Neoliberalism is in crisis. Some of the
elements of this are fairly obvious: the financial crisis of recent years and
elites’ inability to chart an effective strategy for long-term profitability;
the decline of US geopolitical hegemony, most visibly in its one-time backyard
of Latin America and the strategically central Middle East and North African
region; a legitimacy crisis around surveillance and military intervention more
broadly; severe problems with making the WTO, FTAA and other such arrangements actually
produce the intended results; the EU’s increasing inability to secure mandates
for austerity in referenda or elections; not to mention the medium-term threats
to fixed assets (and supporters) caused by climate change.
To say that neoliberalism is in crisis
is not to say that it is powerless, or that it is not causing immense suffering
across the world in many different ways. It is to say that — like all previous
forms of capitalism before it — it is running out of time: it is ceasing to
work for many of the groups which were once central for the alliance that
constructed neoliberal hegemony; it is failing to chart a survival course for
capitalist elites; and it is struggling to manage everyday problems. Coercion,
however terrifying we may find it, is not a viable long-term strategy.
It is important to say this in the face
of arguments which — rightly horrified or terrified by the realities of
neoliberalism — ascribe omnipotence or inevitability to its continuation.
Watching the screen (increasingly of smartphones or tablets rather than TV or
newspapers), transfixed by the daily dose of violence and a sense of
powerlessness, such arguments remain caught within their own local realities —
taking the last couple of decades as defining of human existence, but also
taking what is available to an increasingly narrow mediasphere as defining What
Is Happening. Put another way, they constitute elaborate rationalizations of
personal experience without being able to stand outside the structures that
constitute that experience, either historically or in terms of reading the
world from below, in terms of popular struggles.
In our new book We Make Our Own History:
Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism we write:
Premature Obituaries and Zombie
Neoliberalism
Almost as soon as any new movement from
below appears on the radar screen of the North’s elites, writers proclaim it
dead, irrelevant, or past its prime. This has been so for the Zapatistas (now
celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their uprising), for the global
‘movement of movements’ against neoliberalism (despite events in Latin
America), for the movement against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (despite
everything) and increasingly for anti-austerity movements. In part, of course,
these are deliberate attempts to write off movements by apologists for our
current regimes: to misquote Howard Zinn (1999), we might wonder why it is
necessary to proclaim movements dead again and again.
Another reason for this obituary-writing
lies in how journalists, academics, literary writers and so on are trained.
There is a natural tendency to defend one’s own hard-won intellectual capital:
where this consists of a particular way of writing about how things are at
present, and of ‘business as usual’ tendencies into the future, anything which
suggests that there may be more to the present than meets an eye focused on
routines, and that the future may not yet be written in stone, will be
unwelcome. There is also a need to have something to say about everything, and
to appear to know something about any possible subject of conversation
(‘relevance’, for a very media-oriented value of the word). Given the
complexity of reality and how little of it anyone can know (not to mention how
pressures for intellectual productivity squeeze the time available for
exploring new areas of knowledge), what is most needed is a stock of ready-made
dismissals for whatever falls outside one’s own sphere of interest and actual
knowledge (see Sotiris 2013).
For us, the most interesting part of the
obituary-writing process is that engaged in by movement activists themselves.
This too has multiple roots: frustration and despair, a sense of having lost
particular internal or external battles, a desire to argue for different strategies
(a return to trade union struggles, a return to communities, the construction
of utopias), and the belief that today’s movement is the strongest available
argument for one’s own flavor of theory. Perhaps the most significant, though,
is the experience this chapter addresses, of stalemate: of having made huge
efforts, having moved further in recent years than most of us would have
thought possible in the 1990s, and yet of having in some terms achieved so
little.
The first chapter of We Make Our Own History
discusses how theory can grow out of activist experience and what this means
for “movement-relevant theory”, identifying Marxism as one such form of
movement theorizing which activists can “repair, reuse and recycle”. We then
ask how a Marxism oriented to the praxis of movements and communities can help
activists change the rules of the socially constructed game which academic
social movements research often wants to confine them to.
The central chapter rethinks Marxism as
a theory of social movements, including both movements from below and the
agency of the powerful and wealthy — the social movements from above whose
weight we daily feel on our backs. We go on to use this framework to explore
how movements from above and below have structured the historical development
of capitalism, in its many changing forms. Finally, we discuss movements from
below against neoliberalism and ask how they can win: what it means, in
practice, to make another world possible.
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, WeMake Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight ofNeoliberalism is now out from Pluto Press.
