A Marxist Critique Of Post-Marxists (Part 2)
(...)
'State Power Corrupts': Local Politics Submits
One of the principal critiques of Marxism among the
post-Marxists is the notion that state power corrupts and that
the struggle for it is the original sin. They argue that this is
so because the state is so distant from the citizens, that the
authorities become autonomous and arbitrary, forgetting the
original goals and pursuing their own self-interest. There is no
doubt that throughout history people seizing power have become
tyrants. But it is also the case that the rise to power of
individuals leading social movements have had an emancipating
effect. The abolition of slavery and the overthrow of absolutist
monarchies are two examples. So "power" in the state has a double
meaning depending on the historic context. Likewise, local
movements have had successes in mobilising communities and
improving immediate conditions, in some cases significantly. But
it is also the case that macro-political economic decisions have
undermined local efforts. Today, structural adjustment policies
at the national and international level have generated poverty
and unemployment, depleting local resources, forcing local people
to migrate or to engage in crime. The dialectics between state
and local power operates to undermine or reinforce local
initiatives and changes depending on the class power manifested
at both levels. There are numerous cases of progressive municipal
governments that have been undermined because reactionary
national regimes cut off their funding. On the other hand,
progressive municipal governments have been a very positive force
helping neighborhood-local organisations, as has been the case
with the socialist mayor of Montevideo in Uruguay or the leftist
mayor in Porto Alegre in Brazil.
The post-Marxists who counterpose "local" to "state power"
are not basing their discussion on historical experience, at
least not of Latin America. The antinomy is a result of the
attempt to justify the role of NGOs as mediators between local
organisations and neo liberal foreign donors (World Bank, Europe
or the us) and the local free market regimes. In order to
"legitimate" their role, the post-Marxist NGO professionals, as
"agents of the democratic grassroots", have to disparage the left
at the level of state power. In the process, they complement the
activity of the neo-liberals by severing the link between local
struggles and organisation and national/international political
movements. The emphasis on "local activity" serves the
neo-liberal regimes just right, as it allows its foreign and
domestic backers to dominate macro-socio-economic policy and to
channel most of the state's resources on behalf of export
capitalists and financial interests.
The post-Marxists, as managers of NGOs, have become skilled
in designing projects and transmitting the new "identity" and
"globalist" jargon into the popular movements. Their talk and
writing about international cooperation and self-help
micro-enterprises creates ideological bonds with the neo-liberals
while forging dependency on external donors and their neo-liberal
socio-economic agenda. It is no surprise that after a decade of
NGO activity that the post-Marxist professionals have
"depoliticised" and deradicalised whole areas of social life:
women, neighborhood and youth organisations. The case of Peru and
Chile is classic: where the NGOs have become firmly established,
the radical social movements have retreated.
Local struggles over immediate issues are the food and
substance that nurture emerging movements. The crucial question
is over their direction and dynamic: whether they raise the
larger issues of the social system and link up with other local
forces to confront the state and its imperial backers or whether
it turns inward, looking to foreign donors and fragmenting into a
series of competing supplicants for external subsidies. The
ideology of post-Marxism promotes the latter; the Marxists the
former.
Revolutions Always End Badly: The 'Possibilism' Of Post-Marxism
There is a pessimistic variant to post-Marxism which speaks
less of the failures of revolution as the impossibility of
socialism. They cite the decline of the revolutionary left, the
triumph of capitalism in the East, the "crisis of Marxism", the
loss of alternatives, the strength of the us, the coups and
repression by the military - all these arguments are mobilised to
urge the left to support "possibilism": the need to work within
the niches of the free market imposed by the World Bank and its
structural adjustment agenda, and to confine politics to the
electoral parameters imposed by the military. This is called
"pragmatism" or incrementalism. Post-Marxists played a major
ideological role in promoting and defending the so-called
electoral transition from military rule in which social changes
were subordinated to the reintroduction of an electoral system.
