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Reflections on Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry
The following post is based on a longer review of the book to be published in September 2016 issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
If you were to enter a cryogenic sleep in 2008, wake up in early 2016 and take a quick glance at the fortunes of Western capitalism, you would be forgiven for assuming that you had only spent a month frozen in time, rather than eight years. Indeed, if you were to wake up in the middle of Chancellor George Osborne’s grim Budget 2016 announcement, it is highly likely that the only difference you could immediately notice would be the identity of the person delivering the speech, not the bleak economic outlook that accompanied it. Eight years on, Western capitalism is still struggling to find a way out of its economic cul-de-sac and facing the intensifying political and social repercussions of its metastasising slump. In the intervening years, the expansion of credit and the ever-increasing reliance on private debt have become the lifeline of capitalist economies that are unable and unwilling to alleviate the crisis of social reproduction faced by their populations.
Enter Susanne Soederberg’s Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population—an outstanding study of the precise mechanisms with which the instrumentalisation of credit and debt have given birth to a ‘new form of governance’ responsible for keeping capitalism on resuscitation. In the following post, instead of summarising Soederberg’s impressive analysis, I would like to briefly highlight a number of themes that emerged from my reading of the book with regards to the questions of methodology, critique and political practice.
Debtfare States accomplishes the difficult task of designing a robust theoretical framework and weaving a consistent analytical thread that effortlessly feeds from this conceptual infrastructure. This feat has been recognised with the 2015 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize. According to the judges, Soederberg should ‘be commended on the fact that she does not advertise her theoretical erudition; instead, the book was infused by it, which ensures that the book [is] eminently readable and accessible for the much wider audience to whom the conclusions will pertain’. This is an important statement given the broader theoretical landscape of the debates the book aims to intervene in and problematise. As Soederberg explains at length:
[M]uch of the literature on financialisation and consumer society stops at the realm of exchange without venturing into the wider capitalist relations of production and by extension, accumulation. This is the root of their explanatory weakness in grasping the origins of social transformation, the social power of money and the social reproduction of credit in neoliberal capitalism. A related issue in theorising finance as a separate entity from the social relations of production is the over-emphasis on finance and its tendencies toward greed-driven speculation, as the primary source of crises and immiseration in contemporary times. While financial speculation and predatory forms of consumer credit have played important and detrimental roles in destabilising societies and dispossessing hundreds of millions of people, there are deeper structural factors involved in neoliberal capitalism that have helped to legitimate, reproduce and stoke the dominance of interest-generating income over productive-based profit since the early 1980s.
In contrast, Soederberg’s own tripartite framework—which fuses Marxist theories of money, crisis and the state—invites the reader, following Marx, to leave the ‘noisy sphere’ of exchange and enter ‘into the hidden abode of production’. It is within these parameters that Soederberg conceptualises money, not as a ‘thing’ or a mere ‘commodity’, but as a specific commodity that serves to conceal exploitative class dynamics inherent in capitalist social relations of production.
Soederberg’s theoretical discussion is relevant and essential not only for those who study contemporary finance, credit and indebtedness but also for the broader disciplinary fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE). This is the case because Soederberg convincingly reasserts why historical materialism is best positioned to interrogate not only the economic, but also the political and social components of contemporary capitalism. It is thus not surprising that the book prefaces its theoretical discussion by a thorough critique of those tendencies that charge Marxist analysis with economic determinism and reductionism. Rather than rejecting these criticisms tout court, Soederberg shows how the approaches that charge Marxism with economic determinism themselves are guilty of uncritically accepting ‘the economic meaning of money’ which then results in the naturalisation of ‘the social power inherent to money and its ability to neutralise, individualise, level and normalise highly exploitative and unequal relations of power between people in capitalism’. Soederberg argues that the critical treatments of finance and money offered by ‘Foucauldian and other post-structuralist analyses’ fail to move beyond the ‘realm of exchange’ as they ‘assume’ rather than ‘explain’ the roots and role of credit in capitalism by ‘[separating] the discussion of money from the dynamics of capital accumulation’. These approaches, furthermore, fail to confront the depoliticisation of credit as they ‘[vacate] the economic forms to study the cultural and social features of credit’. Soederberg’s dual positioning of her theoretical framework/critique thus provides both a compelling organisational structure for the study and a demonstration of how the approaches targeted by Soederberg are marked by significant lacunae that ultimately result in a fundamental inability to address the core dynamics of contemporary indebtedness and credit-led accumulation.
A similar move is visible in Soederberg’s periodisation of capital accumulation. Soederberg retraces the emergence of neoliberalism—or the dominance of ‘credit-led accumulation’—by recapitulating a familiar neoliberal ‘origin’ story. In this account, neoliberalism emerged from ‘the underlying tensions and crises in capital over-accumulation’ inherent in Keynesian and Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI)-oriented accumulation models. In response to the accumulation crises and ‘social fallouts’ that beset these state forms, neoliberalism rose upon a number of ‘rhetorical and regulatory’ pillars, including ‘a withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or, the contracting out) of public services and the commodification of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture’. While the historical account largely reflects a conventional narrative of neoliberal ascendancy, it is important to note that Soederberg refrains from reproducing what Damien Cahill has called an ‘ideas-centred explanation’ of neoliberalism with which the rise of neoliberalism is understood as a direct consequence of the policy-makers’ adoption of neoliberal ideas. Instead, Soederberg’s account of neoliberalisation serves as an introduction to her extensive analysis of ‘debtfarism’ which is located as one of the four elements of contemporary neoliberal governance, along with monetarism, corporate welfarism and workfarism. The corollary of this approach is recognising neoliberalism not as a monolithic set of policies, designed and implemented in a uniform manner across different contexts, but as a strategy—and often a desperate one—to offset the crises of capitalist accumulation that all varieties of capitalist state forms face at regular intervals. Perceiving neoliberalism in such terms, in contrast to projecting a triad of functionalism, instrumentalism and statism as some critics of Marxist explanations have argued, enables an appreciation of how a myriad of policies act and emerge as strategic state responses to such accumulation crises.
Finally, revisiting the ‘hidden abode of production’ raises some important questions for anti-capitalist organisation and taking concrete political steps to pacify the worst effects of financialisation and indebtedness. As Soederberg’s study reveals, the issues of indebtedness and dependence on credit cannot be resolved without simultaneous interventions to augment workers’ wages and to re-establish non-corporate forms of social security. And even then, since Soederberg chastises the debtfare state for not ‘providing workers with social protection against market forces through, at a minimum, a living wage’, it is safe to assume that the author considers living/social wage as a necessary criterion to weaken financial bondage, not a sufficient one. This is an important point given the salience of ‘basic income’ proposals and living wage campaigns that are gaining traction in advanced capitalist countries. While the progressive appeal of the basic income proposals is clear, some concrete plans are clearly anchored in a right-wing agenda to shift the ‘burden’ of the welfare state onto individuals with marginally increased consumption capacities—an agenda that is geared towards dismantling universal welfare provisions while invoking the sacred neoliberal tenet of financialised personal responsibility.
Soederberg concludes the book by stating that her study aims to ‘raise pertinent questions about how to radically re-think’ the role of money in neoliberal governance, rather than offering ‘blueprints and roadmaps of how struggles should proceed’. True, the book does not provide systematic ‘blueprint and roadmap’ for individuals and collectivities struggling against the increasingly disciplinary forms of neoliberalism, but it does offer an equally important insight by rendering naked the mechanisms and champions of credit-led accumulation that extend well beyond big business, banks and mortgage companies—conventional targets of many important contemporary radical movements. Soederberg’s critique expertly reaffirms the deleterious role these actors play in entrenching inequalities and indebtedness, but the book’s real strength lies in its determination to frame and target the state as a pillar of the neoliberal assault on social reproduction. Consequently, the book invites us to reassess and design existing ‘blueprints and roadmaps’ that either underestimate or wholly eschew the questions of state power and political organisation as well as coordination beyond localised grassroots efforts.
Overthrowing Dilma Rousseff: It’s Class War, and Their Class is Winning
The judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff is the culmination of the deepest political crisis in Brazil for 50 years.
Every so often, the bourgeois political system runs into crisis. The machinery of the state jams; the veils of consent are torn asunder and the tools of power appear disturbingly naked. Brazil is living through one of those moments: it is dreamland for social scientists; a nightmare for everyone else.
Dilma Rousseff was elected President in 2010, with a 56-44 per cent majority against the right-wing neoliberal PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party) opposition candidate. She was re-elected four years later with a diminished yet convincing majority of 52-48 per cent, or a difference of 3.5 million votes.
Dilma’s second victory sparked a heated panic among the neoliberal and US-aligned opposition. The fourth consecutive election of a President affiliated to the centre-left PT (Workers’ Party) was bad news for the opposition, among other reasons because it suggested that PT founder Luís Inácio Lula da Silva could return in 2018. Lula had been President between 2003 and 2010 and, when he left office, his approval ratings hit 90 per cent, making him the most popular leader in Brazilian history. This threat of continuity suggested that the opposition could be out of federal office for a generation. They immediately rejected the outcome of the vote. No credible complaints could be made, but no matter; it was resolved that Dilma Rousseff would be overthrown by any means necessary. To understand what happened next, we must return to 2011.
