Introducing this issue:
Class struggle and
intellectual reaction
THE RULING ideas of any epoch, said Marx and Engels, are the ideas of the ruling class. Outside of a revolutionary crisis we cannot expect that critical ideology of any kind, let alone Marxism, is going to dominate the media and the academy. So when contemporary Marxists say that "we live in a period of intellectual reaction" they mean something much more precise than the commonplace that pro-capitalist ideas are dominant.
Marxists bemoaning the "move to the right" today are bemoaning three interrelated things: a) The shift within dominant capitalist ideology towards much more explicitly right-wing ideas, as especially in economics b) A huge leap to the right among many previously pro-Marxist and pro-socialist intellectuals and c) The new twist to both these phenomena given by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis in Eastern Europe.
This issue of IMR centres on exploring aspects of these related processes. However, as we explain below, we think that this is a fragile process which could more-or-less rapidly change.
Nobody can read off from the existing stage of the class struggle what the dominant theories will be in society, in any mechanical way. But for any materialist it is obvious that major lurches in the economy, in politics and the class struggle will generate concomitant ideological shifts. Schematically we
4 International Marxist Review can say "the move to the right" in all the major capitalist countries has been going on since the mid-1970s; and that date is far from accidental.
The post-war capitalist boom established a dominant form of pro-capitalist economics, linked together with a broad consensus about forms of democracy and social integration. Very roughly, we can say that during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in Europe, Keynesian interventionist economics were dominant, and going hand-in-hand with that were "social democratic", welfare state ideas — in turn based on full employment and ideas about the trade unions as "social partners"
Of course, this was very uneven in the different capitalist countries, and much weaker in the USA. But even there, things like Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" welfare programme in the 1960s are inexplicable outside of the prevailing state of the international economy and its consequent social consensus.
And the Keynesian welfare state consensus was always under challenge both from the right and the left.
The dominant ideological flavour of the major capitalist countries began to break up under the impact of the onset of a long phase of economic crisis, and more exactly the dramatic events of 1968, which was followed by seven or eight years of more or less continuous labour upsurge in advanced capitalist countries.
This first cracking of the old order brought tens of thousands of young people for the first time into contact with radical and revolutionary ideas. Radical socialism and Marxism were complemented by the first manifestations of a mass women's movement and new forms of Black nationalism. Throughout the 1970s this led to a consolidation of Marxism in the universities, which despite all its vagaries in general constituted a challenge to the old Stalinist distortions of Marxism from the left. This was reinforced, and polarized by, major new forms of radicalism in the labour movement - prolonged workers' insurgency in Italy, the Portuguese revolution, Bennism in the British Labour Party, and even, at one stage removed, things like the Union of the Left between the Communists and Socialists in France.
Two events can be counted as symptomatic of a change to this new period in the mid-1970s. At the level of official politics, the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975 signalled the onslaught of a new and wholly reactionary programme in the ruling class, which would attempt to dispense with the post-war Keynesian social-welfare settlement.
At the level of the academy, the emergence of the intellectually lightweight
"nouveaux philosophes" in France, ultra-rightwingers, often ex-militants of the 1968 revolt, now proclaiming that Marxism equals Gulag-style totalitarianism, showed the beginning of a prolonged rightist shift in the intelligensia.
By 1980 Reagan was elected president in the USA, and a new era of Cold
War, with all its anti-communist ideological consequences, began.
These things were direct products both of the onset of the long phase of capitalist crisis, dramatised by the 1974-5 world recession, and the situation
For the ruling class, the 1970s attempt to fend off working class militancy gradually turned into a sustained attempt at a global restructuring of the world economy, based on the ascendancy of neo-liberal economics and "deregulation" of the state sector and financial markets. This naturally involved an attempt to challenge historic post-war gains of the working class.
