The whole of the September 2003 issue of New Internationalist is devoted to arguing for changing the world by building alternative social relations from below'. According to PHIL HEARSE, this strategy is unworkable and diversionary. In order to sustain their case, he argues, people who hold New Internationalist-type positions are forced to caricature and distort the views of Marxists.
new Internationalist has a decadesand social justice. Its marketing techniques and professional presentation have enabled it to reach a wide audience. Alas, its current political outlook, taken over wholesale from John Holloway's book Change the World Without Taking Power (I), abandons the political terrain to the right internationally. If widely adopted, it would disrupt the mass movements for social justice and sabotage the creation of real alternatives. Why so?
The keynote article in September's NI is by editor Katharine Ainger. According to her, we have to recognise than in fighting the powerful no usable political alternatives exist:
"For an opposing ideology around which resistance can mobilise today seems to be non-existent. Gone are the grand narratives that fuelled revolutions of the past - the Enlightenment values of equality, liberty and the 'rights of man' of the French and American revolutions; the Marxism of the Russian Revolution; the Maoism of the Chinese Revolution; the Third Worldism and only change if the only if the working class organises and takes power nationalism that fuelled the independence movements of former colonies... Worse the vacuum left by the death of an alternative ideology is being filled by religious fundamentalism and racism."
The notion of the 'end of the grand narratives' is a leitmotif of reactionary postmodernist theory, one recycled in Fukuyama's in Venezuela in the idea of the 'end of history'. It deliberately confuses defeats for Marxism and socialist movements with their death; and it all too easily conflates the end of Stalinism with the 'end' of Marxism.
I'm sure that Katharine Ainger knows very well that non-Stalinist Marxist currents got I per cent in the last French presidential elections. Unfortunately for our radical-democratic opponents, we're not dead nor have we gone away.
To to any anti-war or global justice
C demonstration and look around.
Marxism isn't dead, because it is the most coherent critique of capitalism, and theorisation of its overthrow, to have emerged. As long as the fight to overthrow capitalist social relations continues, Marxism will stick around.
Ainger claims: "What we need is not a new political theory, but to widen the very notion of what politics is, to access the sources of our own power, regrounded in the reality of our own lives and practices... The idea of mutual aid is a potent source for the renewal of the Left, leading us beyond the old dichotomy that social welfare is best provided by the State or the market. Ideas of Mass action in Bolivia can force a change of government: but the system will
.•. Why is there the massive agitation reve and self-organisation first place? Because of the election of a left wing government.
... mutuality and co-production put people back into the heart of local services; and these ideas are catching on. Examples range from the much-vaunted participatory budget of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, to the neighbourhood committees of Argentina, all the way to the run down English social-housing estates of Luton, Manchester and Newcastle, where as Hilary Wainwright shows in her book Reclaim the State, people are initiating popular participation in public services."
Ainger's arguments are given weight by contributions from radical activists in Mexico and South Africa, basing themselves on community organisations in both countries, and of course the experience of the Zapatistas in Mexico.
What they are saying is basically this: forget about conquering the state to change the world - that leads only to co-option or the brutal wielding of oppressive power - and get on with changing social relations in the here and now by taking control of our own lives and communities, building a co-operative economy, sharing our own resources and making lives tolerable again. That, in the words of John Holloway, is 'the meaning of revolution today'.
This line of argument has some positive things going for it, but is globally unworkable. Take the situation today in the ultra-poor barrios of the Venezuelan capital Caracas There, because of the politicisation caused by the left-leaning government of Hugo Chavez and his 'Bolivarian revolution', selforganisation in the poor barrios is massive.
People are taking the provision of water, electricity and other basic services such as the running of schools into their own hands. Administration is in the hands of local committees - the poor are running their own lives. A barrio activist recently told The -Absenger ile don't want our own government to cepresent us, we want to be the government."
, This is a very progressive line of argument. But it omits crucial factors. Why is there the massive agitation and self-organisation in Venezuela in the first place? Because of the election of a left-wing government.
That government has many limitaI tion, but if is overthrown from
the right - by local reaction backed by US imperialism - the self-organisation in the barrios will be repressed and collapse.
The many activists in the poor neighbourhoods who express impatience and hostility to the ultra-politicised debates in the Bolivarian committees risk cutting off their nose to spite their face. It is in those debates that the possibility of a popular political alternative, which links local self-organisation into a national network of self-administration, is being hammered out.
Do-it-yourself local activism seems very attractive because it addresses concrete problems in the here and now, rather than apparently 'abstract' questions of national state power. This issue has arisen in all the debates about the tremendous wave of struggle and self-organisation in Argentina.
According to Naomi Klein (2), this vast movement started to decline because the revolutionary left organisations bored everyone to death prattling on about a workers' government. The truth is very different.
Economic collapse, which led to the expropriation of the savings of millions of people, mass unemployment and pauperisation, also engendered a multi-million move. ment of revolutionary proportions. Such a movement can easily survive the boredom of sectarian interventions.
It declined, not because it had no more self-organised tasks to accomplish, but because it could not hammer out a national political alternative, a real alternative to Peronism at the level of government.
Why do the self-organised masses need a governmental alterna tive? Why can't they just "be' th government?
For two linked reasons: first, the local selforganised committees pose questions of resources, of employment, of investment, of infrastructure and security, which cannot be solved at a local level.
This is obvious in the discussion about public services in Britain. You can't resolve the problems of the NHS by local participation and administration, you need massive national investment, and that needs the decision of government. As someone reviewing Toni Negri's famous book Empire put it, "you can't remake society with a Stanley knife".
Secondly, if the radical self-organised poor and their allies abandon the political terrain of the national (and international), capitalism will use its state to crush them, either politically, or if necessary, militarily
That's what happened during the 'dirty war' in Argentina in 1974-6, that's what happened in Chile in 1973, that's what happened in Catalonia in 1937. Massive levels of strug gle, big experiments in self-organisation, utter and complete defeat
How then can we avoid the terrible experience of the Stalinist state, or the experience of social democracy in power, utterly capitulating before neo-liberalism? Ultimately the only answer is a different type of state, a selforganised state, an anti-statist 'state' if you want.
This is what revolutionary marxists ty it is possible to build a national state structure based on the self-organisation of society, federated at a regional and national level. A 'state' with its roots in 'civil society, with elected officials subject to instant recall of their electing bodies. A state based on the sovereignty of the selfce January 2004 19 Anti-capitalist politics
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