Engels began his brief remarks at Marx’s funeral in 1883 by describing his life-long political companion’s ‘scientific’ accomplishments. ‘But he looked upon science above all things as a grand historical lever, as a revolutionary power in the most eminent sense of the word … For he was indeed, what he called himself, a Revolutionist’. As his closest collaborator, Engels knew better than anyone about this indispensable dimension of Marx’s project. If it wasn’t enough, as the young Marx had concluded in 1845, to ‘interpret the world’ but also necessary ‘to change it’, then action and organization were essential. Yet nowhere did Marx lay out a set of clearly articulated principles for revolutionary organization. But if all of his organized political activities are examined – along with those of Engels after Marx’s death – this essay demonstrates it is possible to distill in broad outlines the norms that guided Marx’s approach to revolutionary organizing. Almost fifty years ago, in the 1967 Socialist Register, Monty Johnstone performed an invaluable service in synthesizing for the first time – certainly in English – Marx and Engels’s views on the revolutionary party. But aside from materials Johnstone didn’t have access to when he published his still quite valuable essay (above all the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), the most complete compilation of their writings in any language) it’s now easier to verify citations of their writings and, more importantly, to see the larger context in which the citations were originally written. Also, much has passed in real world politics since 1967, not least the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes after 1989, reigniting much-debated questions (which Johnstone didn’t address) about whether the actions of Lenin, let alone Stalin and his successors, were consistent with the views of Marx and Engels. For today’s activists, what are – the question Marx and Engels would have posed – the organizational lessons inspired by their example?
{"title":"Marx and Engels on the Revolutionary Party","authors":"August H. Nimtz","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.15","url":null,"abstract":"Engels began his brief remarks at Marx’s funeral in 1883 by describing his life-long political companion’s ‘scientific’ accomplishments. ‘But he looked upon science above all things as a grand historical lever, as a revolutionary power in the most eminent sense of the word … For he was indeed, what he called himself, a Revolutionist’. As his closest collaborator, Engels knew better than anyone about this indispensable dimension of Marx’s project. If it wasn’t enough, as the young Marx had concluded in 1845, to ‘interpret the world’ but also necessary ‘to change it’, then action and organization were essential. Yet nowhere did Marx lay out a set of clearly articulated principles for revolutionary organization. But if all of his organized political activities are examined – along with those of Engels after Marx’s death – this essay demonstrates it is possible to distill in broad outlines the norms that guided Marx’s approach to revolutionary organizing. Almost fifty years ago, in the 1967 Socialist Register, Monty Johnstone performed an invaluable service in synthesizing for the first time – certainly in English – Marx and Engels’s views on the revolutionary party. But aside from materials Johnstone didn’t have access to when he published his still quite valuable essay (above all the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), the most complete compilation of their writings in any language) it’s now easier to verify citations of their writings and, more importantly, to see the larger context in which the citations were originally written. Also, much has passed in real world politics since 1967, not least the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes after 1989, reigniting much-debated questions (which Johnstone didn’t address) about whether the actions of Lenin, let alone Stalin and his successors, were consistent with the views of Marx and Engels. For today’s activists, what are – the question Marx and Engels would have posed – the organizational lessons inspired by their example?","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114568403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
No hace mucho, la celebracion de las democracias capitalistas –como si estas realmente constituyeran la coronacion de toda aspiracion democratica– encontraba legiones de adeptos en Latinoamerica, donde la frase era pronunciada con una solemnidad reservada por lo general para los mas grandes logros de la humanidad. Pero ahora que mas de un cuarto de siglo ha transcurrido desde los comienzos del proceso de re-democratizacion, resulta apropiado examinar sus logros tanto como sus defectos y promesas incumplidas. ?Merecen las democracias capitalistas el respeto tan amplio que se les ha otorgado?
