Burying 1989

For 20 years the revolutionary left has been marginal to the mainstream of world politics. In some countries it remains strong, in a few it continues to exercise state power. But overall it no longer represents a viable counter to the globalising agenda of corporate capitalism. Where vocal opposition has challenged the right's ideological offensive it's tended to derive from loosely libertarian, romantic anti-capitalist perspectives rather than from the advocates of socialised production and disciplined revolutionary leadership. And there's no sign of that changing in the near future.

In 1989 the world's peoples were promised a new beginning: an end to Cold-War division and a "peace dividend" from the cessation of the 1980s arms buildup. Instead we've had 20 years of aggressive war, proxy conflicts across much of the developed world, reversal of social protection across the developed world and the imposition of usually disastrous free-market agendas on the world's poorest, followed by their formal incorporation into a global trading system dominated by transnational monopoly capital.

The classical Leninist left certainly survives, but outside its few strongholds it barely makes an impact. The question is, how to reverse the decline? And should we seek to?

This blog doesn't aim to romanticise the Marxist left or to overlook its failings. But I'll start by proposing that even to non-Marxists, its survival as a force for agitation, electoral competition and ideological discourse should be seen as a plus to those seeking a more just world. If you doubt that, just look at the undoing of social gains since the 1980s and burial of progressive agendas through the explosion of national, ethnic and religious hatreds. A diffuse liberal left simply hasn't delivered effective resistance to right-wing neoliberalism or the rise of racism and nationalism. And now other forms of division threaten to stifle collective advance and draw opponents of western capitalist primacy into violence devoid of a progressive social agenda.

But if the "old" revolutionary left's to make a comeback, can it do so on the basis of its own ideas of “business as usual”? This is where I think the answer’s a resounding No. The left was never perfect. Many today are reluctant to throw in their lot with the revolutionary parties of ideological uniformity not only because of the long shadow cast by the Soviet collapse, but because their own yearning for diversity of thought and expression runs counter to the Leninist model of party centralism, democratic in theory but too often top-heavy in practice.

And what of socialism? There can be no doubt that conservative and liberal trumpeting of the independent entrepreneur exercised a powerful appeal for millions who had no wish to follow their parents into a working life of poorly-rewarded factory drudgery. An agenda of comprehensive elimination of private enterprise offers little to those empowered by small-scale entrepreneurial success. Yet many of these same would-be capitalists feel no sympathy for the oppressive corporations which have been the principal beneficiaries of the neoliberal economic model. Are they to be doomed to constitute class enemies of progress?

This brings us to the movement’s social base, a divisive issue from at least the 1960s with the emergence of the first widespread countercultural challenges to bourgeois hegemony in the west. The industrial working-class base that was once the bedrock of Marxism in the developed countries has been steadily eroded since the 1980s, not merely in terms of legal rights, collective identification and trade union involvement, but numerically and economically. Industry now accounts for a dwindling share of a fifth to a quarter of the economic output of the bulk of the most developed countries, as services loom ever larger and manufacturing shifts to lands formerly excluded from the club of industrial powers.

If revolutionary socialism is to again become a force to be reckoned with, it can’t just adhere to its old ways of organising and engaging. A centralist party under an impenetrable leadership embracing ideological enmity to all forms of non-socialised economic activity and claiming its base solely in a weakening class ever more threatened with becoming an anachronism holds little appeal for many who yearn to strike a decisive blow against corporate domination. In practice, many Marxist parties were already entertaining such heresy long before the debacle of 1989. The disaster that followed should be no occasion for retreat into past approaches ever more at odds with 21st-century realities.

Does this spell the end of the ideologically disciplined party of revolutionary leadership and working-class militancy? Not necessarily, for gainful re-engagement with the broad mass of anti-imperialist sentiment must take the form of building alliances and foregoing sectional agendas in the short term in the interest of the wider progressive cause: this isn’t merely good tactics, it’s the only strategy that will convince non-communists of the movement’s credibility as a prospective mass force and open it to the independent critical thinkers most likely to question the socio-economic status quo and rally broader opinion behind creative challenges to the bourgeois order.

That will mean putting socialism to some extent on the back burner: rather than grudging acceptance of the improbability of an early end to capitalism, we should explicitly differentiate between its abusive, parasitical forms and those manifestations of individual enterprise which offer empowerment and diversity. We must break free of doctrinaire devotion to the leadership of a working class which may be irretrievable as a leading force in society. We should build coalitions whose agendas differ from our own, while emphasising the international dimension of capitalism’s injustices and above all the anti-imperialist solidarity in which communists can justly claim the leading role. And we should recognise that ideological strength needs to draw on constructive engagement and openness to new solutions, not merely discipline and conformity.