Dilma inherited from Lula a booming economy. Alongside China and other middle-income countries, Brazil bounced back vigorously after the global crisis. GDP expanded by 7.5 per cent in 2010, the fastest rate in decades, and Lula’s hybrid neoliberal-neodevelopmental economic policies seemed to have hit the perfect balance: sufficiently orthodox to enjoy the confidence of large sections of the internal bourgeoisie and the formal and informal working class, and heterodox enough to deliver the greatest redistribution of income and privilege in Brazil’s recorded history. For example, the real minimum wage rose by 70 per cent and 21 million (mostly low-paid) jobs were created in the 2000s. Social provision increased significantly, including the world-famous Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer programme, and the Government supported a dramatic expansion of higher education, including quotas for blacks and state school pupils. For the first time, the poor could access education as well as income and bank loans. They proceeded to study, earn and borrow, and to occupy spaces, literally, previously the preserve of the upper-middle class: airports, shopping malls, banks, private health facilities and roads, with the latter clogged up by cheap cars purchased on 72 easy payments. The Government enjoyed a comfortable majority in a highly fragmented Congress, and Lula’s legendary political skills managed to keep most of the political elite on side.
Then everything started to go wrong. Dilma Rousseff was chosen by Lula as his successor. She was a steady pair of hands and a competent manager and enforcer. She was also the most left-wing President of Brazil since João Goulart, who was overthrown by a military coup in 1964. However, she had no political track record and, it will soon become evident, lacked essential qualities for the job.
Once elected, Dilma shifted economic policies further away from neoliberalism. The Government intervened in several sectors seeking to promote investment and output, and put intense pressure on the financial system to reduce interest rates, which lowered credit costs and the Government’s debt service, releasing funds for consumption and investment. A virtuous circle of growth and distribution seemed possible. Unfortunately, the Government miscalculated the lasting impact of the global crisis. The US and European economies stagnated, China’s growth faltered, and the so-called commodity super-cycle vanished. Brazil’s current account was ruined. Even worse, the US, UK, Japan and the Eurozone introduced quantitative easing policies that led to massive capital outflows towards middle-income countries. Brazil faced a tsunami of foreign exchange, that overvalued the currency and bred deindustrialisation. Economic growth rates fell precipitously.
The Government doubled its interventionism through public investment, subsidised loans and tax rebates, which ravaged the public accounts. Their frantic and seemingly random interventionism scared away the internal bourgeoisie: local magnates were content to run Government through the Workers’ Party, but would not be managed by a former political prisoner who overtly despised them. And her antipathy was not only reserved for the capitalists: the President had little inclination to speak to social movements, left organisations, lobbies, allied parties, elected politicians, or her own ministers. The economy stalled and Dilma’s political alliances shrank, in a fast-moving dance of destruction. The neoliberal opposition scented blood.
For years, the opposition to the PT had been rudderless. The PSDB had nothing appealing to offer while, as is traditional in Brazil, most other parties were gangs of bandits extorting the Government for selfish gain. The situation was so desperate that the mainstream media overtly took the mantle of opposition, driving the anti-PT agenda and literally instructing politicians what to do next. In the meantime, the radical left remained small and relatively powerless. It was despised by the hegemonic ambitions of the PT.
The confluence of dissatisfactions became an irresistible force in 2013. The mainstream media is rabidly neoliberal and utterly ruthless: it is as if Fox News and its clones dominated the entire US media, including all TV chains and the main newspapers. The upper-middle class was their obliging target, as they had economic, social and political reasons to be unhappy. Upper-middle class jobs were declining, with 4.3 million posts paying between 5 and 10 minimum wages vanishing in the 2000s. In the meantime, the bourgeoisie was doing well, and the poor advanced fast: even domestic servants got labour rights. The upper-middle class felt squeezed economically, and excluded from their privileged spaces. It was also dislocated from the state. Since Lula’s election, the state bureaucracy had been populated by thousands of cadres appointed by the PT and the left, to the detriment of ‘better-educated’, whiter and, presumably, more deserving upper-middle class competitors. Mass demonstrations erupted for the first time in June 2013, triggered by left-wing opposition against a bus fare increase in São Paulo. Those demonstrations were fanned by the media and captured by the upper middle-class and the right, and they shook the Government – but, clearly, not enough to motivate them to save themselves. The demonstrations returned two years later. And then in 2016.
Now, reader, follow this. After the decimation of the state apparatus by the pre-Lula neoliberal administrations, the PT sought to rebuild selected areas of the bureaucracy. Among them, for reasons that Lula may soon have plenty of time to review and to regret, the Federal Police and the Federal Prosecution Office (FPO). In addition, for overtly ‘democratic’ reasons, but more likely related to corporatism and capacity to make media-friendly noises, the Federal Police and the FPO were granted inordinate autonomy; the former through mismanagement, while the latter has become the fourth power in the Republic, separate from – and checking – the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The abundance of qualified jobseekers led to the colonisation of these well-paying jobs by upper-middle class cadres. They were now in a constitutionally secure position, and could chew the hand that had fed them, while loudly demanding, through the media, additional resources to maul the rest of the PT’s body.
Corruption was the ideal pretext. Since it lost the first democratic presidential elections, in 1989, the PT moved steadily towards the political centre. In order to lure the upper-middle class and the internal bourgeoisie, the PT neutralised or expelled the party’s left wing, disarmed the trade unions and social movements, signed up to the neoliberal economic policies pursued by the previous administration, and imposed a dour conformity that killed off any alternative leadership. Only Lula’s sun can shine in the party; everything else was incinerated. This strategy was eventually successful and, in 2002, ‘Little Lula Peace and Love’ was elected President. (I kid you not, reader: this was one of his campaign slogans.)
For years the PT had thrived in opposition as the only honest political party in Brazil. This strategy worked, but it contained a lethal contradiction: in order to win expensive elections, manage the Executive and build a workable majority in Congress, the PT would have to get its hands dirty. There is no other way to ‘do’ politics in Brazilian ‘democracy’.
We only need one more element, and our mixture will be ready to combust. Petrobras is Brazil’s largest corporation and one of the world’s largest oil companies. The firm has considerable technical and economic capacity, and it was responsible for the discovery, in 2006, of gigantic ‘pre-salt’ deep sea oilfields hundreds of miles from the Brazilian coast. Dilma Rousseff, as Lula’s Minister of Mines and Energy, was responsible for handling exploration contracts in these areas including large privileges for Petrobras. The enabling legislation was vigorously opposed by PSDB, the media, the oil majors and the US Government.
In 2014, Sergio Moro, a previously unknown judge in Curitiba, a Southern state capital, started investigating a currency dealer involved in tax evasion. This case eventually spiralled into a deadly threat against Dilma Rousseff’s Government. Judge Moro is good-looking, well-educated, white and well-paid. He is also very close to the PSDB. His Lavajato (Carwash) operation unveiled an extraordinary tale of large-scale bribery, plunder of public assets and funding for all major political parties, centred on the relationship between Petrobras and some of its main suppliers – precisely the stalwarts of the PT in the oil, shipbuiding and construction industries. It was the perfect combination, at the right time. Judge Moro’s cause was picked up by the media, and he obligingly steered it to inflict maximum damage on the PT, while shielding the other parties. Politicians connected to the PT and some of Brazil’s wealthiest businessmen were summarily jailed, and would remain locked up until they agreed a plea bargain implicating others. A new phase of Lavajato would ensnare them, and so on. The operation is now in its 26th phase; many have already collaborated, and those who refused to do so have received long prison sentences, to coerce them back into line while their appeals are pending. The media turned Judge Moro into a hero; he can do no wrong, and attempts to contest his sprawling powers are met with derision or worse. He is now the most powerful person in the Republic, above Dilma, Lula, the speakers of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate (both sinking in corruption and other scandals), and even the Supreme Court Justices, who have either been silenced or are quietly supportive of Moro’s crusade.
Petrobras has been paralysed by the scandal, bringing down the entire oil chain. Private investment has collapsed because of political uncertainty and the politically-driven investment strike against Dilma’s Government. Congress has turned against the Government, and the Judiciary is overwhelmingly hostile. After years of sniping, the media has been delighted to see Lula fall under the Lavajato juggernaut, even if the allegations are often far-fetched: does he actually own a beach-side apartment that his family does not use, is that small farm really his, who paid for the lake and the mobile phone masts nearby, and how about those pedalos? No matter: in a display of bravado and power, Moro even detained Lula for questioning on 4 March. He was taken to São Paulo airport and would have been flown to Curitiba, but the Judge’s plan was halted by fear of the political fallout. Lula was questioned at the airport, then released. He was livid.
In order to shore up her crumbling administration and protect Lula from prosecution, Dilma Rousseff appointed Lula her Chief of Staff (the President’s Chief of Staff has ministerial status and can be prosecuted only by the Supreme Court). The right-wing conspiracy went into overdrive. Moro (illegally) released the (illegal) recording of a conversation between President Dilma and Lula, pertaining to his investiture. Once suitably misinterpreted, their dialogue was presented as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy to protect Lula from Moro’s determination to jail him. Large right-wing upper-middle class masses poured into the streets, furiously, on 13 March. Five days later, the left responded with not quite as large demonstrations of its own against the unfolding coup. In the meantime, Lula’s appointment was suspended by a judicial measure, then restored, then suspended again. The case is now in the Supreme Court. At the moment, he is not a Minister, and his head is posed above the block. Moro can arrest him at short notice.
Why is this a coup? Because, despite aggressive scrutiny no Presidential crime warranting impeachment proceedings has emerged. Nevertheless, the political right has thrown the kitchen sink at Dilma Rousseff. They rejected the outcome of the 2014 elections and appealed against her alleged campaign finance violations, which would remove from power both Dilma and Vice-President Michel Temer, now the effective leader of the impeachment drive (and strangely enough, this case has been parked). The right simultaneously started impeachment procedures in Congress. The media has attacked the Government viciously, neoliberal economists ‘impartially’ beg for a new administration ‘to restore market confidence’, and the right will resort to street violence as necessary. Finally, the judicial charade against the PT has broken all the rules of legality, yet it is cheered on by the media, the right and even by the Supreme Court Justices.
