’ sector of the class–in the elemental risings of millions after Trump took office. Second was the enormous risings following the murder of George Floyd by the police—over 20 million, the largest in U.S history. With other mass groups like Our Revolution and Indivisible, they all added a higher degree of organization at the base to this dynamic and growing cluster.

What does it all mean?

With this brief descriptive and analytical mapping of the upper crust of American politics, many things are falling into place. The formerly subaltern rightist groupings in the GOP have risen in revolt against the Neoliberal Establishment of the Cheneys, Romneys and the Bushes. Now they have rightwing populist and white nationalist hegemony. The GOP, then, can be accurately called the party of the neo-Confederates and the main target of a popular, anti-fascist front. Under the other tent, the Third Way is seeking a new post-neoliberal platform, through President Joe Biden’s reforms. The progressive-center unity of the earlier Obama coalition, with all its constituency alliances, is still in place. At the same time, the Third Way still wants to co-opt and control the Social Democrats as an energetic but critical secondary ally. The Sanders’ forces have few illusions about this pressure on them, and don’t want to be anyone’s subaltern without a fight. So we are continuing to press all our issues, but adapting some policies to the common front vs. the fascist right. If we work well, we will build more base organizations, more alliances, and more clout as we go.

This ‘big picture’ also reveals much about the current budget debates. All three parties under the GOP tent still advocate neoliberal austerity. The Third Way-dominated Senate Democrats and Blue Dogs push for an ‘austerity lite’ budget and some Keynesian infrastructure programs. Team Biden, the Social Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are working on ‘Build Back Better’ programs and ‘Green New Deal’ projects that might expand advanced manufacturing jobs.

However, we must keep in mind that favorably ‘shifting the balance of forces’ in election campaigns is often an indirect and somewhat ephemeral gain. It does ‘open up space’, but for what? Progressive initiatives matter for sure, but much more is required strategically. Strategically, we are in a war of position, with periodic tactical ‘war of movement’ elemental risings. In that framework, we are interested in pushing the popular front vs. finance capital to its limits and developing a 21st-century socialist bloc. If that comes to scale in the context of a defeat of the pro-Trump right bloc, the Democratic tent is also going to be stretched and strained. It could even collapse and implode, given the sharper class contradictions and other fault lines that lie within it, much as the Whigs split four ways in the 19th Century. This ‘Whig option’ tactic would demand an ability on the part of the left to regroup all the progressive forces, inside and outside, into a new ‘First Party’ alliance or counter-hegemonic bloc. Such a formation also includes a militant minority of socialists, which will then be able to contend for governing power. The tricky part is to do this in a way that keeps the right at bay.

An old classic formula summing up the strategic thinking of the united front is appropriate here: ‘Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate and divide the backward forces, then crush our adversaries one by one.’ In short, we must have a policy and set of tactics for each one of these elements, as well as a strategy for dealing with them overall. Moreover, take note of a warning from the futurist Alvin Toffler: ‘If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.’ Then finally, as to tactics, ‘wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint.’

To conclude, we still need to start with a realistic view of ourselves as an organized socialist left. Save for DSA, we are mostly quite small as organizations, but now we can see we are swimming in a sea of millions open to socialism. What can we do now? If you can see yourself or your group honestly working to achieve DSA’s stated program, by all means, join them and make them even larger. Or set up Jacobin / In These Times Reading Groups in your living rooms and unite socialists and close friends with them. The same goes with the new Convergence project growing out of Organizing Upgrade. Or join CCDS, CPUSA, Left Roots, or Liberation Road—socialist groups which largely share some or most of the perspective here. Join or start PDA or WFP chapters everywhere, use organizations and broad ‘Third Reconstruction’ and ‘Modern Tecumseh’ alliances and popular rainbow assemblies to build mass mobilizations, register new voters and defeat the GOP in November 2022 and 2024.

With both socialists and rainbow progressives, start at the base, focus on city and state governments, and expand the Congressional Progressive Caucus. We rarely gain victories at the top that have not been won and consolidated earlier at the base. Most of all, in order to form broader and winning coalitions, you need base organizations of your own to form partnerships and alliances WITH! Seize the time and Git ‘er done!

As Marxism’s old messianic character faded in the late twentieth century, too many forgot that wandering in the wilderness is often the precondition of a prophet’s appearance. With the collapse of “really existing” socialism came what seemed like a permanent triumph of capitalism and the slow, grinding destruction of whatever resisted the market’s advance. But the far-too-unexpected renaissance of socialism in the twenty-first century reveals not only how much ground has been lost, but how much baggage has been shed. The presence of an authoritarian communist superpower was not only an ideological ball and chain for left politics outside the Eastern bloc, but also a real geopolitical straitjacket: at the electoral peak of European communist parties in the 1970s, the Soviet Union never kept secret that it preferred reactionaries in power in the West.

Now that this old shadow has passed and socialists are making a slow exit from the desert, they have a chance to redefine themselves for a new century. That involves taking bigger and more difficult steps, and it is not surprising that the effort has sent contemporary democratic socialists back to the 1970s, the last historical moment when socialist thinkers enjoyed even the illusion of political possibilities. In the brief window before the neoliberal era, socialists were just beginning to ask what a left politics that could win elections in a democratic system would look like. Who would its base be—what sort of alliance between classes and identity groups would it appeal to? How would it act toward a “bourgeois” political system that communists had always seen as an unredeemable instrument of class domination? Is it even possible to be a democratic revolutionary?

These questions came together in the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a Greek thinker who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in Paris. There, Poulantzas argued that a sophisticated understanding of the capitalist state was central to a strategy for democratic socialism. Pushing as far as possible toward a Marxist theory of politics while still holding onto the central role of class struggle, Poulantzas tried to combine the insights of revolutionary strategy with a defense of parliamentary democracy against what he called “authoritarian statism.”

Recent signs of a Poulantzas renaissance, including the republication of several of his books in French and English, have a lot to do with the fact that his dual strategy for democratic socialism resonates with the task of today’s socialists: to understand how to use the capitalist state as a strategic weapon without succumbing to a long history of failed electoral projects and realignment strategies. The tensions in Poulantzas’s thinking resemble the current tensions within the left: is winning back power a matter of casting the oligarchs out of government and restoring a lost fairness, or is a more radical transformation of the state required?

It is an open question whether Poulantzas himself was able to articulate a satisfying vision for democratic socialism. His work, nevertheless, goes straight to the heart of the problems that twenty-first-century socialism must face.

Toward a Structural Theory of the Capitalist State

Nicos Poulantzas was born in Athens in 1936. In his twenties, he began a law degree at the University of Athens as a back door into philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings became a conduit for Marxism among young Greek intellectuals since, as Poulantzas later explained, it was difficult to get the original canonical Marxist texts in a country that had suffered Nazi occupation, then civil war, then a repressive anticommunist government. After a brief stint in legal studies in Germany, Poulantzas made his way to Paris, where he was soon teaching law at the Sorbonne and mingling with the editors of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s journal Les Temps modernes. Poulantzas was drafted among a crop of new, younger writers for the journal, which published his earliest writings on law and the state and his engagements with British and Italian Marxists, including the Italian Communist Party’s in-house theorist, Antonio Gramsci. His 1964 doctoral thesis on the philosophy of law was broadly influenced by Sartre’s existentialism and the thought of Georg Lukács and Lucien Goldmann, who harmonized with the Hegelian Marxism dominant in France.

Louis Althusser, then a more marginal French philosopher but soon to be famous across Europe, dissented from this Hegelian turn. Althusser’s 1965 seminar, “Reading Capital,” was a curious event in the history of Marxism that marked the intellectual itineraries of well-known theorists like Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière. The framework it launched into Marxist theory, usually described as “structuralism,” was inextricable from Althusser’s dual opposition to Stalinist economism and the humanism of thinkers like Sartre. In the classic Marxist schema, the economic “base” gives rise to political and ideological “superstructures”—in other words, most everything about capitalist society, from its political institutions to its culture, are ultimately fated by the laws of economics. The Althusserians argued that, on the contrary, all of the domains of capitalist society operate quasi-independently of one another in order to more flexibly reproduce capitalist domination. Of course, they are tightly interrelated, and the economic decides “in the last instance” whether economics or something else will take priority, but, according to Althusser himself, “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”

Poulantzas was not a major participant in the “Reading Capital” seminar, but applied some of its theoretical principles to his own thinking about law and the state. Like Marx and Engels before him, Poulantzas believed that the fundamental role of the state is to defend class power. But the capitalist state, he argued, does this in a complex way that is obscured both by liberal and traditional Marxist theory. The capitalist state is not merely, as liberals imagined, a political structure that represents the unity of the individual members of a “civil society.” Nor is it, as in base-and-superstructure Marxism, simply an outgrowth of capital’s economic domination of labor, a straightforward tool of class power. On the contrary, liberal ideals—popular sovereignty, individual rights—are what enable the capitalist state to act in the interests of the dominant classes. Because it can pose as the representative of the people, the capitalist state is the ideal manager of the interests of the capitalist class. It can arrange compromises with the “dominated classes” necessary to establish the legitimacy of the social order while maintaining a distance from the most venal and short-sighted fractions of the capitalist class, whose natural instinct is to pursue what Marx called “the narrowest and most sordid private interests” over the well-being of the dominant classes as a whole.

Poulantzas’s shift of emphasis away from the struggle between capital and labor required him to rethink the nature of “class” and “class struggle.” Classes, he argued, are born in traditional “economic” confrontation over wages, time, and working conditions, but they are also made politically, depending on how they organize themselves and exert pressure on the political system. Poulantzas argued that the political in capitalist society in fact “overdetermines”—establishes a kind of complex, contradiction-riddled hierarchy over—other kinds of class struggle by rigging things from the beginning against the dominated classes. The same legal setup that enables the capitalist state to “organize” the interests of the dominant classes simultaneously disorganizes the dominated classes: it recognizes them, legally and politically, only as isolated individuals, with no recognition of the economic position into which they have been sorted. The capitalist state’s separation of the political from the economic isolates class struggle in factories and workplaces while the real battle has already been decided in the very functioning of the political system.

As a work of militant Marxist sociology, Political Power and Social Classes struck out onto a terrain that, since the end of the Second World War, had grown over with new liberal theories of social groups, bureaucracy, and “industrial relations” that celebrated the postwar order as an era of growing social integration and declining class conflict. Liberal sociology tended to see the growth of bureaucracy in both private firms and state administration as an inevitable result of the complexity of social organization, a new era of “managerial” or “industrial” society that was, for some, a welcome overcoming of the competition and conflict of laissez-faire capitalism. Many, though certainly not all, liberal social scientists and technocrats took an elitist view of postwar society: the Keynesian compromise delivered real gains to the masses while keeping political power safely in the hands of rational experts.

Poulantzas was not the only figure of the late 1960s to sense that Marxist theory had to advance in order to demonstrate what most everyone to the left of social democrats believed: that the liberal orthodoxy of the epoch was a delusional obfuscation of the real nature of the new technocratic Keynesian state. In The State in Capitalist Society, published just months after Poulantzas’s book, the British political scientist Ralph Miliband demonstrated empirically that the transition from the more limited liberal state to the interventionist, managerial state, had done nothing to threaten the ruling class’s consolidation of power. In many cases, he argued, it wasn’t even true that big business kept a distance from the state—in fact, it had a direct and constant presence in executive cabinets and the apparatuses of financial governance and economic planning. Influenced by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, who tried to diagnose the tight interlocking of the American ruling classes in The Power Elite (1956), Miliband assembled a mass of evidence that different kinds of elites share social origins, cultural backgrounds, educational trajectories, and mentalities, and the exceptions were subtly indoctrinated into conforming to the rules. Whatever its compromises with the working class, the capitalist state was still the instrument of the dominant classes.

Miliband’s approach to the capitalist state had certain affinities with the communist view that was Poulantzas’s other primary target. For Poulantzas, this view mistakenly saw the state as a neutral infrastructure that was corrupted by who had power over it. On the contrary, he argued, it made zero difference who was in charge because the capitalist state was already a highly calibrated machine for manufacturing class domination. This was a theoretical point with big strategic consequences, Poulantzas argued: if the left imagined the state could be left intact and steered toward socialism, it was in for a rude awakening.  “Lenin said that it was necessary to win state power by smashing the state machine,” he declared, “and I need say no more.”