Most of the arguments of the post-Marxists are based on
static and selective observations of contemporary reality and are
tied to predetermined conclusions. Having decided that
revolutions are out of date, they focus on neo-liberal electoral
victories and not on the post-electoral mass protests and general
strikes that mobilise large numbers of people in
extra-parliamentary activity. They look at the demise of
communism in the late 1980s and not to its revival in the
mid-1990s. They describe the constraints of the military on
electoral politicians without looking at the challenges to the
military by the Zapatista guerrillas, the urban rebellions in
Caracas, the general strikes in Bolivia. In a word, the
possibilists overlook the dynamics of struggles that begin at the
sectoral or local level within the electoral parameters of the
military and then are propelled upward and beyond those limits by
the failures and impotence of the electoral possibilists to
satisfy the elementary demands and needs of the people. The
possibilists have failed to end the impunity of the military, to
pay the back salaries of public employees (the provinces of
Argentina) or to end crop destruction of the cocoa farmers (in
Bolivia).
The post-Marxist possibilists become part of the problem
instead of part of the solution. It is a decade and a half since
the negotiated transitions began and in each instance the
post-Marxists have adapted to neo-liberalism and deepened its
free market policies. The possibilists are unable to effectively
oppose the negative social effects of the free market on the
people, but are pressured by the neo-liberals to impose new and
more austere measures in order to continue to hold office. The
post-Marxists have gradually moved from being pragmatic critics
of the neo-liberals to promoting themselves as efficient and
honest managers of neo-liberalism, capable of securing investor
confidence and pacifying social unrest.
In the meantime, the pragmatism of the post-Marxists is
matched by the extremism of the neo-liberals: the decade of the
1990s has witnessed a radicalisation of neo-liberal policies,
designed to forestall crisis by handing over even more lucrative
investment and speculative opportunities to overseas banks and
multinationals.
The neo-liberals are creating a polarised class structure,
much closer to the Marxist paradigm of society than the
post-Marxist vision. Contemporary Latin American class structure
is more rigid, more deterministic, more linked to class politics
or the state, than in the past. In these circumstances
revolutionary politics are far more relevant than the pragmatic
proposals of the post-Marxists.
Class Solidarity And The 'Solidarity' Of Foreign Donors
The word "solidarity" has been abused to the point that in
many contexts it has lost meaning. The term "solidarity" for the
post-Marxists includes foreign aid channelled to any designated
"impoverished" group. Mere "research" or "popular education" of
the poor by professionals is designated as "solidarity". In many
ways the hierarchical structures and the forms of transmission of
"aid" and "training" resemble nineteenth century charity and the
promoters are not very different from Christian missionaries.
The post-Marxists emphasise "self-help" in attacking the
"paternalism and dependence" on the state. In this competition
among NGOs to capture the victims of neo-liberalism, the
post-Marxists receive important subsidies from their counterparts
in Europe and the usa. The self-help ideology emphasises the
replacement of public employees for volunteers and upwardly
mobile professionals contracted on a temporary basis. The basic
philosophy of the post-Marxist view is to transform "solidarity"
into collaboration and subordination to the macro-economy of
neo-liberalism by focusing attention away from state resources of
the wealthy classes toward self-exploitation of the poor. The
poor do not need to be made virtuous by the post-Marxists for
what the state obligates them to do.
The Marxist concept of solidarity in contrast emphasises
class solidarity and within the class, solidarity of oppressed
groups (women and people of colour) against their foreign and
domestic exploiters. The major focus is not on the donations that
divide classes and pacify small groups for a limited time period.
The focus of the Marxist concept of solidarity is on the common
action of the same members of the class sharing their common
economic predicament and struggling for collective improvement.
It involves intellectuals who write and speak for the social
movements in struggle, committed to sharing the same political
consequences. The concept of solidarity is linked to "organic"
intellectuals who are basically part of the movementthe resource
people providing analysis and education for class struggle. In
contrast, the post-Marxists are embedded in the world of
institutions, academic seminars, foreign foundations,
international conferences and bureaucratic reports. They write in
esoteric postmodern jargon understood only by those "initiated"
into the subjectivist cult of essentialist identities.
Marxists view solidarity as sharing the risks of the
movements, not being outside commentators who question everything
and defend nothing. For the post-Marxists, the main object is
"getting" the foreign funding for the "project". The main issue
for the Marxist is the process of political struggle and
education in securing social improvement. The objective is
raising consciousness for societal change; constructing political
power to transform the general condition of the great majority.