Yet… the coup de grâce is taking a long time coming. In the olden days, the military would have already moved in. Today, the Brazilian military are defined more by their nationalism (a danger to the neoliberal onslaught) than by their right-wing faith and, anyway, the Soviet Union is no more. Under neoliberalism, coups d’état must follow legal niceties, as was shown in Honduras, in 2009, and in Paraguay, in 2012.
Brazil is likely to join their company, but not just now: large sections of capital want to restore the hegemony of neoliberalism; those who once supported the PT’s national development strategy have fallen into line; the media is howling so loudly it has become impossible to think clearly, and most of the upper-middle class has descended into a fascist odium for the PT, the left, the poor, and blacks. Their disorderly hatred has become so intense that even PSDB politicians are booed in anti-Government demonstrations. And, despite the relentless attack, the left remains reasonably strong, as was demonstrated on 18th March. The right and the elite are powerful and ruthless – but they are also afraid of the consequences of their own daring.
There is no simple resolution to the political, economic and social crises in Brazil. Dilma Rousseff has lost political support and the confidence of capital, and she is likely to be removed from office in the coming days. However, attempts to imprison Lula could have unpredictable implications and, even if Dilma and Lula are struck off the political map, a renewed neoliberal hegemony cannot automatically restore political stability or economic growth, nor secure the social prominence that the upper-middle class craves. Despite strong media support for the impending coup, the PT, other left parties and many radical social movements remain strong. Further escalation is inevitable. Watch this space.
Egypt and the Dialectic of Passive and Permanent Revolution
Although it is always difficult, if not impossible, to clearly discern the emergence of a new epoch when you find yourself right in the middle of the process, there are strong indications that we are experiencing a watershed moment in the development of capitalism. Conjunctural crises such as the 2008 financial meltdown reveal the structural instabilities of the neoliberal system of deregulated capital flows, while the tendency toward increased authoritarianism and securitisation in both core and peripheral capitalist countries show the limits of bourgeois democracy to absorb mass discontent. At the same time, episodes such as the ‘Arab Spring’ sharply posit the relevance of ‘old’ categories such as revolution and counter-revolution for the 21st century. As moments of political hope and despair, optimism and pessimism, succeed one another rapidly, activists’ consciousness and understanding of unfolding events often tail-end the almost bipolar ebb and flow of popular initiative. In order to intervene successfully, activists have to make sense of the direction of the process as a whole and of the various instances of agency at work – their own included. Therefore, radical theory has to extend beyond the sphere of mere philosophical, political or economic critique – the unveiling of relations of power – and into the ‘interventionist’ domain of concrete emancipatory strategies and imaginaries.
Arguably Antonio Gramsci is one of the key figures within this revolutionary tradition. His notion of a ‘philosophy of praxis’ challenged the rigid and mechanical framework of the dominant stream of Marxism in the late 1920s, advocating the development of an intellectually sophisticated, but also practice-oriented theory of social change. The last decade has witnessed a renewal of Gramscian theory in the Anglophone world. Key works such as Adam Morton’s Unravelling Gramsci (2007) and Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment (2009) are moving away from leading postwar interpretations that cast the Sardinian Marxist in the restricted role of a ‘reformist’ and of a ‘cultural’ or ‘postcolonial’ thinker, re-appropriating his thought within the context of a new era of global capitalist crisis and struggle. My book Gramsci on Tahrir is a humble contribution to this ongoing debate. I investigate the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt and its relation to the broad historical development of capitalism through the combined lens of permanent and passive revolution. Conversely, the Egyptian experience is deployed as a means to think about general changes in state and class power.
Passive revolution is a concept that basically “captures various concrete historical instances in which aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both ‘revolutionary’ rupture and a ‘restoration’ of social relations”. In spite of the adjective ‘passive’ this process of ‘revolution-restoration’ does not exclude sudden outbursts of street politics ‘from below’ and even mass uprisings. The concept draws our attention to the political initiative of dominant groups and their capacity to maintain power, through a ‘revolution from above’, in the sense of a gradual, elite-driven transformation of society, and/or by the deflection, fragmentation, and appropriation of popular movements. Faced with the stubborn survival of capitalism in the face of mass revolution and its rebirth in Fordism and Fascism, Gramsci formulated his theory of passive revolution as a “critical corollary” to Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Put simply: what if, indeed, the relations of production began to “fetter” the productive forces and “an era of social revolution” ensued, but the revolutionary proletariat was unable to conquer and transform the bourgeois state? Could this period of non-transition lead to anything else than the apocalyptic choice between “socialism or barbarism”?
Gramsci turned to the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, as a historical case study to ‘work out’ the concept of passive revolution, which, in turn, allowed him to understand the emergence of Fascism. Hence the concept of passive revolution does not function as a discrete political ‘form’, situated somewhere between ‘active’ revolution and counter-revolution, but, as a heuristic that “reveals specific class strategies and spatial practices that characterise capitalist society and how these have changed with the further development of capitalism.” It is, in Gramsci’s own words, a “criterion of interpretation”: a methodological searchlight that reveals the agency, agility, and adaptability of dominant groups that are able to survive their own hegemonic crises. Thus a nation’s history can be comprehended as a series of discrete revolutionary and passive-revolutionary episodes that are incorporated within long-term transformations of global capitalism.
In this regard “Gramsci on Tahrir” functions as a reading of Egypt’s modern history through the lens of its revolutionary upheavals and their displacements: the 1882 Urabi uprising; the 1919 revolution; the 1952 Free Officer coup; the 1977 ‘bread riots’; and the recent mass movements. Here the concept of passive revolution is complemented with Trotsky’s notion of ‘uneven and combined development’, for in the colonial and postcolonial world moments of capitalist constitution and reconstitution become a contemporaneous and protracted process – with important implications for emancipatory struggles. Even after formal independence was declared in 1922 Egypt remained a society in crisis, unable to free itself from its political and economic bondage to imperialism. The interventions of British capital and its alliance with the Egyptian crown and landlords blocked the formation of a capitalist ‘historical bloc’ and a transformation ‘from above’. Conversely, enduring conflicts and cleavages between subaltern groups prevented an alliance that could effectively overthrow state power. The process of permanent-passive revolution became itself deflected through the 1952 Free Officer coup. The military appeared as a neutral, third party that forcefully solved the Egyptian stalemate. However, despite its autonomy, the military did not act in a class vacuum. State power remained rooted in class power, which slowly shifted from the industrial bourgeoisie in the 1950s to the ‘popular classes’ in the 1960s – only to root itself back into parasitic rentier classes from the 1970s onward.
The Egyptian case indicates that the concept of passive revolution offers much more than a heuristic device, for it also probes into the very nature of capitalist class and state power. In his prison notebooks, Gramsci often returns to the case of the French Revolution, which poses the riddle of bourgeois hegemony (and its subsequent demise) – a riddle that Gramsci, in my opinion, never completely solves. In his “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) Marx mentions how the political revolution of the French bourgeoisie in 1789 created:
…a moment in which this class fraternises and fuses with society in general, becomes identified with it and is experienced and acknowledged as its universal representative; a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the rights and claims of society itself and in which it is in reality the heart and head of society.
Gramsci elaborated upon this idea, adding that:
The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere ‘technically’ and ideologically: their conception was that of a closed class. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of the State has been transformed; the State has become an ‘educator’.
The French Revolution destroyed the ‘mechanical’ ensemble of feudal society, which consisted of self-contained corporate estates. Whereas feudal dominant classes ruled society almost ‘from the outside’, the bourgeoisie ruled by becoming society and, conversely, by offering the other classes a pathway to become bourgeois.
Although much has been written about ‘the state as educator’ in the above excerpt, the interesting concept of ‘organic passage’ (passaggio organico) itself has not been discussed at length. The importance of the concept cannot be underestimated, because the promise of an ‘organic passage’ of the broad population to the bourgeois class has been capitalism’s mobilising myth, functioning as the origin of the bourgeoisie’s hegemony – and of its systemic crisis. As Marx explains, the universality of the bourgeois project remains abstract, realised by separating a ‘political society’ from ‘civil society’ in which all citizens are equal before the law. Marx distinguishes between this restricted, abstract form of political emancipation and human or social emancipation, which liberates humanity from class society and alienation. At its core, the permanency of revolution in the modern, bourgeois age is the always-present, immanent possibility of social revolution to spring from the conditions of political revolution. Marx quipped in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that: ‘The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide?’ and, later in the Economic Manuscripts that, ‘[t]he political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery’.
The 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune of 1871 confirmed the thesis of permanent revolution in Marx’s eyes. Even if they ended up merely reconfiguring political relations, revolutions – in the sense of mass mobilisations from below contesting existing state power – always contained a ‘social soul’: concrete emancipatory practices that prefigured new social forms in the womb of capitalism. Functioning as passive revolution’s mirror heuristic, the concept of permanent revolution teases out the immanent social soul in a nation’s historical trajectory. In the case of Egypt, Tahrir is revealed as much more than a ‘democratic’ struggle against dictatorship. A desire for social justice and human dignity coincided with practices of popular self-organisation, which embodied the seeds of an alternative society based on equality, diversity, cooperation, and joyful labour. My book shows that these practices have lineages in earlier struggles, reaching back to the early twentieth century.