Authoritarian Statism, or How We Got Neoliberalism All Wrong

As Poulantzas was debating the nature of the state in the late sixties and seventies, the postwar, post-ideological consensus was coming undone. Left-wing movements with new ideas sprouted everywhere at the same time traditional social democratic and communist parties’ memberships swelled, apparently putting them on the path to electoral power. But almost everywhere, socialism’s steps toward power were answered by brutal reaction. Fears of a left-wing government led to a military coup in Greece in 1967, and the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile was crushed by a similar—and equally U.S.-supported—coup in 1973. By the end of the decade, economic crisis had further complicated the situation, heralding a long period of retreat from the use of state power for redistributive and egalitarian projects.

Poulantzas stood out among 1970s thinkers in seeing military dictatorship and the beginnings of neoliberalism as part of a single menu of options capitalist governments had in response to economic and political crisis. There is a doggedly persistent view that the post-1970s political-economic order involved a weakening of the nation-state: that big business demanded a retreat from state intervention in the economy, while the increasingly global system enabled capitalists to circumvent national government. For Poulantzas, neoliberalism was only one facet of a broader turn he called “authoritarian statism”: a combination of the managerial powers of the Keynesian state with a strategic retreat from some of its former economic functions. New state tactics included deliberate submission to anti-democratic international institutions, economic policies that made life more atomized and precarious, and intensified surveillance and repression. In extreme situations, especially in countries dependent on larger “imperialist” powers, economic crisis could lead to “exceptional forms” of capitalism, like fascism or military dictatorship. In advanced liberal-democratic countries it was likely to look like a subtler combination of selective internationalism, intensified technocracy, and police violence.

Early in his trajectory, Poulantzas had highlighted the importance of locating each nation’s position in a global “imperialist chain” to make sense of the particular form its state needed to take to reproduce capitalist class power. In the 1970s, he focused particularly on the emerging dependence of European states and their dominant classes on U.S. imperialism, expressed in the growing investment of American capital in Europe during the 1960s. It was not enough for the European left to conclude that the crises of “monopoly capitalism” were destined to destroy it from within, as many communist parties held. For strategic reasons, they needed to understand the specific relations of imperialism and the crises they produced, including the relations between the “imperialist metropoles” of the United States and Europe. American capital, Poulantzas argued, had increased its hold over Europe through direct investment in sectors where American corporations already exercised highly consolidated international control. By doing so, they were able to exert even broader economic influence, setting the standards for raw materials, insisting on reorganizing the labor process, and imposing certain management ideologies.

The answer to Europe’s new dependence, or “satellite imperialism,” was not, as even some French liberals argued, one of the nation-state versus “multinational corporations,” or, as some leftists imagined, the chance for a coalition that aligned a national bourgeoisie with the left against the dominating forces of international capital. Despite the internationalization of the economy and the growth of supranational institutions like the European Economic Community, Poulantzas insisted that the national state was still the primary site of the “reproduction” of capitalism. The rise of supranational institutions itself was merely a part of the national state’s transformation of its role in managing the economy, facilitating economic internationalization as part of its efforts on behalf of its national ruling class.

But acting as the primary agent of internationalization put the capitalist nation-state in a position particularly vulnerable to crisis and with a limited range of responses. Internationalization weakened the unity of the domestic ruling classes, as the state acted on behalf of certain fractions of capital at the expense of others. It put the ideological unity of the nation in jeopardy by supporting lopsided economic development within its own territory—as illustrated by our current situation where booming mega-cities power the global economy while small towns and rural areas suffer painful depopulation and decline. Such contradictions are certain to cause political tension and revolt because they shatter the myth that the state is a neutral arbiter on behalf of the whole nation. (They, might, for example, get people thinking about “nationalists” versus “globalists.”) “In a certain sense, the state is caught in its own trap,” Poulantzas writes. “It is not an all-powerful state with which we are dealing with, but rather a state with its back to the wall and its front poised before a ditch.”

“Authoritarian statism,” then, was a general term for the type of capitalist governance that had emerged in the postwar period and only been accentuated by the political and economic crises of the 1970s and the upsurge of popular militancy. He deliberately intended the term as a broad stand-in for what seemed to be the transformation of capitalist government: the massive shift in power from parliaments to the executive, the decline of traditional political parties, the shift of more and more functions of governance from representative institutions to permanent bureaucratic apparatuses controlled by executive power. It also had dimensions of direct repression: the increased use of police and military violence against domestic populations, arbitrary curtailments of civil liberties, and the rise of government on an emergency basis that transcended—sometimes permanently—the normal “state of law.”

State, Power, Socialism (1978) was Poulantzas’s last major update to his theory of the capitalist state, in which one of his major tasks was to think through the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of power, and to articulate how authoritarian statism, as he later put it, brought a shift from “organized brute force to internalized repression.” Unlike Foucault, however, Poulantzas insisted that such disciplinary techniques, even though they are laundered through the state, are ultimately linked back to economic exploitation and class power. Poulantzas had already argued that the separation of the political from the economic, with its attendant creation of atomized legal individuals, was part of the infrastructure of the capitalist state. In State, Power, Socialism, he reiterated that dividing up individuals for domination in the economy is the liberal state’s “primal” role; it continually institutionalizes that fracturing, reinforcing it both ideologically and materially. In other words, the state uses its own practices to make the neoliberal individual. Old markers of social hierarchy and relationships are replaced with scientific-bureaucratic norms that classify and measure people and remind them of their status as individualized social atoms.

Poulantzas’s conception of the state had grown progressively more dynamic: where he had initially emphasized its functional, machine-like qualities, he now dramatized its internal fractures and divisions, and the contingencies introduced by its vulnerability to crisis and its tight links to class struggle. The state, in Poulantzas’s most famous formulation, was “the condensation of a relationship of forces between classes. . . . Class contradictions are the very stuff of the state: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization.” Poulantzas’s insistence on the materiality of the state’s apparatuses and their reproduction of class power was thus a direct challenge the Foucauldian theorization of power as the all-encompassing fabric of society, a kind of game in which every act of resistance was a strategic “move.” “Power always has a precise basis,” Poulantzas countered. The state “is a site and a center of the exercise of power, but it possesses no power of its own.”

Inside and Outside the State: The Democratic Road to Socialism

Poulantzas’s evolution toward a more dynamic conception of the state had important implications for socialist strategy, one of the features of his thought that has attracted the most attention from contemporary democratic socialists. In his early work, the central argument of his theory of the capitalist state—that it was a structural device for reproducing class domination—led him to affirm a traditional Leninist strategy of “smashing the state.” But as Poulantzas got more specific about the complexity of the state’s apparatuses and their status as a force field of class struggle, he reached a new conclusion: if the state was a set of relationships rather than a “thing,” could it really be encircled or charged like a fortress?

There was no question that, in its current form, the state acted as the organizer of class domination. But a crucial dimension of Poulantzas’s theory was that, in nontrivial ways, the dominated classes were already a part of the state. In the twentieth century, the capitalist state’s fundamental task of “organizing” class struggles had forced it to take major steps—not least the creation of the welfare state—toward accommodating working-class demands. While such achievements were always under threat from capital, they were still achievements that had become a real part of the state infrastructure. In the mid-1970s, as the dictatorships of Southern Europe transitioned to democracy, and as the Italian and French Communist parties wrestled with how to participate in parliamentary politics, Poulantzas began to think about how the balance of power between classes could be radically shifted so that the weak and marginal positions the dominated classes already held in the struggles over the state could be turned into bases for rupture and transformation.

For both theoretical and strategic reasons, Poulantzas reconsidered the relevance of Leninist “dual-power” strategies that aimed to build working-class counter-institutions that would eventually grow strong enough to “smash” the capitalist state. This strategy had originated in a rather ad-hoc fashion in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917. For Poulantzas, looking at the political systems of Western Europe in the late 1970s, it was impossible to imagine a position entirely outside the state. While the dominated classes could and should build rank-and-file institutional power at a distance from the state, they could never be truly outside its field of power. “Today, less than ever is the state an ivory tower isolated from the popular masses,” he wrote. “The state is neither a thing-instrument that may be taken away, nor a fortress that may be penetrated by means of a wooden horse, nor yet a safe that may be cracked by a burglary: it is the heart of the exercise of political power.”

The rhetoric of “smashing” the state not only failed to see that the state was not a “thing” to smash, but also implied—as it ultimately had in the October Revolution—a suppression of institutions of representative democracy that could serve as a defense against an authoritarian statism under new management. Poulantzas tried to envision a way that the left could simultaneously champion both rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and a push for radical transformation within it. Working within the state would aim to produce “breaks” that would polarize the highly conflictual state apparatuses toward the working class, assisted by external pressure from rank-and-file organizations. “It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose,” Poulantzas wrote. “In addition struggle must always express itself in the development of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centers of self-management.”

Poulantzas’s attempt at an internal-external strategy aimed to walk a narrow line between a social democratic reformism that merely practiced parliamentary politics as usual and a Leninist revolutionary strategy that he saw as potentially authoritarian and in any case doomed to perpetual isolation from really-existing paths to socialism. Revolutionary critics from the 1970s to the present have argued that this was merely a reformism in disguise. Poulantzas agreed that the risk of falling into reformism was real, but suggested that such a risk was endemic to every revolutionary position in the late twentieth century. “History has not yet given us a successful experience of the democratic road to socialism,” he wrote. “What it has provided—and that is not insignificant—is some negative examples to avoid and some mistakes upon which to reflect. . . . But one thing is certain: socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.”

A Marxism for the Twenty-First Century?

Poulantzas threw himself from a window in Paris in 1979. In his final years, he seemed to be straining against the seams of his thinking—and perhaps even against the Marxist tradition itself. He had tried to remake the theory of the capitalist state for the twentieth century and socialist strategy for an era of democratic politics. Fellow Marxists have accused him of every transgression in the book: of “scholasticism,” of reformism, of abandoning the concept of class, of remaining too attached to class struggle and the determining power of the economic. He considered his own position as far as one could go toward a Marxist politics without abandoning the fundamental commitment to the determinant role of the relations of production. “If we remain within this conceptual framework, I think that the most that one can do for the specificity of politics is what I have done,” he confessed to the British journal Marxism Today in 1979. “I am not absolutely sure myself that I am right to be Marxist; one is never sure.”

The ambiguities of the final Poulantzas could stand for the whole of his work. Is it possible to square a structural theory of the capitalist state with a dynamic sense of class struggle? Can the vision of a machine-like state whose infrastructure unfailingly spits out class domination be reconciled with one that has “no power of its own,” that merely reflects the balance of class forces in society? Can we really think about class struggle without attention to historical subjects, to the consciousness of all the past discriminations and defeats that, as Marx put it, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living?” Is the strategy of combining struggle within the capitalist state with popular movements outside it any less of a pipe dream than all the revolutionary strategies that went before?

There is certainly no question of Poulantzas answering all, or even most, of the questions that democratic socialists face today. If nothing else, his at times maddeningly abstract and incantatory writing style make his work a forbidding thicket for a reader of almost any level of preparation to penetrate. But it is also possible to argue that his very contradictions and ambiguities, which reflected an era of uncertainty that strongly resembles our own, are precisely what makes Poulantzas a provocative source today. Even if he failed to provide satisfying answers to the challenges of the 1970s, he did a great deal to highlight them.

Above all, Poulantzas draws attention to what the British political theorist Ed Rooksby calls “one of the oldest and most fundamental controversies in socialist thought”—that is, “how, and to what extent, capitalist state power might be utilized for socialist objectives.” Poulantzas’s conception of the capitalist state reveals the clear limits of the view typical on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, likely to be on full display in the 2020 election campaign, that reversing American oligarchy is primarily a matter of restoring smart governance and rolling back the grip of the wealthy on the political system. At the same time, however, it is skeptical that unreconstructed revolutionism, which has a small but vocal presence in the resurgent American left, is anything but a fantasy and a path to continued marginality. A nuanced theoretical understanding of the state could serve as an antidote to both kinds of error.

