Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Rehearsals and Rejections - Part I

 “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age - 1989-2019," edited by C. Barker, G. Dale, N. Davidson, 2021

This is an almost excellent account of certain class struggles since the late1980s, best for those socialists, unionists and activists stuck in the past.  It tracks the involvement of proletarians in uprisings across the globe. It is a follow-up to a prior book that covered the period prior to 1987 in the same way.  While marred by a Schactmanite ‘state capitalism’ analysis, its real focus is on how workers and proletarians became active in political upheavals within the context of capitalist and workers’ states. It is also an indirect criticism of ‘movementism’ – which has no broader goals or organization, just immediate actions based on ‘throwing the bums’ out.  Movementism essentially relies only on ad hoc organization and reformist demands.

The great interest of this book, no matter your politics, is that it investigates recent world social struggles in some detail – including unfamiliar ones.  It is really quite enlightening and optimistic.  It shows how the struggles nearly always went only so far - let’s say getting rid of a dictator or corrupt imperial lackey, but not his system, cronies, economic relations or ideas.  Or why an anti-bureaucratic labor struggle turned into a pro-imperialist and capitalist one, as in Poland.

INCREASE in SOCIAL UNREST

One of the key points the editors make (who, as of publication, were connected to the International Socialist Organization, (ISO) a Schactmanite Trotskyist group) is that research indicates there has been an increase in social unrest across the capitalist world since the onset of neoliberalism.  This includes demonstrations, riots, street battles with police, strikes and general strikes, occupations, the taking over of squares, cities and geographic areas, council formation, communes, insurrections, political revolutions and attempts at dual power.  Almost none have come to the point of a successful social revolution - as yet.  They do not analyze rural struggles like Rojava, the Naxalite areas in India or Chiapas. 

In the context of dialectics, the increase in quantity is significant.  Their analysis agrees with the ‘protest’ tracking of John Bieber, Mark Buchanan, Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone. Their methods jive with complexity analysis and the ‘power law’ – which says the frequency of smaller events are inevitably followed by larger and even larger ones, though with less frequency as size increases.

In a certain sense, they note the victory of imperialist-led bourgeois ‘democracy’ as a template across the world in this period weakened some capitalist autocrats, but not others.  Some of these mass movements forced ‘duly elected’ capitalist presidents out of office, sometimes replacing them with reform governments.  Business electoralism is a fraught system, even in the U.S., which is why there is now a bigger rise in corrupt authoritarian ‘democracies.’  The general degeneration of ruling-class electoralism is not covered in this volume.

CENTRAL EUROPE, AFRICA, ASIA, MIDDLE EAST

This book, written by various comrades in each country, starts with the reactionary rejection of the bureaucratic workers’ states in the former USSR and Central Europe, focusing on Solidarnosc in Poland, so the numbers are somewhat off.  But they do include the purely proletarian demands against the bureaucracies versus later Solidarnosc demands for a ‘free’ market, privatization and bourgeois democracy. 

It continues by looking at mass ‘extra-parliamentary’ labor, union and people’s involvement in the somewhat familiar events in South Africa, concluding in the defeat of apartheid in 1994 and the continuing struggle against capitalism there.  They track the political upheavals and experience in the Congo/Zaire from 1991 to 1997 and the overthrow of Mobutu; in Zimbabwe in 1996-1998 and events that eventually led to the unseating of Mugabe; in Burkina Faso in 2014 against a military dictatorship; the overthrow of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998 by a mass movement.  Moving to Latin America, they analyze the overcoming of the Bolivian conservative government by social movements in 2000-2005, that led to the election of Evo Morales; the violent mass upheaval in Argentina in 2001 which threw out an elected president over years of neoliberal IMF and ‘structural adjustment’ programs; in Egypt in 2011, in a tragic political revolution that threw out Mubarak only to end up with a ‘restoration’ coup and the elevation of Abdel al-Sisi in 2014.   