In its most radical, Jacobin, moment, the French Revolution already showed the fundamental contradiction at the heart of bourgeois hegemony: the promise of an organic passage of the whole of society into the state can never be fulfilled. As Peter Thomas argues, the key term ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci’s writings is not a concept of a neutral political science that describes bourgeois and proletarian leadership in the same terms. The content of bourgeois and proletarian hegemony and its concrete methods of coercion and consent differ fundamentally. Nevertheless, despite this crucial distinction, Gramsci himself is ambiguous about the organic quality of bourgeois leadership at its earliest historical phase, positing a political homology between ‘bourgeois’ Jacobin and ‘proletarian’ Leninist class leadership. Echoing Marx, Gramsci is keen to point out that the progressive role of the bourgeoisie is already exhausted in the revolutions of 1848, as it began to forge alliances with Ancien Régime elites against the emerging proletariat and the spectre of social revolution. However, one could argue that the French Revolution’s radical Jacobin moment, which created the myth of a bourgeois organic passage was already transgressing the bourgeoisie’s traditional strategy of class rule. Compromise, co-optation, fragmentation of the opposition, and molecular, gradual change engineered ‘from above’ – i.e., passive revolution – appear as the true hallmarks of capitalist state formation. In fact, the English Revolution or German unification are better archetypes of bourgeois state formation than the French Revolution as they show how dominant Ancien Régime groups were gradually transformed into fractions of capital.
Hence the premise of Gramsci’s investigation into the concepts of passive revolution and the ‘integral state’ is that, even though the bourgeois state is not a mechanical state, it is not genuinely organic either. Making a slight detour to Hegel I underline that the bourgeois state in fact supervises a “chemical” ensemble of classes, meaning that there is an apparently neutral relation between the bourgeois class and other social groups on the basis of their shared property as citizens or belonging to ‘the people’. As the late Ellen Meiksins Wood underlined, the history of class society is the history of the differentiation of class and state power, which reaches its pinnacle in bourgeois society. Here state power functions as a ‘middle term’ that mediates class relations, but this representative function is merely a means to the end of achieving bourgeois class power. In other words, it is due to the separation and autonomy of the state that the bourgeoisie is able to rule. Similarly, the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the bourgeoisie emerge mostly in separation of the class itself, within the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie or ‘middle classes’.
Two important conclusions can be drawn from the ‘chemical’ make-up of bourgeois state power. First, the rather common sense and self-evident deduction that bourgeois hegemony is inherently unstable and limited. Second, that political forms that appear historically as aberrations of bourgeois class rule – Bonapartist or Caesarist régimes –are in fact the purest expressions of bourgeois state power. Marx did not conceive of the Bonapartism and empire-crafting of Napoleon III as a regression to a pre-bourgeois phase, but as a development of modern capitalist class power. For the bourgeoisie it was much easier to be a ruling class that appeared to suffer the shared fate of all classes in society – to be subjugated in equal measure by imperial power – than to face the reality of being a class that cowardly refrained from completing its own democratic project. Thus the political dispossession of the bourgeoisie from state power guaranteed its class power. Likewise, Gramsci considered Fascism and parliamentary forms of ‘civil Caesarism’ as modern expressions of bourgeois domination. With this in mind, capitalism’s historical anomaly is not the authoritarianism of the interwar years, but the postwar democratisation of Western Europe’s institutions and the rise of the welfare state. This ‘counter-revolution in democratic form’, a defensive passive revolution sui generis, was rendered possible and necessary in unique circumstances of a powerful labour movement, discredited capitalist parties, a bipolar world order, and an economic boom sustained by a Fordist accumulation strategy.
Similarly, the rise of Nasserism in Egypt and of the ‘developmental state’ in much of the Global South was the unique and contingent result of national and global geopolitical and economic conditions. Decolonisation struggles in the 1950s and 1960s often deflected processes of both permanent and passive revolution, dethroning traditional elites and pushing back the forces of imperialism, but also preventing farmers, workers, and other subaltern groups from taking power. The use of a ‘blocked dialectic’ to describe this process – drawing from Christine Buci-Glucksmann – would be incorrect, as the crisis of imperialist capitalism in core and peripheral countries produced new (capitalist) social forms that did not represent either “socialism or barbarism” and which actually developed the means of production.
The emergence of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s is a reiteration of prewar imperialism, complete with novel forms of Caesarist state power, which undermine the democratic institutions of bourgeois democracy, for example by relocating political and economic decision-making to supranational entities such as the IMF and the elusive ‘financial markets’. In Europe the recent Greek debt crisis illustrates how capital is able to subdue recalcitrant bourgeois parliaments and a national, sovereign, popular will by international and transnational coercive forces such as the ECB. In Egypt, popular initiative was displaced twice, in 2011 and 2013, by the military apparatus that, in a classical Caesarist way, had to affirm the independence of the state in order to assure the rule of rentier capital. The ‘deep state’ has been coated with a thin layer of democratic legitimacy, which cannot contain the lingering contradictions of the Mubarak era: how can economic development, social justice, and political democracy ever be achieved by a dependent, rentier capitalist class that still operates as a client state for US-imperialism in the region? President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s charismatic leadership of the counter-revolution is already waning in the face of subsidy cuts and increasing police violence. From the perspective of the ruling elites, in order to deflect the dialectic of permanent revolution in a structural manner, Egypt’s political and economic system has to be reformed and important concessions have to be made to the farmers, workers, unemployed youth, street vendors, et cetera, who risked their lives during the uprising. However, the enduring crisis of global capitalism and the arrogance and unwillingness of the dominant groups to engage in a ‘revolution from above’ that offers different goals and recipes than an iteration of the Washington consensus means that in the middle-long term the country is heading to a new bifurcation: either a reassertion of open dictatorship that violently represses the existing political and social movements; or the revival and triumph of the struggle from below.
This analysis has immediate repercussions for an emancipatory politics today. Firstly, it concedes that authoritarian state power is not an expression of an ‘incomplete’ or ‘developing’ capitalism, but the very essence of a mature bourgeois society. Secondly, it understands the specific and local process of counter-revolution in Egypt as part of a general and global process of capitalist crisis and resistance. From these two conclusions we can deduce that any ‘stage theory’ and transitology that demands the construction of a (bourgeois) democratic framework before the implementation of radical social reforms is inherently reactionary. The brief ‘democratic’ episode of the presidency of Muhammad Morsi illustrates the impossibility of ‘democratisation’ without the revolutionary overthrow of the ‘deep state’ and a fundamental change of power relations – not only within Egypt, but also between national and regional and international forces (e.g., USA, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia). At this point Gramscian theory reveals its interventionist character. Permanent revolution and subaltern hegemony offer not only a methodological tool for political science, but also a conscious strategy for social change.
Cuba: Building on Sugar or Sand?
With the first visit to Cuba in 88 years by a sitting U.S. president unfolding this week, this co-authored piece with Chris Hesketh – stemming from a joint visit to the island in 2013 – is offered as a snapshot reflecting on the changing dynamics facing revolutionary politics in Latin America.
In Memorias del subdesarrollo [1965, available in English Memories of Underdevelopment], the novelist Edmundo Desnoes captures the idée fixe of uneven development in Cuba by noting that the people of Latin America have often been confronted with ‘nothing but a bad imitation of the powerful, civilised countries, a caricature, a cheap reproduction’. Clearly, the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and its series of cycles since broke with that pattern of imitation. The mass mobilisation and structured participation of the Revolution has meant that Fidel Castro has survived nine U.S. presidents, one U.S.-backed invasion, various assassination attempts and the longest sanctions in history. Talking about revolutionary processes, Che Guevara once declared in his famous statement to the Tricontinental: “Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution”.
More than half a century after their imposition, U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba are estimated to have cost more than $751 billion, undermining a functioning health system on the island and leading to a state of siege, or blockade. As Salim Lamrani details in The Economic War Against Cuba, the United States has pursued the extraterritorial application of economic sanctions that affects the citizens and companies of third countries operating in Cuba. This has resulted in the prevention of the treatment of children suffering from cancer and diverse ophthalmic conditions. Meanwhile the Barack Obama administration has continued to apply the extraterritorial measures of the blockade, imposing a fine of $575 million on the Australia and New Zealand Bank Group, Ltd. for transacting with Cuba in dollars and punishing the Dutch bank ING with a fine of $619 million for the same reason, resulting in the largest penalty since the inception of the economic siege against Cuba in 1960.
Meanwhile, the social gains of the Revolution have been well documented, including education, employment, land reform, housing, gender equality, and the development of the arts and culture alongside an expansive foreign policy abetting social revolution. For example, in 1961, the Literacy Campaign brought the illiteracy rate in Cuba down in less than one year from 23.6 percent to 3.9 percent. The land reform of 1963 nationalised 10,000 properties and placed some 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land in the state’s hands. Revolutionary mobilisation witnessed the creation of the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (CDRs: Committees for the Defence of the Revolution), established in 1960, numbering approximately 800,000 to 1.2 million members that rallied against invasion. As such, mobilisation became replaced by institutional structures in the 1970s and the guerrilla ethos of the Revolution dwindled in preference for an apparatus of political representation and formalised institutional participation. The Revolution has since evolved from the “special period” of austerity in the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union to witness a complex mix of cubanía (“Cuban-ness”), a particular manifestation of revolutionary nationalism, in combination with demands for egalitarian social revolution.
From the viewpoint of Cuba specialist, Antoni Kapcia, in his excellent book Cuba in Revolution:
despite appearances of Cuba as an enclosed, militantly defensive community, the Revolution has more often than not (except at moments of national crisis or perceived or real external threat) operated as a system with a surprisingly high degree of leeway and space being given to those who, though not fully committed, are nonetheless passively supportive of the aims and meaning of something which they see as “the Revolution” . . . That is not to say that the political system has not been tolerant; at certain times greater or lesser levels of coercion, peer pressure or harassment have ensured a conformity that can be stultifying and oppressive, leading to excesses of intolerance.