Relatedly, Poulantzas’s sense of the modulations of the capitalist state through its succession of crises are a welcome challenge to simplistic narratives that have colored even left-wing understandings of twentieth-century history. By trying to understand the phases and crisis forms of a fundamentally continuous capitalist state, Poulantzas is a helpful corrective to the notion of a mid-century Keynesian period of strong state interventionism followed by a deregulated neoliberal period marked by a weakened and undermined national state. For strategic reasons, it is important that the contemporary left understand neoliberalism as neither an overall weakening of the nation-state nor a decline in in its strategic importance. Technocratic statism is, rather, a combination of state practices developed during the twentieth century, including the selective delegation of governing powers to international bodies, that have both effectively disorganized the dominated classes and provoked social resistance that now makes them sites of controversy and struggle.

And then there are his writings on the democratic road to socialism, sketches that, while providing no answers in advance, leave a series of suggestive blanks begging to be filled in. “There is only one sure way of avoiding the risks of democratic socialism,” Poulantzas concluded his final book, “and that is to keep quiet and march ahead under the tutelage and the rod of advanced liberal democracy.” We know that path has frightening risks of its own.

David Sessions is a doctoral candidate in European history at Boston College and a graduate fellow at the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Jacobin, Commonweal, and elsewhere.

October 2018:An exchange prompted by the essay 

The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class? 

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Bill Fletcher
Taking a long view of precariousness as an inherent feature of capitalism can shed light on the contemporary debate on “the precariat.” Read

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Nancy Folbre
The focus on “the precariat” is useful but limited: the fight over distribution isn’t just between labor and capital. Read

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Azfar Khan
A universal basic income is key to delivering security and autonomy to people in a precarious world. Read

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Alexandra Köves
Beyond policies like a universal basic income, a transition to a equitable and sustainable society requires the redefinition of well-being, needs, and work itself. Read

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George Liodakis
There is no “precariat,” per se—the working class as-a-whole remains the necessary agent for transformation. Read

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Ronaldo Munck
Work in the Global South has always been precarious, but the resurgence of global labor organizing offers a way forward. Read

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William I. Robinson
The “precariat,” rather than a new class, is part of the global proletariat, on whose struggle with transnational capital our fate depends. Read

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Pritam Singh
A basic income alone is not transformative, but a feature of a broader ecosocialist vision of dismantling capitalism. Read

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Eva-Maria Swidler
Workers in the Global North have a lot to learn from the past struggles of workers in the Global South (as well as in their own countries). Read

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Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor
Labor unions must continue to play an important role in the fight for economic justice and against precariousness. Read

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Author’s Response
Guy Standing addresses points raised by the contributors to this roundtable. Read
 

By Guy Standing

October 2018

Panagiotis Sotiris and Thomas Goes

Viewpoint Magazine, May 7, 2018

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Thomas Goes: Why should we, today, study the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a theoretician who died almost 40 years ago? Or to put it differently, what can activists, organizers, and cadres within the anti-capitalist left learn from his writings that could be useful, indeed, even necessary to build a strong, promising left?

Panagiotis Sotiris: The work of Nicos Poulantzas is one of the most important contributions to a possible Marxist theory of the state and of class antagonisms within the state. His was a highly original, relational conception of the state — the state as not simply an instrument in the hands of the ruling class but as the “condensation of a class relation.” He offered invaluable insights into the complexity of state apparatuses, articulating multiple relations between the state and the terrain of class struggle including the realm of production, and the myriad ways that the state functions as a crucial node in the (re)production of bourgeois class strategies.¹

Poulantzas’s final book, State, Power, Socialism, offers one of the most sophisticated conceptualizations of how the state plays a crucial role in the production and reproduction of repressive measures and ideological interpellations, but also shapes discourses, strategies and technologies of power, to borrow Foucault’s term. This approach is reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci’s integral state, the “entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”² In this sense, Poulantzas’s theory is a tool to help militants understand what they are up against.

At the same time, Poulantzas’s relational conception of the state offers a way to theorize the effectiveness of class struggles. It is true that there has been a tendency to interpret this relational conception as a form of reformism, that it points toward a gradual transformation of the state by means of the struggles that are “interiorized” within it. I disagree with a reading that would turn Poulantzas’s work into something like Eduard Bernstein’s reformism. According to Poulantzas, state apparatuses are the “materialization and condensation of class relations.” So, we are talking about a class state inscribed with the strategic and tactical interests of the bourgeoisie.³ In any case it is neither fortress nor instrument but a terrain of class antagonisms. Subaltern classes can induce ruptures, openings, and gains as part of a strategy for hegemony, which in the end will also need a confrontation with the very materiality of the repressive apparatuses of the state (what in classical Marxist theory was described as the necessity to smash the state). This is yet another useful reminder for militants: radical politics is neither a long march through institutions nor a simple preparation for a final confrontation with the state. We might think of it instead as a complex dialectical process: of changing the class balance of forces in favor of the subaltern classes, creating conditions for working class hegemony and preparing for the confrontation with the class strategies materially inscribed in the state.

Lastly, I want to emphasize the importance of Poulantzas’s theorization of authoritarian statism. Poulantzas was one of the first Marxist theorists in the aftermath of the capitalist crisis of 1973-4 to suggest that the reaction of the capitalist classes and their political representatives in the state was the result of extensive capitalist restructuring (and the first signs of the neoliberal turn) along with an authoritarian transformation of the state. I think that this dual tendency has since been a constant feature of social and political power. On the one hand it is exemplified in developments within capitalist states e.g. the expansion of repressive surveillance, the move of the center of power from the legislative to the executive, insulation of the decision processes against any form of intervention by the popular classes, and reduction of the scope of political debate with important strategic choices presented as simply technical. On the other hand, it is evident in the authoritarian institutional framework of the European Union, in some ways the model par excellence of authoritarian statism in Europe.

TG: Maybe we can move on to Poulantzas’s class analysis. What is its importance for our activism today? Why should we distinguish between a working class and what he called the “new petty bourgeoisie” composed of different layers of wage earners?

PS: Poulantzas offered a theory of class structures grounded in three key points.

First, he suggested that social classes are unthinkable outside of the terrain of class struggle. He wrote that “social classes involve in one and the same process both class contradictions and class struggle; social classes do not firstly exist as such, and only then enter into a class struggle. Social classes coincide with class practices, i.e. the class struggle, and are only defined in their mutual opposition.”⁴

Second, he argued that relations of production are not simple relations of legal ownership but rather complex relations of power and control of the means and process of production.

Third, he said that when we deal with the relations of production and the formation of class we are not simply talking about “economic” aspects but also political and ideological ones. In this sense, we avoid both the narrow economism of many traditional Marxist approaches and, at the same time, the underestimation of the centrality of relations of production that characterizes neo-Weberian theories of class stratification.

Poulantzas’s insight into the new petty bourgeoisie was essential.⁵ It was based upon a conception of the primacy of the social division of labor over the technical division of labor (which is the reflection of the primacy of the relations of production over the productive forces). For Poulantzas, “it is the social division of labor, in the form that this is given by the specific presence of political and ideological relations actually within the production process, which dominates the technical division of labor.”⁶

Consequently, he stressed the fact that the emergence of contradictory class positions that represent at the same time aspects of the collective laborer and of the collective capitalist was not a “neutral” technical evolution, but the expression of a deepening of the capitalist character of the labor process and of the political and ideological relations within the terrain of production. Despite certain shortcomings, such as Poulantzas’s tendency to identify the working class with productive labor (a choice that leaves out important working class segments), I think that this is an important contribution to any Marxist theory of social classes.

Moreover, I think that Poulantzas’s analysis can help us understand why treating these social strata as “working class” would mean taking for granted this form of the capitalist labor process and of the capitalist division between intellectual and manual labor. Moreover, it would also mean the incorporation of important elements of the petty-bourgeois ideology.

This does not mean that these strata could not be a part of the “people” as the alliance of the subaltern classes. Indeed one of the most important challenges today is gaining these strata in such political direction. In our time, contemporary capitalist restructurings tend at the same time to expand such positions but also to worsen their working conditions, thus polarizing them towards the working class. Organizing such strata, incorporating them in trade unions, engaging them in collective practices and demands and breaking the ideology that they are “middle class” or “professionals” is indeed one of the most important stakes of class struggles today.

TG: Poulantzas argued for a class alliance between the working class and the old and new petty bourgeoisie. He named it “the people.” So, first, how did he assume such a “people” develops? And what was, in his understanding, the role of the state and the party within this process? My impression is that his understanding of the party’s role was quite traditional.

PS: Poulantzas attempted a reconstruction of a theory of class alliances based upon his conception of the people as an alliance under the hegemony of the working class. In this sense, he offers a class-theoretical perspective of the people in contrast to current positions such as the ones associated with reading of the work of Ernesto Laclau that tend to treat the people as a form of interpellation and as a discursive construction.

It is true that Poulantzas treated the Communist party as the main terrain for the creation of the political conditions of such an alliance. He had in mind both the experience of the Greek communist movement, how the KKE became the leading force of the people in the Resistance and the Civil War, and the experience of the titanic Communist parties of Italy and France. He therefore also had in mind the idea of an alliance of the forces of the Left.

However, it is important to note that he did not restrict his view to the Party or parties. He also underscored the significance of autonomous social movements. In his last interventions, shortly before his suicide, we can find elements of a deeper apprehension of a certain crisis of the Western mass workers’ parties and an even stronger emphasis on autonomous social movements.⁷

Unfortunately, because of his untimely death, we cannot say to which direction his work would have gone. Nowadays, we know that we cannot deal with these questions simply within a traditional party-form. Social movements, especially new forms of political intervention also based upon the reclaiming of public space, such as the Movement of the Squares in Greece or Indignados in Spain, have enabled exactly this coming together of the different social classes and groups that the “people” is comprised of. However, I still think that the question of working-class hegemony within the articulation of such an alliance still requires a common political project and the organizational form that can support it, namely a novel form of the radical left front in its encounter with autonomous initiatives from below.

TG: How would you judge Poulantzas’s theoretical and political trajectory? One can easily recognize a Maoist inflection to his work, especially in Fascism and Dictatorship and in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. What was the precise influence of Maoism on Poulantzas?

PS: Poulantzas’s theoretical and political trajectory began with his experiences as a youth in Athens, within the Greek Left (the illegal organizations of the Communist Party and the legal organizations of the EDA) and then by his close experiences of the French developments surrounding May 1968. It also included a series of theoretical influences beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre and Lucien Goldmann before his turn to Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. Another important experience for Poulantzas was the particular way he experienced not only May 1968 in France, but also the split in the Greek Communist Party in 1968 and his participation in the Communist Party of the Interior.⁸

The traditional approach is to describe the rupture in the Greek Communist movement in terms of a split between the pro-USSR hardliners of the KKE and the more “eurocommunist” or “right-wing” approach of the Communist Party of the Interior (KKE-Es). However, many militants that sided with KKE-Es were looking for a radical or even revolutionary renovation of the strategy and tactics of the Communist movement, and did so in opposition to the more traditional and bureaucratic approach of the KKE.

The local organization of KKE-Es in Paris, of which Poulantzas was an active member, was far to the left of the leadership. At the same time, it is obvious that Poulantzas was also influenced by both the radical critique of economism and reformism not only by his experiences with May 1968 but by the Chinese experience, by Mao and also the Cultural Revolution. For example, his insistence on not treating the hierarchies within the labor process as “neutral” and “technical” echoes the Cultural Revolution’s critique against the capitalist social division of labor.

However, later, particularly in the second half of the 1970’s we see a different political approach by Poulantzas. He opts for what he defined as a Left Eurocommunism and he seemed to be sympathetic towards both a strategy of left unity and democratic road to socialism. This is more obvious in the last chapter of his last book where he defended such an approach, where he insists on the possibility of combining a parliamentary majority with strong autonomous movements from below.⁹ This is indeed a contradictory position. Still, it is an attempt to think thoroughly about an important problem. Since we have the benefit of hindsight, we can say that at that particular moment he was overly optimistic about such possibilities. At the same time he did not discern how the socialist parties of that period (such as PS in France or PASOK in Greece), in the end, would end up implementing capitalist restructuring from the 1980’s onwards.