"Solidarity" for the post-Marxists is divorced from the general
object of liberation; it is merely a way of bringing people
together to attend a job retraining seminar, to build a latrine.
For the Marxists, the solidarity of a collective struggle
contains the seeds of the future democratic collectivist society.
The larger vision or its absence is what gives the different
conceptions of solidarity their distinct meaning.
Class Struggle And Cooperation
The post-Marxists frequently write of the "cooperation" of
everyone, near and far, without delving too profoundly into the
price and conditions for securing the cooperation of neo-liberal
regimes and overseas funding agencies. Class struggle is viewed
as an atavism to a past that no longer exists. So we are told
"the poor" are intent on building a new life. They are fed up
with traditional politics, ideologies and politicians.
So far, so good. The problem is that the post-Marxists are
not so forthcoming in describing their role as mediators and
brokers, hustling funds overseas and matching the funds to
projects acceptable to donors and local recipients. The
foundation entrepreneurs are engaged in a new type of politics
similar to the "labour contractors" (enganchadores) of the
not-too-distant past: herding together women to be "trained";
setting up micro-firms subcontracted to larger producers of
exports.
The new politics of the post-Marxists is essentially the
politics of compradors: they produce no national products, rather
they link foreign funders with local labour (self-help
micro-enterprises) to facilitate the continuation of the
neo-liberal regime. In that sense the post-Marxists in their role
of managers of NGOs are fundamentally political actors whose
projects, training and workshops do not make any significant
economic impact either on the gnp or in terms of lessening
poverty. But their activities do make an impact in diverting
people from the class struggle into harmless and ineffective
forms of collaboration with their oppressors.
The Marxist perspective of class struggle and confrontation
is built upon the real social divisions of society: between those
who extract profits, interest, rent and regressive taxes and
those who struggle to maximise wages, social expenditures and
productive investments. The results of post-Marxist perspectives
are today evident everywhere: the concentration of income and the
growth of inequalities are greater than ever, after a decade of
preaching cooperation, micro-enterprises and self help. Today
banks like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) fund the
export agribusinesses that exploit and poison millions of farm
labourers while providing funds to finance small micro-projects.
The role of the post-Marxists in the micro projects is to
neutralise political opposition at the bottom while
neo-liberalism is promoted at the top.
The ideology of "cooperation" links the poor through the
post-Marxists to the neo-liberals at the top. Intellectually, the
post-Marxists are the intellectual policemen who define
acceptable research, distribute research funds and filter out
topics and perspectives that project class analysis and struggle
perspectives. Marxists are excluded from the conferences and
stigmatised as "ideologists", while post-Marxists present
themselves as "social scientists". The control of intellectual
fashion, publications, conferences and research funds provide the
post-Marxists with an important power basebut one ultimately
dependent on avoiding conflict with their external funding
patrons.
The critical Marxist intellectuals have their strength in
the fact that their ideas resonate with the evolving social
realities. The polarisation of classes and the violent
confrontations are growing, as their theories predict. It is in
this sense that the Marxists are tactically weak and
strategically strong vis-a-vis the post-Marxists.
Is Anti-Imperialism Dead?
In recent years anti-imperialism has disappeared from the
political lexicon of the post-Marxists. The ex-guerrillas of
Central American turned electoral politicians, and the
professionals who run the NGOs speak of international cooperation
and interdependence. Yet debt repayments continue to transfer
huge sums from the poor in Latin America to the European, us and
Japanese banks. Public properties, banks, and above all natural
resources are being taken over at very cheap prices by us and
European multinationals. There are more Latin American
billionaires with the bulk of their funds in us and European
banks than ever before. Meanwhile, entire provinces have become
industrial cemeteries and the countryside is depopulated. The us
has more military advisers, drug officials and federal police
directing Latin American "policing" than ever before in history.
Yet we are told by some former Sandinistas and ex-Farabundistas
that anti-imperialism/imperialism disappeared with the end of the
Cold War. The problem, we are told, is not foreign investments or
foreign aid but their absence and they ask for more imperial aid.
The political and economic myopia that accompanies this
perspective fails to understand that the political conditions for
the loans and investment is the cheapening of labour, the
elimination of social legislation and the transformation of Latin
America into one big plantation, one big mining camp, one big
free trade zone stripped of rights, sovereignty and wealth.