{"title":"La verdad sobre la democracia capitalista","authors":"A. Boron","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1gm02jk.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1gm02jk.10","url":null,"abstract":"No hace mucho, la celebracion de las democracias capitalistas –como si estas realmente constituyeran la coronacion de toda aspiracion democratica– encontraba legiones de adeptos en Latinoamerica, donde la frase era pronunciada con una solemnidad reservada por lo general para los mas grandes logros de la humanidad. Pero ahora que mas de un cuarto de siglo ha transcurrido desde los comienzos del proceso de re-democratizacion, resulta apropiado examinar sus logros tanto como sus defectos y promesas incumplidas. ?Merecen las democracias capitalistas el respeto tan amplio que se les ha otorgado?","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132035565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1163/9789004272934_005
David Miller
The media have a contradictory role in relation to class power. They do predominantly carry corporate and state friendly messages, but not exclusively. They do have a role in legitimating capitalist social relations, but the role of ideology in maintaining social order has been overplayed by some theorists. A variety of other mechanisms employed by the powerful to pursue their interests are arguably as important as the mass media in the maintenance of 'ruling ideas'. In attempting to rethink the relationship between media power and class power, this essay uses the work of Stuart Hall as the starting point for a critique of cultural and media studies. It argues that Critical Theorists such as Hall overemphasized the importance of ideology and the 'function' of the media in capitalist social order.
{"title":"Media power and class power: overplaying ideology","authors":"David Miller","doi":"10.1163/9789004272934_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004272934_005","url":null,"abstract":"The media have a contradictory role in relation to class power. They do predominantly carry corporate and state friendly messages, but not exclusively. They do have a role in legitimating capitalist social relations, but the role of ideology in maintaining social order has been overplayed by some theorists. A variety of other mechanisms employed by the powerful to pursue their interests are arguably as important as the mass media in the maintenance of 'ruling ideas'. In attempting to rethink the relationship between media power and class power, this essay uses the work of Stuart Hall as the starting point for a critique of cultural and media studies. It argues that Critical Theorists such as Hall overemphasized the importance of ideology and the 'function' of the media in capitalist social order.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122961683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.4324/9780203079751-34
R. Albritton
We live in a world capable, in principle, of providing a diverse and healthy diet for all, and yet one quarter of its people suffer from frequent hunger and ill health generated by a diet that is poor in quantity or quality or both. Another quarter of the world’s population eats too much food, food that is often heavy with calories and low on nutrients (colloquially called ‘junk food’). This quarter of the world’s population risks diabetes and all of the other chronic illnesses generated by obesity. Study after study in recent years has come to the conclusion that the single most important factor in human health is diet, and diet is something we can shape. Cheap food is important to capitalism because it allows wages to be lower (and thus profits to be higher) and yet leave workers with more disposable income available to buy other commodities. In this short essay most of my examples come from the US, because, as the most hegemonic capitalist power in the world, it has done the most to shape the global food system. But I don’t want to give the impression that there is one tightly integrated capitalist world food system. Even in the US, capitalism has not entirely subsumed the whole food system, and while there are few places in the world untouched by capitalism, its degree of hegemony may vary a great deal. Still, up to the present, capitalism has been the single strongest force shaping the global food system, and much of that shaping power has flowed outward from the US.