It is important to stress that this debate with the interventions of Poulantzas, Althusser, Balibar, the replies by Henri Weber or Daniel Bensaïd, the interventions by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and the parallel Italian debate (see for example the texts by Ingrao) all represent the last major debate on questions of strategy regarding socialist transition as a real, not simply theoretical, question.¹⁰

TG: You mentioned Poulantzas’s critique of economism and reformism. What was his criticism exactly about? And how did it influence his own theoretical and strategic thinking? For example, in Fascism and Dictatorship we find a constant argument that the parties of the Third International had an economistic approach. But his only strategic suggestion is that a more mass line politics would have been necessary. For example, how did it influence the politics of the local group of the KKE-Es in Paris?

PS: Poulantzas’s critique of economism is evident in many aspects of his work. First of all, the very idea of attempting to elaborate on a complex theory of the state and its role is in contrast to any instrumental conceptualization of the state. Second, the critique of Third International economism is a crucial aspect of the argument he attempts to present in Fascism and Dictatorship. Third, his theory of social classes, which includes political and ideological determinations and insists on the primacy of social division of labor to the technical division, also represents a rupture with economism.

Regarding his critique of the Third International, it is very interesting how Poulantzas attempted to draw a line of demarcation with both “third-period” sectarianism but also a reformist conception of “popular fronts” and political alliances with “democratic” bourgeois parties. Having said that, I would like to draw attention to his interventions in the debates within the Greek Communist Party of the interior.

I would like to draw attention to a text he wrote under an alias in 1970, in Agonas (“Struggle”) the organ of the Paris local organization of the KKE-Es.¹¹ This is an answer to an article by L. Eleutheriou, a member of the leadership of the Party who suggested a strategy of alliances from above with democratic parties (such as the parties of the center), based on the idea that these parties represented the petty bourgeois strata.

Poulantzas opposed this conception of political representation, rejected the idea of alliances only “from above” and insisted that the United Front tactic required work from below and an attempt from the communist parties to also work within the peasantry and other petty bourgeois strata. Since Eleutheriou evoked the 7th Congress of the Communist International and Dimitrov’s positions, Poulantzas uses his critical approach to these positions that we also find in Fascism and Dictatorship, to suggest that a different approach to political alliances was necessary.

I would like to stress here that the question of political alliances was very crucial in the debates of the Greek Left in the period of the 1967-74 dictatorship and the challenges that the Left faced such as how to create unity in struggle against the dictatorship while avoiding giving the bourgeois forces the hegemonic role in the anti-dictatorship struggle. This was also evident in his interventions after the dictatorship, in the debates around the strategy of KKE-Es where Poulantzas criticized “national anti-dictatorship alliance” that promoted, again, an alliance with bourgeois forces. In this sense, we can say that, in his interventions, Poulantzas was always to the left of the leadership of KKE-Es.

On the other hand, Poulantzas always referred to the communist movement, not to some form of heterodoxy. His positions were, by all accounts, to the left of European communist parties, and we can find, in his work, many positions that were critical of what we might call “communist reformism.” However, he never opted for a form of gauchisme [ultra-leftism] and his focus was on the communist parties. He never seemed to suggest that the solution was to adopt the positions of Maoist or Trotskyist groups of that period, whose positions he treated as one-sided; he stressed the importance of autonomous and radical mass movements.

TG: At least since 1989 there has been little discussion about a socialist transition within the broad European left. Except for some smaller groups within the revolutionary left, for example the Socialist Workers Party in England or the LCR (now the NPA) in France, left parties have focused more or less on fighting for reforms. In one way or another this was tied to strategies that tried to build alliances with social democratic and/or left-liberal parties. This was even true for the PRC [Communist Refoundation Party] in Italy – a party that tried to rethink the relationship between social movements and the party. To put it another way: The anti-neoliberal government has been the main strategic idea within the broader European Left. From a Poulantzian point of view, and also based on the Greek experience, what do you think about this strategic orientation?

PS: It is true that the period after 1968 represents a strategic crisis of the Left that took many forms. One of these was the “de-communization” of major parties of the Left and their transformation into social-democratic and later social-liberal parties. The Italian Communist Party is the one that comes first to mind. On the other hand, most of the tendencies that refused such an openly social-democratic turn did not develop something more than an anti-neoliberal position in the 1990’s, along with a defence of mass movements and a general, abstract support of socialism.

At the same time most tendencies of the revolutionary or anti-capitalist Left, or the Left that referred to the experience of 1968, also experienced an ideological crisis. Many groups dissolved and those tendencies that persisted were relatively small and lacked strategic renovation. This was obvious in the 4th International, the IST, and others.

At the same time, especially after the second half of the 1990’s with the symbolic expression of the anti-globalization movement, there was a renewed radicalism. This radicalism was expressed in the streets, in social movements, and in confrontations with the police. In some cases it was manifested in important electoral results such as the LCR-LO in 1999 France and the impressive result for Olivier Besancenot in the 2002 French presidential election, or at a different register in the PRC’s newfound appeal with youth. However this was not followed by a strategic debate. This was obvious in the European Social Forum and the World Social Forum where one could find thousands of militants, social movements of great significance, and a burgeoning interest in Marxist theory, but no real strategic debate. Daniel Bensaïd’s call to reopen the strategic debate went unanswered.

Even more unfortunate was the substitution of left strategy for alliances with social democracy especially anti-neoliberal governments or – worse yet – “anyone but” governments. The disastrous experience of the PRC’s participation in the second Prodi government, from which the communist left in Italy never recovered, offers a lesson we cannot ignore. It is true that in various instances, Poulantzas was invoked to support such strategies, but there was no depth and no strategic debate. It was not a “democratic road to socialism” but a full capitulation to parliamentary logic and the ceding of hegemony to social democracy in a period when it was one of the main political forces that implemented “actually existing neoliberalism.”

This vacuum of strategy created by this approach and the fact the substitution of electoral politics and basic anti-neoliberal reforms is the fundamental limitation of this left variety; it created a version of the Left that is rhetorically radical yet incapable of thinking about strategies of rupture. The most tragic example of this is SYRIZA whose programmatic unpreparedness and compulsive Europeanism paved the way for a thoroughgoing capitulation to the Troika and now a full-fledged acceptance of an aggressive neoliberal logic. The younger members of SYRIZA’s leadership, including Tsipras himself, received their “political education” in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, exactly during the period of European Social Forum and peak popularity for the idea of an “anti-neoliberal front.”

TG: Some comrades would argue that the balance of forces as well as the “character of the period” do not allow more than anti-neoliberal politics. In the German left it is common to hear the argument that, given different possible roads of capitalist development (either more authoritarian and neoliberal or more social and democratic) as well as the balance of forces, anything we do is pushing for a better capitalism. Thus we create better conditions for class struggle, social movements and more space for the Left. In other words, in their perspective there is only one solution. But that’s not revolutionary politics; it is called in German the “Reformalternative.” The late Poulantzas, with his interest in left Eurocommunism, is a point of reference for these kind of strategies. What is your reply to these strategic suggestions?

PS: I think that such an approach is a very anti-dialectical one. The very idea that the Left can present a project of a better capitalism and thus create a better terrain for movements is almost absurd. I mean the very history of the workers’ movement suggests that whenever there was a “better” capitalism, this was not the result of the Left promoting alliances for a good capitalism. It has always been the outcome of autonomous and militant struggles and of a broader anti-capitalist challenge to the existing social order, exemplified in the communist movement of the 20th century. Only such dynamics could force the capitalist powers to make reforms and concessions to the subaltern classes.

Moreover, such an approach underestimates another important aspect of the current conjuncture: the combination of the neoliberal fuite en avant. This has been the answer to the 2007-8 capitalist crisis. Increased authoritarian statism and an almost “post-hegemonic” approach, along with the erosion of any democratic process, has meant there is not much space for reforms towards a “better” capitalism. Of course, the class struggle never ends and there is a constant character to social antagonism. At the same time, the actual decision-making processes are more insulated against the intervention of the subaltern classes than at any time in the past.

What is needed is a much more confrontational approach that presents a radical alternative. We are now talking about a transitional program, a series of interlinked demands and goals that challenge the power of the capitalists, accentuate the contradictions of the current form of bourgeois politics and crisis-management and open up the way for a post-capitalist social configuration. Such a programmatic approach can, on the one hand, re-establish the Left as a truly anti-systemic force, draw a line of demarcation with bourgeois forces, suggest an alternative narrative (and not the fantasy of a better capitalism) and offer a political perspective for mass movements. Such an approach can really open up the way for truly hegemonic projects of the forces of labor, and can create conditions for a Left that aims at not only resistance, but also power and hegemony.

I can understand the possible invocation of Poulantzas in such debates and positions. Yet Poulantzas never referred to a left that would simply struggle for reforms. Even when he made a political turn to the “democratic road” we should never forget that he was referring to a “democratic road to socialism,” a process where a parliamentary victory of the Left with a radical program towards socialist transformation would be combined with strong autonomous social movements in a complex process of social transformation. We can criticize these positions and bring forward their contradictions and lacunae, such as Poulantzas’s underestimation of how the state apparatus would react to such a challenge, or his all-too-positive approach to the possibility of collaboration of the communist left with parties like PASOK, yet we must admit that he never suggested an alliance with social-democratic forces just in the name of “better capitalism.”

Moreover, Poulantzas also realized that simply aiming at governmental power was not the answer to the question of strategy, even if he championed – contra more classical “insurrectionist” approaches – the possibility of a “democratic road.” He always gave credence to the importance of mass movements from below, autonomous movements that would also pressure even a left-wing government to overcome its shortcomings, move in a more radical direction, initiate processes of transformation and answer any potential counter-offensives from the part of the bourgeois forces. Take the following passage from a 1979 interview by Poulantzas:

However, to modify the balance of power [le rapport de force] within the state, and furthermore, radically modify the materiality of the state, is only one aspect of a democratic transition to socialism. The other aspect of the process depends on, at the same time, grassroots social movements propelling the spread [l’essaimage] of spaces of direct democracy: in short for movements to ground themselves in popular struggles that always spill over beyond, and keep a distance from, the state. To remain limited to the state terrain, even in order to adopt a strategy of ruptures, is to unwisely slip towards social democracy; because of the specific weight of the materiality of the state, to even change the relation of forces within the state can only happen by also relying on struggles and movements which go beyond the state.¹²

TG: What would an alternative strategy look like? As far as I can see, there are three major alternative strategies discussed in the radical left. First, the idea of an anti-monopolistic alliance and a progressive democracy. This is for example the strategic framework of the declining German Communist Party. Second, the idea of non-state radical politics, in its different varieties – anarcho-syndicalism or some autonomous currents. And last but not least, revolutionary Marxist organizations mostly of a Trotskyist current, organizing their politics around the idea of a deep revolutionary crisis and the development of situations of dual power. Do you see an alternative approach? In a discussion I attended last year, Stathis Kouvelakis argued for a left government that would mobilize for anti-capitalist reforms working together and in tension with social movements.

PS: This is surely an open and rather difficult question. First, I think that the idea of an anti-monopolistic alliance is based on a misapprehension of the dominant social bloc. The contrast between monopolies and more medium or small bourgeoisie is a tension within the dominant bloc which is managed by the dominant segments of the power bloc. For instance, we can see how “monopoly capital” instrumentalizes labor deregulation and overexploitation to maintain its leading role relative to medium and small businesses. Moreover, the reproduction of medium and small businesses in many cases is conditioned upon the strategy of monopoly capital (outsourcing and new flexible forms of concentration/centralization). It is one thing to try to think of a potential alliance with the self-employed or very small business and another to insist on the fantasy of an alliance with progressive elements of the bourgeoisie.