One such historical manifestation would include the rise of the Unidades Militares para Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP: Units to Aid Military Production), or work camps, that targeted sexual, religious, and political dissenters in the 1960s to provide cheap labour for the state. In 2010, Fidel Castro admitted responsibility for such imprisonments committed during the revolutionary period, as detailed in the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada. For Samuel Farber, in Cuba since the Revolution of 1959, this evidences how Cuba has been organised along a Soviet-type system where the dull compulsion of economic relations has been replaced with more direct coercion and the militarisation of labour. However, Kapcia’s stress on avoiding a petrified Cold War framing of Cuba, as simply the reproduction of a Caribbean version of the Socialist Bloc, is astute. Concurrent with Kapcia, ‘one constant in the understanding of Cuba’s complex system has been the need to eschew the paradigm of the Socialist Bloc and, in fact, to focus on Cuba’s differences’.
One of these differences is Cuba’s emergence in the context of global capitalism or what George Lambie details in The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century as ‘market socialism’ in which the state retains firm control over key sectors of the economy while allowing private enterprise and foreign capital to enter the country alongside participatory democracy. This is the most fascinating aspect of Samuel Farber’s book Cuba since the Revolution of 1959 in detailing how, since the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), the ‘statification’ of the Cuban Revolution is leading to a form of capitalist restoration. The renovation of Old Havana, through the ubiquitous tourist-oriented Habaguanex, directed by Eusebio Leal, is one expression of this form of economic development. Cuba, an island the size of England, and with a current population of some eleven million people is attracting over 2 million tourists annually. Indeed, walking around Old Havana it is impossible not to notice both the gentrification of the city and the rise of private markets, sometimes initiated by a hiss and whisper of ‘Cigar? Cigar my friend? Cohiba?’ (Cohiba being the premier brand of Cuban cigar once smoked by Fidel Castro himself). It is with a certain irony that a Revolution inspired by the excesses of US-based interests and the regime of Fulgencio Batista, now seeks to precisely utilise such symbolic capital as a form of branding alongside the old classic cars of Havana excitedly touted as ‘American taxis’.
Today, along with the liberalisation of rules governing small businesses and foreign investment we are witnessing the emergence of civilian and military joint ventures with foreign capital and economic enterprises, administered for example through the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA). As a result, Farber’s book is highly useful in delineating the emergence of what he refers to as a ‘reconstituted ruling class’ in Cuba, through enterprise improvement.
The official organ of the Central Committee of the CCP, Granma, indicated as recently as 22nd November in an article entitled ‘Continúa el fortalecimiento de la empresa estatal socialista’ that the strengthening of state socialist enterprises would continue into 2014. Under the application of the new concept of ‘Encargo Estatal’ [State Order], specific enterprises and products notably linked to the ministries of industry, construction, energy and mining sectors would be gradually included in the policy of commercial strengthening of state socialism. ‘The implementation of this project’, as stated in Granma, ‘will allow enterprises to increase their sales and profits, which is a source for recapitalisation and increased incomes for workers’. Here, the concept of ‘the state as the centre of accumulation’ begins to enter the picture, as detailed by David Ruccio in Development and Globalization.
In Cuba as elsewhere across Latin America, there is a return to a conception of the role of the state in planning and controlling economic surplus, through the ‘new extractivism’, so that the state becomes the centre of accumulation by centralising the so-called surplus and thereby planning the use of that surplus in accumulation. The state can therefore ‘siphon off’ surplus realised in nonstate enterprises that could then be used for the reactivation and restructuring of the economy on the basis of state investment. However, these attempts then position the state in a wide range of political and economic class struggles and tensions: the elimination of subsidies and social benefits (food, education), attempts to lower real wages (to increase the amount of surplus extracted), or increase taxes on joint-venture capitalist enterprises in order to direct the surplus into fiscal revenues could all generate conflicts threatening the central role of the state in accumulation.
In 1960, as relayed in Eduardo Galeano’s classic book Venas abiertas de América Latina [1971, available in English, Open Veins of Latin America], Jean-Paul Sartre apparently asked about Cuba, ‘Is building on sugar better than building on sand?’ With sugar production falling from 7.2 million to 4.5 million tons in the 1950s and then rising to a high of 7 to 8 million tons in the 1980s to fall to 1 and 1.5 million tons more recently, it seems that Cuba is building less on sugar and more on sand in the form of tourism with the state as the centre of accumulation. Struggles from below, meaning the democratic self-management of the Cuban economy and the fight for the self-emancipation of the working classes against capitalist priorities might be one outcome, as argued by Farber. Resolving popular demands through new forms of co-option within state institutions and retaining the state as a centre of accumulation within a form of capitalist restoration might of course be another outcome. It is too early to say whether Cuba is now nothing but a caricature of socialism. Nevertheless, rather than talking about a revolution, it does indeed sound more like a whisper of ‘Cigar? Cigar my friend? Cohiba?’.
The Great Global Governmental-Philanthrocapitalist-Corporate Development Project
Who cares what celebrities think?
On 1st December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the intention to set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company financed by infusions of shares from Facebook. A signatory of the ‘giving pledge’ (founded by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) which encourages the super-wealthy to donate at least half of their wealth within their lifetime, Zuckerberg’s initiative represents another media-intense event in the rise of ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Philanthrocapitalism encompasses a set of overlaps, between super-wealthy individuals, political agents within global development organisations, some academics and scientists (but by no means a majority), and those celebrities who have committed themselves to some poverty- or welfare-related cause.
A prominent response to announcements like Zuckerberg’s or the media-prominent statements of Bill Gates or Bono is to debate the merits of their motives. Is he doing this for publicity reasons? Is this a way of avoiding tax? Or, conversely: isn’t Mark Zuckerberg nice? Good for him; we need more like him. This debate is rather limited and distracting because it falls into the trap that so much public discussion about celebrity does: an obsessional focus on the personalities of the celebrity.
In 2013, when teaching African Politics, I asked students for their response to the legal and ethical controversy surrounding Madonna’s attempts to adopt a Malawian child. I was expecting some thoughts or questions about the dubious legalities of her actions, the symbolism (even written into her name!) of the White Saviour that the public act provoked, or perhaps something about whether the act of ‘saving’ an individual has any relevance to Malawi’s pervasive poverty. Instead, students spontaneously started discussing the content of Madonna’s soul: ‘she means well…’; ‘she’s been doing this kind of thing for years so she must be serious’; ‘I hope she succeeds’ and so on.
This is what the phenomenon of celebrity is based in. A kind of emotional sovereignty in which the feelings of these individuals seem to have far broader social and political meaning. In some cases – most notably Bono – celebrity seems to entitle individuals to strive to ‘feel’ on the part of mass publics, to represent them emotionally. You might notice how effusive Bono always is about his feelings, even when doing so in ways that seem ostensibly modest or self-deprecating. He sometimes seems almost in pain in his efforts to broadcast his sentiments not only as heart-felt but also as a way to make great swathes of public opinion empathise. Once one is discussing the personality or the celebrity it does not matter if you wish to claim that they are being vainglorious or virtuous; you have already conceded the ground to the celebrity episteme: how can we judge the feelings of these people and thus make sense of a moral or political issue?
In this spirit, I want to say: forget you, Zuckerberg; I am not interested in you ‘as a person’ in the slightest. There is only one very obvious point to draw from the altruism of those on the spectrum of Bono, Madonna, Zuckerberg, Branson, Gates, Buffet and others: that they possess such massive amounts of wealth that they have it in their hands to influence the world in ways that now outweigh the agency of many states and even intergovernmental organisations. They vastly outweigh the collectivities and projects of labouring classes, civil society and social movements: those sources of democratic and progressive politics. In light of this, rather than concerning oneself with the moral motivations of philanthrocapitalists, we should rather address something more obvious and important: the broader structures of power that they create and the ways in which it influences how we understand mass poverty and development.
The corporate developmental Weltanschauung
The Foundations and Limited Liability Companies, wealthy donors, advisory groups of ‘experts’, and celebrity endorsers have constructed a global social project of philanthrocapitalism and they command a considerable amount of resource. The Gates Foundation has an annual spend in excess of that of the World Health Organisation. By virtue of their celebrity benefactors, they also have considerable influence over politicians, institutions, and broader publics. This influence is exercised through social events (private and public), connections to major international development campaigns, lobbying, and close connections to individual politicians. Philanthrocapitalism is also closely connected to a bundle of transnational corporations that have created ‘development projects’, given (small) amounts of money to ‘socially responsible’ activities and (less highly publicised on their glossy webpages) received public money from development budgets. Structurally, philanthrocapitalism looks as oligarchic and Putinesque as any Russian oil and property dynasty, or the military-industrial complex of the Cold War.
This oligarchy shares a broad vision of the meaning of development which can be summarised as follows.
- Development is about the release of economic activities within free markets which promotes both growth and a reduction in poverty.
- This process can be galvanised by ‘smart’ and ‘incentivised’ grant giving by privately-supported and managed foundations and companies. These organisations – contrasted with a supposed ‘bureaucratic’ intergovernmental institutionalism within the UN – use ‘business models’ to generate ‘value for money’ and ‘impact’.
- Private business has the key – and up to recently neglected – role in promoting this kind of development.
Taken together, this development framing is a radical departure from previous development practices. It contrasts strongly with what one might call the liberal intergovernmentalism development practice which emerged in the mid 1950s under the auspices of the United Nations and World Bank, coming to be supported by a raft of governments and development agencies. It reformulates development as best promoted by private foundations and businesses. It is garbed in an ideology that profit and ‘good’ development are mutually-supportive: ‘frictionless development’ in Bill Gates’s phrase. It also argues that change is best achieved through the dynamism of entrepreneurialism, and that the technologies and expertise of large transnational corporations are the key to ‘unleashing’ development. To be clear: this is not simply the oft-repeated argument that a country needs to attract foreign private investment in order to grow. It is rather that foreign companies and private foundations should run the development project itself.