The Marxist emphasis on the deepening of imperial
exploitation is rooted in the social relations of production and
state relations between imperial and dependent capitalism. The
collapse of the USSR has intensified imperial exploitation. The
post-Marxists (ex-Marxists) who believe that the unipolar world
will result in greater "cooperation" have misread U.S.
intervention in Panama, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. More
fundamentally, the dynamic of imperialism is embedded in the
internal dynamic of capital not in external competition with the
Soviet Union. The loss of the domestic market and external sector
of Latin America is a return to a "pre-national" phase: the Latin
economies begin to resemble their "colonial" past.
The struggle against imperialism today involves the
reconstruction of the nation, the domestic market, the productive
economy and a working class linked to social production and
consumption.
Two Perspectives On Social Transformation: Class Organisations
And NGOs
To advance the struggle against imperialism and its domestic
neo-comprador collaborators passes through an ideological and
cultural debate with the post-Marxists inside and on the
periphery of the popular movements.
Neo-liberalism operates today on two fronts: the economic
and the cultural-political, and at two levels, the regime and the
popular classes. At the top, neo-liberal policies are formulated
and implemented by the usual characters: the World Bank, the IMF
working with Washington, Bonn and Tokyo in association with
neo-liberal regimes and domestic exporters, big business
conglomerates and bankers.
By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the
neo-liberal ruling classes realised that their policies were
polarising the society and provoking large-scale social
discontent. Neo-liberal politicians began to finance and promote
a parallel strategy of "from below", the promotion of
"grassroots" organisation with an "anti-statist" ideology to
intervene among potentially conflicting classes, to create a
"social cushion". These organisations were financially dependent
on neo-liberal sources and were directly involved in competing
with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local
leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these
organisations, described as "non-governmental", numbered in the
thousands and were receiving close to U.S.$4 billion world-wide.
The confusion concerning the political character of the NGOs
stems from their earlier history in the 1970s during the days of
the dictatorships. In this period they were active in providing
humanitarian support to the victims of the military dictatorships
and denouncing human rights violations. The NGOs supported "soup
kitchens" which allowed victimised families to survive the first
wave of shock treatments administered by the neo-liberal
dictatorships. This period created a favorable image of NGOs even
among the left. They were considered part of the "progressive
camp". Even then, however, the limits of the NGOs were evident.
While they attacked the human rights violations of local
dictatorships, they rarely denounced their and European patrons
who financed and advised them. Nor was there a serious effort to
link the neo-liberal economic policies and human rights
violations to the new turn in the imperialist system. Obviously
the external sources of funding limited the sphere of criticism
and human rights action.
As opposition to neo-liberalism grew in the early 1980s, the
and European governments and the World Bank increased funding of
NGOs. There is a direct relation between the growth of movements
challenging the neo-liberal model and the effort to subvert them
by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs.
The basic point of convergence between the NGOs and the World
Bank was their common opposition to "statism". On the surface the
NGOs criticised the state from a "left" perspective defending
civil society, while the right did so in the name of the market.
In reality, however, the World Bank, the neo-liberal regimes and
Western foundations co-opted and encouraged the NGOs to undermine
the national welfare state by providing social services to
compensate the victims of the MNCs. In other words, as the
neo-liberal regimes at the top devastated communities by
inundating the country with cheap imports, external debt payments
and abolishing labour legislation, creating a growing mass of
low-paid and unemployed workers, the NGOs were funded to provide
"self-help" projects, "popular education" and job training, to
absorb temporarily, small groups of poor, to co-opt local leaders
and to undermine anti-system struggles.
The NGOs became the "community face" of neo-liberalism,
intimately related to those at the top and complementing their
destructive work with local projects. In effect, the neo-liberals
organised a "pincer" operation or dual strategy. Unfortunately,
many on the left focused only on "neo-liberalism" from above and
the outside (IMF, World Bank) and not on neo-liberalism from
below (NGOs, micro-enterprises). A major reason for this
oversight was the conversion of many ex-Marxists to the NGO
formula and practice. Post-Marxism was the ideological transit
ticket from class politics to "community development", from
Marxism to the NGOs.