There is the idea that we can do away with politics in the sense of a struggle for revolutionary power. From Alain Badiou’s “politics at a distance from the state” to John Holloway’s notion of changing the world without taking power, there is an abundance of examples.¹³ However great the changes made by autonomous movements, there is a limit. We need strong, autonomous, and victorious social movements, just as we need successful experiments of alternative social configurations such as the experience in self-management. Yet this is not enough. Social change also needs confrontation with the power of the dominant classes: the power that is materialized and condensed in state apparatuses. This is especially true if we look at current forms of authoritarian statism, especially in the form of state of permanent economic exception and urgency (such as the “regime” imposed by the Troika in Greece). There is a tendency towards the pre-emptive undermining of social movements and towards the drastic reduction of the possibility of major changes induced by movements. There is an extreme insulation of the decision-making process against such developments. In such a conjuncture you need political power to change the world.

However, the idea that the seizure of power would be a simple repetition of October 1917 is absurd. This is more fantasy than an actual strategy, and in certain cases (the current anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Greek Communist Party is an example that comes to mind) an excuse for not doing much. I can understand the defence of the revolutionary road as an ideological reference point against political and theoretical anticommunism, yet this has to be translated into strategy. This means actually thinking about the conjuncture, the opportunities offered and the original ways necessary to take advantage of them. In no case does it mean constantly treating the situations as “not ripe enough.” In 2010-12 Greece came closer to a hegemonic crisis than any European country since the “fall of the dictatorships” in the mid-1970’s. What could be more “ripe” than that?

Does this mean simply combining a left government with a transitional program and strong autonomous movements form below? I think that we need a more dialectical approach. On the one hand, recent developments not only in Europe but also in the previous decade in Latin America have shown the possibility that in a condition of extreme social and political crisis that leads to mass movements and to major breaks in the relations of representation articulated around systemic parties, it is possible for forces of the radical left to reach governmental power. At the same time, the extent of the transformation of the state (the solidification and materialization of a class relation of forces in favor of capital), and the degree of development of authoritarian statism mean that it is very difficult to exercise power in a normal way. This is especially true when we talk about a government that (in contrast to SYRIZA) would have gone all the way towards a rupture with the European Union and imperialism (since it is impossible to have any form of social change within the embedded neoliberalism of the Eurozone and the EU institutional framework).

What is needed is an excess of popular power from below to counter the capitalist strategies inscribed in the very materiality of the state and to answer potential bourgeois counter-offensives. We need not just strong movements but also novel forms of dual power. Sooner or later it would need to not only run the state or reform it but also to bring about a more profound transformation in a process that would require a rupture with the bourgeoisie and lead to a constituent process that could implement institutional arrangements antagonistic to the capitalist ones: limits to ownership, new forms of democracy, new forms of participatory planning, democratic control, and reduction of oppressive mechanisms.

These cannot be simple abstract blueprints for the future. They must be based on real experiences and experimentations, the collective ingenuity of the masses, the learning process associated with movements and radical politics, and open theoretical debate. Radical or revolutionary politics is a process of constant experimentation. Unfortunately most organizations and fronts of the Left have failed so far to become the kind of collective laboratories for the production of strategies, discourses, and intellectualism needed. Even the experience of SYRIZA, if we take it as a test case, has not dealt with its tragic deficiencies and defeats.

Some will argue that now we only need resistance and movements since the “window of opportunity” for revolutionary politics has closed, where perhaps it was open in 2010-12. The reply is that strategic debate has never been a luxury for the Left. From 1848 to the Paris Commune to the 1905 revolution to 1917 the idea that we learn from major experiences and constantly reassess and transform communist theory and practice and even revolutionize strategy has been like oxygen for both Marxism and the working class movement. We need that oxygen today.

1. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1979), 26.

2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 244.

3. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, 25.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Poulantzas argued that the conditions of monopoly capitalism give rise to a new petty bourgeoisie class of non-productive salaried workers. Examples include office workers, engineers, and technicians.

6. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, 21.

7. See, for example, Nicos Poulantzas, “The State, Social Movements, Party: Interview with Nicos Poulantzas (1979),” trans. Patrick King, Viewpoint Magazine.

8. Nicos Poulantzas, “Interview with Nicos Poulantzas,” in The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State, trans. James Martin (London: Verso, 2008) 387-388.

9. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: New Left Books, 1978). The chapter in question is entitled “Part Five: Towards a Democratic Socialism.”

10. See the debate between Henri Weber and Poulantzas in The Poulantzas Reader, 334-360 and Buci-Glucksmann’s many interventions in the review Dialectiques.

11. Nicos Poulantzas, “On the question of alliances,” Agonas, July 1970 (in Greek, written under the pseudonym, N. Skyrianos).

12. Poulantzas, “The State, Social Movements, Party.”

13. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto, 2002).

Panagiotis Sotiris has taught social and political philosophy as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Crete, Panteion University, the University of the Aegean, and the University of Athens. His research interests include Marxist philosophy, the work of Louis Althusser, and social and political movements in Greece.

Thomas Goes is a sociologist, focusing on Sociology of Work and Labor Relations. He is working at the Soziologisches Forschungsinstitut (SOFI) Göttingen, is a member of »Organisieren Kämpfen Gewinnen«, Projekt M and DIE LINKE.

By Rod Such

The prominent Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, admired the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for his views on cultural hegemony. What might have transpired if these two intellectual giants were able to collaborate on strategy and tactics for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005, two years after Said’s death and 68 years after Gramsci’s?

This essay explores Gramsci’s concepts of moral leadership, common sense and good sense, cultural hegemony, superstructure, “taking inventory,” “war of position,” and the philosophy of praxis, their influence on Said’s thinking, and their relevance to the BDS movement. Underpinning this exploration, I seek to answer whether a Marxist or socialist perspective on BDS is even needed, let alone desired. Why is it not enough that socialists simply answer the call of Palestinian civil society and find ways to support the BDS movement in practical activity? Does Marxist theory contribute anything of importance to this movement? The conclusion reached is that both Gramsci and Said left behind a legacy that provides invaluable insights and reasons for why and how BDS can succeed in Western capitalist countries, particularly the United States, and become part of a global Intifada that works in tandem with Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine.

Marxism is unique as a philosophy that goes beyond merely interpreting the world by announcing that its intention is to change the world. This essay, therefore, also explores a three-year-long BDS campaign in Portland, Oregon. The goal is to determine if the Gramscian-Said legacy might have helped guide it. A dialectical relationship exists between theory and practice in which neither is complete without the other. Theory guides practice, and practice in turn deepens, corrects, and enriches theory. Theoretical precepts, according to this view, must be tested in the laboratory of human activity.

Moral Leadership, Hegemony, and ‘Good Sense ‘vs. ‘Common Sense’

Gramsci’s concept of “moral leadership” is apt in this context. For Gramsci the working class was “economist” if it spoke only for itself. He urged Italy’s Socialist Party and later its Communist Party to take up the “Southern Question”—that is, the plight of the peasantry, particularly in the less-industrialized southern part of Italy. But Gramsci was not content with just a worker-peasant alliance. He called for the working-class parties to provide “moral leadership” for all “subalterns,” who he defined as anyone in a subordinate position in capitalist society or what today we would call the 99 percent.

Similarly, in his book Orientalism Said stakes out a viewpoint of moral leadership in his underlying theme of challenging the way Western colonialism and its literature dehumanized and denied agency to colonized peoples. Said’s critique of the West’s conception of the Orient is ultimately based on a radical understanding and rejection of the notion of superior cultures, placing the “Orientalist” framework firmly in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

Gramsci’s notions of common sense and good sense are intimately linked to his idea of cultural hegemony and superstructure. For Gramsci the advanced capitalist countries enforced their rule and control not just through the repressive state apparatus—the police, the courts, the prisons, the military—but also through the institutions that emerge in civil society. The state apparatus is primarily based on force and coercion to maintain capitalist rule while institutions of civil society—ranging from trade unions to churches to the media to what we call today nongovernmental organizations—often help manufacture consent with the established order of things rather than challenge that order.

The notion of cultural hegemony derives in part from Marx’s famous dictum in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

Gramsci pondered why workers succumb to these ruling ideas when their class interests are diametrically opposed to those of the capitalists. He invoked the ideas of common sense and superstructure to explain how ruling class ideas establish hegemony over society at large and make it seem as though the capitalist order is merely the common sense outcome of human affairs.

In a sense Gramsci anticipated by nearly 100 years Thomas Frank’s exploration in his best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas of why voters in the state of Kansas, once a center of abolitionism and agrarian socialism, voted against their own economic interests by embracing the Republican Party’s social agenda.

To establish this cultural hegemony and to keep it functioning smoothly, the ruling class also helps sustain a superstructure, such as the academy, civil society organizations, and the media, to ensure that its ideas remain supreme. The chief architects of “common sense”are our media and academic pundits who manage to disguise or obscure the systemic nature of capitalist oppression and exploitation. People learn to embrace and accept ideas contrary to their own interests because they are surrounded daily by a virtual gestalt of hegemonic ideas that must be true because seemingly everyone believes them to be true. To be controversial is to be dissident, an outlier from the established order of common sense.

Edward Said and Common Sense

In The Question of Palestine and The Politics of Dispossession, Said deconstructs the “common sense” ideas that have buttressed the Israeli narrative for decades and made the existence of a Jewish state seem reasonable to many people. These include the argument that the crimes of the Holocaust left the Jewish people with no alternative but to establish a Jewish state of their own for their own protection and refuge. Palestinian resistance to Zionist displacement in the “common sense” narrative then became simply a continuation of the persecution of the Jews. Israel became heroic David to the Goliath of surrounding Arab countries, according to this hegemonic narrative.

To counter this narrative, Said applied “good sense,” as opposed to the prevailing “common sense,” unerringly dissecting every hypocrisy, lie, and contradiction within the Israeli narrative by showing how they contravened established ideas of human rights and democracy. In doing so, Said, along with many others, established the Palestinian narrative as a hegemonic alternative to the dominant paradigms.

In Orientalism, Said acknowledges the influence of Gramsci, calling out in particular the distinction Gramsci made between civil society and state institutions and the role played by civil society in establishing cultural hegemony. Said writes:

“Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far.” 

Said was also particularly taken with another concept of Gramsci’s—the idea of “personal discovery” and “taking an inventory” of one’s own subjectivity and conditioning due to one’s historical circumstances. As we’ll see, this is also of particular relevance to the BDS movement. In another passage in Orientalism, Said writes:

“The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, ‘therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.’ Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to judge, although I have felt it important to be conscious of trying to produce one.”

Said admittedly was not a Marxist and even criticized Marx for succumbing to Orientalist ideas himself. At the time of writing Orientalism, the influence of French philosopher Michel Foucault was much more apparent, although Said never fully embraced Foucault’s denial of an objective reality. As Zachary Lockman notes in Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, “Said’s embrace of Foucault was always partial and ambivalent.” Together with Gramsci, Said also admired the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams and later openly broke, as Lockman notes, with “Foucault’s ‘overblown’ conception of power,” insisting “on the possibility of a more just future society. . . .”

Said’s appreciation for the importance of the concept of cultural hegemony surfaced again in his later critique of the way the corporate media promulgated Islamophobia with his book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981).

Case In Point: Portland

How do these theoretical concepts translate into practice? A BDS campaign in Portland, Oregon, led by a coalition of religious, social justice, peace, and secular left groups known as Occupation-Free Portland, provides some insights.

The objective of the campaign was to persuade the City Council to divest from any corporations involved in the Israeli occupation. It was the Palestine solidarity community’s first attempt at a political BDS campaign aimed at a representative, democratic institution; all previous campaigns having been economic—that is, aimed at convincing retailers to deshelve Israeli products. Tellingly, this political BDS campaign was the first to garner public opposition from the local Zionist Lobby, particularly the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, which had previously ignored economic boycott campaigns.

The campaign’s first major victory came when the city’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) voted unanimously to endorse the call for the city to divest any holdings in four corporations—Caterpillar, G4S, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions—due to their complicity in the Israeli occupation. The endorsement was itself a signal that the dominant narrative was changing inasmuch as this voluntary, unpaid civil society institution understood completely that Palestinian human rights were being violated, especially after witnessing the massacre of Gaza in 2014. As the former chair of the HRC put it to me when I asked if the HRC would consider our resolution “controversial,”she responded, “Not anymore.”