Good examples of this shift can be found in East and Southern Africa agriculture. Under initiatives like AGRA and the related Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGC) in Tanzania, one can easily identify heavy corporate involvement in what is increasingly rather misleadingly labelled as ‘development aid’ and ‘development projects’, both of which tend to suggest ‘official’ or governmental projects and programmes.
The UK government’s development agency, DFID, supports the SAGC by providing co-financing projects run by Unilever, Diageo, SAB Miller, Monsanto, Syngenta, Du Pont, and Yara. These are large international companies involved in chemical inputs into agriculture and brewing (the latter being a major demand for grass crops). They exercise immense power in global ‘chains’ of commodity production through their scale, control of retail, branding, and control of high value technologies.
The vision of SAGC is to transform agriculture into large-scale commercial farms to supply inputs into global industries, and to re-make smallholder farmers into contracted producers of specifically-selected cash crops. In the process, these smallholders become more strongly locked into the purchase of chemical inputs, proprietorial seeds (rather than seeds from their own crops) and fertilisers (which might be designed to ‘fit’ with the seeds). Genetic modification is the perfect instantiation of the commodification of agriculture: replacing a seed crop on-farm with an ‘intellectual property right’ encapsulated in a seed. Within the AGRA programme the Gates Foundation is supporting efforts to disseminate genetically modified seeds through the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. Private money goes into a rolling show of workshops and events to proselytise the model of entrepreneurial farmer investing in new seeds. This ideological work is based on the belief that, in the words of the Director of Communications at DSM (an health and nutrition chemical company), ‘we care about people, planet, and profit. We believe we possess the capacity to help others solve the world’s greatest issues.’ This world vision is now entirely accepted throughout elite development circles, as one could see in all of the announcements that emanated from the UK government hosted and revealingly titled Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science in 2013.
One can easily find a raft of messianic statements about the potential of philanthropcapitalism, a queasy mixture of aspirational business-speak and ersatz hippie-discourse. This is a discourse of dreams, hope, new tomorrows, an end to poverty forever. It is the discourse of a TED talk soundbite. In one sense these statements are easily critiqued or satirised; in another, they are the building blocks for a dominating corporate development strategy. In an age of relentless and vacuous irony, perhaps the strongest ideologies are those most easily laughed at.
Neoliberalism and the dynamics of indirect and direct rule
Neoliberalism is a term based in a critique of governance that highlights how public authorities have based their policies and programmes on the promotion of liberal capitalism. The sense of the concept is that governments and other intergovernmental organisations increasingly try to conform to market logic and the promotion of transnational capitalism. That a shift of this nature has taken place over the last thirty years or so is now so obvious as to be unremarkable and politicians happily declare that this is what the ‘business’ of government is about: more market in the economy and within government.
But, there is a potential shift in the governance of development implied in the philanthrocapitalist model. Private foundations and companies promote transnational companies as the key agent in global development, and they directly fund projects devised and managed by those companies. So do major Western donor states. Those international companies that declare that they have a developmental mission have become increasing habituated to intervening in the livelihoods of the poor. These are the practices of corporate social responsibility and partnership between companies, aid donors, and foundations. Private foundations, companies and governments also put money into nationally-based advocates of the corporate development model: think tanks, research centres, universities.
The trend is away from the indirect rule of neoliberalism in which governments allocate aid and loans to promote market-friendly macroeconomic policy and programmes, and towards a set of practices within which private companies are directly involved in development. Governments are still responsible for the promotion of capitalist development, but it is increasingly the case that transnational capitalists are also directly responsible for capitalist development. There is in the present-day a combination of indirect (policy-based) and direct (‘philanthropic’ investment-based) neoliberal rule.
What’s the problem?
The Great Global Governmental-Philanthrocapitalist-Corporate Development Project exists and is growing. And, it is not modest. Celebrity donors, politicians, and spokespeople from the development industry – notably some economists who have become public intellectuals – all offer praise for the new model. They do so because the article of faith that underpins this venture capitalism to transform the poor is that development is win-win. It is not people before profits but people and profits. Corporations get into new markets, development agencies get financial leverage and ‘value for money’, and the poor get new opportunities to improve their livelihoods. To use the hackneyed cliché: doing good by doing well.
To entrust the fates of the world’s poorest to the world’s wealthiest seems – to put it mildly – naïve: like trusting the welfare of lambs to eagles. Here are some reasons why the win-win logic needs to be questioned.
- In agriculture, corporately-owned technologies and production contracts where smallholders commit to supply crops to transnational agricultural traders introduce substantial risk and market exposure to farmers. The evidence that GM seeds improve productivity and livelihoods is weak. The model of agrarian transition that ‘solving malnutrition through business and science’ relies upon is as generalised and abstract as the most vulgar state-based villagisation or modernisation programme.
- Corporations remain motivated by profit seeking and as such will aim to generate as much cheap produce or advantageous contracts for services provided as possible. Within the ‘partnership’ logic that pervades the philanthrocapitalist approach, there is little space for governments of poor countries to push companies beyond voluntary ‘social responsibility’ commitments which are weakly monitored and not connected to a strong process of accountability. Also, in spite of the pizzazz about risk taking and dynamism, large corporations are risk-averse, often commit very small proportions of revenue, and have no intrinsic commitment to a project because they are accountable to no-one but their shareholders, credit-rating agencies, and boards of directors.
- The development model itself assumes that properly-integrated small-scale livelihoods can thrive and promote development. This ignores the plain fact that small-scale livelihoods are structurally vulnerable and unlikely to generate the kinds of economic growth that transform economies. The kinds of processes that create the possibility (but no more) of transformational development have historically been based in state intervention and the rise of new ‘national capitalists’. Both of these possibilities are anathema to the philanthrocapitalist project. They want their happy and globally-disciplined mini-entrepreneurs in the countryside buying their chemical ‘property right’ inputs and growing their cash crops for corporately-dominated commodity chains. The result is that poor communities are locked into a life of contracted production, microfinanced small-scale investments, and social projects that aim for healthy and appropriately skilled workers.
- The Great Global Governmental-Philanthrocapitalist-Corporate Development Project is only accountable to whom it wishes, in the ways it wishes, and for as long as it wishes. It is entirely based in a kind of naïve and fatalistic trust that foundations and companies have the ‘vision’ to re-energise the global development project. Unlike governments or intergovernmental organisations, there is no public deliberation about development practice, not external auditing or review of the institutions of development, and no clearly-defined constituency that can clearly endorse or reject its activities. If profit margins fall, share prices dive-bomb, or property bubbles burst, philanthrocapitalists and companies can simply change their minds.
As this development model expands, the practice of development becomes indistinguishable from the strategising of large international companies who have some interest in agriculture, health, and nutrition. This is the meaning of neoliberal direct rule. To call this a new development model is not only to define away issues of redistribution, social justice, and economic transformation; it is also to assume that many of the woes created by indirect neoliberalism are best resolved by encouraging a more direct version of the same.
The End of China’s Labour Regime?
A key ingredient of China’s Post-Mao economic “miracle” is a labour regime entrenched in the export-oriented consumer manufacturing sector and premised on despotic exploitation, institutional discrimination and political exclusion of labour. It is built on the back of massive rural-to-urban migration in the context of a stagnant agricultural sector and rising disparity in rural-urban incomes from the 1990s. The rural migrants are not only placed under exploitative labour relations under the Party-state’s market liberalisation, but also institutionally discriminated against by the urban household registration system that denies them of permanent urban residency and entrenches the transient nature of their labour migration, and politically excludes them from organising autonomous labour unions and asserting as an organised social force. This combination, by no means unique in the history of capitalist development, produces an abundant and seemingly endless supply of not only cheap and disposable but disciplined, fragmented and atomised labour. However, having help propel China into a global economic power, the reproduction of this labour regime is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
One challenge springs from the changing nature of rural migration in China. At the core of the labour regime is the transient nature of rural migration in the 1980s and 1990s. In this early stage of migration, rural migrants and their families mostly retained land and agricultural production, and maintained social and familial ties to the countryside. They were not dependent entirely on wages and could draw on their rural resources when needed; and, as a result, they were able to live on meager wages in the city. But more recent migration has become less transient as millions found roots in the cities; many have simply lost agricultural skills and arable land to urban redevelopment. A growing proportion are therefore only notionally “migrants” due to the segregated residential system that keeps them from settling permanently; but they are for all intents and purposes urban dwellers. This severely criticised institutional discrimination against rural migrants is only sustained by the government’s concerns over costs of providing social services and welfare to the migrants and the possible formation of an urban underclass and slum. Efforts to ease and eradicate the institutional discrimination, already happening in some regions, are likely to erode the basis of the labour regime.
One consequence flowing from the changing nature of migration is workers’ challenge to wage repression built into the labour regime. Whereas the reproduction of migrant labour is partially subsided by their rural families, they are almost entirely dependent on wage labour today, and are thus compelled by higher urban living costs to demand higher salaries. The accumulated organising and mobilising skills over the last two decades have led to increasing numbers of autonomously organised strikes by migrant workers aimed at addressing wages and conditions. Coupled with a demographic transition that favours workers, it is posing a no small challenge to the sustainability of the low-wage regime. There is also wide recognition that wage repression militates against the stated goal of the government to raise people’s incomes in order to boast domestic consumption.
While economic strikes confined within factories are largely tolerated by the local authorities, any attempt to build lasting organisations has to confront the Party-state’s crushing repression. Against such odds, the nascent workers’ movement – yet a labour movement strictly speaking – is already giving headaches to China’s quasi-corporatist structure of industrial relations in which the state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) monopolises labour representation. Indistinguishable from other branches of state bureaucracy, the ACFTU has proved itself to be incapable of serious structural reforms necessary for it to stay relevant to workers’ concerns and grievances. Instead, migrant workers who go on wildcat strikes have sometimes turned to community-based workers’ centres that have emerged to fill the organisational void for legal and organising assistance. The upsurge of labour strikes and protest in recent years has alarmed the authorities. Particularly, concerned about the role of workers’ centres to aid workers’ mobilisation, the authorities have stepped up efforts to target these workers’ centres and criminalise labour organising. Ironically, the political exclusion of labour has likely sharpened strikes which for many workers are the only means to successfully address their concerns. How long can such political exclusion – “corporatism without labour” – continue?