This situation of Marxism and the far left is of course a highly controversial question inside and outside of the Fourth International. But it seems clear now that in the 1968-1975 crisis, the far left started from much too weak a base to establish itself permanently as the leadership of a sector of the masses in any advanced country. There are many examples, some quite recent, of the far left being in the leadership of mass movements, or — as with the British
Militant Tendency — having a mass base in one or two localities (Liverpool and Glasgow). But nowhere were new revolutionary parties of a mass charac-
The retreat of the working class in front of the austerity offensive unleashed by the bourgeoisie in the mid-1970s inevitably found its reflection in the universities and in the intelligensia more generally. The 1968 generation ran out of steam. Marxists, especially in France and Italy, became virulent anti-
Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, charts many of the highways and byways of this evolution. It was never one-directional or unchallenged. In particular Marxism retained a substantial academic base in
Britain and the USA. These two cases were very different; the former reflects the resilience of the labour movement left, the second a Marxist intelligensia almost totally cut-off from domestic political change, and probably surviving
All these processes were given a new twist by the onset of the second Cold
War at the beginning of the 1980s, and by the overthrow of Stalinism at the end of the decade. Anti-Communist and free market ideology ran rampant, reinforced in the US and Britain by the temporary enrichment of a section of the "yuppie" middle class on the back of the 1980s speculative financial e d et e e ter stabilized.
Marxists.
because of that.
in which the far left and Marxism found themselves.
Class struggle and intellectual reaction 5
These things combined to (re)produce what is commonly known as the
"crisis of Marxism", combining both a widespread disillusionment about the very possibility or desirability of socialism, and a demoralization and selfdoubt among those who remained, to some degree or other, committed to
Such crises generally combine rational and irrational elements. The world of the early 1990s hardly presents us with a glowing case for the wonders of capitalism as the final and perfect form of human civilisation. On the contrary, we live in a period of the decay of the productive forces, and in many places, especially in the third-world and former Communist bloc, of social regression. One would have thought that in all this there should hardly have been a time when socialism has had such an unanswerable case.
On the other hand, Marxism has to face difficult mutations confronted with challenges from the feminist and ecological movements, as well as explaining such phenomena as the re-emergence of the national question to centre
But the necessity for updating and deepening Marxist analyses is not what creates the atmosphere of crisis and self-doubt. That is the product above all of scepticism, a feeling of defeat; a feeling of defeat which is a product of the real setbacks suffered by the workers movement in the West, and, after the
Gulf war and the crisis in the USSR, the impression that imperialism is on the
A Mick Jagger song (on a topic far removed from these considerations)
proclaims that "nothing lasts for ever". As this is written, in the late autumn of 1992, there are signs of a change, both in the class struggle and
First, neo-liberal monetarist economics is more and more discredited. Even among bourgeois theorists, the balance sheet of the Reagan-Thatcher years is grim. This is leading to a new discussion about the possibilities of Keynesian experiments, with Japan leading the way, attempting to pull its economy out of growing depression with a $50 billion state-led recovery package.
In the class struggle there are some first tentative signs of recovery and fightback against austerity, especially in Italy and Britain. Even the election of Bill Clinton in the US, while he is very far from being any kind of radical politician, reflects a desire for change and for economic reflation; and significantly is a major defeat for the "moral majority", "family values" anti-
Whatever the outcome of these developments, the panorama of ideological boom.
socialism.
stage.
rampage and unstoppable.
ideologically.
6 International Marxist Review abortion Republican right-wing.
development over the past three decades shows us clearly that, while intransigence by Marxists is vital, the ideological mood in broad layers of the population will change as a function of political and social struggle by the working class and oppressed. This indeed was the motor-force of radicalization of the 1968 generation, even if the struggle which propelled it was primarily in Vietnam, Cuba and Czechoslovakia and not in their own countries.
Part of the discussion stimulated by the mood of scepticism among socialist activists is about what sort of political structures are needed and are best adapted to intervene, as we take note of the challenges not only to Marxist theory but also to traditional Marxist practice that have come from the "new
The reflections we present here touch on some of the many questions raised in this context. They include a dissection of market ideology by Spanish
Marxist Jesus Albarracín and a discussion of the evolution of the thought of leading German social theorist Jurgen Habermas by Phil Hearse. Jane Kelly from Britain discusses challenges to, and within, feminism from "postmodernism" while Josette Trat from France considers the implications of the
Marxism in France. U.S. Marxist Alan Wald offers a first contribution to a discussion of the evolution of the left in the United States. Finally, a resolution of the 1991 World Congress of the Fourth International deals directly with some of the problems posed by the natural dynamic towards the exclusion of women from the political process, how this is reflected in our ranks and what are the counter-measures we can adopt to change this dynamic -
These contributions are just the start to what we hope will be a broad discussion among revolutionary Marxists on the questions posed by the current social movements"
', most notably the feminist movement.
"theory of difference"
in short, positive action.
period of ideological and political turmoil.
Class struggle and intellectual reaction 7
. Daniel Bensaid analyses the roots of the crisis of
JESUS ALBARRACIN