The HRC endorsement led to a campaign of intimidation launched by the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation, also a civil society institution. The Federation issued a statement condemning the HRC which was signed by leaders of the Democratic Party establishment—the mayor, a leading mayoral candidate, and a member of Congress—along with the president of Portland State University. Negative media coverage also ensued. In effect, the Federation revealed the principal pillars of its civil society support—the media, the academy, and the Democratic Party—all of whom supported the bipartisan hegemonic narrative that denies Palestinian rights and upholds Israel as a strategic U.S. ally.

It’s worth dwelling on this campaign of intimidation because it proved to be a pivotal moment in the campaign and because it shows that cultural hegemony also has a component of coercion and in effect acts as an adjunct to state repression. In addition to issuing its statement, the Federation also appears to have organized an email and telephone campaign that included physical threats made against members of the HRC. As the chair of the HRC acknowledged in an email to other members, “the threats of bodily harm are not to be taken lightly.” One of the strengths of the HRC as an institution derived from its role as a voluntary, unpaid advisory commission made up of people with an interest in human rights. It was also made up predominantly of people of color, in part because of its role in civilian oversight of a racist police force. Because HRC members were unpaid, the intimidation campaign could not use the coercive method of firing someone and depriving them of income. If that option had been available, it surely would have been used.

The head of the Federation’s Community Relations Council also threatened the chair of the HRC with the promise that “the shit is about to hit the fan.”He warned that negative media coverage was about to appear in the Willamette Week, a local “alternative”newspaper. Sure enough a disparaging article soon appeared in that publication, dismissing the HRC as an “obscure Commission.”

Communal pressure also appeared to have caused the two Jewish members of the HRC to reconsider their vote, with both claiming they didn’t know what they were voting on when they voted to approve the divestment resolution. The intimidation campaign succeeded in pressuring the HRC to schedule a second community hearing where it would consider a motion to rescind its vote.

Several factors came into play here. The fact that physical threats had been used led the mayor to back off from his promise to attend the second hearing. His community liaison director told us that death threats had been made. The mayor clearly did not want to be associated with those tactics, and so did not show up at the second hearing, where his mere presence might have swayed the HRC’s position. Instead the issue would be decided solely on the basis of persuasion rather than coercion. A huge community turnout in support of the resolution and the failure of the opposition to even address the facts presented regarding corporate complicity in the Israeli occupation led the HRC to refuse to reconsider its original vote. The HRC chair cited the fact that they had not heard any evidence rebutting our argument of corporate complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation.

As Gramsci might have said, the people put forward their own counter hegemonic narrative and won. Progressive civil society groups and organizations, particularly from the faith community, from traditional civil rights groups, from Jewish Voice for Peace, and from the Palestinian-American community, used moral leadership “good sense” and defeated the dominant hegemonic narrative that attempted to deny Palestinian human rights.

What Said might have said about the differing roles and narratives emanating from civil society also bears examination. I believe Said would have “taken an inventory” and noted that a white male used abusive hegemonic language against an African-American woman, the chair of the HRC, when he threatened that “the shit was going to hit the fan.” Said might have pointed out that one of the Jewish members of the HRC also told the chair that she needed to be “educated,” as if she was a member of an inferior culture that couldn’t understand the “superior”culture, the wellsprings of which Said described so effectively in Orientalism. And finally he probably would have noted that the sole Native American member of the HRC remarked that she could not vote otherwise than to uphold Palestinian rights considering “what happened to my ancestors.”  This woman had taken her own inventory and knew that what happened to Native Americans was the same ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians experienced under Zionist colonization.

In a sense the Federation had unwittingly mirrored the racism Israel exhibits toward Palestinians. Our campaign enabled people to get a glimpse of the Palestinian experience. When the dominant culture is a culture of white and male supremacy, it’s inevitable that the dominant hegemonic narrative will reflect these characteristics, as the Federation did with its intimidation tactics.

In the end, the opposition had so discredited itself that subsequently one of the members of Congress who signed the Federation statement appeared to disown it when she told a visiting delegation that she “really hadn’t read what it said.”

The clash between the Federation and the HRC resulted in another crack in civil society’s role of upholding the dominant paradigm; namely, the role played by the media. In addition to the negative coverage in the Willamette Week, the editor/publisher of that publication also submitted a public records request asking for the HRC’s internal email correspondence, apparently assuming that it could base another disparaging article on the email it obtained. In the event, however, no subsequent article on the HRC was ever published. Curious, I submitted my own request for the exact same records, thinking that the Willamette Week might have decided to drop its coverage because the records revealed information damaging to the Federation. Sure enough references to “threats of bodily harm”appeared in the emails. The newspaper would have been obligated to report that or risk its credibility. Its subsequent coverage of the OFP campaign proved to be much more even-handed.

Similarly, a campaign organized by Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER) at Portland State University helped undermine and isolate the role played by the PSU president in backing the Federation. SUPER successfully brought a divestment resolution to the Student Senate, which backed it by an overwhelming vote of 20-2. Thus, the students offered a convincing and dramatic counter narrative to the university administration.

The OFP campaign in effect heralded the emergence of a people’s counter hegemonic narrative that enlisted its own support within civil society. That support included not just institutions like the Human Rights Commission but also the city’s Socially Responsible Investments Committee and the religious community, including Christian, Muslim, and Jewish groups, and students. Traditional secular left groups were also involved and helped provide leadership but lacked the mass base and energy generated by the human rights, student, and faith communities.

It became obvious that a sea change had occurred in civil society, especially after the Socially Responsible Investments Committee (SRIC) voted 4-2 to recommend that the City divest from Caterpillar due to its human rights violations in Israel/Palestine. When that occurred, the city’s leading newspaper, The Oregonian, finally took note of the changing narrative and editorialized against the SRIC recommendation, claiming lamely that Caterpillar “just makes tractors.”

Despite these successes, however, the campaign ultimately failed to break the dominant Progressive Except Palestine (PEP) paradigm. The City Council voted to stop investing in all corporate securities. One councilor said the issue took up too much of his time, while another suggested that citizens’ objections to corporate investments was likely to be never ending and it was probably best to get out of all corporate investments. One OFP supporter remarked that when confronted with the argument that Palestinian Lives Matter, the Council responded by saying All Lives Matter. The third and deciding vote on the five-member council came from a councilor who was prepared to accept the SRIC report, including its recommendation to stop investing in Caterpillar, and joined with the other two Councilors to ensure the City would divest from corporate bonds. However, not one of the Councilors ever said anything openly against Caterpillar’s role in the Occupation; in effect, keeping the PEP paradigm intact. One councilor even suggested that she could not say anything publicly about Palestine because she had so many Jewish friends, as if “identity politics”was the sole determiner of her political positions.

OFP activists were themselves divided on how to assess the end results. Some considered it a partial victory because objectively the city of Portland did stop investing in Caterpillar. Moreover, the Palestine solidarity movement demonstrated that it was a political force that could not be ignored or disrespected. We succeeded not only in marshaling community pressure but also in allying with other progressive forces, particularly the Prison Divestment Campaign, which was targeting Wells Fargo. At the April City Council hearing, an alliance of environmental, Palestine, and Prison Divestment activists came together to demand adoption of the SRIC’s final report. Palestine had never before been such a prominent focus of City Council hearings.

All of this was true, and yet not one word from the City Councilors about Palestine. In the end it proved too difficult for them politically to risk stating open support for Palestinian rights. Ironically the only political nod the campaign ever received was when one councilor chastised the Federation for suggesting that Jewish Voice for Peace was made up of “fringe Jews” and “extremists.” But our campaign was not about Jewish support for Palestine. It was about Palestine itself.

Summary and Key Points

Here are my takeaways from what a Gramscian-Said analysis reveals:

—civil society is increasingly divided over Israel/Palestine. The cultural hegemony exercised by pro-Israel institutions can be successfully challenged with a Palestinian counter-narrative that one day will itself become hegemonic.

—pro-Israel civil society institutions will attempt to use coercion when it can, knowing that its ability to persuade or to establish hegemony by consent no longer works due to increased awareness and knowledge of the injustice done to Palestinians.

—Palestine solidarity activists need to exercise moral leadership, showing that the Palestinian struggle is a liberation struggle and therefore a moral movement. By exercising moral leadership, it can unite broad sections of civil society, especially in the faith and human rights communities, to challenge, neutralize or even win over those sections of civil society most likely to support the dominant hegemonic narrative—that is, the Democratic Party leadership, the academy, and the media.

—By directly challenging the principal proponents of the Israeli narrative, the opposition can be counted on to expose its own “inventory”of racism, sexism, arrogance, authoritarianism, and colonialism.

—Palestine solidarity activists must “take their own inventory,”understanding that they, too, are influenced by the dominant hegemonic culture. Suggestions of downplaying Palestine in intersectional alliances because Palestine is considered controversial are an example of internalizing the dominant narrative and succumbing to it rather than challenging it. Palestine solidarity activists must guard against a tendency toward national chauvinism, “condescending savior” paternalism, prioritizing domestic issues over international issues (a kind of left-wing American Firstism), and Palestine isolationism.

–Finally, Gramsci’s concept of a “war of position” provides further guidance for the BDS movement. By “war of position,” Gramsci acknowledged that in advanced capitalist countries with well-established constitutionalism, the forces for change face a protracted struggle in which a principal objective is to establish a people’s counter-hegemonic narrative to the dominant neoliberal narrative of the ruling class. This struggle demands engaging with all sectors of civil society and winning them to the people’s narrative.

As the German activist Rudi Duetscke, a student of Gramsci’s, put it, we must begin the “long march through the institutions.” The longest march begins with a single step.

Rod Such is a former reporter and editor for The Guardian, the independent radical newsweekly, and is a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada

Bacon and rebels vs Virginia aristocrats

Theodore W. Allen’s Legacy

By Jeffrey B. Perry

Solidarity

THEODORE W. “TED” Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working-class intellectual and activist, whose work on the centrality of struggle against white supremacy is growing in importance and influene 98 years after his birth.

With its focus on racial oppression and social control, Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997: Verso Books, new expanded edition 2012) is one of the 20th-century’s major contributions to historical understanding.

Allen’s study presents a full-scale challenge to what he refers to as “The Great White Assumption” — the unquestioning acceptance of the “white race” and “white” identity as skin color-based and natural attributes rather than as social and political constructions.

His thesis on the origin, nature and maintenance of the “white race” and his contenion that slavery in the Anglo-American plantation colonies was capitalist and that enslaved Black laborers were proletarians, provide the basis of a revolutionary approach to United States labor history.

On the back cover of the 1994 edition of Volume 1, subtitled Racial Oppression and Social Control, Allen boldly asserted “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That statement, based on 20-plus years of primary research in Virginia’s colonial records, reflected the fact that Allen found no instance of the official use of the word “white” as a token of social status prior to its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691.

As he later explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’ White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

In this context Allen offers his major thesis — that the “white race” was invented as a ruling-class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later (civil war) stages of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77).

To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and to implement a system of racial oppression, and 2) the consequence was not only ruinous to the interest of African Americans, but was also disastrous for European-American workers.

The Story of an Invention

Volume II, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, tells the story of the invention of the “white race” and the development of the system of racial oppression in the late 17th and early 18th century Anglo-American plantation colonies.

Allen’s primary focus is on the pattern-setting Virginia colony. He pays special attention to how tenants and wage-laborers in the predominantely English labor force were reduced to the status of chattel bond-servants beginning in the 1620s. In so doing, he emphasizes that this was a qualitative break from the condition of laborers in England and from long established English labor law.

He argues that this was not a feudal carryover, rather that it was imposed under capitalism, and an essential precondition of the emergence of the lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers under the system of racial slavery.

Allen describes how, throughout much of the 17th century, the status of African Americans was indeterminate (because it was still being fought out) and he details the similarity of conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants.

He also documents many significant instances of labor solidarity and unrest, especially during the 1660s and 1670s. Of great significance is his analysis of the civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion when thousands of laboring people took up arms against the ruling plantation elite, the capital Jamestown was burned to the ground, rebels controlled sixth-sevenths of the Virginia colony, and Afro- and Euro-American bond-servants fought side by side demanding an end to their bondage.

It was in the period after Bacon’s Rebellion that the “white race” was invented. Allen describes systematic ruling-class policies, conferring “white race” privileges on European Americans while imposing harsher disabilities on African Americans resulting in a system of racial slavery, a form of racial oppression that also imposed severe racial proscriptions on free African Americans.