A further challenge has arisen from persistent slow growth in the global economy. Having replaced East Asian manufacturing and become integrated into the Asian-centered global production chain, it is highly dependent on debt-fueled consumption in advanced capitalist economies. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, the export market contractions in North America and Western Europe have resulted in the faltering of China’s manufacturing sector. The initial shock in 2007 and 2008 created systemic factory closures in the export sector, only rescued by the massive injection of state bank credits into the economy since. But in the last two years, there remains continuing worries about the export sector. In 2015, China’s economy as a whole recorded its slowest growth rate of 6.9% since its takeoff in the early years of 1990s. The slowing manufacturing sector, with factory closures but also relocations both within and between regions often accompanied by layoffs, has fermented more protests and strikes.
The last several years have seen some of the most significant strikes in the country’s recent history: the Honda autoworkers’ strike in 2010 and the Yue Yuen footwear strike in 2014. Interestingly, these two strikes also mark a shift: whereas the Honda strike centers its core demands on wage rise and democratic union election, the Yue Yuen strike is instead focused on social insurance and severance payment following management’s plan to relocate its facilities. At the same time as recent strikes widen the scope of demands, the economic space for workers’ wage demand is shrinking. In desperation, workers’ discontent can take a violent turn, as when a worker facing unpaid wages torched a bus full of passengers in January this year. The factory closures and layoffs further depresses domestic consumption of a large segment of the population.
From the standpoint of regional authorities in South China, the manufacturing decline – and the end of the labour regime – may in fact be welcome. Recognising the export model is not sustainable and desirable, the authorities have indicated their preference for high-tech and high value-added production instead of assemblage, emulating similar transitions in early East Asian industrialising states. The authorities allowed factories to close down or relocate. Migrant labour is disposable once again. The government’s hope is that the growing service industry will be able to absorb the surplus labour. While for now the unemployment rate remains low, it is questionable whether it is able to create sufficient employment; and it is hard to imagine this shift without massive social dislocation.
The labour regime is clearly in crisis. It is being challenged from multiple fronts. But this is not necessarily good news for workers: a rise in unemployment, and fragmented labour unrest without structural solutions is likely. We face two possible scenarios: 1) either workers’ conditions continue to degrade with more layoffs and unemployment, and the authorities brace for more labour unrest; or 2) workers will be able to organise unions and engage in collective bargaining.
The latter still fall short of getting to the root of the labour question, but it in the very least paves the way for better and fairer working conditions for China’s migrant workers.
Henri Lefebvre: Rural Sociology, Ground Rent and the Politics of Land
Stuart Elden (PAIS) and Adam David Morton (Political Economy, University of Sydney) have been awarded a small grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation on the project ‘Henri Lefebvre’s writings on Rural Sociology, Ground Rent and the Politics of Land’.
The grant is to support the translation of essays by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre on the political economy of ground rent and rural sociology. Stuart and Adam will edit these essays and present them as a book with substantial notes and introduction, on the model of a previous book of Lefebvre’s essays that Stuart co-edited with Neil Brenner – State, Space, World, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
The first essay from the project, “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology” was recently publishing in the journal Antipode, translated by Warwick Philosophy PhD student Matthew Dennis, and edited and with an introduction by Stuart and Adam. Several more such essays will appear in the edited book.
When Stuart and Adam were first beginning the project they wrote a short piece for the Politics Reconsidered blog answering a key question about this project: Why read a long dead French Marxist to think about land struggles today?
Deflected Passive Revolution
In preparing for an engagement with Brecht De Smet’s new book Gramsci on Tahrir: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt, I thought it would be a good idea to dust-down a few earlier blog posts of mine in order to provide a ground-clearing exercise on thinking about Antonio Gramsci’s concept and condition of passive revolution. My goal in this endeavour is therefore to re-blog a series of four posts all revolving around the notion of passive revolution.
The fourth in the series, entitled ‘Defelected Passive Revolution’, originally appeared on the Journal of Australian Political Economy blog spot (25 May 2014). The post appears without any changes. The aim is then to develop a wider commentary on passive revolution, as well as Brecht De Smet’s important new book, in subsequent contributions to Progress in Political Economy.
As reblogged from the Journal of Australian Political Economy blogspot, I noted that some time ago Tony Cliff developed a theorisation of deflected permanent revolution to consider how state power, notably in post-colonial conditions of uneven and combined development, becomes the driver for capital accumulation. One result was the deflection of permanent revolution as the means of socialist transformation from bourgeois rule. This built on Leon Trotsky’s work ‘The Permanent Revolution’ where he wrote of ‘the inner connections’ linking the theory of permanent revolution, or the revolution in permanence, to states that experience ‘belated bourgeois development’, especially colonial and semi-colonial states.
As explained in my book Revolution and State in Modern Mexico, the notion of ‘deflected permanent revolution’, derived from Leon Trotsky, is consonant with the concept of passive revolution as developed by Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued in the Prison Notebooks that mobilisation through passive revolution involved ‘the formation of an ever more extensive ruling class’ through ‘the gradual but continuous absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of the active elements produced by allied groups—and even of those which came from antagonistic groups and seemed irreconcilably lost’. Here the state serves as the locus of accumulation and the construction of the political order of capital.
One way of regarding the condition and concept of passive revolution, as outlined in my blog post ‘What is this thing called passive revolution?’, is to reflect on how elements of an insurrectionary force become domesticated, which may involve a dialectical relation between processes of revolution from above and processes of revolution from below.
A passive revolution—or deflected permanent revolution—is therefore secured through the political dominance of state capitalism. But what about considering the antithesis of these circumstances? How can a sense of fatalism or historical defeatism within an understanding of passive revolution be avoided? How can we dialectically consider a conception of deflected passive revolution, a necessary breaking of deflected permanent revolution, to rethink active revolution today?
In addressing these questions, my focus here ranges across four recent articles that in different aspects are engaged in theorising processes of what I have termed deflected passive revolution. These are:
- Peter Thomas’ article on hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince published in Thesis Eleven;
- Ryan Brading’s article on radical revolution and passive revolution in Venezuela published in Latin American Perspectives;
- Brecht De Smet’s article on revolution, counter-revolution, and passive revolution in Egypt published in Science & Society; and
- Chris Hesketh’s article on the production of state spaces of passive revolution and counter-spaces of resistance in Mexico published in Critical Sociology.
My purpose is to raise the collective profile of these outstanding contributions to the debate on passive revolution and in so doing try to highlight how they all offer a realisation of different conditions of ‘deflected passive revolution’. Said otherwise, these contributions are essential reading on how to think about the conditions of possibility, theoretically and practically, for revolution in the twenty-first century. That the four pieces in the spotlight have all been published in leading heterodox journals, outside the suffocating conformity of mainstream political science, is also of some significance.
First, Peter Thomas provides a crucial reconnaissance of the theory of passive revolution as an important and necessary coda to his prize-winning book The Gramscian Moment. Significantly, he links the concept of passive revolution to hegemony, as part of a ‘dialectical chain’ of integrally related moments. Rather than deducing hegemony from passive revolution, driving a wedge between their internal relationship, Thomas outlines how passive revolution is a deformation of hegemonic politics. As Thomas states, ‘as an analytical concept, passive revolution was a strategic intervention that aimed to highlight an historical failure of hegemony’ (original emphasis). Broadly, then, the notion of passive revolution indicates the inability of a bourgeois political project to realise fully the political practice of hegemony, not as an irrevocable and immobilised outcome of capitalist modernity, but as an incomplete process. Passive revolution therefore stands as a condition of the historical formation of modern state power and capitalist modernity in specific instances and circumstances. However, for Thomas, there needs to be a relational – dialectical – integration of the polarities of hegemony and passive revolution. It would be antithetical to Gramsci’s theorising of political modernity to regard passive revolution and hegemony as separate conditions, they should be regarded dialectically in order to understand the continuum of passive revolution.
Crucially, Thomas indicates that for Gramsci ‘the concept of passive revolution needed to be confronted by the potential for a process of de-pacification and active revolution by and within the action of the popular classes’ (my emphasis). As the antithesis of passive revolution, then, Gramsci considered forms of collective agency – the modern Prince – as part of an expansive revolutionary process in movement. One can add that engaging a strategy of deflected passive revolution would precisely involve these forms of agency of active revolution. At the end of the article, Thomas therefore stakes out the claim that Gramsci provides a prefigurative vocabulary with which to understand contemporary resistance and rebellion, as also mentioned in this blog post on ‘Gramsci & Political Economy Today’. This thread is left hanging but the Latin Rebellion or the Arab Spring would be significant backdrops to consider, which is where the looming of my analysis now turns.
Here, the article by Ryan Brading is important in focusing on the different phases of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, tracing a periodisation of the different moments of its unfolding in and around the events of 2002. Supplementing his book Populism and Venezuela, Brading focuses on factions linked to Luis Miquilena (a moderate supporter of Hugo Chávez) and Pedro Carmona, installed as President after Chávez’s detention in the coup d’état of 2002, that attempted to engineer a passive revolution. In his view, this strategy from above was aiming to restore neoliberal practices in such a way that the new Bolivarian state could have claimed to be a revolution, promoting social development for Venezuela’s lower classes, while serving the interests of the dominant classes as engineers of its formation.