These mostly mass-based left-wing upheavals clearly show an intimate connection between economic, social and political demands, not their separation, contrary to syndicalist or economist ideas.  It also shows that the involvement of a significant or overwhelming mass of proletarians is essential to any significant change.  A simple lesson, but one lost on many activists.  Picket lines of 50 go almost nowhere.

Bolivia 2003-2005 

LATIN AMERICA

As a specific example, the authors track the 2003 & 2005 ‘gas wars’ in Bolivia, which led to Morales’ win.  The resistance was based on thick networks of unions, indigenous proletarians, former miners and peasants who called for a transitional demand: re-nationalizing Bolivian gas, along with a broad left program.  The authors take a careful look at El Alto, a proletarian suburb near La Paz that was the seat of this class struggle. In order to succeed, the movement united every ethnic and labor sector, from local neighborhood councils to national labor and peasant groups.  It represented the actual creation of a mass ‘workers front,’ something the great Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui advocated.  However it has not expropriated the bourgeoisie, even though Morales’ MAS calls itself socialist. 

In Argentina in 2001, the struggle introduced highway barricades manned by the unemployed; factory occupations and takeovers as collectives; popular assemblies that formed a sort of dual power and united left formations (Trotskyists and the Communist Party) that contested for electoral power. Autonomists (anarchists) and Maoists refuse to participate in the political struggle, even with flawed but successful examples like Lula, Morales and Chavez in front of them.  The significance of united fronts among leftists becomes more apparent in Latin America.  Presently in Argentina the actual Marxist left is once again a large force, as part of a proletarian united front.  What follows is a discussion of the first reformist ‘pink tide’ in Latin America, which was turned back.  A second – in Chile, in Honduras, in Peru and Bolivia, the survival of Venezuela, even the weakening of Bolsonaro in Brazil, is upon us again.

THEORY

Neil Davidson ends the book with a theoretical take on these experiences, citing Engels and Marx on the alternative outcomes to a victory of the working class:  a, war, b, “the ruin of the contending classes” and c, permanent economic collapse.  Now we have somewhat different negative consequences according to Davidson:  an environmental holocaust; global corporate autocracy or nuclear war.  He does not mention a key role for the issue of falling profit rates, world-wide debt levels and economic stagnation / depression.

The steps and 'stages' towards revolution

Davidson discusses Lukac’s reconception of Lenin’s approach to revolutionary logic, based on 3 ‘actualities’: 

    A. Material pre-conditions.  Davidson thinks these conditions are absolutely present now, across most of the world.  Instead reformists grasp the 2nd International / CP / Kautskyist idea of stages or phrases which must be gone through - until capital controls every nook and cranny of the world.  Then the time will be ripe … in that distant future.  This was also the position of Samir Amin and some others who follow Mao Zedong.    

    B. Revolutionary preparedness. Davidson considers voluntarism and Guevararist guerillaism as failed approaches to revolution, but neither is passive waiting.  He quotes Gramsci as being only able to predict ‘the struggle’ - not when it will mature into a revolutionary situation.  It is the linking of partial struggles in a transitional, empowering way, which unites the working class towards the broader goal of social revolution.  This ‘linkage’ is the prime problem for the Left.  It does not involve either shouting ‘socialism’ at every moment or wearing out cadre in tailist and unfocused hyper-activity around every single issue. 

    C. Revolutionary situation.  That short period of time – that moment - that actually would allow a powerful and united working class to overthrow a weakened capital.  It might only be a matter of months. Lenin in 1917 saw that the post-Czar provisional government was capitalist, and turned against it.  It continued the war, stood up for the landlords against the peasantry and starved and exploited the workers. At the same time the Party still worked with other left forces.  Yet when the masses turned to the Bolsheviks, he knew the moment had come.

(Review to be continued…)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive: Use terms like “Lenin,” “Samir Amin,” “Che Guevara,” “Karl Kautsky,” “Lukacs,” “Mariategui” “South Africa,” “Poland” or the word “revolution.”    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 4, 2022   

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