He emphasizes that when free African Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia, and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order “to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos,” this was no “unthinking decision.”

Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie and a conscious decision taken in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it entailed repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century.

The “White Race” — A Ruling-Class Social Control Formation

Key to understanding the virulent racial oppression that develops in Virginia, Allen argues, is the formation of the intermediate social control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of the ruling class.

In Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry after Bacon’s Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of laboring-class “whites.” In the Anglo-Caribbean, by contrast, under a similar Anglo ruling elite, “mulattos” were included in the social control stratum and were promoted into middle-class status.

This difference was rooted in a number of social control-related factors, one of the most important of which was that in the Anglo-Caribbean there were “too few” poor and laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were “too many” to be accommodated in the ranks of that class.

The Invention of the White Race challenges what Allen considers to be two main ideological props of white supremacy — the argument that “racism” is innate (and it is therefore useless to challenge it) and the argument that European-American workers “benefit” from “white race” privileges and white supremacy (and that it is therefore not in their interest to oppose them).

These two arguments, opposed by Allen, are related to two master historical narratives rooted in writings on the colonial period. The first is associated with the “unthinking decision” explanation for the development of racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop D. Jordan in his influential White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812.

The second argument is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, which maintains that in Virginia, as slavery developed in the 18th century, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to matter.” Allen points out that what Morgan said about “too few” free poor was true in the 18th century Anglo-Caribbean, but not in Virginia.

Poisoned Privileges

This author’s article, “The Developing Con­juncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” (Cultural Logic, 2010) describes key components of Allen’s analysis of “white race” privilege.

The article explains that as he developed the “white race” privilege concept, Allen emphasized that these privileges were a “poison bait” (like a shot of “heroin”) and he explained that they “do not permit” the masses of European American workers nor their children “to escape” from that class.

“It is not that the ordinary white worker gets more than he must have to support himself,” but “the Black worker gets less than the white worker.” By thus “inducing, reinforcing and perpetuating racist attitudes on the part of the white workers, the present-day power masters get the political support of the rank-and-file of the white workers in critical situations, and without having to share with them their super profits in the slightest measure.”

As one example to support his position, Allen provided statistics showing that in the South where race privilege “has always been most emphasized . . . the white workers have fared worse than the white workers in the rest of the country.”

Probing more deeply, Allen offered additional important insights into why these race privileges are conferred by the ruling class. He pointed out that “the ideology of white racism” is “not appropriate to the white workers” because it is “contrary to their class interests.” Because of this “the bourgeoisie could not long have maintained this ideological influence over the white proletarians by mere racist ideology.”

White supremacist thought is “given a material basis in the form of the deliberately contrived system of race privileges for white workers.” Thus, writes Allen, “history has shown that the white-skin privilege does not serve the real interests of the white workers, it also shows that the concomitant racist ideology has blinded them to that fact.”

Allen added that “the white supremacist system that had originally been designed in around 1700 by the plantation bourgeoisie to protect the base, the chattel bond labor relation of production” also served “as a part of the ‘legal and political’ superstructure of the United States government that, until the Civil War, was dominated by the slaveholders with the complicity of the majority of the European-American workers.”

Then, after emancipation, “the industrial and financial bourgeoisie found that it could be serviceable to their program of social control, anachronistic as it was, and incorporated it into their own ‘legal and political’ superstructure.”

Two essential points must be kept in mind. First, “the race-privilege policy is deliberate bourgeois class policy.” Second, “the race-privilege policy is, contrary to surface appearance, contrary to the interests, short range as well as long range interests of not only the Black workers but of the white workers as well.”

Allen repeatedly emphasized that “the day-to-day real interests” of the European-American worker “is not the white skin privileges, but in the development of an ever-expanding union of class conscious workers.” He emphasized, “’Solidarity forever!’ means ‘Privileges never!’” He elsewhere pointed out, “The Wobblies [the Industrial Workers of the World] caught the essence of it in their slogan: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’”

The Masters’ Ideology

Throughout his work Allen stresses that “the initiator and the ultimate guarantor of the white skin privileges of the white worker is not the white worker, but the white worker’s masters” and the masters do this because it is “an indispensable necessity for their continued class rule.”

He describes how “an all-pervasive system of racial privileges was conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural and urban, exploited and insecure though they themselves were” and how “its threads, woven into the fabric of every aspect of daily life, of family, church, and state, have constituted the main historical guarantee of the rule of the ‘Titans,’ damping down anti-capitalist pressures, by making ‘race, and not class, the distinction in social life.’”

That, “more than any other factor,” he argues, “has shaped the contours of American history — from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the Civil War, to the overthrow of Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, to the Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle and ‘white backlash’ of our own day.”

Allen also addressed the issue of strategy for social change, emphasizing: “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy.” He considered “white supremacy” to be “both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy.”

Based on this analysis Allen maintained, “the first main strategic blow must be aimed at the most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck, namely, white supremacism.” This, he argued, was the conclusion to be drawn from a study of three great social crises in U.S. history — “the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

In each of these cases “the prospects for a stable broad front against capital has foundered on the shoals of white supremacism, most specifically on the corruption of the European-American workers by racial privilege.”

Ted Allen died on January 19, 2005, and a memorial service was held for him at the Brooklyn Public Library where he had worked. On October 8, 2005, his ashes, per his request, were spread in the York River (near West Point, Virginia) close to its convergence with the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Rivers — the location where the final armed holdouts, “Eighty Negroes and Twenty English,” refused to surrender in the last stages of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Allen’s historical work has profound implications for American History, African-American History, Labor History, Left History, American Studies and “Whiteness” Studies, and offers important insights in the areas of Caribbean History, Irish History and African Diaspora Studies.

With its meticulous primary research, equalitarian motif, emphasis on the class struggle dimension of history, and groundbreaking analysis his work continues to grow in influence and importance.

Sources

For writings, audios, and videos by and about Theodore W. Allen and his work see Jeffrey Perry, http://bit.ly/2xW4JLj

For information on The Invention of the White Race Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control [Verso Books] (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see Perry, http://bit.ly/1ajsD3u

On The Invention of the White Race Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see Perry, http://bit.ly/2xPLjs9

For the fullest treatment of the development of Theodore W. Allen’s thought see “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/files/Perry.pdf

We need a socialism that goes beyond capitalism. And not just for moral reasons

By Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara
Jacobin

Oct 3, 2017 – John Judis has all the right intentions. He’s looking at the resurgence of openly democratic socialist currents in the United States with a mix of excitement and trepidation. Excitement, because he knows how desperately the country’s workers need social reforms. Trepidation, because he worries that the new left might fall into the familiar traps of insularity and sectarianism.

But while Judis wants us to change society for the better, his response to the failures of twentieth-century state socialism would lead us into the dead end of twentieth-century social democracy.

In his New Republic essay “The Socialism America Needs Now,” Judis makes a passionate plea for the rebuilding of a social-democratic movement — or what he calls “liberal socialism.” He contends that the welfare state and democratic regulation of a capitalist economy should be the end goal for socialists, as past efforts at top-down nationalization and planning yielded the repressive societies and stagnant economies of the Soviet bloc. In contrast, Judis argues, the Scandinavian states are dynamic capitalist economies that are still far more equitable and humane than the United States.

For him, socialism — democratic control over workplaces and the economy — consists of “old nostrums” whose days have past.

Of course, we urgently need the reforms that Judis and the movement around Bernie Sanders advocate for. No democratic socialist could oppose efforts to guarantee public provision of basic needs and take key aspects of economic and social life like education, health care, and housing out of the market. It would, as Judis writes, “bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans.”

But we have moral reasons to demand something more. After all, we can’t have real political democracy without economic democracy. Corporations are “private governments” that exercise tyrannical power over workers and society writ large. The corporate hierarchy decides how we produce, what we produce, and what we do with the profits that workers collectively make.

To embrace radical democracy is to believe that any decision that has a binding effect on its members — say, the power to hire or fire or control over one’s work hours — should be made by all those affected by it. What touches all, should be determined by all.

At minimum, we should demand an economy in which various forms of ownership (worker-owned firms, as well as state-owned natural monopolies and financial institutions) are coordinated by a regulated market — an economy that enables society to be governed democratically. In an undemocratic capitalist economy, managers hire and fire workers; in a democratic socialist economy, workers would hire those managers deemed necessary to build a content and productive firm.

They Won’t Let Us Keep Nice Things

This, however, isn’t a debate about the contours of the world we would like to see. While Judis rejects the desire of socialists (and the historic goal of social democracy itself) to create a radical democracy after capitalism, he does so largely on pragmatic grounds. The old vision, for him, is “not remotely viable.”

Yet history shows us that achieving a stable welfare state while leaving capital’s power over the economy largely intact is itself far from viable. Even if we wanted to stop at socialism within capitalism, it’s not clear that we could.

Since the early 1970s, the height of Western social democracy, corporate elites have abandoned the postwar “class compromise” and sought to radically restrict the scope of economic regulation. What capitalists grudgingly accepted during an exceptional period of postwar growth and rising profits, they would no longer.

The past forty years have witnessed an ideological and political war against once-powerful labor movements and the welfare states they helped build. This bipartisan class war advocated for the four “d”s of neoliberalism: deregulating the economy, decreasing progressive taxation; decreasing the scope of public goods; and decreasing the power of organized labor.

Corporations also moved their investment in production to newly industrializing nations or lower-wage regions and automated much of the higher-skilled manufacturing that remained. The focus of corporate profitability shifted to the FIRE economy (finance, insurance, and real estate), an economy based heavily on speculation and a low-wage service economy that mostly serves the richest earners.

So did it have to end this way? Could the old welfare state not only have survived but been expanded? Yes, but that would have required pushing back against capital’s power to withhold investment. Simply put, that would have required a more radical socialism.

Many of the last generation’s social democrats knew that capital would disinvest from societies that enjoyed strong social rights. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s there were important attempts to gain greater control over capital to prevent just that.

Left social democrats in the Swedish labor federation advanced the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits over a twenty-five-year period to achieve social ownership of major Swedish corporations. The Socialist-led and Communist-supported government in France under François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1983 nationalized 25 percent of French industry overnight and radically expanded labor rights (mandating collective bargaining in firms of fifty workers or more).

Of course, these attempts and others were defeated. France faced a real capital strike, whereas the Swedish Social Democrats pulled back from adopting the Meidner Plan out of fears of such a strike. The lag in corporate investment created a recession in France that led to a major conservative victory in the 1985 parliamentary elections. Mitterrand had to denationalize firms and adopt budgetary austerity.

Judis mentions in passing social democracy’s rightward lurch over the past thirty years. But he fails to mention the extent of its neoliberalization or the historical lesson we must draw: when capital goes on the offensive, either labor must do the same or it will be forced to retreat.

In short, Judis writes out of history the conscious corporate offensive against constraints on its power.  To sustain even the modest reforms he sees as the horizon of socialism, we need to legitimate a greater role for democratic and state regulation of capital.

Private capital simply refuses to invest in those goods needed to overcome radical inequality: affordable housing, mass transit, alternative energy, and job retraining. Capital is often reluctant to risk heavy investment in natural monopolies that almost inevitably come under state regulation or ownership (no company would invest in a competing alternative energy grid). Judis does not speak of the climate crisis, yet there is no road to solving it short of massive public investment and control over utilities.

Of course, the United States is the place where “social democracy in one country” would be the most economically viable. Our domestic market is as large as the European Union’s, and we control our own global currency. We are a wealthy society that could easily afford universal health, elder, and child care, as well as high quality education for all. But on the road to achieving those nice things, corporations would resist and deploy their most powerful tactic: the capital strike.

Social democrats like Judis refuse to grapple with this, causing them at key moments to sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces, eroding the very reforms they hope to preserve.

To chart a different course, we would need a militant labor movement and a mass socialist presence strengthened by accumulated victories, looking to not merely tame but overcome capitalism. A socialism that refuses to deal with the “old nostrums about ownership and control of the means of production” will not only fall short of our democratic expectations of what a just society would look like — it will doom us to failure.