{"title":"Between Obesity and Hunger: The Capitalist Food Industry","authors":"R. Albritton","doi":"10.4324/9780203079751-34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203079751-34","url":null,"abstract":"We live in a world capable, in principle, of providing a diverse and healthy diet for all, and yet one quarter of its people suffer from frequent hunger and ill health generated by a diet that is poor in quantity or quality or both. Another quarter of the world’s population eats too much food, food that is often heavy with calories and low on nutrients (colloquially called ‘junk food’). This quarter of the world’s population risks diabetes and all of the other chronic illnesses generated by obesity. Study after study in recent years has come to the conclusion that the single most important factor in human health is diet, and diet is something we can shape. Cheap food is important to capitalism because it allows wages to be lower (and thus profits to be higher) and yet leave workers with more disposable income available to buy other commodities. In this short essay most of my examples come from the US, because, as the most hegemonic capitalist power in the world, it has done the most to shape the global food system. But I don’t want to give the impression that there is one tightly integrated capitalist world food system. Even in the US, capitalism has not entirely subsumed the whole food system, and while there are few places in the world untouched by capitalism, its degree of hegemony may vary a great deal. Still, up to the present, capitalism has been the single strongest force shaping the global food system, and much of that shaping power has flowed outward from the US.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115887215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is impossible to read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks without appreciating how far he actually transcended the dichotomy between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. He did so precisely by applying his stunningly creative intelligence to what really would need to be involved in the creation of a new type of political party, which in homage to another great Italian political theorist who could also be described as a realist with imagination, he called the ‘modern prince’. In trying to articulate the form of a party capable of navigating a revolutionary transformation in conditions where the state was deeply rooted in society, Gramsci was doing the very opposite of entrusting it to revolutionary will to usher in the spontaneous transformative ‘event’ that is rather in fashion among some radical intellectuals today. What many intellectuals today may find troubling about optimism of the intellect is the credit they fear it may lend to all that has emanated from the ‘age of reason’, with its universalist claims to truth and its evolutionist proclamations of progress. The abdication of so many left intellectuals from the vocation of telling the truth on these grounds was no doubt partly the result of political and intellectual shortcomings on the traditional left. But they have sometimes only generalized what was wrong with the narrow class struggle perspective that crudely labelled truth either bourgeois or proletarian, applying the same type of dichotomy to race and gender, and indeed to any and all asymmetric relations of power. But optimism of the intellect does not involve embracing any teleological laws of historical progress. Optimism of the intellect in fact involves being sensitive to contingency in human history, with contradictions and crises not the only variable factors in determining the scope and possibilities of such contingency, but also the capacities of collective human agency as especially crucial variable factors in developing transformative institutional forms. To get to where Marx or Gramsci wanted us to get involves probing the limits of economic and political institutions. And to do this it is also important to pay close attention to such great pessimists of the intelligence as Max Weber on state bureaucracy and Roberto Michels on party oligarchy. This is precisely because we need to identify the actual institutional barriers that lie in the way of replacing the capitalist rationality of market competition with the socialist rationality of collective planning, so we can at least minimize those barriers through articulating the institutional forms that can develop popular capacities for genuinely democratic participation as well as complex representation and administration. The political purpose for this kind of institutionalism is exactly the opposite of validating path dependency, insisting rather on institutional contingency to the end of discovering how to transform institutions in socialist ways.
{"title":"On Revolutionary Optimism of the Intellect","authors":"L. Panitch","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.21","url":null,"abstract":"It is impossible to read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks without appreciating how far he actually transcended the dichotomy between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. He did so precisely by applying his stunningly creative intelligence to what really would need to be involved in the creation of a new type of political party, which in homage to another great Italian political theorist who could also be described as a realist with imagination, he called the ‘modern prince’. In trying to articulate the form of a party capable of navigating a revolutionary transformation in conditions where the state was deeply rooted in society, Gramsci was doing the very opposite of entrusting it to revolutionary will to usher in the spontaneous transformative ‘event’ that is rather in fashion among some radical intellectuals today. What many intellectuals today may find troubling about optimism of the intellect is the credit they fear it may lend to all that has emanated from the ‘age of reason’, with its universalist claims to truth and its evolutionist proclamations of progress. The abdication of so many left intellectuals from the vocation of telling the truth on these grounds was no doubt partly the result of political and intellectual shortcomings on the traditional left. But they have sometimes only generalized what was wrong with the narrow class struggle perspective that crudely labelled truth either bourgeois or proletarian, applying the same type of dichotomy to race and gender, and indeed to any and all asymmetric relations of power. But optimism of the intellect does not involve embracing any teleological laws of historical progress. Optimism of the intellect in fact involves being sensitive to contingency in human history, with contradictions and crises not the only variable factors in determining the scope and possibilities of such contingency, but also the capacities of collective human agency as especially crucial variable factors in developing transformative institutional forms. To get to where Marx or Gramsci wanted us to get involves probing the limits of economic and political institutions. And to do this it is also important to pay close attention to such great pessimists of the intelligence as Max Weber on state bureaucracy and Roberto Michels on party oligarchy. This is precisely because we need to identify the actual institutional barriers that lie in the way of replacing the capitalist rationality of market competition with the socialist rationality of collective planning, so we can at least minimize those barriers through articulating the institutional forms that can develop popular capacities for genuinely democratic participation as well as complex representation and administration. The political purpose for this kind of institutionalism is exactly the opposite of validating path dependency, insisting rather on institutional contingency to the end of discovering how to transform institutions in socialist ways.