While the neo-liberals were transferring lucrative state
properties to the private rich, the NGOs were not part of the
trade union resistance. On the contrary, they were active in
local private projects, promoting the private enterprise
discourse (self-help) in the local community by focussing on
micro-enterprises. The NGOs built ideological bridges between the
small-scale capitalists and the monopolies benefitting from
privatisation all in the name of "anti-statism", and building
civil societies. While the rich accumulated vast financial
empires from the privatisation, the NGO middle-class
professionals got small sums of funds to finance offices,
transportation and small-scale economic activity. The important
political point is that the NGOs depoliticised sectors of the
population, undermined their commitment to public employment and
co-opted potential leaders in small projects. NGOs abstain from
public school teacher struggles as the neo-liberal regimes attack
public education and public educators. Rarely if ever do NGOs
support the strikes and protests against low wages and budget
cuts. Since their education funding comes from the neo-liberal
governments they avoid solidarity with public educators in
struggle. In practice, "non-governmental" translates into
anti-public spending activities, freeing the bulk of funds for
neo-liberals to subsidise export capitalists while small sums
trickle from the government to NGOs.
In reality, non-governmental organisations are not
non-governmental. They receive funds from overseas governments or
work as private sub-contractors of local governments. Frequently
they openly collaborate with governmental agencies at home or
overseas. This "sub-contracting" undermines professionals with
fixed contracts, replacing them with contingent professionals.
The NGOs cannot provide the long term comprehensive programmes
that the welfare state can furnish. Instead they provide limited
services to narrow groups of communities. More importantly, their
programmes are not accountable to the local people but to
overseas donors. In this sense NGOs undermine democracy by taking
social programmes out of the hands of the local people and their
elected officials and creating dependence on non-elected,
overseas officials and their locally anointed officials.
NGOs shift people's attention and struggles away from the
national budget toward self-exploitation to secure local social
services. This allows the neo-liberals to cut social budgets and
transfer state funds to subsidise bad debts of private banks and
loans to exporters. Self-exploitation (self-help) means that, in
addition to paying taxes to the state and not getting anything in
return, working people have to work extra hours with marginal
resources, expending scarce energies to obtain services that the
bourgeoisie receives free from the state. More fundamentally, the
NGO ideology of "private voluntary activity" undermines the idea
that the government has an obligation to look after its citizens
and provide them with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;
that political responsibility of the state is essential for the
well-being of citizens. Against this notion of public
responsibility, the NGOs foster the neo-liberal idea of private
responsibility for social problems and the importance of private
resources to solve these problem. In effect, they impose a double
burden on the poor: paying taxes to finance the neo-liberal state
to serve the rich and private self-exploitation to take care of
their own needs.
NGOs And Socio-Political Movements
NGOs emphasise projects not movements. They "mobilise"
people to produce at the margins not to struggle to control the
basic means of production and wealth. They focus on technical
financial assistance of projects not on structural conditions
that shape the everyday lives of people. The NGOs co-opt the
language of the left: "popular power", "empowerment", "gender
equality", "sustainable development" and "bottom up leadership".
The problem is that this language is linked to a framework of
collaboration with donors and government agencies that
subordinate practical activity to non-confrontational politics.
The local nature of NGO activity means "empowerment" which never
goes beyond influencing small areas of social life with limited
resources within the conditions permitted by the neo-liberal
state and macro-economy.
The NGOs and their post-Marxist professional staff directly
compete with the socio-political movements for influence among
the poor, women, racially excluded and such like. Their ideology
and practice diverts attention from the sources and solutions of
poverty (looking downward and inward instead of upward and
outward). To speak of micro-enterprises as solutions, instead of
the exploitation by the overseas banks, is based on the notion
that the problem is one of individual initiative rather than the
transference of income overseas. The NGOs' aid affects small
sectors of the population, setting up competition between
communities for scarce resources, generating insidious
distinction and inter- and intra-community rivalries thus
undermining class solidarity. The same is true among the
professionals: each sets up their NGO to solicit overseas funds.
They compete by presenting proposals closer to the liking of the
overseas donors for lower prices, while claiming to speak for
more followers. The net effect is a proliferation of NGOs that
fragment poor communities into sectoral and sub-sectoral
groupings unable to see the larger social picture that afflicts
them and even less able to unite in struggle against the system.