Instead, attempts to displace Chávez brought to the surface class-based political and economic disparities that crystallised the Bolivarian hegemonic project through a radical revolution (or deflected permanent revolution) from below based on popular will. Chávez then exchanged the passive political position that had helped him win the presidency previously for a radical one. As Brading states, ‘the Miquilenistas (moderate Chavistas) had engineered a passive revolution that in fact was nothing but a reconfigured/revised neoliberal strategy concealed in a populist discourse of change and progress’. The development of differences between moderate Miquilenistas and radical Chavistas meant that Venezuela averted a passive revolution with conditions providing Chávez with a hegemonic framework to galvanise radical revolution consisting of a variety of social programmes – including the Barrio Adentro healthcare programme – in previously marginal urban and rural areas. A deflected passive revolution was replaced with a radical revolution, crystallising a new and expansive hegemonic order based on the populism of the Bolivarian Revolution, which is now under threat. Elsewhere, as Massimo Modonesi indicates in his book Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy, the modality of passive revolution in Venezuela is open to debate as to whether the balance of class forces in struggle will define the process from below in active revolution or whether there will be a reflux towards depoliticisation and re-subalternisation as features of passive revolution.
Brecht De Smet
’s analysis of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt starts with the notion of revolution deriving from Leon Trotsky in The History of the Russian Revolution as ‘the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny’. His article contours the historical formation of modern state power in Egypt, tracing its entrance into capitalist modernity as a series of passive revolutions. More recently, his attention turns to understanding the revolution of January 25 and its counter-revolutionary appropriation as alternating moments of one and the same process of revolution-restoration, or passive revolution, in Egypt. Here the role of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) is highlighted in leading and controlling the revolutionary process, defending its own particular interests and managing the expectations of the popular masses, by sacrificing Hosni Mubarak.
The Caesarist intervention had thrown the burden of political leadership upon the Armed Forces, and while the generals wished to fortify their economic and political clout within the ruling bloc, they had neither the capacity nor the will to develop hegemony over the whole of society. Instead, the generals preferred to rule by “civil proxy”.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Mohamed Morsi and the remnants of the military in Ahmed Shafiq therefore represented two wings of the counter-revolution. Morsi’s victory but subsequent inability to absorb opponents in a form of Islamism, leading to his downfall at the hands of a coup d’état, has ‘emphasised the success of the capitalist classes and the ‘deep state’ in deflecting popular revolutionary demands for democracy and the redistribution of wealth’ (my emphasis). The rise of President Adly Mansour, head of the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) backed by the military, signals for De Smet a derailing of the radical popular demands and a reinforcing of the current process of restoration. This is the deferral of deflected passive revolution.
Finally, Chris Hesketh adds something highly original to this survey by offering a spatially sensitive account of the sub-national articulation of passive revolution as a means of constructing state space in Chiapas, Mexico. This historical geographical sociological approach focuses on the production of state space as well as processes of counter-spaces of resistance in the form of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). In so doing capitalism is revealed as a multi-scalar phenomenon to distinguish the production of space affecting the sub-national scale (Chiapas), national development (Mexico), and geopolitics (global political economy). For Hesketh, ‘space is thus not an empty stage onto which social relations are projected, but rather it is these relations themselves that contribute to the changing mise-en-scène of development. It is therefore through a reading of the spatial that the power relations of society can be uncovered’.
Once again passive revolution comes to the fore as a class-driven process that involves a state-led reorganisation of social relations so as to maintain or restore class dominance while diffusing subaltern class pressure. The historical geographical conditions of passive revolution are traced by Hesketh throughout Mexico and Chiapas focusing on land reform. The latter, in the arrangement of the ejido or state-granted communal property, became spaces of passive revolution: or, spatial projects that partially satisfied peasant demands for land as well as allowing the expansion of capitalism alongside defending the interests of the agrarian bourgeoisie. Nevertheless the revocation of such land reform conditions sparked the Zapatista rebellion that has witnessed the emergence of counter-spaces aiming to develop a new territorial form of politics and autonomous organising in rejecting the old geographical patternings of state power. Most recently, the initiative of the Escuelita Zapatista (Little Zapatista Schools), launched in August/December 2013 and January 2014, have attempted to challenge moves to re-territorialise communities under state power by re-launching autonomous education initiatives. Today more than ever, the class struggle in deflecting conditions of passive revolution is inscribed in space, as Chris Hesketh also traces in a related blog post on subcomandante Marcos’ recent communiqué here.
What these contributions show against the condition of permanent passive revolution is the importance of avoiding a degree of fatalism in challenging processes of capitalist restoration. This could be called the struggle over deflected passive revolution. As Gramsci stated in relation to passive revolution there is a dialectic process that ‘presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary a vigorous anti-thesis which can present intransigently all its potentialities for development’. The rest is up to us.
Telescoping Passive Revolution
In preparing for an engagement with Brecht De Smet’s new book Gramsci on Tahrir: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt, I thought it would be a good idea to dust-down a few earlier blog posts of mine in order to provide a ground-clearing exercise on thinking about Antonio Gramsci’s concept and condition of passive revolution. My goal in this endeavour is therefore to re-blog a series of four posts all revolving around the notion of passive revolution.
The third in the series, entitled ‘Telescoping Passive Revolution’, originally appeared on For the Desk Drawer (4 November 2013). The post appears without any changes. The aim is then to develop a wider commentary on passive revolution, as well as Brecht De Smet’s important new book, in subsequent contributions to Progress in Political Economy. The fourth in the series is entitled ‘Deflected Passive Revolution’.
An updated paperback edition of my book Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development has now been published. A central proposition of the book is that the conditioning situation of uneven and combined development on a world scale — as the geographical expression of the contradictions of capitalism — shapes the spatial, territorial, and scalar configuration of state power. However, although shaped by the condition of uneven and combined development, it is also the balance of class forces within state spaces that alters the developmental trajectory and spatial form of statehood through emergent passive revolutionary class strategies defining the rise of a state in capitalist society.
In more detail, a focus on the affinal concepts of uneven and combined development (drawing from Leon Trotsky) and passive revolution (drawing from Antonio Gramsci) reveals pertinent features of modern state formation in an historically specific sense within the twentieth century transition to and transformation of modern capitalist political space in Mexico. In relation to uneven and combined development it was Leon Trotsky that sketched how capitalism unfolds by “drawing the countries economically closer to one another and levelling out their stages of development” but also, thereby, “developing some parts of world economy while hampering and throwing back the development of others”. To then paraphrase, the historical process is the correlation of both equalisation and differentiation within the uneven and combined development of capitalism. In my argument, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution then refers to processes in which aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both “revolutionary” rupture and a “restoration” of social relations across different scales and spatial aspects of the state.
The crucial element in passive revolution is the statifying tendency to reorganise or restructure the geographies of capital accumulation. This means that the state form becomes the dominant site, generator, and product of spatial projects in attempting to maintain the relationship of ruler–ruled and the incoherence of popular initiatives from below. My argument leads to the outlook that such processes across Latin America will clearly be different across state forms. Yet the condition of passive revolution does provide certain clues to the diversity of Latin American history and thus forms of transition to capitalist modernity within the region and, especially, in relation to spaces of state power in Mexico. Hence my argument that the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) stands as one of the links in a chain of passive revolutions called forth by capitalist modernity in Latin America. My aim, then, in Revolution and State in Modern Mexico is to demonstrate how specific processes of passive revolution capture the territorial, class, and spatial relations of socially uneven and combined development in Mexico at the state level but also across various scales.
Rather than assuming a conditon of ‘normal’ hegemony, characterised by the reciprocal combination of force and consent, my argument is that state space in Mexico was configured by a minimal hegemony indicative of the experience of passive revolution, where the state–coercive element superintends the struggle for hegemony. Hence the significance I place on the meaning behind telescoping passive revolution: the coercive class practices of passive revolution are best understood dialectically when telescoped with struggles for hegemony. A crucial aspect of my book is how it remains sensitive to the coercive circumstances constituting modern state formation. Passive revolution thus provides an alternative approach to theorising coercion and hegemony shaping twentieth–century state–making in Mexico. Through dialectically telescoping passive revolution together with hegemony, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico adds an additional standpoint to the emerging literature that aims to develop fresh analysis of the historical roots of coercion in relation to broader hegemonic processes of state–making in Mexico, such as Wil Pansters edited Violence, Coercion and State-Making in Twentieth Century Mexico.
The new lengthy epilogue to the paperback edition engages with some of these theoretical issues that have sprung forth within debates in Latin America on passive revolution since the publication of my book. Also, I sketch some of the dominant contemporary territorial and scalar geographies of passive revolution and forms of resistance shaping the state spatial restructuring of Mexico under capitalism. These include the war on drugs, the so-called democratic transition since the election of Enrique Peña Nieto, and the enduring relevance of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in commanding counter-spaces of resistance.
Erik Olin Wright on ‘How to be an anti-capitalist for the twenty-first century?’
Erik Olin Wright (University of Madiscon-Wisconsin) 'How to be an anti-capitalist for the twenty-first century?'
This is to announce a unique workshop at the University of Sydney centred around the hosting of Professor Erik Olin Wright in the Department of Political Economy as an Honorary Professor who will be workshopping on his next book with Verso.
Across four workshops in the month of May, Erik Olin Wright will be sharing chapters from his next book ‘How to be an anti-capitalist for the twenty-first century?’.
The workshops are open to Honours students, postgraduate taught students, and PhD researchers in and beyond the Department of Political Economy across the School of Social and Political Sciences.
Participants should sign up for the series of workshops as a whole, which will develop the sort of dynamic exchange and dialogical encounter that is sought through regular contact.
To register please contact Profressor Adam David Morton: Adam.Morton@sydney.edu.au