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133910355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On-Screen Barbarism: Violence in U.S. Visual Culture","authors":"Philip Green","doi":"10.1057/9781137381552_8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381552_8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133767513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay is motivated by the centennial of 1917 providing occasion for reflection on the great revolutionary projects of the last century and rumination on the status of the notion of revolution now. My concern is fundamentally ‘presentist’ and best characterized as demystification or ideology-critique. Specifically, my interest is in reflecting on the emergence of antiracism as a discrete political stance – that is, not simply a principled opposition to discrimination and bigotry – and the impact that it, along with other strains of what is commonly called identity politics, has had on contemporary left political thought and practice, including dominant ways of conceptualizing social transformation and revolution. I believe, for reasons that I trust this examination will make clear, taking critical stock of antiracist politics is a crucial task for the left, especially in the United States, where antiracism arguably emerged as a claim to a discrete politics, but elsewhere as well. Antiracist politics, and its corollary commitment to diversity, has become a significant American cultural export, as Bourdieu and Wacquant noted nearly two decades ago. As the intellectual left moved both into the academy and away from an intellectual and epistemic commitment to class struggle, it by and large gave up the goal of radical social transformation and the objective of pursuing political power for the purpose of realizing that goal became less distinct from liberalism. Such a left, as Russell Jacoby notes, ‘ineluctably retreats to smaller ideas, seeking to expand the options within the existing society’. Militant embrace of the discourses of identity politics, most notably antiracism, has helped to sustain an appearance that the left is not in retreat but remains on the cutting edge of transformational politics. That is because of the prominence of a view that construes ‘oppressions’ rooted in race and gender, etc., as both foundational to American society – or the West – and so deeply embedded that most whites/men are in denial about their power. From that perspective the civil rights movement’s legislative victories in the 1960s were superficial and could not address the deep-structural sources of racism and sexism, which are effectively ontological and therefore beyond the reach of normal political or social intervention. Thus the struggle against these sources of inequality is always insurgent because their power never diminishes.
{"title":"Revolution as ‘National Liberation’ and the Origins of Neoliberal Antiracism","authors":"Adolph Reed","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1bpmbn2.18","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is motivated by the centennial of 1917 providing occasion for reflection on the great revolutionary projects of the last century and rumination on the status of the notion of revolution now. My concern is fundamentally ‘presentist’ and best characterized as demystification or ideology-critique. Specifically, my interest is in reflecting on the emergence of antiracism as a discrete political stance – that is, not simply a principled opposition to discrimination and bigotry – and the impact that it, along with other strains of what is commonly called identity politics, has had on contemporary left political thought and practice, including dominant ways of conceptualizing social transformation and revolution. I believe, for reasons that I trust this examination will make clear, taking critical stock of antiracist politics is a crucial task for the left, especially in the United States, where antiracism arguably emerged as a claim to a discrete politics, but elsewhere as well. Antiracist politics, and its corollary commitment to diversity, has become a significant American cultural export, as Bourdieu and Wacquant noted nearly two decades ago. As the intellectual left moved both into the academy and away from an intellectual and epistemic commitment to class struggle, it by and large gave up the goal of radical social transformation and the objective of pursuing political power for the purpose of realizing that goal became less distinct from liberalism. Such a left, as Russell Jacoby notes, ‘ineluctably retreats to smaller ideas, seeking to expand the options within the existing society’. Militant embrace of the discourses of identity politics, most notably antiracism, has helped to sustain an appearance that the left is not in retreat but remains on the cutting edge of transformational politics. That is because of the prominence of a view that construes ‘oppressions’ rooted in race and gender, etc., as both foundational to American society – or the West – and so deeply embedded that most whites/men are in denial about their power. From that perspective the civil rights movement’s legislative victories in the 1960s were superficial and could not address the deep-structural sources of racism and sexism, which are effectively ontological and therefore beyond the reach of normal political or social intervention. Thus the struggle against these sources of inequality is always insurgent because their power never diminishes.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132642540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of antineoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state. A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has come to define the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism. It above all requires discovering how to avoid the social democratization even of those committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.