Recent experience also demonstrates that foreign donors finance
projects during "crises" - political and social challenges to the
status quo. Once the movements have ebbed, they shift funding to
NGO-regime "collaboration", fitting the NGO projects into the
neo-liberal agenda. Economic development compatible with the
"free market" rather than social organisation for social change
becomes the dominant item on the funding agenda. The structure
and nature of NGOs with their "apolitical" posture and their
focus on self-help depoliticises and demobilises the poor. They
reinforce the electoral processes encouraged by the neo-liberal
parties and mass media. Political education about the nature of
imperialism, the class basis of neo-liberalism, like class
struggle between exporters and temporary workers are avoided.
Instead the NGOs discuss "the excluded", the "powerless",
"extreme poverty", "gender or racial discrimination" without
moving beyond the superficial symptom, to engaging the social
system that produces these conditions. Incorporating the poor
into the neo-liberal economy through purely "private voluntary
action", the NGOs create a political world where the appearance
of solidarity and social action cloaks a conservative conformity
with the international and national structure of power.
It is no coincidence that as NGOs have become dominant in
certain regions, independent class political action has declined,
and neo-liberalism goes uncontested. The bottom line is that the
growth of NGOs coincides with increased funding from
neo-liberalism and the deepening of poverty everywhere. Despite
its claims of many local successes, the overall power of
neo-liberalism stands unchallenged and the NGOs increasingly
search for niches in the interstices of power. The problem of
formulating alternatives has been hindered in another way. Many
of the former leaders of guerrilla and social movements, trade
union and popular women's organisations have been co-opted by the
NGOs. The offer is tempting: higher pay (occasionally in hard
currency), prestige and recognition by overseas donors, overseas
conferences and networks, office staff and relative security from
repression. In contrast, the socio-political movements offer few
material benefits but greater respect and independence and, more
importantly, the freedom to challenge the political and economic
system. The NGOs and their overseas banking supporters
(Inter-American Bank, the World Bank) publish newsletters
featuring success stories of micro-enterprises and other
self-help projects - without mentioning the high rates of failure
as popular consumption declines, low price imports flood the
market and as interest rates spiralas is the case in Mexico
today.
Even the "successes" affect only a small fraction of the
total poor and succeed only to the degree that others cannot
enter into the same market. However, the propaganda value of
individual micro-enterprise success is important in fostering the
illusion that neo-liberalism is a popular phenomenon. The
frequent violent mass outbursts that take place in regions of
micro-enterprise promotion suggests that the ideology is not
hegemonic and the NGOs have not yet displaced independent class
movements.
Finally, NGOs foster a new type of cultural and economic
colonialism and dependency. Projects are designed, or at least
approved, according to "guidelines" and priorities of the
imperial centres or their institutions. They are administered and
"sold" to communities. Evaluations are done by and for the
imperial institutions. Shifts in funding priorities or bad
evaluations result in the dumping of groups, communities, farms
and cooperatives. Everything and everybody is increasingly
disciplined to comply with the donors' demands and their project
evaluators. The new viceroys supervise and ensure conformity with
the goals, values and ideologies of the donor as well as the
proper use of funds. Where "successes" occur they are heavily
dependent on continued outside support, otherwise they could
collapse.
While the mass of NGOs are increasingly instruments of
neo-liberalism there is a small minority which attempt to develop
an alternative strategy that is supportive of class and
anti-imperialist politics. None of them receive funds from the
World Bank or European and governmental agencies. They support
efforts to link local power to struggles for state power. They
link local projects to national socio-political movements
occupying large landed estates, defending public property and
national ownership against multinationals. They provide political
solidarity to social movements involved in struggles to
expropriate land. They support women's struggles linked to class
perspectives. They recognise the importance of putting politics
in command in defining local and immediate struggles. They
believe that local organisations should fight at the national
level and that national leaders must be accountable to local
activists. In a word, they are not post-Marxists.
[James Petras, a Links contributing editor, is professor of
sociology at Binghampton University, New York and the author of
many works on revolutionary movements in Latin America.]
(Source: Links #9 - November 1997 to February 1998)
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