Joseph M. Schwartz is the national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and professor of political science at Temple.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin

David Harvey: ‘The Left Has to Rethink Its Theoretical and Tactical Apparatus.’

FROM ROAR MAGAZINE. David Harvey, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of our times, sits down with the activist collective AK Malabocas to discuss the transformations in the mode of capital accumulation, the centrality of the urban terrain in contemporary class struggles, and the implications of all this for anti-capitalist organizing.

AK Malabocas: In the last forty years, the mode of capital accumulation has changed globally. What do these changes mean for the struggle against capitalism?

David Harvey: From a macro-perspective, any mode of production tends to generate a very distinctive kind of opposition, which is a curious mirrored image of itself. If you look back to the 1960s or 1970s, when capital was organized in big corporatist, hierarchical forms, you had oppositional structures that were corporatist, unionist kinds of political apparatuses. In other words, a Fordist system generated a Fordist kind of opposition.

With the breakdown of this form of industrial organization, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, you ended up with a much more decentralized configuration of capital: more fluid over space and time than previously thought. At the same time we saw the emergence of an opposition that is about networking and decentralization and that doesn’t like hierarchy and the previous Fordist forms of opposition.

So, in a funny sort of way, the leftists reorganize themselves in the same way capital accumulation is reorganized. If we understand that the left is a mirror image of what we are criticizing, then maybe what we should do is to break the mirror and get out of this symbiotic relationship with what we are criticizing.

In the Fordist era, the factory was the main site of resistance. Where can we find it now that capital has moved away from the factory floor towards the urban terrain?

First of all, the factory-form has not disappeared—you still find factories in Bangladesh or in China. What is interesting is how the mode of production in the core cities changed. For example, the logistics sector has undergone a huge expansion: UPS, DHL and all of these delivery workers are producing enormous values nowadays.

In the last decades, a huge shift has occurred in the service sector as well: the biggest employers of labor in the 1970s in the US were General Motors, Ford and US Steel. The biggest employers of labor today are McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart. Back then, the factory was the center of the working class, but today we find the working class mainly in the service sector. And why would we say that producing cars is more important than producing hamburgers?

Unfortunately the left is not comfortable with the idea of organizing fast-food workers. Its picture of the classical working class doesn’t fit with value production of the service workers, the delivery workers, the restaurant workers, the supermarket workers.

The proletariat did not disappear, but there is a new proletariat which has very different characteristics from the traditional one the left used to identify as the vanguard of the working class. In this sense, the McDonalds workers became the steel workers of the twenty-first century

If this is what the new proletariat is about, where are the places to organize resistance now?

It’s very difficult to organize in the workplaces. For example, delivery drivers are moving all over the place. So this population could maybe be better organized outside the working place, meaning in their neighborhood structures.

There is already an interesting phrase in Gramsci’s work from 1919 saying that organizing in the workplace and having workplace councils is all well, but we should have neighborhood councils, too. And the neighborhood councils, he said, have a better understanding of what the conditions of the whole working class are compared to the sectoral understanding of workplace organizing.

Workplace organizers used to know very well what a steelworker was, but they didn’t understand what the proletariat was about as a whole. The neighborhood organization would then include for example the street cleaners, the house workers, the delivery drivers. Gramsci never really took this up and said: ‘come on, the Communist Party should organize neighborhood assemblies!’

Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions in the European context where Communist Parties did in fact organize neighborhood councils—because they couldn’t organize in the workplace, like in Spain for example. In the 1960s this was a very powerful form of organizing. Therefore—as I have argued for a very long time—we should look at the organization of neighborhoods as a form of class organization. Gramsci only mentioned it once in his writings and he never pursued it further.

In Britain in the 1980s, there were forms of organizing labor in city-wide platforms on the basis of trades councils, which were doing what Gramsci suggested. But within the union movement these trades councils were always regarded as inferior forms of organizing labor. They were never treated as being foundational to how the union movement should operate.

In fact, it turned out that the trades councils were often much more radical than the conventional trade unions and that was because they were rooted in the conditions of the whole working class, not only the often privileged sectors of the working-class. So, to the extent that they had a much broader definition of the working class, the trades councils tended to have much more radical politics. But this was never valorized by the trade union movement in general—it was always regarded as a space where the radicals could play.

The advantages of this form of organizing are obvious: it overcomes the split between sectoral organizing, it includes all kinds of “deterritorialized” labor, and it is very suitable to new forms of community and assembly-based organization, as Murray Bookchin was advocating, for example.

In the recent waves of protest—in Spain and Greece, for instance, or in the Occupy movement—you can find this idea of “localizing resistance.” It seems that these movements tend to organize around issues of everyday life, rather than the big ideological questions that the traditional left used to focus on.

Why would you say that organizing around everyday life is not one of the big questions? I think it is one of the big questions. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and everyday life in cities is what people are exposed to and have their difficulties in. These difficulties reside as much in the sphere of the realization of value as in the sphere of the production of value.

This is one of my very important theoretical arguments: everybody reads Volume I of Capital and nobody reads Volume II. Volume I is about the production of value, Volume II is about the realization of value. Focusing on Volume II, you clearly see that the conditions of realization are just as important as the conditions of production.

Marx often talks about the necessity of seeing capital as the contradictory unity between production and realization. Where value is produced and where it is realized are two different things. For example, a lot of value is produced in China and is actually realized by Apple or by Walmart in the United States. And, of course, the realization of value is about the realization of value by means of expensive working-class consumption.

Capital might concede higher wages at the point of production, but then it recuperates it at the point of realization by the fact that working people have to pay much higher rents and housing costs, telephone costs, credit card costs and so on. So class struggles over realization—over affordable housing, for example—are just as significant for the working class as struggles of wages and work conditions. What is the point of having a higher wage if it is immediately taken back in terms of higher housing costs?

In their relationship to the working class, capitalists long ago learned that they can make a lot of money out of taking back what they have given away. And, to the degree that—particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—workers became increasingly empowered in the sphere of consumption, capital starts to concentrate much more on pulling back value through consumption.

So the struggles in the sphere of realization, which where not that strong in Marx’s times, and the fact that nobody reads the damn book (Volume II), is a problem for the conventional left. When you say to me: ‘what is the macro-problem here?’—well, this is a macro-problem! The conception of capital and the relation between production and realization. If you don’t see the contradictory unity between both then you will not get the whole picture. Class struggle is written all over it and I can’t understand why a lot of Marxists can’t get their head around how important this is.

Harvey_FistMoneyThe problem is how we understand Marx in 2015. In Marx’s times, the extent of urbanization was relatively convenient and the consumerism of the working class was almost non-existent, so all Marx had to talk about was that the working class manages to survive on a meager wage and that they are very sophisticated in doing that. Capital left them to their own devices to do what they like.

But nowadays we are in a world where consumerism is responsible for about 30 percent of the dynamic of the global economy—in the US it’s even 70 percent. So why are we sitting here and saying consumerism is kind of irrelevant, sticking to Volume I and talking about production and not about consumerism?

What urbanization does is to force us into certain kinds of consumerism, for example: you have to have an automobile. So your lifestyle is dictated in lots of ways by the form urbanization takes. And again, in Marx’s days this wasn’t significant, but in our days this is crucial. We have to get around with forms of organizing that actually recognize this change in the dynamic of class struggle.

Given this shift, the left would definitely have to adjust its tactics and forms of organizing, as well as its conception of what to organize for.

The groups that stamped the recent movements with their character, coming from the anarchist and autonomist traditions, are much more embedded in the politics of everyday life, much more than the traditional Marxists.

I am very sympathetic to the anarchists, they have a much better line on this, precisely in dealing with the politics of consumption and their critique of what consumerism is about. Part of their objective is to change and reorganize everyday life around new and different principles. So I think this is a crucial point to which a lot of political action has to be directed these days. But I disagree with you in saying that this is no “big question.”

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100 percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states out of public control where this is the case. No question: the capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of what happened for example in 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona and then all over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and smashed the resistance.

That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be seized?

To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some different forms of organization.

There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and activities alone.

One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of organization that is very different to the one coming out of assembly-based politics.

From an anarchist perspective, I would say that it is possible to replace even supra-national institutions like the WHO with confederal organizations which are built from the bottom up and which eventually arrive at worldwide decision-making.

Maybe to a certain degree, but we have to be aware that there will always be some kind of hierarchies and we will always face problems like accountability or the right of recourse. There will be complicated relationships between, for example, people dealing with the problem of global warming from the standpoint of the world as a whole and from the standpoint of a group that is on the ground, let’s say in Hanover or somewhere, and that wonders: ‘why should we listen to what they are saying?’

So you believe this would require some form of authority?

No, there will be authority structures anyway—there will always be. I have never been in an anarchist meeting where there was no secret authority structure. There is always this fantasy of everything being horizontal, but I sit there and watch and think: ‘oh god, there is a whole hierarchical structure in here—but it’s covert.’

Coming back to the recent protests around the Mediterranean: many movements have focused on local struggles. What is the next step to take towards social transformation?

At some point we have to create organizations which are able to assemble and enforce social change on a broader scale. For example, will Podemos in Spain be able to do that? In a chaotic situation like the economic crisis of the last years, it is important for the left to act. If the left doesn’t make it, then the right-wing is the next option. I think—and I hate to say this—but I think the left has to be more pragmatic in relation to the dynamics going on right now.

More pragmatic in what sense?

Well, why did I support SYRIZA even though it is not a revolutionary party? Because it opened a space in which something different could happen and therefore it was a progressive move for me.

It is a bit like Marx saying: the first step to freedom is the limitation of the length of the working day. Very narrow demands open up space for much more revolutionary outcomes, and even when there isn’t any possibility for any revolutionary outcomes, we have to look for compromise solutions which nevertheless roll back the neoliberal austerity nonsense and open the space where new forms of organizing can take place.

For example, it would be interesting if Podemos looked towards organizing forms of democratic confederalism—because in some ways Podemos originated with lots of assembly-type meetings taking place all over Spain, so they are very experienced with the assembly structure.

The question is how they connect the assembly-form to some permanent forms of organization concerning their upcoming position as a strong party in Parliament. This also goes back to the question of consolidating power: you have to find ways to do so, because without it the bourgeoisie and corporate capitalism are going to find ways to reassert it and take the power back.

What do you think about the dilemma of solidarity networks filling the void after the retreat of the welfare state and indirectly becoming a partner of neoliberalism in this way?

There are two ways of organizing. One is a vast growth of the NGO sector, but a lot of that is externally funded, not grassroots, and doesn’t tackle the question of the big donors who set the agenda—which won’t be a radical agenda. Here we touch upon the privatization of the welfare state.

This seems to me to be very different politically from grassroots organizations where people are on their own, saying: ‘OK, the state doesn’t take care of anything, so we are going to have to take care of it by ourselves.’ That seems to me to be leading to forms of grassroots organization with a very different political status.

But how to avoid filling that gap by helping, for example, unemployed people not to get squeezed out by neoliberal state?

Well there has to be an anti-capitalist agenda, so that when the group works with people everybody knows that it is not only about helping them to cope but that there is an organized intent to politically change the system in its entirety. This means having a very clear political project, which is problematic with decentralized, non-homogenous types of movements where somebody works one way, others work differently and there is no collective or common project.

This connects to the very first question you raised: there is no coordination of what the political objectives are. And the danger is that you just help people cope and there will be no politics coming out of it. For example, Occupy Sandy helped people get back to their houses and they did terrific work, but in the end they did what the Red Cross and federal emergency services should have done.

The end of history seems to have passed already. Looking at the actual conditions and concrete examples of anti-capitalist struggle, do you think “winning” is still an option?

Definitely, and moreover, you have occupied factories in Greece, solidarity economies across production chains being forged, radical democratic institutions in Spain and many beautiful things happening in many other places. There is a healthy growth of recognition that we need to be much broader concerning politics among all these initiatives.

The Marxist left tends to be a little bit dismissive of some of this stuff and I think they are wrong. But at the same time I don’t think that any of this is big enough on its own to actually deal with the fundamental structures of power that need to be challenged. Here we talk about nothing less than a state. So the left will have to rethink its theoretical and tactical apparatus.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His most recent book is Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile, 2014).