{"title":"Class, Party and the Challenge of State Transformation","authors":"L. Panitch, S. Gindin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv5cg88c.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv5cg88c.11","url":null,"abstract":"The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of antineoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state. A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has come to define the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism. It above all requires discovering how to avoid the social democratization even of those committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131177297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.15496/PUBLIKATION-3933
Marie Duboc
In January and February 2014, about 100,000 workers participated in strikes and other collective actions. The pace of protest escalated further in March when thousands of public sector doctors, dentists and pharmacists declared a full strike, as did thousands of Alexandria Public Transport workers. During the year’s first quarter there were a total of 240 labour actions. Projected to an annual basis, this is a significant decline from the high point of 2011-12, but still far more than any year during the decade before the demise of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the era of global neoliberal hegemony, the significance of the workers’ movement has been underestimated in both Western and Egyptian explanations for Mubarak’s overthrow. Egyptian workers had participated significantly in the burgeoning culture of protest that delegitimized the Mubarak regime during the decade before his ouster on 11 February 2011. The recent upsurge followed a relatively quiescent six-month period after the ouster of President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brothers-sponsored Freedom and Justice Party. Morsi was removed by a combination of massive popular demonstrations on 30 June 2013 – even larger than those that had led to the demise of Mubarak two and a half years earlier – followed by a military coup on July 3 after serving just one year in office as Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The essay will explore the roots of the 2011 popular uprising and chart the cycle of contention over economic demands that began in the late 1990s. Egyptian workers have sharply escalated the pace of their strikes and collective actions, a movement that has been in large measure a response, albeit for the most part not articulated in these terms, to the neoliberal transformation of the Egyptian economy.
2014年1月和2月，约有10万名工人参加了罢工和其他集体行动。3月份，抗议活动进一步升级，数千名公共部门的医生、牙医和药剂师宣布全面罢工，亚历山大公共交通部门的数千名工人也宣布罢工。今年第一季度总共发生了240起劳工行动。按年计算，这一数字较2011-12年的高点大幅下降，但仍远高于前总统胡斯尼•穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)于2011年下台前10年的任何一年。在全球新自由主义霸权的时代，工人运动的重要性在西方和埃及对穆巴拉克被推翻的解释中都被低估了，这也许并不令人意外。在2011年2月11日穆巴拉克下台之前的十年里，埃及工人积极参与了迅速发展的抗议文化，这些文化使穆巴拉克政权失去了合法性。在穆斯林兄弟会(Muslim brothers)支持的自由与正义党(Freedom and Justice Party)的总统穆罕默德•穆尔西(Muhammad Morsi)被赶下台后的6个月时间里，抗议活动出现了相对平静的高潮。穆尔西在2013年6月30日的大规模民众示威活动中被赶下台，这比两年半前导致穆巴拉克下台的示威活动还要大。随后，在担任埃及首位民选总统仅一年之后，7月3日又发生了军事政变。本文将探讨2011年民众起义的根源，并描绘自上世纪90年代末开始的围绕经济诉求的争论周期。埃及工人的罢工和集体行动的步伐急剧升级，这场运动在很大程度上是对埃及经济新自由主义转型的回应，尽管在很大程度上没有明确表达出来。
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-86145-3_1
H. Rose, S. Rose
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